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.