LITMIR.BIZ

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Mind, Lotman had questioned Ferdinand de Saussure’s premise that what matters for linguistics is only the underlying semiotic structure, and not actual utterances. For Lotman, this reflects an impoverished understanding of the function of language as merely a conveyor of pre-existing information. Instead he argued for a broader view, which takes into account the “creative function” of languages, as well as their capacity to condense cultural memory.

AUTOCOMMUNICATION: “I” AND “OTHER” AS ADDRESSEES

      (On the Two Models of Communication in the System of Culture)

      The organic connection between culture and communication forms one basis of contemporary cultural studies. A consequence of this is the transfer of models and terms adopted into the cultural sphere from communication theory. Applying the basic model elaborated by Roman Jakobson has allowed us to connect the broad range of problems in language, art, and culture more broadly with the theory of communicative systems. As we know, the model laid out by Jakobson is as follows:¹

      context

      message

      addresser ........... addressee

      contact

      code

      The creation of a unified model of communicative situations has been a substantial contribution to the study of the semiotic cycle and has provoked a response in many scholarly works. Yet the automatic transfer of established ideas into the realm of culture creates a raft of difficulties. The most basic of these is the following: in the mechanics of culture, communication operates through a minimum of two channels that are differently constructed.

      We will have an opportunity later to turn our attention to how the unified mechanism of culture must have both visual and verbal connections, which can be regarded as two differently constructed channels for information transfer.ⁱ Both of these channels, however, can be described by Jakobson’s model, and in this respect they are of one kind. But if we were to task ourselves with constructing a model of culture on a more abstract level, it would be possible to separate the two kinds of communicative channel, only one of which would be described by the classic model used till now. Doing so would first require that we separate two potential directions for transferring a message. The most typical case is the direction “I—HE,” in which the “I” is the subject of the transmission, the one who possesses the information, and “HE” is the object, the addressee. In this instance, it is assumed that until the act of communication begins a certain message is known to “me” and unknown to “him.”

      In the culture to which we are accustomed, the prevalence of communications of this kind overshadows another channel of communicative transmission, one that one could characterize schematically as the “I—I” channel. A case of the subject delivering a message to himself—that is, to the person who already knows the message in the first place—seems paradoxical. In actual fact, however, it is not really so rare, and it plays a not insignificant role in the general system of culture.

      When we speak of transmitting a message through the “I—I” system, we have in mind, firstly, not those instances when the text fulfills a mnemonic function. Here, the second, recipient “I” is functionally equivalent to the third person. The distinction comes down to the fact that in the “I—HE” system, information circulates in space, whereas in the “I—I” system it does so in time.²

      What interests us first of all is the instance when the transmission of information from “I” to “I” is not accompanied by a gap in time and serves not a mnemonic function, but some other cultural function instead. Communicating to oneself information that one already knows occurs, first of all, whenever the communicative register is elevated in the process. Thus when a young poet reads his own poem as it is printed, the message remains textually the same as the manuscript text he knows. But once it is transcribed into a new system of graphic signs that possess another level of authority in the given culture, it receives a certain added significance. Analogous instances are those where the veracity or falsehood of the communication is conditional on whether it has been articulated in words or is merely implied, spoken or written, written or printed, and so on.

      But we are dealing with the transmission of a message from “I” to “I” in many other instances as well. These include every instance where a person addresses himself, in particular those diary entries that are recorded not with the goal of memorializing specific data, but rather, for example, of elucidating the writer’s interior state, an elucidation that does not occur without the entry. Addressing oneself—in text, in speech, in argument—is an essential fact not only of psychology, but of the history of culture as well.

      In what follows we shall strive to demonstrate how the place of autocommunication in the system of culture is much more significant than one might suppose.

      But how does such a strange situation arise, that a message transmitted within the “I—I” system not only doesn’t become completely superfluous, but acquires some new, additional information?

      In the “I—HE” system, the model’s framing elements are variable (the addresser changes places with the addressee), while the code and message are stable. The message and the information it contains are constant, whereas the carriers of that information change.

      In the “I—I” system, the carrier of information remains the same, but the message is reformulated and assumes a new meaning in the process of communication. This occurs due to the fact that a second, supplementary code is introduced, and the initial message is recoded in the units of that code’s structure, acquiring the features of a new message.

      In this instance, the communicative schema looks like this:

      context shift in context

      message 1------------------------------→message 2

      I→ .............................................................................................. ←I

      Code 1 Code 2

      If the “I—HE” communicative system secures only the transmission of a certain constant informational content, then what happens in the “I—I” channel is its qualitative transformation, which leads to the reformation of the “I” itself.ⁱⁱ In the first instance, the addresser transmits a message to someone else, the addressee, and remains unchanged in the course of the act. In the second, in broadcasting to himself, he reforms his own essence internally, insofar as one can regard one’s personal essence as one’s individual store of socially meaningful codes, and here this store of codes changes in the process of the communicative act.

      A message’s transmission through the “I—I” channel has no immanent character, insofar as it is conditioned by the encroachment of certain additional codes from outside and by the presence of external shocks that shift the contextual situation.

      A typical example would be the effect of metered sounds (the beat of wheels turning; rhythmic music) on a person’s interior monologue. One could name a whole range of artistic texts in which rich and unbridled fantasy is conditioned by the metered rhythms of riding on horseback (Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” a number of poems from Heine’s Lyrical Intermezzo), the rocking of a ship (Fyodor Tyutchev’s “Dream upon the Sea” [Son na more]), the rhythms of the railroad (Mikhail Glinka’s “Travelling Song” [Poputnaia pesnia], with words by Nestor Kukolnik).

      Let us consider Tyutchev’s “Dream upon the Sea” from this perspective:

       Dream upon the Sea

      Both sea and the storm held our bark in its sway;

      And, sleepy, I felt at the whim of each wave.

      Infinitudes two I possessed deep within,

      And they made of me a most trifling thing.

      So like cymbals, around me, the rock cliffs did crash,

      The swells singing their part, the winds answering back.

      And I in the chaos of sound lay there stunned,

      But then over

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