PIIRI MÕISTEST JURI LOTMANI SEMIOOTIKAS
On the Concept of ’Boundary’ in Yuri Lotman’s Semiotics

Summary/Abstract: The fifteen years that have passed since the departure of Yuri Lotman (22. II 1922–28. X 1993), who was one of the most famous scholars of Estonia, have proved the viability of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school, of which he was the founder, in the cultural awareness of the Estonian-speaking public. One of the latest proofs is the doctoral thesis „Universals in the context of Yuri Lotman’s semiotics” defended at the University of Tartu in 2007 by Peet Lepik. The present article, based on that monograph, is focused on the concept of ’boundary’, which in the author’s opinion is another universal of Lotman’s semiotics. The analysis refers to most of the relevant Estonian-language publications, in particular the interpretations and elaborations of Lotman’s texts by Peeter Torop, Mihhail Lotman, and Kalevi Kull. In Lotman’s semiotics the boundary carries at least three functions: the separative/ circumscriptive, interpretative/mediative, and jointive/connective ones. The structuralist period of Lotman’s writing (from the early 1960s to the early 1970s) is characterized by an antithetic approach to the ’boundary’, seen as a distinguisher of mutually exclusive opposites, as a barrier between binary oppositions. The following introduction of text as a ’cornerstone’ of culture meant an enlargement of the ’boundary’ concept. Texts are not just entities with fixed borders: addition of an assumed subject (audience) makes the boundary a bilingual tool of interpretation. The boundary acquires a clearly spatial character, manifesting transition or transformation. In Lotman’s cultural semiotics the boundary becomes an essential component of an important reflective mechanism (symmetry– asymmetry). Emphasis on the boundary as a membrane highlights another aspect of Lotman’s concept – the world beyond the boundary is semioticized as well. In other words, as stated in Lotman’s spiritual testament „Culture and explosion”, the space outside the semiosphere is also structured as potentiality. Thus the concept acquires additional attributes such as extreme, destination, death as the ultimate end, challenge. The author finds that such understanding of the boundary takes Lotman to the existential paradigm. This is where death may indeed mean a physical boundary, but in semiotic terms it is just a transition to a new textuality. Moreover, Lotman goes on to emphasize that „whatever has no end has no meaning”.

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