injustice, if not to the long-dead poet, who is unlikely to object, then to the reader thus left to take the admiring critic’s word for it. For those who might prefer to read the poems in the original, however, in each instance this is provided after the English translation.
If every translator also edits, retooling the text to serve a new audience in their own language and to their own purposes, then it is equally true that the engaged editor of a translation also translates. That is certainly the case here. Andreas Schönle not only conceptualized the project, selecting its constituent texts and their arrangement, but throughout the process of pulling these texts into English he has been the translator’s close collaborator, interlocutor, and—occasionally, and in the very best spirit—sparring partner. He has rescued the effort from my numerous oversights, misjudgments, and outright errors. The fault for any that remain rests with me alone.
Part One
SEMIOTICS
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
