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CHAPTER 1

From Universe of the Mind

This section and the next two are from a monograph, composed partly from previously published articles, which came out first in English translation in 1990 under the title of Universe of the Mind, trans. Ann Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), and in Russian in 1999. Our translation is based on the version included in Iu. M. Lotman, Semiosfera (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2000), 163–177, itself based on the manuscript copy of Lotman’s text. In this section we see Lotman grapple with an important issue, rarely addressed, which is how semiotics can account for the production of new ideas and information, as opposed to the actualization of meanings already encoded in the linguistic structure. Lotman derives novelty from the interaction between two differently coded semiotic systems, placing heterogeneity at the heart of his theory, which lends it dynamism and openness to change. In the previous section in Universe of the Mind, Lotman had questioned Ferdinand de Saussure’s premise that what matters for linguistics is only the underlying semiotic structure, and not actual utterances. For Lotman, this reflects an impoverished understanding of the function of language as merely a conveyor of pre-existing information. Instead he argued for a broader view, which takes into account the “creative function” of languages, as well as their capacity to condense cultural memory.

AUTOCOMMUNICATION: “I” AND “OTHER” AS ADDRESSEES

(On the Two Models of Communication in the System of Culture)

The organic connection between culture and communication forms one basis of contemporary cultural studies. A consequence of this is the transfer of models and terms adopted into the cultural sphere from communication theory. Applying the basic model elaborated by Roman Jakobson has allowed us to connect the broad range of problems in language, art, and culture more broadly with the theory of communicative systems. As we know, the model laid out by Jakobson is as follows:¹

context

message

addresser ........... addressee

contact

code

The creation of a unified model of communicative situations has been a substantial contribution to the study of the semiotic cycle and has provoked a response in many scholarly works. Yet the automatic transfer of established ideas into the realm of culture creates a raft of difficulties. The most basic of these is the following: in the mechanics of culture, communication operates through a minimum of two channels that are differently constructed.

We will have an opportunity later to turn our attention to how the unified mechanism of culture must have both visual and verbal connections, which can be regarded as two differently constructed channels for information transfer.ⁱ Both of these channels, however, can be described by Jakobson’s model, and in this respect they are of one kind. But if we were to task ourselves with constructing a model of culture on a more abstract level, it would be possible to separate the two kinds of communicative channel, only one of which would be described by the classic model used till now. Doing so would first require that we separate two potential directions for transferring a message. The most typical case is the direction “I—HE,” in which the “I” is the subject of the transmission, the one who possesses the information, and “HE” is the object, the addressee. In this instance, it is assumed that until the act of communication begins a certain message is known to “me” and unknown to “him.”

In the culture to which we are accustomed, the prevalence of communications of this kind overshadows another channel of communicative transmission, one that one could characterize schematically as the “I—I” channel. A case of the subject delivering a message to himself—that is, to the person who already knows the message in the first place—seems paradoxical. In actual fact, however, it is not really so rare, and it plays a not insignificant role in the general system of culture.

When we speak of transmitting a message through the “I—I” system, we have in mind, firstly, not those instances when the text fulfills a mnemonic function. Here, the second, recipient “I” is functionally equivalent to the third person. The distinction comes down to the fact that in the “I—HE” system, information circulates in space, whereas in the “I—I” system it does so in time.²

What interests us first of all is the instance when the transmission of information from “I” to “I” is not accompanied by a gap in time and serves not a mnemonic function, but some other cultural function instead. Communicating to oneself information that one already knows occurs, first of all, whenever the communicative register is elevated in the process. Thus when a young poet reads his own poem as it is printed, the message remains textually the same as the manuscript text he knows. But once it is transcribed into a new system of graphic signs that possess another level of authority in the given culture, it receives a certain added significance. Analogous instances are those where the veracity or falsehood of the communication is conditional on whether it has been articulated in words or is merely implied, spoken or written, written or printed, and so on.

But we are dealing with the transmission of a message from “I” to “I” in many other instances as well. These include every instance where a person addresses himself, in particular those diary entries that are recorded not with the goal of memorializing specific data, but rather, for example, of elucidating the writer’s interior state, an elucidation that does not occur without the entry. Addressing oneself—in text, in speech, in argument—is an essential fact not only of psychology, but of the history of culture as well.

In what follows we shall strive to demonstrate how the place of autocommunication in the system of culture is much more significant than one might suppose.

But how does such a strange situation arise, that a message transmitted within the “I—I” system not only doesn’t become completely superfluous, but acquires some new, additional information?

In the “I—HE” system, the model’s framing elements are variable (the addresser changes places with the addressee), while the code and message are stable. The message and the information it contains are constant, whereas the carriers of that information change.

In the “I—I” system, the carrier of information remains the same, but the message is reformulated and assumes a new meaning in the process of communication. This occurs due to the fact that a second, supplementary code is introduced, and the initial message is recoded in the units of that code’s structure, acquiring the features of a new message.

In this instance, the communicative schema looks like this:

context shift in context

message 1------------------------------→message 2

I→ .............................................................................................. ←I

Code 1 Code 2

If the “I—HE” communicative system secures only the transmission of a certain constant informational content, then what happens in the “I—I” channel is its qualitative transformation, which leads to the reformation of the “I” itself.ⁱⁱ In the first instance, the addresser transmits a message to someone else, the addressee, and remains unchanged in the course of the act. In the second, in broadcasting to himself, he reforms his own essence internally, insofar as one can regard one’s personal essence as one’s individual store of socially meaningful codes, and here this store of codes changes in the process of the communicative act.

A message’s transmission through the “I—I” channel has no immanent character, insofar as it is conditioned by the encroachment of certain additional codes from outside and by the presence of external shocks that shift the contextual situation.

A typical example would be the effect of metered sounds (the beat of wheels turning; rhythmic music) on a person’s interior monologue. One could name a whole range of artistic texts in which rich and unbridled fantasy is conditioned by the metered rhythms of riding on horseback (Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” a number of poems from Heine’s Lyrical Intermezzo), the rocking of a ship (Fyodor Tyutchev’s “Dream upon the Sea” [Son na more]), the rhythms of the railroad (Mikhail Glinka’s “Travelling Song” [Poputnaia pesnia], with words by Nestor Kukolnik).

Let us consider Tyutchev’s “Dream upon the Sea” from this perspective:

Dream upon the Sea

Both sea and the storm held our bark in its sway;

And, sleepy, I felt at the whim of each wave.

Infinitudes two I possessed deep within,

And they made of me a most trifling thing.

So like cymbals, around me, the rock cliffs did crash,

The swells singing their part, the winds answering back.

And I in the chaos of sound lay there stunned,

But then over the chaos of sound came my dream.

A shock to behold, and yet magically mute,

O’er fulminous mist it plotted its route.

In feverish rays it unfolded its world,

The green earth grew greener as the ether glowed,

Circuitous gardens, rich halls, colonnades,

Assemblages seething in unspeaking crowds.

And many a stranger’s new face I observed,

Saw sorcerous creatures, mysterious birds,

On the heights of creation, like God, I did tread,

And the world underneath me still shone, as if dead.

But like sorcerers’ howling, in these reveries,

I hearkened the rumbling of unfathomed seas,

And visions and dreams, all my quiet domain

Was breached by the swells and the blasting of foam.³

И море, и буря качали наш челн;

Я, сонный, был предан всей прихоти волн.

Две беспредельности были во мне,

И мной своевольно играли оне.

Вкруг меня, как кимвалы, звучали скалы́,

Окликалися ветры и пели валы.

Я в хаосе звуков лежал оглушен,

Но над хаосом звуков носился мой сон.

Болезненно-яркий, волшебно-немой,

Он веял легко над гремящею тьмой.

В лучах огневицы развил он свой мир –

Земля зеленела, светился эфир,

Сады-лавиринфы, чертоги, столпы,

И сонмы кипели безмолвной толпы.

Я много узнал мне неведомых лиц,

Зрел тварей волшебных, таинственных птиц,

По высям творенья, как бог, я шагал,

И мир подо мною недвижный сиял.

Но все грезы насквозь, как волшебника вой,

Мне слышался грохот пучины морской,

И в тихую область видений и снов

Врывалася пена ревущих валов.

We are not interested here in that aspect of the poem that is connected with what is for Tyutchev an essential juxtaposition (“Thought upon thought, wave upon wave” [Duma za dumoi, volna za volnoi]) or the opposition (“A melody found in the waves of the sea” [Pevuchest′ est′ v morskikh volnakh]) between the life of the soul, on the one hand, and the sea, on the other.

Insofar as the text is evidently rooted in a real experience—the recollection of a four-day storm in September 1833, as he was voyaging around the Adriatic—it interests us as a monument to the author’s psychological self-observation (one can hardly deny the legitimacy of such an approach to the text, among others).

The poem lays out two components of the author’s spiritual state: the soundless dream and the storm’s metrical roar. The latter is marked in the original by the unexpected insertion of an anapestic line into an amphibrachic text:

So like cymbals, around me, the rock cliffs did crash,

The swells singing their part, the winds answering back …

But then over the chaos of sound came my dream …

But like sorcerers’ howling, in these reveries …

The anapestic lines are devoted to the rumbling of the storm, and the two symmetrical verses beginning with “but” portray the dream erupting through the storm’s noise, or else the noise of the storm erupting through the dream. The verse dedicated to the philosophical theme of the “double abyss” (“infinitudes two”) and connecting the text to other Tyutchev poems is set off by the sole dactyl.ⁱⁱⁱ

The abundance of sonic features makes the noise of the storm stand out just as sharply against the backdrop of the soundless world of the dream (“magically mute,” populated by “speechless crowds”). But it is precisely these metrical, deafening sounds that become the rhythmic backdrop that occasions the liberation of thought, its ascent and brilliance.

Let us bring in another example (Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, chapter 8):

XXXVI

And so? While eyes continued reading,

His thoughts remained yet far away;

His dreams, desires, as well as grieving

Were crammed deep in his soul today.

Among the lines in plain print visible,

And with the spirit’s eyes perceptible,

Were others. Those were what for verse

He took, now utterly immersed.

’Twas secret lore of deep tradition,

Obscure, sincere, from olden times,

And disconnected, muddled dreams,

A dread, and mumblings, premonitions,

Just living nonsense in a fairy’s land

Or correspondence in girlish hand.

XXXVII

And gradual pacification

Of thoughts and feelings now holds sway,

And before him his imagination

Its motley pharaoh sets to play …

XXXVIII

… How much when in a corner, solo,

Did he look like a poet inspired,

And sat he near the blazing fire,

And to himself hummed “Idol mio”

Or “Benedetta,” while up the flue

Burned now a paper, now a shoe.

(VI, 183–184)⁴

XXXVI

И что ж? Глаза его читали,

Но мысли были далеко;

Мечты, желания, печали

Теснились в душу глубоко.

Он меж печатными строками

Читал духовными глазами

Другие строки. В них-то он

Был совершенно углублен.

То были тайные преданья

Сердечной, темной старины,

Ни с чем не связанные сны,

Угрозы, толки, предсказанья,

Иль длинной сказки вздор живой,

Иль письма девы молодой.

XXXVII

И постепенно в усыпленье

И чувств и дум впадает он,

А перед ним воображенье

Свой пестрый мечет фараон …

XXXVIII

… Как походил он на поэта,

Когда в углу сидел один,

И перед ним пылал камин,

И он мурлыкал: Benedetta

Иль Idol mio и ронял

В огонь то туфлю, то журнал.

In this instance, we have three external rhythm-forming codes: the printed text, the measured flickering of the fire, and the “humming” motif. It is quite typical that the book appears here not as communication—it is read without its content being noticed (“While eyes continued reading,/His thoughts remained yet far away”)—but as something that stimulates the development of an idea. And, crucially, it stimulates not with its content, but through the mechanistic automaticity of reading. Onegin “reads without reading,” just as he looks at the fire without seeing it and hums without noticing. None of these three rhythmic sequences, each perceived by different organs, has an immediate semantic relationship to what he is thinking, his imagination’s game of “pharaoh.”^iv And yet they are indispensable if he is to read the “other” lines “with the spirit’s eyes.” The external rhythm’s intrusion organizes and stimulates the interior monologue.

Finally, a third example we would wish to introduce is the Japanese Buddhist monk contemplating a “rock garden.”⁵ Such a garden consists of a modest, gravel-strewn square with stones arranged according to a complex mathematical rhythm. Contemplating these complexly arranged pebbles is supposed to create a certain mood that fosters introspection.

* * *

Various systems of rhythmic series, from musical repetitions to repeating ornamental patterns—constructed according to clearly marked syntagmatic principles, but deprived of their own semantic content—can appear as the external codes by which the verbal message is reconstructed. For comparison, see also Yuri Knorozov’s notion of a correlation between information and fascination.^{6 v} In order for the system to work, however, two heterogeneous fundamentals must collide and interact: the message, in some semantic language, and the intrusion of an additional, purely syntagmatic code. Only the combination of these fundamentals gives rise to a communicative system that one might characterize as “I—I.”

Thus we can regard the existence of a special channel for autocommunication as well-established. And it happens that this question has already drawn scholarly attention. We find an indication of the existence of a special language specifically designed for autocommunication in L. S. Vygotsky, who describes it as “inner speech.”^vi And here we also find an indication of its structural markers:

The basic distinction between inner and outer speech is the absence of vocalization.

Inner speech is mute, silent speech. This is its fundamental distinction. But it is in precisely this respect, meaning the gradual increase of this distinction, that egocentric speech undergoes an evolution. … The very fact that this marker develops gradually, that egocentric speech makes itself known sooner in function and structure than in vocalization, indicates only that upon which we have based our hypothesis about how inner speech develops, namely, that inner speech develops not through the outer weakening of its vocal aspect, passing from speech to whisper and from whisper to mute speech, but through the functional and structural separation from outer speech, passing from it to the egocentric, and from egocentric to inner speech.⁷

Let us try to describe some features of the autocommunicative system.

The first marker distinguishing it from the “I—HE” system will be such language’s reduction of words: they will tend to turn into signs of words, indices of signs. On this score, Wilhelm Küchelbecker has an excellent note in his fortress diary: “I have noted something strange, a curiosity for psychologists and physiologists alike: for some time I have been dreaming not of things, not of incidents, but of these wondrous sorts of abridgements that are related to them, as a hieroglyph is to a picture, as a book’s table of contents is to the book itself. Does this not proceed from the paucity of things around me and of incidents that befall me?”⁸

The tendency toward reduction in “I—I” language is manifest in the shorthand that forms the basis of notes to oneself. Ultimately, the words of such notes constitute indices that one might decipher only by knowing what was written. Consider how the scholar I. Iu. Krachkovsky characterized the early script tradition of the Koran: “Scriptio defectiva. Absence not only of short vowels, but also of long ones, and of diacritical marks. Can only be read if you know it by heart.”⁹

We find a striking example of this kind of communication in Anna Karenina, in the famous confession scene between Kitty and Konstantin Levin, which is all the more interesting for recalling the episode of Leo Tolstoy’s confession to his fiancée Sofya Bers:

“Right,” he said, and he wrote the initials w, y, r—i, c, b—d, t, m, n, o, t? These letters meant: When you replied, “It cannot be,” did that mean never, or then? …

“I got it,” she said, blushing.

“What word is this?” he asked, pointing to the n, which signified never.

“That one means never,” she said.¹⁰

In all of these examples we are dealing with a case where the reader understands the text only because he or she knows it in advance (in Tolstoy, because of the fact that Kitty and Levin are spiritually already one; the conflation of the addresser and addressee occurs before our very eyes).

Word-indices formed through such reduction tend toward isometry. Also connected with this is the fundamental peculiarity of syntax in this kind of speech: it does not form complete propositions, but moves toward infinite chains of rhythmic repeatability.

The majority of the examples we have introduced are not “I—I” communications in the pure sense, but constitute a compromise that arises because the laws governing the text deform its usual language. Accordingly, one ought to distinguish between two instances of autocommunication: one having a mnemonic function, the other not.

As an example of the first, one might turn to Pushkin’s note to the final draft of his poem “Beneath the Blue Sky of One’s Native Land” [Pod nebom golubym strany svoei rodnoi]:

Hear of d. 25

H of d. R. P. M. K. B.: 24.

It can be deciphered as follows:

Hear[d] of d[eath of] [Riznich] 25 [July 1826]

H[eard] of d[eath of] R[yleev], P[estel], M[uravyov], K[akhovsky], B[estuzhev]: 24 [July 1826].^{11 vii}

The note serves a distinctively mnemonic function, though one ought not to forget the other as well: to a significant degree, by virtue of the sporadic connection between the signified and the signifier in the “I—I” system, it turns out to be significantly better suited to cryptography, insofar as it is constructed according to the formula of being “understood only by those who understand.” As a rule, the text’s secret encoding is connected to its transfer from the “I—HE” system to the “I—I” one. (Members of a collective using cryptography are regarded in this case as a single “I,” relative to which those from whom the text should be concealed compose a collective third person.) True, what occurs here, too, is clearly an unconscious act that can be explained by neither the mnemonic-memorial function of the note, nor by its nature as secret: the words in the first line are shortened into groups consisting of a few graphemes, and in the second the group is composed of single letters. Indices gravitate toward equal length and rhythm. In the first line, insofar as the preposition feels a pull to merge with the noun, two groups are formed that, in the phonological parallelism of u and o in the original Russian, on the one hand, and l and m, on the other, display not only rhythmic features, but a phonological organization as well. In the second line, the need to shorten surnames to one letter for conspiratorial reasons has established a second, internal rhythm, and all remaining words have been equally reduced. It would be strange and monstrous to suggest that Pushkin had structured this note, one that he would have found tragic, with conscious care for its rhythmic or phonological organization; the point, rather, is that the immanent and unconsciously operative laws of autocommunication display certain structural features that we commonly observe in the example of a poetic text.

These peculiarities are even more noticeable in the following example, stripped of both the mnemonic and the conspiratorial functions and presenting auto-messaging in its purest form. We are speaking here of the unconscious notes that Pushkin made in the process of reflection, quite possibly without realizing he was doing so.

On May 9, 1828, Pushkin wrote the poem “Alas! The Language of Garrulous Love” [Uvy! iazyk liubvi boltlivoi], dedicated to Anna Alexeevna Olenina, whom he was then courting. There we find the following note:

ettenna eninelo

eninelo ettenna.¹²

Beside the note: “Olenina Annette.” Over “Annette,” Pushkin had jotted “Pouchkine.” It is not difficult to reconstruct the line of thought: Pushkin was thinking about Annette Olenina as a fiancée and wife (the note “Pouchkine”). The text presents anagrams (one reads them right-to-left) of A. A. Olenina’s first and last name as he was thinking of her in French.

The note’s mechanics are interesting. Initially, the name is transformed through its reverse reading into a conventional index, and then the repetition establishes a certain rhythm, while the transposition rhythmically disturbs that rhythm. The poem-like character of such a construction is obvious.

* * *

One can represent the mechanism for information transfer along the “I—I” channel as follows: a certain message is introduced in a natural language, then a certain supplemental code is introduced that constitutes a purely formal organization, one that is constructed syntagmatically in a specific way and is simultaneously either liberated completely from semantic meanings or strives toward such liberation. A tension arises between the initial message and the secondary code, fostering a tendency to interpret the text’s semantic elements as having already been included within the supplemental syntagmatic construction and now receiving new—relational—meanings from their mutual correlation. However, while the secondary code strives to liberate the primarily signifying elements from the general semantic embedded in the primary code, this does not occur. The shared semantics remains, but they are overlaid with a secondary semantics formed on account of those shifts that arise out of using signifying units to construct a language of different kinds of rhythmic series. But the text’s semantic transformation does not end there. The proliferation of semantic connections within the message muffles the primary semantic connections, and the text can behave, at a given level of perception, as a complexly organized, asemantic message. But highly organized, asemantic texts tend to become the organizers of our associations. We ascribe them associative meanings. Thus, in scrutinizing the pattern on the wallpaper or listening to non-program music, we ascribe specific meanings to the elements of these texts. The starker the syntagmatic organization, the more associative and free the semantic connections will become. Accordingly, the text along the “I—I” channel tends to become overgrown with individual meanings, and it begins to serve as an organizer of the scattered associations that accumulate in a given person’s consciousness. It restructures the personality that has been involved in the autocommunicative process.

In this way, the text carries a threefold significance: the primary level is in the language itself; the secondary comes about on account of the text’s syntagmatic reorganization and the tension among its primary units; and the third level arises from extratextual associations of varying degrees—from the most general to the extremely individual—being drawn into the message.

There is no need to prove that the mechanism we have described can simultaneously be presented as typical of the processes that form the basis of poetic creation.

The poetic principle, however, is one thing, but actual poetic texts are another. It would be an oversimplification to identify the latter with the messages being broadcast along the “I—I” channel. An actual poetic text is broadcast along two channels simultaneously (the exceptions being experimental texts, glossolalia, texts like asemantic children’s school rhymes and zaum,^viii as well as texts in languages their audiences do not understand). It oscillates between the meanings transmitted across the “I—HE” channel and those formed in the process of autocommunication. Depending on its movement toward one axis or the other, and on the text’s orientation toward one kind of transmission or the other, it is taken to be a “poem” or “prose.”

Of course, the text’s orientation toward the primary linguistic message or a complex restructuring of meanings and the proliferation of information in itself does not mean that it will function as poetry or as prose: what comes into play here is the correlation with these concepts’ general cultural models within a given era.

And so we can conclude that the system of human communication can be constructed in two ways. In one instance, we are dealing with certain information given in advance and traversing from one person to another, and with a code that is constant within the limits of the entire communicative act. In the other, we have an increase in information, its transformation, its reformulation, during which it is not new messages but new codes that are introduced, and the receiver and the transmitter are combined in one person. In the process of such autocommunication the individual personality is itself reformulated, and a rather broad range of cultural functions is tied to this, from the sense of your own separate being that a person needs to have in certain kinds of culture, to self-consciousness and autopsychotherapy.

The role of such codes can be played by various kinds of formal structure—the more asemantic their organization, the more successfully they serve the function of reorganizing meanings. Such are spatial objects that, like patterns or architectural assemblages, are destined to be contemplated, or temporal ones, like music.

Verbal texts present a more complex issue. Insofar as the autocommunicative nature of a transmission can be masked by its assuming the forms of other aspects of communication (for example, a prayer can be perceived as a communication not with oneself, but with an external, almighty power; a repeat reading, the reading of a text that is already familiar—by analogy with the first reading—as a communication with the author, and so on), the addressee who is receiving the verbal text must decide what it is that has been transmitted to him—a code or a message. Here, to a significant degree, it will be a question of the receiver’s frame of mind, insofar as one and the same text can serve as message or code or, oscillating between these poles, one and the other simultaneously.

Here one ought to distinguish between two facets—the properties of the text that allow it to be interpreted as a code, and how the text functions, which allows it to be used in this way.

In the first case, the need to receive the text not as a usual message but as some coded model is marked by the formation of rhythmic series, of repetitions, by the appearance of supplemental patterns that are completely superfluous from the point of view of communication within the “I—HE” system. Rhythm is not a structural level in the construction of natural languages. It is no accident that while the poetic functions of phonology, grammar, and syntax find their bases and analogues in corresponding, non-artistic levels of the text, one can point to no such parallel for meter.

The rhythmic-metrical systems are transferred not from the “I—HE” communicative structure, but from the “I—I.” The projection of the principle of repetition into the phonological and other levels of natural language constitutes autocommunication’s aggression toward any linguistic sphere that is alien to it.^ix

Functionally, whenever it adds no new information to what we already have and transforms the self-awareness of the individual who generates texts and transfers messages already in hand to a new system of meanings, the text is used not as a message but as a code. If Reader N is informed that a certain woman named Anna Karenina has thrown herself in front of a train because of a tragic love affair, and instead of attaching that message to those she already has in her memory she concludes, “Anna Karenina—that’s me,” and she reconsiders her own understanding of herself, her relationships with others, and sometimes even her own behavior, then it is obvious that she is using the text of the novel not as a message like any other, but as a kind of code within the process of communicating with herself.^x

This is precisely how Pushkin’s Tatyana reads novels:^xi

X

Imagining each heroine

Of her own most belovèd authors,

Clarissa, Julie, and Delphine,

Tatyana silent forests wanders,

In hand a risky volume caught,

In which she finds, there having sought,

Her secret ardor, reveries,

The fullest fruits of heartfelt dreams,

She sighs to make of stranger’s sorrow,

Of stranger’s rapture, her own plight,

And in absent whisper she recites

A letter to a tender hero …

Our hero, though, a man such as he

A Grandison could never be. (VI, 55)

X

Воображаясь героинeй

Своих возлюбленных творцов,

Кларисой, Юлией, Дельфиной,

Татьяна в тишине лесов

Одна с опасной книгой бродит,

Она в ней ищет и находит

Свой тайный жар, свои мечты,

Плоды сердечной полноты,

Вздыхает и, себе присвоя

Чужой восторг, чужую грусть,

В забвенье шепчет наизусть

Письмо для милого героя …

Но наш герой, кто б ни был он,

Уж верно был не Грандисон.

The text of the novel she has read becomes a model for rethinking reality. Tatyana has no doubt that Onegin is a novelistic character; what is not clear to her is which type she ought to identify him with:

What are you, angel my protector,

Or else perfidious seducer … (6, LXVII)

Кто ты, мой ангел ли хранитель,

Или коварный искуситель …

In Tatyana’s letter to Onegin, it is characteristic that the text splits into two parts: in the frame (the first two stanzas and the last), where Tatyana writes as a lady in love with the lord of the neighboring estate, she naturally addresses him formally, but the middle portion, where she models both him and herself against novelistic schemata, is written in the informal. Given that the letter had originally been written, as Pushkin has advised us, in French, where in both cases one would only use the pronoun vous, the form of address in the letter’s central passage is merely a sign of the bookish, non-experiential—coded—nature of the given text.

It is interesting that Lensky, a Romantic, likewise explains people (including himself) to himself by identifying them with certain texts. Here, too, Pushkin makes demonstrative use of the same set of clichés: “savior” (= “protector”), “tempter” (= “seducer”):

He thinks: For her I’ll be a savior.

I will not suffer that some tempter … (6, CXXIII)

Он мыслит: «Буду ей спаситель.

Не потерплю, чтоб развратитель …»

It is obvious that in all these instances the texts function not as messages in a given language (not for Pushkin, but for Tatyana and Lensky), but as codes that incorporate information about what kind of language they are.

We have been borrowing examples from artistic literature, but it would be erroneous to conclude from this that poetry constitutes a pure form of communication within the “I—I” system. This principle is applied in a more consistent form not in art, but in moralistic and religious texts like parables, in myths, in proverbs. It is characteristic that repetitions penetrated proverbs well before they were treated chiefly in an aesthetic way and still served a much more substantial mnemonic or moral-normative function.

Repetitions of specific constructive (architectural) elements in a temple interior compel us to perceive its structure as something not bound to practical, constructive, technical needs, but, we might say, as a model of the universe or of human individuality. It is precisely because the temple interior in this case is a code, and not just a text, that it is perceived not only aesthetically (only a text, and not the rules of its construction, can be perceived aesthetically), but religiously, philosophically, theologically, or in some other, non-artistic way.

Art arises not among texts of the “I—HE” system or the “I—I” system. It uses both communicative systems in oscillating across the structural tension between them. The aesthetic effect arises at the moment when the code starts to be used as a message, and the message as a code, that is, when the text switches from one communicative system to the other while preserving the connection between them in the audience’s consciousness.

The nature of artistic texts, as a variable phenomenon connected to both kinds of communication, does not exclude the fact that separate genres are oriented to a greater or lesser degree toward the reception of texts as messages or codes. Of course, the lyric poem and the sketch do not correspond equally to one system of communication or the other. Besides the orientations of genres, however, at specific moments, due to historical, social, or other causes of an epochal nature, one literature or another (or, more broadly, art as a whole) can be wholly characterized as an orientation toward autocommunication. It is evident that a negative attitude toward the text/cliché will be a good working criterion for a literature’s general orientation toward the message. Literature oriented toward autocommunication will not only not avoid clichés, but will display a gravitation toward transforming texts into clichés and identifying the “high,” “good,” and “true” with the “stable,” the “eternal”—that is, with cliché.

And yet moving away from one pole (and even consciously polemicizing with it) in no way means casting off its structural influence. No matter how much the literary work imitates the text of a newspaper report, it retains, for example, so typical a feature of autocommunicative texts as the multiple repeatability of its reading. Rereading War and Peace is a significantly more natural activity than rereading the historical sources that Tolstoy used. At the same time, no matter how the artistic text strives, for polemical or experimental reasons, no longer to be a message, this is impossible, as the whole experience of art convinces us.

Poetic texts are apparently formed through a distinctive “swinging” between structures: texts created within the “I—HE” system function as autocommunications, and the other way around—texts become codes, and codes become messages. Obeying the laws of autocommunication—the separation of the text into rhythmic segments, the reduction of words to indices, the weakening of semantic connections while underscoring the syntagmatic ones—the poetic text comes into conflict with the laws of natural language. And yet, without being perceived as a text in natural language, poetry could not exist and fulfill its communicative function. But if one were to view poetry as nothing more than a message in natural language, its specificity would be lost. Poetry’s high capacity for modeling behavior is connected to its transformation from message to code. The poetic text swings like a peculiar pendulum between the “I—HE” system and the “I—I” system. Rhythm is elevated to the level of meaning, and meanings fall into a rhythm.

To a considerable degree, the laws for the construction of the artistic text come down to those for constructing culture as a whole. This has to do with the fact that culture itself can be regarded as the sum of messages exchanged among various addressers (each of whom, to an addressee, is the “other,” “he”), and as the single message that the collective “I” of humanity is sending to itself. From this perspective, the culture of humanity is a colossal example of autocommunication.

* * *

Transmitting simultaneously along two communicative channels doesn’t belong to artistic texts alone. It is a typical feature of culture, if one treats it as a single message. In this regard, one can single out the cultures where the dominant message will be the one transmitted along the general “I—HE” channel and those aiming toward autocommunication.

Insofar as a wide swath of the information that does in fact make up the specifics of a given personality can serve as “message 1,” restructuring that information leads to a change in the structure of the personality. One ought to mention that if the “I—HE” communicative scheme implies a transmission of information while maintaining its constant capacity, then the “I—I” scheme is aimed at increasing information (the appearance of “message 2” does not destroy “message 1”).

In modern times, European culture has been consciously oriented toward the “I—HE” system. The consumer of culture finds himself in the position of ideal addressee; he receives information from outside. Peter the Great formulated such an attitude quite precisely when he said, “I am at the rank of those who are taught, so I demand teachers.” The Honest Mirror of Youth^xii prescribes young people to approach education as receiving knowledge, “… wishing to learn from everything, and looking not in cursory fashion. …”¹³ We are talking here precisely of orientation, insofar as on the level of textual reality any culture is composed of both aspects of communication. Besides, the feature I have noted is not peculiar to culture in modern times; one can find it in various forms in different eras. Emphasizing the European culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is necessary because it has conditioned our customary scientific assumptions, specifically, our identifying information as an act, with reception, with exchange. Still, it is hardly the case that every phenomenon in the history of culture can be explained from these positions.

Let us consider the paradoxical position we find ourselves in when studying folklore. We know that it is precisely folklore that offers the greatest bases for structural parallels with natural languages, and that it is precisely in folklore that applying linguistic methods has met with the greatest success. Indeed, here the researcher can observe a limited number of systemic elements and of easily articulated rules for combining them. Yet there is also a profound difference: language provides a formal system of expression, but the realm of content remains, as far as concerns language as such, extremely free. Folklore, especially in such forms as the fairytale, automatizes both spheres to an extreme. But such a circumstance is paradoxical. If the text were truly constructed in such a way, it would be completely redundant. One could say the exact same thing, too, of other artistic modes oriented toward canonical forms, toward the implementation, and not the violation, of norms and rules.

The answer apparently consists in the fact that if these kinds of texts possessed a particular semantics at the instant of their conception (the semantics of the fairytale was apparently tied to its relationship with ritual), then these connections were subsequently lost, and texts started to acquire the features of purely syntagmatic organizations. If, at the level of natural language, they indisputably possess a semantics, then as manifestations of culture they gravitate toward the purely syntagmatic, that is, the texts become instances of “code 2.” This tendency of myth to transform into a purely syntagmatic, asemantic text, not a message about certain events, but the scheme by which the message is organized, is what Claude Lévi-Straus had in mind when he spoke of its musical nature.

For culture to exist as a mechanism that assembles a collective personality with a shared memory and collective consciousness, it apparently demands the availability of paired semiotic systems, with the later potential for the texts’ subsequent translation.

This is the kind of structural pair that takes shape in “I—HE” and “I—I” communicative systems (we must note parenthetically that the rule that one part of any culture-formative semiotic pair be presented in natural language or contain natural language appears to be the law, one that, it seems, we can take for a universal feature of culture on earth).

Actual cultures, like artistic texts, are constructed according to a principle of a pendular swinging between these systems. Yet the orientation of one or another kind of culture toward either autocommunication or receiving the truth from outside in the form of a message becomes a dominant tendency. The orientation is especially pronounced in the mythological image that every culture creates as its own ideal self-portrait. This model of oneself has an impact on cultural texts, but it cannot be conflated with them, as it is sometimes the generalization of structural principles hidden behind textual contradictions and sometimes a representation of their direct opposition. (In the realm of cultural typology, it is possible for a grammar to emerge that essentially does not apply to texts in the language it pretends to describe.)

Cultures focused on messages have a more mobile, dynamic nature. They tend to multiply the number of texts infinitely and provide for a rapid increase in knowledge. The classic example might be European culture of the nineteenth century. The reverse side of this kind of culture is the society’s sharp split into transmitters and receivers, the appearance of a psychological predisposition to receive the truth in the form of a readymade message about someone else’s mental effort, and the rise in social passivity among those who find themselves in the position of the message’s recipients. It is obvious that the reader of the European novel in the modern era is more passive than he who listens to a fairytale, who is still faced with having to transform the clichés he has received into the texts of his own consciousness, just as one who visits the theater is more passive than one taking part in the carnival. The tendency toward mental consumerism constitutes the precarious side of a culture focused unilaterally on receiving information from outside.

Cultures focused on autocommunication are capable of developing great spiritual activity, yet they frequently turn out to be significantly less dynamic than the needs of human society demand.

Historical experience shows us that the systems that turn out to be most vigorous are those in which the struggle between these structures does not lead to the unconditional victory of one over the other.

At present, however, we are still quite far from the possibility of providing anything like a sound forecast of which cultural structures are optimal. Before that day comes, we must still understand and describe their mechanisms, if only in their most typical manifestations.

SEMIOTIC SPACE

Translated from Iu. M. Lotman, “Semioticheskoe prostranstvo,” in Semiosfera, 250–256. Lotman first proposed the concept of the semiosphere in an article published in Sign System Studies [Trudy po znakovym sistemam] in 1984. The flexibility of this model, in the way it pits highly structured metalanguages produced from the center against displacements, disruptions, and recodings from the peripheries, can be highly productive, and the model has been used extensively. It presumes a degree of semiotic fluidity that renders justice to the complex ways in which communication circulates within a society. However, it may be less applicable to such cases, where the semiotic traffic is between plural centers, or directly between peripheries, however construed. Ultimately, the dialectic of center and periphery remains dependent on a monocentric view of communication. This has the advantage of implicitly incorporating a consideration of the semiotic ways in which political and social power are manifest in society, but it risks eclipsing communications that elude this dialectic. On Lotman’s concentric view of culture, see also Semenenko, The Texture of Culture, 51–54.

Our discussions up to this point have been constructed according to a standard scheme: first we have the discrete, isolated communicative act, and then we examine the relationship between addresser and addressee that arises from it. This approach assumes that studying an isolated fact reveals all the basic features of semiosis that can then be extrapolated into more complex semiotic processes. Such an approach satisfies the famous third rule from Descartes’s Discourse on Method, “to adhere to a certain order of thought, beginning with the simplest and most easily recognized of objects and proceeding gradually to know the more complex. …”¹

In addition, this speaks to the scientific habit, a product of the Enlightenment, of performing a Robinsonade: singling out an isolated object and later imparting the significance of the general model to it.ⁱ

However, in order for such singling out to be appropriate, it is necessary that the isolated fact allow us to model all the properties of the phenomenon to which conclusions will be extrapolated. This cannot be said of this instance. A setup consisting of an addresser, addressee, and the sole channel connecting them will not yet work. For that, it should be immersed in semiotic space. All those who participate in communication should already have some kind of experience, some practice at semiosis. In this way, paradoxically, semiotic experience should precede any semiotic act. Were we to zero in on the semiosphere through an analogy with the biosphere (Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept), it would become obvious that this semiotic space is not the sum of separate languages but rather consists of the condition for their existence and operation and, in a certain respect, precedes them and constantly interacts with them.ⁱⁱ In this respect, language is a function, a concentration of semiotic space, and the boundaries between them, however stark in the language’s grammatical self-description, appear in semiotic reality as blurry and replete with transitional forms. There is neither communication, nor language, outside of the semiosphere. Of course, a single-channel structure also exists in reality. A self-sufficient, single-channel system is an acceptable mechanism for transmitting exceedingly simple signals and, in general, for actualizing the first function, but it is decisively inadequate to the task of generating information. It is no accident that we can view such a system as an artificial construct, but under natural conditions working systems of a completely different kind emerge. The very fact that the dualism of arbitrary and figurative signs (or, more precisely, of arbitrariness and figuration, which are present to varying degrees in these signs or others) is universal in human culture can be regarded as a clear example of how semiotic dualism is the minimal organizational form of a working semiotic system.

Binarity and asymmetry are the obligatory laws for constructing a real semiotic system. Binarity, however, ought to be understood as a principle that is actualized as multiplicity, insofar as every newly formed language is fragmented binarily in turn. All living culture has a “built-in” mechanism for multiplying its languages (we will see later that in parallel there is a mechanism of unifying languages that works in the other direction). Thus, for example, we are constantly witness to a proliferation in the languages of art. This is especially noticeable in the culture of the twentieth century and in past cultures to which it is typologically comparable. Under conditions where basic creative activity shifts into the audience’s camp, the following slogan becomes operative: art is anything that we take for art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema turned from a fairground amusement into high art. It was not alone, but was accompanied by a whole cortege of traditional and newly invented spectacles. Back in the nineteenth century, no one would have considered the circus, the spectacles of the fairground, folk toys, signboards, or the shouts of street merchants as artforms. Once it became art, filmmaking immediately split into narrative and documentary, live-action and animated, each having its own poetics. And in the present time yet another opposition has been added: cinema versus television. True, at the same time as the range of languages of the arts has been expanding there has also been a contraction: certain arts are almost dropping out of the active repertoire—so much so that one ought not be surprised if a more thorough study were to discover that the diversity of semiotic means within one or another culture remains relatively constant. But the essential thing is that the composition of languages entering into the active cultural field is continually changing, and what is subject to even greater changes is the axiological appraisal and hierarchical position of the elements entering that field.

At the same time, in the entire space of semiosis—from social, age-specific, and other jargons, to fashion—there is also a continuous renewal of codes. In this way, any discrete language turns out to be immersed in some semiotic space, and it is only by virtue of its interaction with this space that it is able to function. We ought to regard as an indivisible working mechanism—a unit of semiosis—not the discrete language, but the entire semiotic space inherent to a given culture. It is this space that we define as the semiosphere. Such a designation is justified, insofar as, like the biosphere—which is, on the one hand, the aggregate and the organic unity of living matter (as defined by Vladimir Vernadsky, who introduced this concept), and on the other the condition for the continued existence of life—the semiosphere is both the result of and condition for the development of culture.

Vladimir Vernadsky wrote that all “concentrations of life are intimately connected. One cannot exist without the other. This connection between different living strata and concentrations, as well as their unchanging nature, are the perennial feature of the mechanism of the earth’s crust, manifest within it across all geological eras.”²

This notion is expressed with particular specificity in the following formula: “… the biosphere has a quite specific structure, one that defines everything occurring within it, without exception. … Man, as he is observed in nature, is, like all living organisms, a specific function of the biosphere within its specific space–time.”³

As early as his notes from 1892, Vernadsky pointed to man’s (mankind’s) intellectual activity as an extension of the cosmic conflict between life and inert matter:

… the lawlike nature of conscious labor in national life has led many to deny individual influence in history, though in essence we see throughout history the continuous struggle of the conscious (that is, “not natural”) ways of life against the unconscious order of nature’s dead laws, and within this exertion of consciousness is the entire beauty of historical manifestations, their original place among all other natural processes. One can use this exertion of consciousness to appraise the historical era.⁴

The semiosphere is distinguished by its nonuniformity. The languages that fill semiotic space are diverse by nature and related to each other along a spectrum from complete mutual translatability to equally complete mutual non-translatability. The nonuniformity is shaped by the languages’ heterogeneity and heterofunctionality. In this way, if we, as a thought experiment, were to picture a model of semiotic space in which all the languages appear at the very same moment and are compelled by identical impulses, we would still be faced not with one coding structure, but by some plurality of connected, yet diverse, systems. Let’s say, for example, that we build a model of the semiotic structure of European Romanticism, arbitrarily delineating its chronological boundaries. Even within such a space, which is completely artificial, we will not achieve uniformity, insofar as a different measure of iconism will inevitably create a situation of notional correspondence rather than of mutually unambiguous semantic translatability. Of course, Denis Davydov, the poet-partisan of 1812, could compare the tactics of partisan warfare to Romantic poetry when he demanded that as leader of a partisan detachment one should appoint “not a methodist of calculating mind and cold spirit. … This walk of life, imbued with poetry, demands a Romantic imagination, a passion for adventure, and this is not supplied by dry, prosaic daring. It’s a stanza from Byron!”⁵

However, one need only look at his historical-tactical study Toward a Theory of Partisan Action [Opyt teorii partizanskogo deistviia], which is full of plans and maps, to be convinced that this beautiful metaphor speaks only to the conjoining of the incommensurate within this Romantic’s contradictory consciousness. The fact that the unity of diverse languages is established through a metaphor speaks better than anything else to their fundamental difference.

But one must also account for the fact that different languages possess varying periods of circulation: clothing fashion changes with a rapidity incomparable to the rate of change in the manifestations of literary language, and Romanticism in dance is not synchronous with Romanticism in architecture. In this way, at the same time as some segments of the semiosphere will be experiencing the poetics of Romanticism, others might already be moving toward post-Romanticism. Accordingly, even this artificial model will not provide a homologous picture in a strictly synchronous cross-section. It is no accident that when people endeavor to provide a synthetic picture of Romanticism that characterizes all the forms of art (and at times adding still other spheres of culture), chronology is decisively sacrificed. The same applies to the Baroque, Classicism, and many other “isms.”

If, however, we were to speak not of artificial models, but of the modeling of a real literary (or, more broadly, cultural) process, then we will have to admit that—continuing with our example—Romanticism encompasses only a certain segment of the semiosphere, wherein diverse traditional structures, which at times reach deep into antiquity, continue to exist. Beyond that, none of these stages of development is free from collision with texts that enter from outside, from cultures generally situated up to that point beyond the horizon of a given semiospshere. These incursions—sometimes individual texts, sometimes whole strata of culture—exert diverse disturbing influences on the internal order of a given culture’s “world picture.” In this way, in any synchronous cross-section of the semiosphere we see a tension among various languages, various stages of their development, some texts turn out to be submerged in languages that are inappropriate to them, and the codes that would decipher them may be quite absent. Let’s imagine, as a kind of uniform world caught in a synchronic cross-section, a museum hall where exhibits for different eras are displayed in different windows, and there are captions in familiar and unfamiliar languages, instructions on how to decipher them, explanatory notes to the exhibition formulated by pedagogues, diagrams for walking tours and the regulations for visitor conduct. Let’s go on to furnish this hall with guides and visitors, and let’s picture all of this as a unified mechanism (which is what, in a certain respect, it is). We will have an image of a semiosphere. In doing this, one ought not to lose sight of the fact that every element of a semiosphere is not static, but in fluid, dynamic correlation, constantly changing the formulae of their mutual relations. This is especially noticeable in traditional instances drawn from the culture’s earlier manifestations. The evolution of culture differs radically from biological evolution, and here the word “evolution” often performs a poor, misleading service.ⁱⁱⁱ

Evolutionary development in biology has to do with the extinction of species rejected by natural selection. Only that which is synchronic with the researcher is alive. Somewhat analogous is the situation of technological history, where the instrument that technological progress has pushed out of use finds refuge only in the museum. It is transformed into a dead exhibit. In the history of art, works related to a culture’s long-past epochs continue to take an active part as living factors in its development. The work of art can “die” and be reborn; having grown obsolete, it can be made contemporary or even prophetically indicative of the future. What is “operative” here is not the last temporal cross-section, but the whole depth of the culture’s texts. The model of the history of literature built according to the evolutionary principle was created under the influence of concepts from the natural sciences. Consequently, what is considered to be the synchronic state of literature in any given year is the roster of works written in that year. Meanwhile, if one were to draw up lists of what had been read in that year or another, the picture would likely be different. And it is difficult to say which of the lists would most characterize the culture’s synchronic condition. Thus, for Pushkin in 1824 and 1825, the most current writer was Shakespeare, Bulgakov experienced Gogol and Cervantes as writers contemporaneous with himself, and Dostoevsky seems no less current at the end of the twentieth century than he did at the end of the nineteenth. In effect, everything contained in the current memory of a culture partakes, directly or indirectly, of its synchrony.

The semiosphere’s structure is asymmetrical. This is expressed in the directional system of internal translations permeating the whole depth of the semiosphere. Translation is the fundamental mechanism of consciousness. The expression of some essence by means of another language is the basis by which the nature of this essence is revealed. And insofar as the various languages of the semiosphere are semiotically asymmetrical in the majority of cases—that is, they do not possess mutually unambiguous signifying correspondences—the entire semiosphere can be regarded in its totality as an information-generator.

The asymmetry manifests itself in the relation between the semiosphere’s center and its periphery. The languages that show the most development and structural organization constitute the center of the semiosphere. First and foremost, this includes the given culture’s natural language. One can say that if no one language (the natural language among them) can function, not being immersed in a semiosphere, then no semiosphere, as Émile Benveniste has noted, can exist without a natural language as its organizing core. The point is that alongside structurally organized languages, in the space of the semiosphere specialized languages are jostling for position, languages capable of serving only discrete cultural functions and quasi-lingual, half-shaped formations that can be carriers of semiosis if they are inserted into a semiotic context. This can be compared to the fact that a stone or fancifully twisted tree trunk can function as a work of art. The object assumes the function that is ascribed to it.

In order to perceive the whole mass of these constructions as carriers of semiotic meaning, one must hold “the presumption of semioticity”: the potential of meaningful structures should be a given in one’s consciousness and in the semiotic intuition of the collective. These qualities are produced through the use of natural language. Thus, for example, it appears obvious that, in some cases, the structure of the “family of gods” or other basic elements of a world picture depends on the language’s grammatical composition.

The highest form of structural organization of a semiotic system is the self-descriptive phase. The very process of description is the ultimate level of structural organization. The creation of grammars, much like the codification of customs or of juridical norms, raises the descriptive object to a new level of organization. That is why a system’s self-description is the last stage in the process of its self-organization. Meanwhile, the system gains in its level of structural orderliness, but it loses the inner stores of indeterminacy to which its flexibility, its ability to increase its informational capacity, and the reserve of its dynamic development are bound.

The need for a self-descriptive stage is connected to the threat of excessive diversity within the semiosphere: the system can lose its unity and distinctiveness and can “fray.” Whether we are talking about linguistic, political, or cultural aspects, we are facing analogous mechanisms in all cases: some one segment of the semiosphere (as a rule, one that falls within its core structure) creates its own grammar in the course of its self-description—real or ideal, this depends on the description’s inner orientation toward the present or the future. Next, attempts are made to extend these norms across the entire semiosphere. The local grammar of a single cultural dialect becomes the metalanguage for the description of culture as such. Thus, during the Renaissance, the Florentine dialect is made into the literary language of Italy, the juridical norms of Rome into the laws of the entire Empire, and court etiquette in the era of Louis XIV into the court etiquette for all of Europe. There arises a literature of norms and prescriptions in which the later historian sees the real portrait of actual life in this era or another, its semiotic praxis. This illusion is supported by the testimonies of contemporaries, who are actually convinced that this is precisely how they conduct themselves. The contemporary argues roughly as follows: “I am a person of culture (meaning, an Athenian, a Roman, a Christian, a knight, an esprit fort, an Enlightenment philosopher, or a Romantic genius). As a person of culture I enact the behavior that is prescribed by such-and-such norms. It is only that portion of my behavior that corresponds with those norms that one can consider an action. Yet if I, out of weakness, illness, inconsistency, or other reasons somehow deviate from the given norms, it is meaningless, irrelevant, it simply does not exist.” The list of what “does not exist” in a given system of culture, despite its happening in praxis, is always an essential typological feature of the accepted semiotic system. Thus, for example, the famous Andreas Capellanus, author of De Amore (between 1175 and 1186), a tractate about the norms of fin’amor, in subjecting courtly love to thorough codification and demanding of the lover faithfulness toward his lady, silence, attentive servir, chastity, chivalry, and so forth, blithely permits violence towards a female peasant, since in this world picture she is “as if nonexistent”; what is done to her stands outside of semiotics—that is, it is “as if it never happened.”

The world picture created in such a way will be perceived by contemporaries as reality. What is more, it will even be their reality, inasmuch as they have accepted the laws of the given semiotics. But subsequent generations (including scholars), reconstructing life according to texts, will adopt the notion that this is also precisely how lived reality had been. And yet, how such a metaplasm of the semiosphere relates to the real picture of its semiotic “map,” on the one hand, and the lived everyday reality that lies beyond semiotics, on the other, will be rather complex. First, if, in the core structure where the given self-description has been created, it has actually presented an idealization of some real language, then on the semiosphere’s periphery the ideal norm has contradicted the semiotic reality located “underneath it”; it has not emerged from it. If the texts’ self-description has engendered norms at the center of the semiosphere, then on the periphery the norms, actively invading the “incorrect” praxis, have engendered “correct” texts that correspond to them. Second, whole strata of cultural formations that are marginal from the perspective of a given metastructure are in no way correlated with the culture’s idealized portrait. They have been declared “nonexistent.” Beginning with the works of the cultural-historical school, a favorite genre of many scholars has been articles with titles like “An Unknown Poet of the Twelfth Century” or “Another Forgotten Author of the Enlightenment,” and so on. Where does this unlimited store of the “unknowns” and the “forgotten” come from? These are the ones who in their own era had slipped in among the “nonexistent” and were ignored by science, since its point of view had fallen in line with the normative views of the era. But points of view shift—and the “unknowns” are suddenly revealed. People remember that the “unknown philosopher” Louis Claude de Saint-Martin was already thirty-five in the year that Voltaire died; that Nicolas-Edme Rétif ^iv wrote over 200 volumes that continue to stump historians of literature when they call their author now “a minor Rousseau,” now “the Balzac of the eighteenth century”; that during the Romantic era in Russia there lived a Vasily Narezhny, who wrote about two dozen novels that went “unnoticed” by his contemporaries, since they already displayed features of Realism.

In this way, a picture of semiotic unification is created on the meta-level, while a diversity of tendencies seethes on the level of the semiotic “reality” it is describing. If the map of the surface layer is painted a uniformly even color, the bottom layer is brightly mottled and has a multitude of intersecting boundaries. When, at the close of the eighth century, Charlemagne raised the cross and sword to the Saxons, and St. Vladimir baptized Kievan Rus a century later, the great barbarian empires of the West and the East turned into Christian states. Their Christianity, however, suited their self-characterization and was situated on a political and religious meta-level, with language traditions and diverse everyday compromises seething beneath it. It could not have been otherwise under the conditions of mass and, at times, forced baptism. The horrifying massacre that Charlemagne inflicted upon the captive pagan Saxons at Verden could hardly foster the propagation of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount among the barbarians.^v

And yet it would be wrong to suggest that even a simple change of self-identification held no sway on “lower” levels, that it didn’t foster a transformation of Christianization into Evangelism, that it didn’t unify the cultural space of these states, now at the level of “real semiotics.” In this way, currents of meaning flow not only along the horizontal layers of the semiosphere, but also act along the vertical, forming complex dialogues among its various layers.

Yet the unity of the semiosphere’s semiotic space is achieved not only through metastructural constructions, but, even to a significantly greater degree, through the unity of the relation to the boundary that divides the semiosphere’s inner space from the outer, its in from its out.

THE IDEA OF BOUNDARY

Translated from Iu. M. Lotman, “Poniatie granitsy,” in Semiosfera, 257–268. The notion of the boundary as a site of semiotic translation, rather than obstruction, offers interesting extensions. It bears, of course, on the emergent field of Boundary Studies, which incorporates the study of border areas, but it also applies more broadly to approaches that aim to conceptualize the contact between cultures and the transfer of ideas and values across their borders, such as Transfer Studies, Transnational History, or Histoire croisée. For a good overview and critical discussion of these various approaches, see Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). In its emphasis on the transformations that occur in the act of translation, Lotman’s expansive understanding of translation resonates with current debates in Translation Studies and Cultural Anthropology about cultural translation. See, for example, Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

The semiosphere’s inner space is, in a paradoxical way, simultaneously both uneven, asymmetrical, and unified, uniform. Consisting of structures in conflict, it possesses an individuality as well. This space’s self-description implies a first-person pronoun. One of the basic mechanisms of semiotic individuality is the boundary. And one can define this boundary as the feature where periodic form ends. This space is defined as “ours,” “one’s own,” “cultural,” “safe,” “harmoniously organized,” and so forth. It is opposed by that which is “their space,” “foreign,” “enemy,” “dangerous,” “chaotic.”

Any culture begins by dividing the world into inner (“one’s own”) and outer (“their”) space. How this binary separation is interpreted depends on the culture’s typology. Such division itself, however, belongs to universals. The boundary can separate the living from the dead, the settled from the nomadic, the city from the steppe, it can have a governmental, social, national, confessional, or some other character. It is striking how unconnected civilizations find convergent expressions for characterizing the world beyond the boundary. This is how a Kievan monastic chronicler in the eleventh century described the lives of other, still-pagan East Slavic tribes:

… the Drevlyans live in a beastly manner, living brutishly: they kill one another, they eat all in filth, and hold no wedding, but abduct maidens by the water. And the Radimichi, and the Vyatichi, and the Northerns all keep the same custom: they live in the forest like any beast, they eat everything in filth, and speak foul before their fathers and before their daughters-in-law, and there are no wedding feasts among them, but festivities between the villages, they get together for festivities, dancing, and all manner of demonic songs. …¹

And here is how, in the eighth century, a Frankish chronicler—a Christian—described the mores of the pagan Saxons: “Vicious by nature, devoted to a demonic cult, enemies of our religion, they respect the laws neither of men, nor of God, what is not permitted they permit themselves.”²

These last words offer a clear expression of how “our” world and “theirs” mirror each other: what is not permitted to us, is permitted to them.

Any existence is possible only in the forms of a given spatial and temporal concreteness. Human history is only a particular instance of this law. A person is immersed in the real, the space that nature has given him. The constants of the earth’s rotation (the sun’s movement across the sky), of the movement of the stars in the heavens, of nature’s transitory cycles—these have an immediate influence on how someone models the world within his own consciousness. No less important are the physical constants of the human body that assign predetermined relations to the world around it. The dimensions of the human body determine the fact that the world of mechanics, of its laws, appears to a person as “natural,” whereas he imagines the world of elementary particles or cosmic spaces only in the abstract, having first committed a certain violence against his own consciousness. The correlation between a person’s average weight, the force of earth’s gravity, and the body’s vertical posture has brought about the opposition of high and low that is universal in all human cultures, with a wide range of substantive interpretations (religious, social, political, moral, or others). One may doubt whether the expression “he reached the summit,” which people understand regardless of culture, would be quite so obvious for a thinking fly or a person born in zero-gravity.ⁱ

“High,” “the summit”—these require no explanation. The expression Qui ne vole au sommet tombe au plus bas degré³ (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Satires) is just as comprehensible as La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux (Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe).⁴

Despite the tremendous temporal and spatial distance between Camus and Yan Vyshatich, the commander of the military campaign against the pagans in eleventh-century Rus, they had an identical concept of the semantics of high and low. Before executing their soothsayers (shamans), Yan asked them where their god resides, and (according to the monk-chronicler) he received the following answer: “He rests in the abyss.” To which Yan explained authoritatively: “What kind of god rests in an abyss? That is a demon, for God is in the heavens …”

This turn of phrase delighted the chronicler, and he pressed it into service, in almost the same words, in quoting a pagan priest from near Lake Peipus (Estonia): “Says he [the Novgorodian]: ‘Tell me, then, where do your gods live?’ Says he [the sorcerer]: ‘In abysses. For they are black in appearance, winged, they have tails. And they ascend skyward, obeying your gods. For your gods are in the heavens.’”⁵

The asymmetry of the human body formed the anthropological basis for its semiotization: the semiotics of right/left is as universal for all human cultures as the opposition of high/low. Equally primary is the asymmetry of male/female, living/dead, that is, moving, warm, breathing, versus immobile, cold, not breathing (the treatment of cold and death as synonyms is affirmed in an enormous number of texts in various cultures, and it is just as common to identify death with petrification, with being turned to stone: consider the numerous legends about the origins of certain mountains or cliffs).

Vladimir Vernadsky remarked that life on earth flows in a special spatial-temporal continuum that it has created for itself:

… it is logically appropriate to construct a new scientific hypothesis that when it comes to living matter on Planet Earth we are dealing not with a new geometry, not with one of Riemann’s geometries, but with a special manifestation of nature that is as yet peculiar only to living matter, with a manifestation of space-time geometrically incommensurate with space, where time is manifest not as the fourth dimension, but as a change of generations.⁶

Conscious human life—that is, the life of culture—also demands a special “space-time” structure. Culture organizes itself in the form of a defined “space-time” and cannot exist outside of such an organization. This organization is actualized as a semiosphere and, simultaneously, with the help of the semiosphere.

The outer world, in which a person is immersed in order to become a factor of culture, undergoes semiotization: it splits off into a realm of objects that signify, symbolize, indicate something, that is, that have meaning, and objects that represent only themselves. At the same time, the various languages that fill the semiosphere, that hundred-eyed Argus,ⁱⁱ mark out different things in external reality. The resulting stereoscopic picture assumes the right to speak in the name of culture as a whole. Simultaneously, for all the diverse substructures of the semiosphere, they are organized within a general system of coordinates: on the temporal axis is the past, present, and future; on the spatial, inner space, outer space, and the boundary between them. Extra-semiotic reality—its space and time—is recoded in this system of coordinates as well, so as to be rendered “semiotizable,” capable of becoming the content of a semiotic text. This side of the question will be discussed later.

As has already been mentioned, the extension of metastructural self-description from the culture’s center to its entire semiotic space, which, for the historian, unifies a whole synchronic cross-section of the semiosphere, in fact creates merely the appearance of unification. If at the center the metastructure comes across as its “own” language, then at the periphery it appears as a “foreign” language incapable of adequately reflecting the semiotic praxis underpinning it. It is like the grammar of a foreign language. Consequently, at the center of cultural space, segments of the semiosphere that have been raised to the level of self-description assume a strictly organized character and simultaneously achieve self-regulation. But they simultaneously lose their dynamicity and, having exhausted their reserve of indeterminacy, become inflexible and incapable of evolving. On the periphery—the further from the center, the more pronouncedly—the relationship between semiotic praxis and the normativity imposed upon it becomes ever more fraught. The texts born in accordance with these norms are suspended in air, deprived of a real semiotic environment, while organic creations defined by a real semiotic milieu come into conflict with artificial norms. This is the realm of semiotic dynamics. It is precisely here that the stress field where future languages are produced comes about. Thus, for example, it has long been noted that peripheral genres in art are more revolutionary than those situated at the culture’s center, enjoy a higher prestige, and are perceived by their contemporaries as art par excellence.⁷ In the second half of the twentieth century we have been witness to the violent aggression of marginal cultural forms. One example might be the “career” of the cinematograph, which has transformed from a fairground spectacle, free from theoretical limitations and regulated only by its own technical possibilities, into one of the central arts and, what is more, particularly in recent decades, into one of the most described arts. The same can be said about the art of the European avantgarde as a whole. The avantgarde has undergone a period of “periphery in revolt,” has become a central phenomenon, dictating its own laws to the era and tending to paint the entire semiosphere in its color and, having effectively congealed, has become an object of intensified theorization on the metacultural level.

The same regularities can appear even within the limits of a single text. Thus, for example, we know that in early Renaissance painting it is on the periphery of the canvas and in the far distances of a landscape that genre scenes and everyday elements are clustered, given the canonicity of the central figures. This process reaches its apex in Piero della Francesca’s enigmatic The Flagellation of Christ (Ducal Palace, Urbino), where the peripheral figures have stepped boldly into the foreground, while the flagellation scene has been set back, its tones muted, providing a sort of background meaning to the colorful triple portrait up front. Analogous processes can be deployed not in space, but in time, in the movement from draft to final text. There are numerous cases of preliminary versions, in painting as well as in poetry, connected more boldly to the aesthetic of the future than is the “normalized,” self-censored, final text. Many examples of shots that directors have removed in the editing process speak to the same point.

An analogous example in another sphere might be the activity of semiotic processes during the European Middle Ages, in those provinces where the Christianization of the “barbarians” did not change pagan popular cultures but sort of draped them in an official mantle, from the remote regions of the Pyrenees and the Alps to the forests and swamps inhabited by the Saxons and Thuringii. It is from precisely this soil that “popular Christianity,” heresies, and finally reform movements later emerged.

When such a situation stimulates vigorous semiotic activity, it leads to the accelerated “maturation” of peripheral centers and to their producing their own meta-descriptions, which can in turn appear as pretenders to a universal structure of meta-description for the entire semiosphere. The history of culture provides many examples of such competition. Essentially, the attentive cultural historian detects in each of the culture’s synchronous cross-sections not one system of canonizing norms, but a paradigm of competing systems. A typical example might be the simultaneous existence in seventeenth-century Germany, on the one hand, of “language societies” (Sprachgesellschaften) and “the Fruitbearing Society” (Die Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft), which assigned itself the task of purification, of cleansing the German language of barbarisms, especially of Gallicisms and Latinisms, and grammatically normalizing the language (Justus Georg Schottelius’s grammar) and, on the other, of the “Noble Academy of Faithful Ladies” (also called “The Order of the Golden Palm”), which pursued the opposite goal, propagating the French language and a precise style of conduct. One might also point to the rivalry between the Académie Française and the chambre bleue salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet. The latter example is especially revealing: both centers work actively and consciously to create their own “language of culture.” If épurer et fixer la langue was indicated among the principal mandates when the Académie Française was founded (the king signed the charter on January 2, 1635), then for “salon culture” the question of language was likewise the first priority. Paul Tallemant wrote:

Si le mot de jargon ne signifioit qu’un mauvais langage corrompu d’un bon, comme peut-estre celuy du bas peuple, on ne pourroit gueres bien dire jargon de Precieuse, parce que les Precieuses cherchent le plus poli, mais се mot signifie aussi langage affecté, et par consequent jargon de Precieuse est une bonne maniere de parler; се n’est pas lа vraye langue que parlent les personnes qu’on appelle Precieuses, се sont des Phrases recherchées, faites exprés … .^{8 iii}

This last confession is especially valuable: it points directly to the artificial and normative character of the langage des Précieuses. If in satires of ladies’ preciosity it seemed that the point was to critique corrupt usage from the position of a higher standard, then from the perspective of the adherents to salon culture themselves the point was to elevate usage to a standard, that is, to create an abstract image of actual usage.^{9 iv}

The controversy in regard to space is equally interesting: Richelieu, who inspired the Académie, envisioned the dissemination of a purified and well-ordered French language within the borders of an ideal, absolutist France, the scope of his state ambitions. Rambouillet’s salon created its own ideal space: the number of documents about “a precious geography” is striking, beginning with Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre, Maulévrier’s 1659 Carte de l’empire des Précieuses, Gabriel Guéret’s 1674 Carte de la cour, and Paul Tallemant’s 1663 Voyage de l’isle d’amour. What comes about is an image of a multi-level space: through a series of conventional renamings, the real Paris transforms into Athens. But on a still higher level what comes about is the ideal space of the “Land of Tenderness” that is identified with the “true” semiosphere. To this one can juxtapose the utopian geography of the Renaissance, in the latter case with its ambition, on the one hand, to create “on top of” reality an image of the ideal city, island, or state, including its geographic and cartographic description (compare Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis), and, on the other, to implement the metastructure on a practical level, inventing plans for ideal cities and experiments for realizing such plans. Compare, for example, Luciano Laurana’s ingenious drawings of ideal cities (Ducal Palace, Urbino). Works like Caspar Stiblin’s Brief Commentary on the Republic of the Blissful [Commentariolus Eudaemonensium republica] (1555) and Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun [La città del Sole, 1602] paved the way for numerous plans for building ideal cities. At the foundation of Renaissance utopian urban planning were the ideas of Leon Battista Alberti. The urban plans sketched out by Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, the plan for the city of Sforzinda made by “Filarete,” Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s map of an ideal city—these represented a direct intrusion of metastructure into reality as they were designed to be realized: “… un succès dont il reste encore aujourd’hui de multiples témoins, depuis Lima (ainsi que Panama et Manille au XVIIe siècle) jusqu’à Zamosc en Pologne, depuis La Valette (à Malte) jusqu’à Nancy, en passant par Livourne, Gattinara (en Piémont), Vallauris, Brouage et Vitry-le-François.”¹⁰

But the “hottest” nodes of semio-formative process are the boundaries of the semiosphere. The concept of boundary is ambiguous. On the one hand, it divides; on the other, it unites. It is always a boundary with something and, consequently, belongs to both bordering cultures—to both adjacent semiospheres—simultaneously. It is a bi- and multilingual boundary. The boundary is a mechanism for translating the texts of a foreign semiotic system into the language of “our” semiotics, the site where the “outer” is transformed into the “inner,” it is the filtering membrane that transforms foreign texts so that they fit into the semiosphere’s inner semiotics while nevertheless remaining alien. In Kievan Rus there was a term designating those nomads who had settled on the frontiers of the Russian territory, became farmers, and, entering alliances with the Russian princes, campaigned with them against their own fellow tribesmen. They were called “our infidels” (where poganyi, “infidel,” is simultaneously “pagan” and “foreign,” “erroneous” and “non-Christian”). The oxymoron “our infidels” expresses the boundary situation quite well.

In order for Byron to enter Russian culture, his cultural double had to arise, the “Russian Byron” who would be the face of two cultures simultaneously: as a “Russian,” he fits organically into the inner processes of Russian literature and speaks in its language (in the broad semiotic sense). What is more, he cannot be excised from Russian literature without leaving a gaping emptiness with nothing to fill it. But at the same time he is also Byron, an organic part of English literature, and in the context of Russian he serves his function only if he is experienced precisely as Byron, that is, as an English poet. It is only in this context that we can understand Lermontov’s exclamation, “No, I am no Byron, I am another. …”¹¹

It is not only separate texts or authors, but also entire cultures that, in order for intercultural contact to be possible, ought to have such image-equivalents in “our” culture, similar to bilingual dictionaries.¹² This image’s dual role is manifest in the fact that it is simultaneously both a means and a hindrance to communication. Here is a representative example: Pushkin’s early Romantic epics, his tumultuous early biography, his exile—in the minds of his readers these created the stereotypical image of the poet-Romantic, the prism through which all his texts were interpreted. In those years Pushkin himself actively participated in shaping “the mythology of his personality,” which corresponded to the general system of “Romantic behavior.” Yet this image then stood between the writings of the evolving poet and his readership. His austere work, oriented toward truth-to-life and having repudiated Romanticism,^v was interpreted by his readers as a “fall” and a “betrayal” precisely because the image of the early Pushkin lived on in their minds.

Similar to the way a change in the metalingual structure of the semiosphere sees the emergence of works about “unknown” and “forgotten” agents of culture, with a change in image-stereotypes we find works of the “unknown Dostoevsky” or “Goethe as he really was” variety, suggesting to the reader that what he has known up to this point is the “wrong” Dostoevsky or Goethe, the true understanding of whom is only now at hand.

We observe something analogous when texts of one genre intrude into the space of another. Innovation consists precisely in the fact that the principles of one genre are reconstructed according to the laws of another, such that this “other” genre fits organically into the new structure and, at the same time, retains the memory of a different system of coding. Thus when Pushkin inserts the actual text of an eighteenth-century court petition into the fabric of his novella Dubrovsky [Dubrovskii], or Dostoevsky includes a carefully composed imitation of the actual speech of a prosecutor and an attorney in The Brothers Karamazov [Brat′ia Karamazovy], these texts stand out simultaneously as the organic fabric of novelistic narrative and as alien document-quotes that fall out of the natural key of artistic narrative.

The notion of a boundary separating the inner space of the semiosphere from the outer space provides only an initial, rough division. In actuality, the entire space of the semiosphere is intersected by boundaries at various levels, boundaries separating languages and even texts, while the inner space of these sub-semiospheres has some semiotic “I” of its own that is realized as the relation of any language, group of texts, or separate text (accounting for the fact that languages and texts are arranged hierarchically at different levels) to some metastructural space that describes them. A multi-level system is created by the semiosphere allowing certain boundaries to run through it. Specific portions of the semiosphere can, on various levels of self-description, form a semiotic whole, an uninterrupted semiotic space bounded by a single boundary, or a group of closed spaces whose discreteness will be marked by the boundaries between them, or, ultimately, a part of a more general space bounded off by a fragment of boundary on one side and left open on the other. Naturally, this is accompanied by a hierarchy of codes: various levels of signification are activated in the single reality of the semiosphere.

An important criterion here is the question of what is interpreted as a subject in a given system, for example, the subject of the law in the juridical texts of a given culture or of “the individual” in the sociocultural coding of one system or another. The idea of the “individual” is identified with the boundaries of a person’s physical individuality only under defined cultural and semiotic conditions. It can be collective, include property or not, and relate to a defined social, religious, or moral situation. The boundary of the individual is a semiotic boundary. Thus, for example, one’s wife, children, slave-servants, and vassals can, in some systems, be included within the individuality of the landlord, patriarch, husband, patron, or suzerain without having their own independent “individual-ness,” while in others they are regarded as separate individuals. Cases of insurrection and rebellion arise from a clash between two ways of coding: when the socio-semiotic structure describes a given individual as a part, yet he recognizes himself as an autonomous unit, a semiotic subject and not an object.

When Ivan the Terrible executed disgraced boyars not only together with their families, but with their servants—and not only their domestic servants, but their peasants and villages (or else the peasants were resettled, the villages renamed, the structures razed to the ground)—this was dictated, despite the tsar’s pathological cruelty, not by the danger they posed (as if a serf on a provincial family estate could be a danger to the tsar!) but by the notion that they were all one person, parts of the individual boyar being executed, and they, accordingly, shared responsibility with him. Such a view was evidently not unfamiliar to Stalin, who had the mentality of an Eastern tyrant.

From a European juridical perspective, one reared on the post-Renaissance sense of an individual’s right to justice, it seemed incomprehensible that one person would suffer for someone else. As late as 1732, Lady Rondeau, the wife of the English envoy in Petersburg (and quite fond of the Russian court, and even inclined to idealize it: in her missives she extols the “sensibility” and “goodness” of Empress Anna Ioannovna, who was as crude as the lady of a provincial estate, and the “nobility” of her cruel favorite, Biron), informing her European correspondent of the Dolgorukov family’s exile, wrote: “You will perhaps wonder at the banishing of women and children, but here, when the master of a family is attacked, the whole family is involved in his ruin. …”¹³

The very same idea of the collective (and, in the given instance, patrimonial) person, rather than the individual, underlies the blood feud, for example, where the killer’s entire extended family is seen as a responsible party. The historian S. M. Solovyov drew a convincing connection between the institution of mestnichestvo¹⁴—which in the eyes of eighteenth-century enlighteners, with their pious faith in progress, appeared only as a manifestation of “ignorance”—and the peculiar collective experience of the clan as a single individual:

One understands that with this strong familial bond, with all family members being responsible one for the other, the import of the separate person necessarily faded before the import of the family. A person was unthinkable without the family. The famous Ivan Petrov was not thought of as one Ivan Petrov, but was thought of only as Ivan Petrov with his brothers and nephews. With such conflation of the person with his family, when the one person was elevated in the service, the entire family was elevated; with the demotion of one member of the family, the entire family was demoted.¹⁵

Thus, for example, Matvey Pushkin, a boyar and stol′nik under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (seventeenth century) who belonged to the list of thirty-one families of highest nobility, refused to go on a diplomatic mission as deputy to Nadrin-Nashchokin,^vi an eminent agent of state and favorite of the tsar, though of lower nobility, preferring to go to prison and steadfastly shouldering the threat that all his property would be confiscated and he would incur the tsar’s wrath, responding with dignity, “though you may put me to death, my lord, to me Nashchokin is a young man, and not one of high birth.”¹⁶

The space that appears as a single individual in one coding system can, in another, turn out to be a site of conflict between several semiotic subjects.

For every message circulating within it, the capacity of semiotic space to be intersected by numerous boundaries creates a situation of multifold translations and transformations accompanied by the generation of new information, which assumes an avalanche-like character.

The function of any boundary or film (from the membrane of a living cell to the biosphere as—following Vernadsky—a film enveloping our planet, to the boundary of the semiosphere itself) amounts to limiting penetration, to the filtration and adaptive reworking of what is external into the internal. This invariant function is realized in diverse ways on different levels. On the level of the semiosphere, it signifies the separation of the self from the other, the filtration of the external, which is assigned the status of text in a foreign language, and the translation of that text into one’s own language. In this way, external space acquires some structure.

In cases where the semiosphere includes real-territorial features, the boundary assumes a spatial meaning in the direct sense. The isomorphism between different kinds of settlement—from ancient settlements to the ideal cities of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—and notions about the structure of the cosmos has been frequently noted. Connected to this is how the center of construction gravitates around the most important religious and administrative buildings. It is on the periphery that the least valued social groups are settled. Those who are situated beneath the line of social value are distributed along the boundary of the outskirts; the very etymology of the Russian word predmest′e, “outskirts,” signifies pered mestom, that is, “before the city,” at its boundary line. Along a vertical orientation, this will be attics and basements and, in the modern city, the subway. If, however, the center of “normal” habitation is the apartment, then it is the stairwell or entryway that becomes the boundary space between “home” and “outside of home.” It is no accident that it is precisely these spaces that become “one’s own” for “boundary” groups—the marginalized—within society: the homeless, the addicted, the youth. Urban public space, stadiums, and cemeteries are among the boundary places. No less revealing, too, is the change in norms of acceptable behavior as one moves from the boundary of such a space toward its center.

There are specific elements, however, that are generally situated outside. If the inner world recalls the cosmos, beyond its boundary we find chaos, the antiworld, an iconic space beyond structure that is inhabited by monsters, infernal forces, or the people connected to them. In the village, beyond the line of settlement is where the sorcerer, the miller, and (sometimes) the smith have to live, and, in the medieval city, the hangman. “Normal” space has not only spatial boundaries, but temporal ones as well. Beyond its line we find nighttime. When he is needed, people go to see the sorcerer at night. It is in anti-space that the bandit lives: his home is the forest (an anti-home), his sun is the moon (“the thief’s sunshine,” as the Russian saying goes), he speaks an anti-language, he demonstrates anti-behavior (he whistles loudly, curses indecently), he sleeps when people are working, and he robs while they’re asleep, and so forth.^vii

The “night world” of the city is likewise situated on the border of cultural space or beyond its line. This travestied world is oriented toward anti-behavior.

We have already paid attention to the process by which a culture’s periphery is shifted to its center and its center removed to the periphery. Even more pronounced is the movement of these contradirectional flows between the center and the “periphery of the periphery”—the boundary zone of culture. Thus, following the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, this process received a manifold, non-metaphorical realization: the poor from the suburbs moved en masse into “bourgeois apartments,” from which they evicted their former occupants or “consolidated” their space. Of course, taking the highly artistic, wrought-iron barrier that had surrounded the royal garden around the Winter Palace in Petrograd up until the Revolution and removing it to a working-class district, where it enclosed a suburban square, with the royal garden remaining entirely without a fence—“open”—this had a symbolic meaning. In the utopian plans for the socialist city of the future, which were created in abundance in the early 1920s, one often finds the notion that in the center of such a city—“where the palace and church had been”—there will be an enormous factory.

It is in this sense that Peter I’s transferring the capital to Petersburg—to the border—was telling. Transferring the political-administrative center to a geographic boundary was simultaneously shifting the boundary into the state’s administrative-political center. And the Pan-Slavists’ subsequent plans to transfer the capital to Constantinople even shifted the center beyond all actual borders.