1982/01/01 by Yury M. Lotman, Yury Lotman, Ann Shukman
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Education, Literature, Philosophy Research #Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies #Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry
paper · doi:10.2307/468958
openalex publication_date 1982/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
T HE idea that every message is oriented toward a definite audience and is fully realized only in the consciousness of that audience is not a new one. There is a story about an episode in the life of the famous mathematician P. L. Chebyshev. At one of his lectures on the subject of the mathematical aspects of cutting clothes, there appeared an unexpected audience consisting of tailors, fashionable ladies, and so on. However, the first sentence spoken by the lecturer-Let us suppose for simplicity's sake that the human body has the form of a sphere-put them to flight. Only mathematicians who found nothing surprising in this opening remark remained in the hall. The text selected its own audience, creating it in its own image. What is of much greater interest is to examine the actual mechanisms of interaction between the text and its addressee. It is obvious that when the codes of addresser and addressee do not coincide (and they coincide only as a theoretical assumption which is never realized in practical communication), then the text of the message is deformed in the process of decoding by the receiver. For the moment, however, we are here concerned with the other aspect of this process-how the message affects the addressee, transforming his appearance. This phenomenon is bound up with the fact that any text (and especially a literary one) contains in itself what we should like to term the image of the audience and that this image actively affects the real audience by becoming for it a kind of normatizing code. This is imposed on the consciousness of the audience and becomes the norm for its own