Text as a meaning-generating dialogue and a lacing metaphor: the experience of converging Yuri Lotman’s and Michail Bakhtin’s approaches

Abstract

The article presents a reflection on Yuri Lotman’s idea of reorienting semiotics from the analysis of structures to the analysis of texts and their binary diagogical nature. This idea allows correlating Lotman’s approach with Bakhtin’s concept of a continuous, meaning-generating dialogue. The juxtaposition of these approaches opens up new possibilities for ex­panding the semiotic analysis of the processes of meaning formation, metaphorization, the dynamics of culture, and the correlation of social and personal experience in these dynamics. The prospects of expanding the scope of the apparatus of semiotics, such as the narrative ap­proach, deep semiotics, and analysis of the dynamics of social institutionalization of sign structures, are revealed. This, in turn, opens up new horizons for the development of the theo­ry of meaning and understanding, the convergence and juxtaposition of semiotic and herme­neutic traditions, analytical philosophy and phenomenology, abstract modeling and the role of subjectivity (self-consciousness of self). Such extensions and perspectives realize the potential of semiotics as an effective conceptual platform of interdisciplinarity and convergence of sci­entific disciplines in understanding the ongoing transformations and responsible socio-cultural engineering.