Introduction to Semiotics of Cultures, 2010
Juri Lotman – Universe of the Mind
Chapter 2
I-I and I-S/he communication
Vesa Matteo Piludu
University of Helsinki
I – S/he
Chapter 2
I-I
 Communication system I-S/he
 Adresser
I
 Context – Message
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 Adressee S/he
 Information transferred in space
 Relevance: quantity of information
 Media
Contact - Code
I-I
 Self-communication
 Self-reflection on meanings
 Information can be transferred in time (reminders)
 Mnemonic
 Or creative function (supplementary information)
 Addresser and addressee remain the same, but the message is
reformulated and acquire new meanings or is expressed in new
languages
 Relevance: quality of information
 Art
The I – I communication
 The I –I communication is sensible to external codes or different
languages (music, visual codes, architecture), or messages and
texts
 Isn’t produced in monastic isolation
Example 1: Dream at sea by Tyuchef
 Both the sea and the storm rocked our boat
 Drowsy I gave myself over entirely to the whim of waves
 There were two infinites in me
 An they began willfully to play with me.
 Around me the rocks sounded like cymbals
 The winds answered and waves sang.
 Deafened I lay in the chaos of sounds,
 But my dreams rose up over the chaos of sounds
Example 1:
I – I and foration of new messages
 I -I
 Message 1 (importance of sounds)
 Is transformed in Message 2 (importance of sounds for the self)
 Code 1 (music) – Code 2 (poetry)
Example 2: Eugene Onegin a novel in verse
written by Alexander Pushkin
 All translation by Charles Johnson available as Google-book or
Penguin classic
 Chapter 8 / XXXVI
- Universe of Mind, page 24
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What happened? Thought his eyes were reading,
His thought were on a distant goal:
Desires and dreams and grieves were breeding
And swarming in his inmost soul.
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Between the lines of text as printed,
His mind’s eyes focused on the hinted
Purport of other lines; intense
Was his absorption in theirs sense.
Example 2: Eugene Onegin a novel in verse
written by Alexander Pushkin
 Chapter 8 / XXXVI
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- Universe of Mind, page 24
Legends, and mystical traditions,
Drawn from a dim, warm-hearted past,
Dreams of inconsequential past,
Rumors and threads and premonitions,
Long, lively tales from wonderland,
Or letters in a young girl’s hand.
Example 2: Eugene Onegin a novel in verse
written by Alexander Pushkin
 Chapter 8 / XXXVII
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- Universe of Mind, page 24
Then gradually upon sensation,
And though, a sleepy numbness steals;
Before his eyes, imagination
Bring out its faro pack, and deals.
 Chapter 8 / XXXVIII - Universe of Mind, page 24
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Who could have looked the poet better,
As in the nook he’d sit alone
By blazing fireplace, and intone
Idol mio or Benedetta,
And on the flames let fall unseen
A slipper, or a magazine?
Example 2: Eugene Onegin a novel in verse
written by Alexander Pushkin
 Codes supporting I-I communication (self reflecion):
 Printed texts (source for imagination)
 Flickering of fire
 The intoned tunes
 The hero is not searching for an immediate message in the texts
 He is reading between the lines
 The book serve to stimulate the flow of the thoughts: the faro pack of
his imagination
 The intrusion of other codes (fire, texts, music) organize and
stimulate the internal monologue of the hero
Buddist monk and stone park
 The Mathematical rhythm of the sand garden / stone parks evoke a
mood conducive to introspection
 Karesansui, or "dry gardens," are abstract representations of natural
landscapes in which stones, gravel, sand, and moss are used to
depict mountains, rivers, and islands
Stone – Sand gardens
Japanese Zen Garden, Kyushu, Japan
Japanese Zen Garden
Kinkaku-ji or 'the Golden Pavilion - Kyoto
Nijo-jo [jo=castle], exterior and garden
It was the Tokugawa Shogun's Kyoto residence
A Zen Buddhist temple priest rakes gravel in a
Kyoto garden
Human communication
 Based on two models
 I-s/he:
 Already given information transmitted from one person to another
using the same code
 I-I
 Increase of information (new ideas), its transformation, reformulation
using new codes
 Self-discovery, auto-psychotherapy
Problems of I-I communication
 Vygotsksy
 The internal speech is soundless
 This create a problem when it’s necessary to express it by sounds or
words
 Kyukhebeker (prison diary):
 “I have been dreaming not of objects, or events, but some kind of
abbreviations which relate to them like hieroglyphs to a picture”
 Intense symbolization
 This can lead to cryptography or a form of writing understandable
only by the writer
 Sometimes mnemonic draft (done by musicians or writers) are not
comprehensible for other people
Example: Pushkin love anagrams
 Creative I – I communication could lead to a kind of innovative
cryptography, anagrams, creative writing
 Pushkin, 1928, poem: Alas! The tongue of garrulous love
 Dedicated to Anna Alekseevana Olenina
 Jotting:
 Ettenna eninelo
 Eninelo ettenna
 Olenina
 Annette
 Anagram of the name and surname of Anna, Annette in French
 The repetition create an hypnotic rhythm, similar to a love spell
Tension between the codes
 If a message in a natural language
 Is followed by a supplementary code (rhythmical)
 There is tension between the two codes
 As a result the
 the text could be interpreted following the secondary code (the
rhythmical)
 But the normal semantic values remain valid
Texts used as codes
 A text is used as a code
 When it does not add simple informative messages
 But it transform the self-understanding of the person who has
engendered the text
 And it transfers already existing messages into a new system of
meanings
Example: Pushkin’s Tatyana (Onengin)
 Tatyana read novels in that way:
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Seeing herself a creation
Clarissa, Julie, or Delphine
By writers of her imagination,
Tatyana, lonely heroine,
Roamed the still forest like a ranger,
Sought in her book, that text of danger
And found her dreams, her secret desire;
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She signed, and in trance co-opted
Another’s joy, another breast,
Whispered by hearth a note addressed
To the hero that she’d adopted.
Tatyana
 The text of Tatyana is not a simple media message, like news
 But a code, a new language, a model for reinterpreting reality
Poetic and artistic texts
 Oscillate between the I – s/he and the I-I communication
 Both are present
Literature
 As a whole is more oriented towards self-reflective communication,
but the element of I-s/he communication are always present
 The literate generally has a negative attitude towards the standard
message texts
 The poetic text could be even in conflict with some laws of the
natural language
 But also in the most extreme cases, avant-garde poetry is perceived
as a text in a natural language (French, Russian)
 Otherwise it couldn’t fulfill his communicative function
 Poetry is a pendulum, oscillating between I-s/he and I-I systems
Art and culture
 The laws of construction of an artistic text are very largely the laws of
construction of culture as a whole
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There are cultures (media) where the I-s/he channel is predominant:
Cultural consumer as ideal addressee
great quantity or bombing of information
few self-reflection, passivity
Education as acquisition of knowledge
 And other more oriented to auto communication (avant-garde)
Folk culture
 The participant of a carnival are all receivers and senders of
information: they are generally all actives
 The system of language (folk song) could be formal and structured,
but the contents are often free
 The listener could be a singer and he could transform the song in his
future performance
 A modern theatergoer, if isn’t a theatre professional, is more passive
than a storyteller
 The folk cultures are however less dynamic in terms of acquisition of
new knowledge
The perfection in the middle
 The most viable cultures are those system
 Where the struggle between the two systems has not resulted in an
all-out victory for one of them