Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/138

130 From one standpoint, reading Livshits' words, it might be wondered what is so peculiar about “animated language"? One may often speak of "animated conversation", and to describe the result as "animated language" would not seem far—fetched or very much out of the ordinary. But, of course, Livshits was looking at manuscripts. In its written form, language is not expected to be animated. The feelings which can be experienced when it is-feelings which Livshits describes–indicate something of the scale and the nature of Khlebnikov‘s peculiar achievement.

7. His championship of "transreason".

Human language has an "arbitrariness" about it which distinguishes it from the cries, screams, barks and other forms of communication characteristic of the animal world. In human language, there is no necessary relation between a given sound and a given meaning——the connection is determined by social convention alone. This is not true in the animal world: a cat's purr or a gibbon’s howl conveys the same message in the case of all cats and all gibbons of the same genus, being determined biologically rather than socially.

Khlebnikov's "transrational" principles assume that nothing in human language is arbitrary. Every sound has an intrinsic meaning which can be traced back to the Stone Age and is universal to humanity as a species. The parallel with forms of communication in the animal world is evident. That Khlebnikov was to an extent conscious of this parallel is shown by the fact that he treated real or imaginary animal cries in his poetry as examples of "transreason."

The lack of any necessary or unalterable connection between sound and meaning is in a sense as much a characteristic of human language in its oral form as in its written state.

On the other hand, there is a kind of "animal" or "biological"