Göran Sonesson

ON MODELLING THE COMPLEXITY OF CULTURAL MODELS

If we want to study complexity, we must start out simplifying. The enormous complexity of human culture has long hidden whatever universal structures there are from view. It is a great advantage of the Tartu school model of cultural semiotics, that is presents cultures and their interrelations in a very simple way. At least this is true of the very rudimentary graphic models which I have distilled out from the numerous writings of the Tartu school. Such rudimentary models, it would seem, are the natural starting point for adding complexity, because they will permit us to realise clearly, at any point, what it is we are adding.

Semiotics of culture can be seen as something distinct from anthropology and sociology, as I have argued elsewhere, if we retain two propositions, first formulated by the Tartu school, but then largely forgotten also by its originators: that it is not about Culture per se, but about the model members of a Culture make of their Culture; and that this model itself is more involved with relationships between cultures (as well as subcultures, cultural spheres, and so on) than with a Culture in its singularity. This is not to deny that a model of Culture easily becomes a factor in Culture; thus, for instance, those who insist that contemporary Culture is an information society and/or a global village certainly contribute to transforming it into just that. Indeed, if semiotic systems are points of view on the material world, as Saussure (1974:47) claims, then cultural semiotics is a point of view on these points of views; and it is easy to image this second-hand point of view contaminating the former. As to the second limitation, if it is not all too unfashionable to retain some aspects of the structuralist lesson, relations between cultures may be seen as partly defining what cultures are.

The simple, »Canonical«, model opposing Culture to Non-culture or Nature, which emerges from the writings of the Tartu school, is still used by many cultural groups today; but it is certainly not the only one which is currently employed in the confrontation of cultures. Another, more differentiated, model is needed, which, accounts for the differences between the integrands of the non-cultural »residue«. Such considerations have led me to introduce a distinction between the axis of nomination and the axis of conversation, regrouping Ego, Alter and Aliquid, and thus adding complexity to the separate domains of the cultural model.1

The aim of this essay is to introduce a more formal distinction between what in some versions of cultural semiotics (e.g. Posner 1989) has been called, respectively, Non-Culture and Extra-Culture, and, in so doing, make use of the traditional opposition between Ego and Alter, in particular as is has been extended by Benveniste (1966), with some considerations on otherness taken over from Bakhtin and Peirce. In order to set the model of the cultural model to a test, I have studied two great periods

1 Another way of introducing complexity is at the level of borders, to which I will turn in another publication.

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in the meetings of cultures, the age of « discovery », and the present period of »globalisation«, epitomised, in the first place, by the conquest of America (cf. Todorov 1982; Gruzinski 1990), and, in the second place, by the migration of ethnic groups all over Europe. However, space limitations will not permit me to give more than sparing references to these historical examples here.

A Welcome to Tartu: The Canonical Model

In the following I will present the Tartu model in the schematic form of two overlapping squares representing Culture and Nature, respectively, which are connected by different arrows, referring to the inclusion and exclusion of texts and non-texts (cf. Fig. 1 and Sonesson 1987;.1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1997a,b,c,d; 1998; 2000). This scheme is of course too simple to do justice to the Tartu school conception: as we shall see, it only accounts for one part of the examples given in their articles. On the other hand, it is a model in a more pregnant sense than the one which seems to be implied by the Tartu school: it is, as we shall see in the rest of this essay, a simplified likeness the business of which it is to be continuously modified in the confrontation with new real-world examples.

What I will henceforth call the Canonical model is built around an opposition between Nature and Culture by means of which both terms are constituted, in the classical sense of linguistic structuralism, i.e. by mutually defining each other. Yet a fundamental asymmetry is built into the model: Nature is defined from the point of view of Culture, not the opposite. According to the Canonical model, every Culture conceives of itself as Order, opposed to something on the outside, which is seen as Chaos, Disorder, and Barbarism, in other words, as Culture opposed to Nature. In this sense, Nature will include other cultures, not recognised as such by the Cultural model.

It is easy to see that this is true of most traditional (or »primitive«) cultures and even is codified in their language: one of the Mayan languages still spoken in Mexico, the huesteco, has only one term (»uinic«) for saying »human being« and »speaker of the huesteco language«. Indeed, it is well-known that Barbarians were, to the Greeks, those who could not speak the Greek language: those who babble, i.e. who make sounds which not only are not meaningful but even lack organisation; the Aztecs took the same view on those who did not speak nahuatl (»popoluca«) Indeed, there are many historical examples of cultures describing other people as being »dumb«, e.g. the name given to Germans by the Slavs (»nemec«), to the Toltecs by the Maya (»nunob«), and to the people in Veracruz by the Aztecs (»nonoualca«).

This attitude is certainly not only manifested in verbal language, but in a number of other cultural practices: thus, for instance, persons coming from cultures which were too distant from the Aztec one where not even considered worthy of being sacrificed. The gods would accept a Totonac, but hardly a Spaniard (cf. Todorov 1982:81f). Languages employed in present-day Western Culture do not make use of terms of this kind, nor are we so particular about whom we sacrifice. But it would be naive to think that there is not a similar mechanism at work also in the relationship between contemporary cultures, subcultures and cultural spheres. On the other hand,

On Modelling the Complexity of Cultural Models 13

it is clear that the Canonical model is too simple to account for all those relationships which it is today possible to have with other cultures. Here I want to mention two other cases.

There are two respects in which the Tartu school model of Culture is curiously reminiscent of the proxemic model which describes how distances become socially meaningful (Hall 1966): first, they are relative to a centre, an origo, which in one case in the own Culture, and in the other the own body, that is, like the Husserlean Lifeworld (and like Bakhtin’s world of everyday life), they are »subjective-relative«; and, in the second place, the categories defined by both models attribute meaning to objects to the extent that they transgress borders, in one case between our own Culture and other cultures, and in the another case between different spaces having the body as their centre. Only in this way can we understand that something, which is a »text« on one side of the cultural divide, becomes a »non-text« on the other side of the border, and vice-versa. This latter feature is also found in the rhetorical model of meaning (cf. Sonesson 1995; 1997b). »Textuality« is relative to a centre. In this sense, the model is necessarily asymmetric: Culture defines Culture and Nature, not vice-versa.2

On the Margins of Tartu: The Inverted Model

In some cases, however, a Culture may construe itself as being on the outside, representing Nature and Chaos, while another society plays the role of Culture. This gives rise to what I have called the Inverted Canonical model. To take the example developed in most of the Tartu articles, Peter the Great and other Russians trying to modernise Russia held this latter view, while the slavophiles, more classically, conceived of Russia as Culture and the Occidental countries as being the Barbaric outsiders. For a long time, Latin Americans looking to Spain as the »madre patria« have taken the same stance. More generally, third world countries trying to become industrialised, or states of the former Soviet Block wanting to become integrated into Western Europe, may easily come to look upon the Occident as their cultural model, and for the last few decades young people all over the world have construed the United States, in this peculiar sense, as being the Culture.

It seems, however, that no complete projection is really possible, at least not according to all the different criteria for something being a text. If the cultural model is intrinsically egocentric, then Culture will always be where the Ego is, just as in proxemics; but we can imagine that this same Ego is projected to another sphere, so that there is an imaginary Culture which is built up around the projected Ego (Figure 2). There are reasons to believe that it is not only spatially (in terms of causal history, i.e. the trajectory from birth, in the sense of time geography) that the subject having the model cannot really move from inside his original Culture. As I have shown elsewhere (Sonesson 1998), there are in fact several conflicting criteria for defining what a text is, and hence what Culture is (since Textuality is that which is inside

2 Apart from other cultures, Nature also stands for nature in the sense of ordinary language – and thus perhaps to some extent for nature in the sense of the natural sciences. To give biosemiotics is due, it should of course be noted that, while Culture includes Nature from an intensional point of view, it is Culture which is included in Nature, once we shift to the extensional view-point.

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Culture), and these do not always go together. The non-text is that which is not possible to understand. But, at least, it is also that which we do not care to understand because it is not familiar and/or because we do not ascribe any value to it. Culture may well have been outside Russia for Peter the Great, in terms of attributed value, but in the sense of ease of understanding, it is a good guess that Russia remained more cultural.

Going beyond Tartu: The Extended Model

There is, however, another way in which the Canonical model may seem insufficient to describe our relationship to other cultures. It certainly seems to be possible for a subject in one Culture to conceive of some other society, cultural sphere or whatever as being a Culture, without being part of his or her Culture. We may therefore imagine a model in which Culture is opposed not only to Non-Culture (or Nature), but also to Extra-Culture. These terms are in some respects self-explanatory. But considered as an extension of the Canonical model, such a duplication of the opposite term of Culture at once becomes problematic.

This extension of the model is systematically built into the version of cultural semiotics elaborated by Posner (1989). In his view, the distinction between Non-Culture and Extra-Culture is accounted for by a scale of semiotization, which runs from a zero degree in Non-Culture, then increases in Extra-Culture and even more in Culture, within which it attains its maximum degree at the Centre (as opposed to the Periphery). This solution seems unsatisfactory to me for several reasons. First, it is not clear what semiotization is. It cannot mean that something becomes or ceases to be a sign, for this seems to be an all or nothing affair, nor is such a characterisation wide enough to define culture in the Tartu model. Perhaps it should be understood as something which is subject to attention (as when Lotman 1984 uses this term to describe the way the Decembrists made ordinary behaviour sequences into »texts«; cf. Sonesson 1998:104). Or perhaps the term is used to refer to the basic Hjelmslevian intuition underlying the notion of Nature in the Tartu school model, i.e. an opposition between »form« which is organised and can be understood and »substance« (or rather »matter«) which lacks organisation and thus cannot be grasped. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere (Sonesson 1998), many different criteria as used to distinguish texts from non-texts in the Tartu model (such as meaningfulness, order, ease of interpretation, prominence, worth, etc.), so we should really need to have recourse to several scales..

This suggests another way in which the Canonical model is too simple: the limits between texts and non-texts (extra-texts, centro-texts, etc.) will often be different according as different criteria are used, which means that the limits between Culture and Non-culture (Extra-culture, Centre, etc) will also be different: the Canonical model is simply the case in which all these different oppositions will map out the same border (cf. Sonesson 1998).

But in either case it remains unclear how a scale, which is continuous, should be able to account for a segmentation into different domains, the limits of which change the meaning of the artefact crossing them: in fact, if there is an Extra-culture and a

On Modelling the Complexity of Cultural Models 15

centre, as well as a Non-culture and a Culture, there should also be extra-texts and centro-texts, in addition to texts and non-texts. Rather than a continuous scale (or several scales), what we need are criteria for segmenting the domain of culture and non-culture, in such a way that Culture and Extra-culture remain more intimately connected to each other than either of them is to Non-culture. This can be done by attending to the parallel between persons and cultures, suggested, independently, by Peirce and Bakhtin.

Bakhtin and Peirce on Subjects and Cultures

Already when claiming that the cultural model is egocentric (rather than, more trivially, ethnocentric), I suggested a parallel between persons and cultures: the cultural model is an origo, a portable centre, by means of which members of a culture »take possession of« the semiosphere (to generalise what Benveniste said about language). Indeed, parallels between persons and cultures have often been made, not least in semiotics. Peirce talked about cultures as »compact persons« (cf. Singer 1984; Colapietro 1989). Moreover, Lotman argued that a Semiotics of Culture was possible because cultures could be seen as (collections of) signs, and Colapietro (1989 58, 78ff) quotes Peirce’s comparable identification of minds with symbols when trying to show the viability of a Semiotics of the self.

In his early work, Bakhtin (1990; 1993) is very much preoccupied by the differences between the self and the other, often masquerading under the terms Author and Hero. He points out that it is only the other which may be (and must be) seen from the outside, and thus is perceived as a complete and finished whole; the self, on the other hand, is an unlimited process which can never be grasped in its entirety, indeed it is some kind of stream of consciousness, which only comes to a stand-still at death. This is so because »my emotional and volitional reactions attach to objects and do not contract into an outwardly finished image of myself« (1990:35; cf. 1993). Only the other’s body can be seen completely: there is an »excess of seeing (1990: 22ff). In the case of ourselves, some part of the body is always lacking, even as reflected in a mirror. This difference translates to the mind. In this sense, the other, contrary to the self, has the property of outsideness, or transgredience (1990:27ff).

Just like Bakhtin, Peirce see the self as something which is not and cannot be concluded, something which continues to develop in time until death bring it to an end; but unlike Bakhtin, Peirce attributes the same property to the other (cf. Colaprieto 1989). On the other hand, the »excess of seeing«, which to Bakhtin is so typical of our relationship with the other, in Peirce’s view also extends to the self, at least as far as the mind is concerned.

Bakhtin (1990: 25ff, 61ff) uses these observations to criticise the theory of empathy popular at the time: understanding cannot be an identification with the other, for, to begin with, this would be pointless, since it would only give us the same thing over again, and in the second place, it is impossible, because the other, by

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definition, can only be seen from the outside.3 Yet Bakhtin (1990: 15ff, 17, 25f) admits that we may imaginatively take the position of the other on ourselves, though what is gained from this outside position can only be appreciated once it is reintegrated into the stream of consciousness, as a phase of the ongoing process which is the self.4 In a very late text, however, Bakhtin (1986) suggests a parallel can be made between the meeting of self and other and the interpretation of other cultures: in both cases, understanding is not possible by a total identification with the other culture, but only by entering the other culture and then returning to a position external to it. In our terms, Non-culture can only be transformed into Extra-Culture by taking one’s own ultimate stand in Culture.

The Axes of Nomination and Conversation

In some earlier articles (Sonesson 1997c, d), I have already noted the parallels which might be drawn between relations between cultures, on one hand, and relations between persons, on the other; notably by differentiating Non-Culture into the equivalent of the Non-Ego and the Non-person. In fact, in a famous analysis, Benveniste (1966) has suggested that what is ordinarily considered the pronouns of the first, second, and third persons, should really be considered the result of combining two different dimensions, the correlation of personality, which opposes the person to the non-person, and, within the former pole, the correlation of subjectivity, which opposes the subject to the non-subject. The traditional third person, in this sense, is no person at all, and it is opposed to two kinds of persons, the one identified with the speaker, and the one identified with the listener. Tesnière (1969) later proposed to use the somewhat more enlightening, but more cumbersome, terms autoontive, antiontive, and anontive, respectively: i.e. the one who exists in itself, the one who exists against (the first one), and the one who, properly speaking, does not exist at all. It could be said, then, that Culture is the domain of the subject, or autoontive, while Extra-culture is the domain of the non-subject, or antiontive; Non-culture, finally, is the residence of the Non-person, or anontive. It seems particular proper to describe Non-culture as that which does not properly exist.5

It therefore seems more correct to talk about the axis of conversation or dialogue, joining Ego and Alter, as opposed to the axis of reference or nomination, which connects the former to the thing meant, or Aliquid. Extra-culture is the one with whom Culture is »on speaking terms«; Non-culture is the one Culture may at the most

3 However, Bakhtin (1990: 23f) also claims that this limitation may be overcome by cognition, but not by perception, which is always incarnated (a position which is reminiscent of Bühler and Merleau-Ponty); but then it seems possible to conceive of some kind of ‘cognitive empathy’! 4 Curiously, the concept of dialogicity, for which Bakhtin and the other members of his circle are famous, is very rarely applied to the relation between the other as listener, and thus potential speaker; it is rather concerned with the other as seen from the outside, the one about whom we are talking. Cf. in particular Voloc &inov 1973 and the contributions by the same author in Shukman, ed., 1983, as well as Bakhtin 1981 (an exception is the notion of ›super-addressee‹). 5 The terminology suggested certainly does not involve the imposition of a linguistic model on culture; rather, it is Benveniste’s merit to have discovered a cultural layering within language, which may well exist also in other semiotic systems.

On Modelling the Complexity of Cultural Models 17

be speaking about. In this sense, cultural semiotics becomes, in Milton Singer’s (1984) phrase, a real »conversation of cultures«; but, at the same time, it is a conversation conducted out of reach of other cultures.

Peirce also has had recourse to the metaphor of the three common types of personal pronouns to describe analogies between persons and cultures, but perhaps in a somewhat different way from mine. He even puts them in place of what was later to become the three fundamental categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. But Peirce did not identify the second person, as one may at first naively expect, with Secondness, but with Thirdness. In his view, the second person was the most important, not the first: »all thought is addressed to a second person, or to one’s future self as a second person« (quoted from Singer, 1984: 83f). In terms which Peirce took over from Schiller, the first person stood for the infinite impulse (Firstness), the third person for the sensuous (Secondness), and the second persons for the harmonising principles (Thirdness). Peirce called his own doctrine »Tuism« (from »Tu«, as opposed to »Ego« and »It«), and he prophesised about an »tuistic age«, in which peace and harmony would prevail. So the Peircean other is a friend and collaborator; he is not the spirit which always says no, the devil in a Biblical sense.

What seems to be lacking in Peirce’s thought is the second person as a real Alter, someone who is basically different. As we observed above, both Bakhtin and Peirce see the self as something which is not and cannot be concluded, something which exists only as developing in time. But while to Bakhtin the other is something static, essentially closed off, he is for Peirce of the same kind as the self, that is a stream of consciousness which cannot be halted – before the moment of death. So from this point of view, the other is just another self to Peirce. On the other hand, Peirce claims there is no direct access to knowledge about the self, just as there is none about the other: both are only indirectly known through signs. As far as access to knowledge is concerned, then, the self is merely another other to Peirce. The outsideness, or transgredience, which Bakhtin attributes to the other is also a property of the Peircean self.

I would not presume to decide who is right, of Peirce and Bakhtin, about the self and the other; perhaps we should consider their descriptions to be alternate, but equally possible, models. In any case, it seems clear that, given its egocentrical point of departure, cultural semiotics must side with Bakhtin. Ego and Alter are two of a kind to Peirce, but in the model of cultural semiotics that we have presented Ego and Alter are essentially opposed as to their nature, as in Bakhtin’s work.6 Since Alter is petrified and closed-off by the look of the Ego, he should of course be the square inserted into the openness of the Ego, not the opposite as the model (cf. Figure 1) suggests; but this is another aspect, not taken into account by the model in its visual manifestation. What is important, for the moment, is that Ego and Alter appear as essentially different.

6 It is in the sense that Ego and Alter are not interchangeable that we side with Bakhtin; for we can certainly not follow him in treating the other as a mere subject of conversation.

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Discovering America: an Egocentric Enterprise

What is familiarly known as the discovery of America is surely one of the important examples in history of the meeting of Culture and its other, whether the latter is conceived as Non-Culture or as Extra-Culture. In fact, the very term »discovery« (as well as »conquest«) points to the egocentrical roots of cultural modelling which we have already observed. The fact that the model may in some respects be reversed is of course particularly poignant. There even is a place for those who would project their Ego to the other culture.

Todorov makes a lot of the differences in the attitude taken by the two cultural heroes of the conquest, Colombo, on one hand, and Cortez, on the other: while both find themselves faced with a hermeneutical task, the former applies it to things, the latter to people and their society. As a skilled mariner, Colombo is able to make excellent observations of nature, the direction of winds, currents, etc, but he takes no interest whatsoever in language, culture, people, and so forth. When he talks about people, it is only as part of the landscape: in the long lists of things observed, he will often mention the Indians in-between birds and trees. The first time Colombo meets the Indians, he describe them as being »naked«; and he turns out to have the same view on them also in several metaphorical senses. He sees no interest in mentioning the artefacts the Indians use: he believes they lack everything, including language, culture, religion, customs. Therefore, he also fails to discover any differences between the tribes he encounters: they are all alike, as are their languages (Todorov 1982: 40, 41f, 36f). So it seems safe to say that Colombo really thinks he is confronted with Non-culture, both in the sense of a negation of Culture rather than another Culture, and in the sense of an absence of order and organisation, an identification with Nature and Chaos.7

Often Colombo will tell us that some Indians have informed him about something; but then he goes on to say that nobody understood their language. When the Indians refers to Cariba, he hears this as »Caniba«, which he takes to be a reference to Kubla Kahn; but he also understands it as containing the Latin word »can«, and thus, interpreting the same word twice, he thinks the Indians are claiming that Kubla Kahn’s people are dogs, which he considers to be a lie. First, the Indians are not able to pronounce properly, and when their utterances are corrected as to their pronunciation, they turns out to be lying. Colombo must »teach them to speak«. When he realises that there are other languages than those of the Latin stock, he takes it for granted that they must all by similar, if not identical, to each other, and so he sends a speaker of Arabian to talk with the Indians (Todorov 1982: 42ff, 22,:37). So it seems clear that, in Colombo’s view, correlatively to their Non-culture, the Indians have a Non-language.

Todorov (1982:35f) even takes Colombo to task for not understanding the arbitrarity of language: thus, for instance, when Colombo encounters words such as »cacique« or »nitayno«, he is eager to find out whether the former means king or governor, and whether the latter means nobleman, judge or governor. What Colombo fails to understand, Todorov concludes, is that other languages may make different

7 Although Serge Gruzinski (1990) himself offers a very different interpretation, the facts which he quotes really supports this thesis.

On Modelling the Complexity of Cultural Models 19

segmentations of reality than the Romance languages. Here I think Todorov is a little hard on Colombo: after all, even since Saussure made the arbitrarity of language a basic postulate of linguistics, a lot of people find it very difficult to understand. There is a more important point which should be made against Todorov’s interpretation, however: it is not true that Colombo takes a totally asemiotic attitude. Contrary to Todorov’s opinion, the reported facts cannot be taken to indicate a lack of interest in semiotic operations. We also learn from Todorov’s book that Colombo is very anxious to give names to all places he encounters, although he obviously knows that they have names already, which testifies to his interest in rewriting the foreign Culture as a text of his own Culture. Segmentation, it should be remembered, is the primordial semiotic operation. But Colombo treats everything, from islands and animals to people, as Non-persons. This is semiosis as reference or nomination, not as conversation.

Mediating the Ego: The Malinche Connection

As he is described by Todorov, Cortez takes a very different attitude from that witnessed in Colombo: first of all he wants to understand the other culture, although he is of course not interested in understanding for understandings’ sake. He interprets the world in order to change it. So his first priority when arriving to the New World is to find an interpreter. In fact, he finds two. A fascinating chain of interpretation is set up: the Spaniard Aguilar, who has been living with the Maya, translates from Spanish to Maya, and then Cortez mistress, Malintzin or Malinche, who is a Mayan, translates Aguilar’s Maya into Nahuatl. Thus, together, Cortez, Aguilar and Malintzin travels through two Extra-cultures. In due time, Malintzin learns to master Spanish and thus is able to translate directly from Spanish to Nahuatl. There is evidence that her function as an interpreter was more importance than that as a mistress (Todorov 1982: 105ff).

This is only one element of Cortez’s strategy, however. He also gives the imprisoned Moctezuma a Spanish servant who speaks Nahuatl, so that messages may circulate in both directions. The strategy goes beyond language policy to behavioural semiotics: he stops his soldiers from robbing to avoid giving a bad impression. He even uses the knowledge about the other culture which he acquires for his own purposes. The most notable example of the latter is the way he takes advantage of the myth about the return of Quatzelcoatl (cf. Todorov 1982: 107, 105, 122). In order to realise purposes undoubtedly defined by his own culture, his allows his own behaviour to be rewritten as a text of the other Culture. There can be no doubt that to him, Aztec society is an Extra-culture. But this does not mean, as can be seen, that his behaviour is necessarily more ethical than that of Colombo. The »conversation of cultures« is here not for mutual benefit, but serves to subtly overpower the other.

According to Todorov (1982: 251), there is something specifically European in understanding the other. So Western culture discovered, not the other, but the discovery of the other. The Extended Canonical model, which includes Extra-culture, was invented by Europeans (although it has later been exported to most parts of the world). The ability to understand the other, first found in Cortez, is, in Todorov’s

20 Göran Sonesson

view, a movement in two phases, an identification with the other, followed by a return to one’s own Culture, which one continues to see as superior. This is the attitude taken by most of the monks who came to the New World. Their aim was to convert the Indians to what they considered a superior religion and a superior culture. In the case of some persons, like Guerrero among the Mayans, Duran, Cabeza de Vaca, and perhaps Sahagun, identification gained the upper hand (Todorov 1982:211ff). This is also true, in the other culture, of Malinche. Indeed, in contemporary Mexico, »Malinche« is a derogatory term for somebody who is felt to be a traitor to Mexican culture (for instance by marrying a foreigner); that is, it designates somebody who projects his or her Ego onto what is, from the point of view of earlier experience, his or her Non-Culture or Extra-Culture.

Todorov’s two phase model corresponds closely with Bakhtin’s description of the encounter with the other and his Culture. Yet there is no reference to Bakhtin (although Bakhtin’s term »exotopie« is mentioned a few pager later on). There are differences, of course. Bakhtin does not say that we will necessarily continue to see our own culture as superior. And the encounter does not imply any assimilation of the other. Rather, we would expect that, in the ideal case, there is, both assimilation and accommodation, in Piaget’s sense, on the part of both participants: a combination of projecting our traits on the other and of taking over some of the other’s features. Such an attitude, it would seem, is the real contribution, in the best case, of the Occident, to the »conversation of cultures«. It is the real sense of the dialectics of Enlightenment.8

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M.N,. The dialogic imagination. Austin, University of Texas 1981. –– Speech Genres and other Late Essays. Austin, University of Texas 1986. –– Art and Answerability. Austin, University of Texas 1990 –– Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Austin, University of Texas 1993 Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard.1966 Colaprieto, Vincent, Peirce’s Approach to the self. Albany: State University of New York Press.1989 Gruzinski, Serge, La guerre des images. De Christophe Colomb à »Blade Runner«. Paris: Fayard.1990 Hall, E.T., The hidden dimension. New York: Doubleday.1966 Lotman, J.M., »The decembrist in everyday life«, in Shukman, Ann, ed, 1984, 71-124. Posner, R., »What is Culture? Toward a semiotic explication of anthropological concepts«, in The Nature of Culture. Koch, W., ed.. Bochum. Brochmeyer; 1989, 240-295. Ricœur, Paul, Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil. 1990 Saussure, F., Cours de linguistique générale. Edition critique par Rudolf Engler. Tome 1-II. Harrossowitz, Wiesbaden 1968/74 Shukman, Ann, ed., Bakhtin School Papers. Russian Poetics in Translation 10. Colchester: University of Essex 1983 Singer, M.. Man’s glassy essence. Bloominington, IN., Indiana University Press.1984

8 For a more complete version of this argument, now see Sonesson 2000.

On Modelling the Complexity of Cultural Models 21

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