Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman

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СКАЧАТЬ in vocalization, indicates only that upon which we have based our hypothesis about how inner speech develops, namely, that inner speech develops not through the outer weakening of its vocal aspect, passing from speech to whisper and from whisper to mute speech, but through the functional and structural separation from outer speech, passing from it to the egocentric, and from egocentric to inner speech.⁷

      Let us try to describe some features of the autocommunicative system.

      The first marker distinguishing it from the “I—HE” system will be such language’s reduction of words: they will tend to turn into signs of words, indices of signs. On this score, Wilhelm Küchelbecker has an excellent note in his fortress diary: “I have noted something strange, a curiosity for psychologists and physiologists alike: for some time I have been dreaming not of things, not of incidents, but of these wondrous sorts of abridgements that are related to them, as a hieroglyph is to a picture, as a book’s table of contents is to the book itself. Does this not proceed from the paucity of things around me and of incidents that befall me?”⁸

      The tendency toward reduction in “I—I” language is manifest in the shorthand that forms the basis of notes to oneself. Ultimately, the words of such notes constitute indices that one might decipher only by knowing what was written. Consider how the scholar I. Iu. Krachkovsky characterized the early script tradition of the Koran: “Scriptio defectiva. Absence not only of short vowels, but also of long ones, and of diacritical marks. Can only be read if you know it by heart.”⁹

      We find a striking example of this kind of communication in Anna Karenina, in the famous confession scene between Kitty and Konstantin Levin, which is all the more interesting for recalling the episode of Leo Tolstoy’s confession to his fiancée Sofya Bers:

      “Right,” he said, and he wrote the initials w, y, r—i, c, b—d, t, m, n, o, t? These letters meant: When you replied, “It cannot be,” did that mean never, or then? …

      “I got it,” she said, blushing.

      “What word is this?” he asked, pointing to the n, which signified never.

      “That one means never,” she said.¹⁰

      In all of these examples we are dealing with a case where the reader understands the text only because he or she knows it in advance (in Tolstoy, because of the fact that Kitty and Levin are spiritually already one; the conflation of the addresser and addressee occurs before our very eyes).

      Word-indices formed through such reduction tend toward isometry. Also connected with this is the fundamental peculiarity of syntax in this kind of speech: it does not form complete propositions, but moves toward infinite chains of rhythmic repeatability.

      The majority of the examples we have introduced are not “I—I” communications in the pure sense, but constitute a compromise that arises because the laws governing the text deform its usual language. Accordingly, one ought to distinguish between two instances of autocommunication: one having a mnemonic function, the other not.

      As an example of the first, one might turn to Pushkin’s note to the final draft of his poem “Beneath the Blue Sky of One’s Native Land” [Pod nebom golubym strany svoei rodnoi]:

      Hear of d. 25

      H of d. R. P. M. K. B.: 24.

      It can be deciphered as follows:

      Hear[d] of d[eath of] [Riznich] 25 [July 1826]

      H[eard] of d[eath of] R[yleev], P[estel], M[uravyov], K[akhovsky], B[estuzhev]: 24 [July 1826].^{11 vii}

      The note serves a distinctively mnemonic function, though one ought not to forget the other as well: to a significant degree, by virtue of the sporadic connection between the signified and the signifier in the “I—I” system, it turns out to be significantly better suited to cryptography, insofar as it is constructed according to the formula of being “understood only by those who understand.” As a rule, the text’s secret encoding is connected to its transfer from the “I—HE” system to the “I—I” one. (Members of a collective using cryptography are regarded in this case as a single “I,” relative to which those from whom the text should be concealed compose a collective third person.) True, what occurs here, too, is clearly an unconscious act that can be explained by neither the mnemonic-memorial function of the note, nor by its nature as secret: the words in the first line are shortened into groups consisting of a few graphemes, and in the second the group is composed of single letters. Indices gravitate toward equal length and rhythm. In the first line, insofar as the preposition feels a pull to merge with the noun, two groups are formed that, in the phonological parallelism of u and o in the original Russian, on the one hand, and l and m, on the other, display not only rhythmic features, but a phonological organization as well. In the second line, the need to shorten surnames to one letter for conspiratorial reasons has established a second, internal rhythm, and all remaining words have been equally reduced. It would be strange and monstrous to suggest that Pushkin had structured this note, one that he would have found tragic, with conscious care for its rhythmic or phonological organization; the point, rather, is that the immanent and unconsciously operative laws of autocommunication display certain structural features that we commonly observe in the example of a poetic text.

      These peculiarities are even more noticeable in the following example, stripped of both the mnemonic and the conspiratorial functions and presenting auto-messaging in its purest form. We are speaking here of the unconscious notes that Pushkin made in the process of reflection, quite possibly without realizing he was doing so.

      On May 9, 1828, Pushkin wrote the poem “Alas! The Language of Garrulous Love” [Uvy! iazyk liubvi boltlivoi], dedicated to Anna Alexeevna Olenina, whom he was then courting. There we find the following note:

      ettenna eninelo

      eninelo ettenna.¹²

      Beside the note: “Olenina Annette.” Over “Annette,” Pushkin had jotted “Pouchkine.” It is not difficult to reconstruct the line of thought: Pushkin was thinking about Annette Olenina as a fiancée and wife (the note “Pouchkine”). The text presents anagrams (one reads them right-to-left) of A. A. Olenina’s first and last name as he was thinking of her in French.

      The note’s mechanics are interesting. Initially, the name is transformed through its reverse reading into a conventional index, and then the repetition establishes a certain rhythm, while the transposition rhythmically disturbs that rhythm. The poem-like character of such a construction is obvious.

      * * *

      One can represent the mechanism for information transfer along the “I—I” channel as follows: a certain message is introduced in a natural language, then a certain supplemental code is introduced that constitutes a purely formal organization, one that is constructed syntagmatically in a specific way and is simultaneously either liberated completely from semantic meanings or strives toward such liberation. A tension arises between the initial message and the secondary code, fostering a tendency to interpret the text’s semantic elements as having already been included within the supplemental syntagmatic construction and now receiving new—relational—meanings from their mutual correlation. However, while the secondary code strives to liberate the primarily signifying elements from the general semantic embedded in the primary code, this does not occur. The shared semantics remains, but they are overlaid with a secondary semantics formed on account of those shifts that arise out of using signifying units to construct a language of different kinds of rhythmic series. But the text’s semantic transformation does not end there. The СКАЧАТЬ