Produktive Fehlinterpretation. Zu drei Reflexionsfiguren in Jurij M. Lotmans Die Innenwelt des Denkens

Abstract

Abstract The article examines Jurij M. Lotman’s Universe of the Mind from the perspective of productive misinterpretation. Proceeding from the observation that misunderstanding, incomplete translation, and communicative disruption are conceptualised by Lotman not as deficiencies but as constitutive conditions of cultural dynamics, the study offers a metalinguistic reading of Lotman’s model of cultural semiotics. By shifting the focus from the level of the message to the code and analysing the epistemological status of the figurative and spatial models that structure his argumentation, the approach centers on three figures of reflection (›Reflexionsfiguren‹) – the thinking of the text (›das Denken des Textes‹), nesting (›Verschachtelung‹), and oscillation (›Oszillation‹) – through which Lotman conceptualises cultural processes as dialogic operations grounded in partial untranslatability. The figure of the thinking text presents texts as dynamic systems of storing, generating, and transmitting information whose productive capacities emerge only through interaction with their readers. Nesting refers to the recursive structure of the semiosphere, in which individuals, texts, and cultures are mutually embedded and continuously transformed through acts of translation. Oscillation describes the tension between code and message, as well as between understanding and non-understanding, that characterises the artistic text as an inherently open and interpretively indeterminate object. The article argues that interpretation in Lotman’s thought must be understood as a form of translation that can never be fully successful and that therefore inevitably generates new information. Misinterpretations thus appear not as marginal phenomena but as productive moments of semiosis and cultural development. Although the three figures of reflection occupy a relatively peripheral position within Lotman’s conceptual vocabulary, they prove to be fundamental structures that connect key concepts such as boundary, translation, and semiosphere. The article concludes by showing that Lotman’s work provides a valuable heuristic framework for literary studies approaches concerned with ambiguity, exclusion, and fragmentation, foregrounding the productive force of difference, alterity, and misunderstanding in the construction of meaning.