Maxim Waldstein, The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics (Book Review‪)‬

Maxim Waldstein, The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics. xii + 219 pp. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2008. ISBN13 978-3639056051. Paper, $116.98. Can empire ever be a good, honest, open-ended thing--even an empire of signs, and even one that prides itself on transcending (rather than relying upon) big-power politics? Throughout this account of Iurii Lotman and the rise of the Tartu school, Maxim Waldstein, a sociologist by training, teases out an answer to this question. His verdict comes only late in chapter 6, and in appealingly tentative form. Waldstein intimates that in semiotics, as in every ambitious body of procedures, there is imperial heavy and lite. Heavy is the hardcore interventionist position: the assumption that since "semiotic mechanisms take place everywhere," semioticians can "claim expertise over almost any field of knowledge" (162). Little wonder that the movement was accused of disciplinary promiscuity. What tempted its members was not only the rigor of quantification--its promise of common denominators and the possibility of arriving at objective data in the humanities--and not only the refreshing indifference of cybernetics or information theory to political ideology. Waldstein repeatedly notes that the Tartu scholars, working at the periphery of a centralized state, were universalizers by temperament. Their model, consciously or no, was the multinational, multilingual, multiethnic Soviet empire, the uncomfortable but familiar home that both trapped and nourished them.