Personality in the Semiotic System of Culture: Lana Del Rey - Kate Silverton - Andrey Golov

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to determine the place of the concept of «personality» in the semiotic system of modern culture and comprehend it on the example of the works by Kate Silverton (UK), Lana Del Rey (USA) and Andrey Golov (Russia). The methodological basis of the article is the idea of culture as a semiotic system, based on the works of Yuri Lotman. The study presents theoretical results in the introduction. Sartre expressed modern ideas about personality, rooted in the peculiarities of medieval thinking. The iconography of the Trinity, emphasizing the three Divine Personalities, did not develop in the West because of the influence of the filioque. This iconography tradition was lost in post-revolutionary Russia. As a result, modern science puts the individual as a carrier of human nature at the center of its interests, and the position of the personality is weakened. Personality as a cultural phenomenon was correlated with the symbols of the world as a text - with a unique face and gene. The concept that a personality is a spiritual gene has been formed based on the biological gene. Thanks to it unique entities are formed under the influence of the identical factors. The study presents practical results in the central part. Humans are born as an semiotic (ontological) personality and become a phenomenological one. Scientists (Kate Silverton, for example) study the phenomenological personality. The concept of an ontological personality has been partially preserved in poems by Lana Del Rey and Andrey Golov. We came to the conclusion that the personality has lost its semiotic significance in west scientific discourse but retained it in literature, especially in poetry. The novelty of the work lies in the comparison of the semiotic system of culture with the world-text, and in the projection of the biological gene onto the spiritual gene-personality.