Space and Metalanguage: Territorial defense

Abstract

Space has the particularity of being able to be the metalanguage of culture and of semiotic systems in general. For Lotman, culture organizes itself within the form of a spatial structure whose most important function is the border or limit. In this way, space converts itself into the meeting ground of cultures and programs of action. Therefore, space appears as a place of an unstable negotiation in permanent tension. This tensive instability will give way to the appearance of passional figures whose value will depend on fluctuating and dynamic relationships (between euphoria and dysphoria, and between conflict and contractuality) between passions and distance.