ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a perspective that regards boundaries not as something superfluous, unnecessary, troublesome, and potentially avoidable, but as a phenomenon necessitated, 'ontologically conditioned' by the surrounding human reality. The basic unit of Lotman's ontology is not the individual, but the multitude perceived as a structurally integrated whole although both Lotman's multitude and Bakhtin's individual can internally differentiate into further identity/alterity constellations. The consideration of the second, dynamic aspect is devoted to interaction across boundaries and to the many functions of their communicative capacities. The conflict between the perspectives is absorbed and 'translated' into the properties of asymmetry and ambivalence inherent to boundaries. A 'minimally functioning semiotic structure, Lotman maintains, consists of 'a parallel pair of mutually untranslatable' and at the same time 'mutually interprojected languages'; one of them being 'the conventional, and the other - 'the iconic. Perhaps the most curious aspect of the communicational functions of boundaries is their role in the processes of self-identification.
