Understanding Spatial Metaphors

Lotman’s ‘notion of boundary’

Say what you see…

Say what you see…

Say what you see…

Say what you see…

No, not Rennie McIntosh or Maori markingA BASKETBALL COURT

No, not a kitchen unit.A TENNIS COURT

No, not a cartoon face.A NETBALL PITCH

Surely, straightforward by now.A FOOTBALL PITCH

What does it all mean… semiotically speaking?

SpaceRulesMeasurementsPeopleDynamics

An example of semiosphere?

What’s the roleof history?

What’s the role of memory?

Notion of Boundary

A key feature of Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture and his concept of semiosphere as ‘meaning space’ is his ‘notion of boundary’. Integral to this concept are the supplementary concepts of ‘core’ (the dominant semiotic mechanism) and ‘periphery’ (the ‘innovative’ or ‘disruptive’ mechanism).

Nature of Lotman’s Boundary

The boundary is not a fixed, solid, linear structure but a chaotic, fractal organism that ‘lies between’ the organised world of the internal semiotic (core) and the chaotic extra- or non-semiotic world (periphery) beyond.

As such the boundary, for Lotman, is both dynamic and permeable.

Semiotic Individuation

One of the primary mechanisms of semiotic individuation is the boundary, and the boundary can be defined as the outer limit of the first-person form.

This space is ‘ours’, ‘my own’, it is ‘cultured’, ‘safe’, ‘harmoniously organized’, and so on. By contrast ‘their space’ is ‘other’, ‘hostile’, ‘dangerous’, ‘chaotic’.

Characteristics of Boundary• Difference• Opposition• Division

• Structure• Organisation• Self-description

• Unity• Continuum• System

The grand old Duke of YorkHe had 10,000 menHe marched them up to the top of the hillThen he marched them down againAnd when they were up, they were upAnd when they were down, they were downAnd when they were only halfway upThey were neither up nor down

Characteristics of Core

• Self-regulating• Self-describing• Exclusionary• Framing• Constraining• Organising• Unifying

Characteristics of Periphery

• Somewhere else• Dangerous• Different• Changing• Fringe• Edge• Stimulating • Also reflects

– continuity/discontinuity

Boundaries and Space

The Boundary• The hottest spots for semioticizing processes are the

boundaries of the semiosphere.• The notion of boundary is an ambivalent one: it both

separates and unites.• It is always the boundary of something and so belongs to

both frontier cultures, to both contiguous semiospheres.• It is bilingual and polylingual.• It is a mechanism for translation alien texts into texts of

‘our’ language.• It is the place where what is ‘external’ is transformed into

what is ‘internal’.• It is a filtering membrane

Innovation

• Innovation comes about when the texts of one genre (culture) invade the space of another genre.

• This happens when the principles (rules) of one genre are restructured according to the rules of another, and this ‘other’ genre organically enters the new structure (culture) and at the same time preserves the memory of its other (previous) system of encoding.

Boundary and Semiosphere• The notion of boundary is a rough primary

distinction. • The entire space of the semiosphere is

transected by boundaries of different levels• The internal space of each of these sub-

semiospheres has its own semiotic ‘I’ which is realized as the relationship of any language, group of texts, or separate text to a metastructural space which describes them, always bearing in mind that languages and texts are hierarchically disposed on different levels.

Semiotic PersonalityThe notion of ‘personality’ is only identified with a physical individual in certain cultural and semiotic conditions. The subject of a given system is important in this respect. The ‘personality’ may be an individual or a group. The boundary of the personality is a semiotic boundary.

Disturbances and rebellion arise when two methods of encoding are in conflict: for instance when the socio-semiotic structure describes an individual as a part but that person feels him or herself to be an autonomous unit, a semiotic subject not an object.