Virve Sarapik
Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute for Art History, Estonia
The concept of information and other relevant concepts originating in information theory and cybernetics became increasingly popular in the Soviet humanities of the 1960s and 1970s. Without directly relying on the humanities, Slava Gerowich in his well-known book From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, regarded the spread of popular metaphors and ideas originating in cybernetics so overwhelming that they could be determined as one language uniting different fields.
In April 1959 the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union established an academic council of cybernetics. It was precisely the council that joined cybernetics, structuralism and semiotics on the official level. One of the most significant events was a joint symposium on 19–25 December 1962, organised by the Moscow Institute of Slavic Studies and the research council of cybernetics on the structural research of sign systems (so-called Semiotics Symposium). An impressive booklet of theses was published with the print run of one thousand, and that very publication later became the grounds for attacking the organisers of the subsequent symposium. Half of the print run was shelved and the press published numerous critical reviews. According to the theses, the organisers had undertaken a much bigger mouthful than previously fitted under the cover of cybernetics. E.g. the entire section was involved in art semiotics, which was the first time such a topic had been tackled in the Soviet Union and also in the development of cybernetics.
The main hypothesis of my presentation is that while structural semiotics and linguistics were quite comfortably able to penetrate the Soviet sphere of scientific research under the shield of cybernetics, then, as soon as semiotics started to manifest its interest in the sphere of art, it became ideologically suspicious. Concerning art history, this was amplified by an anti-abstractionism and formalist campaign that was carried out at the same time and which has, regarding the realm of culture, been considered as the freezing point of the previous “thaw”.