Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/156

148 :The execution of a Tsar forms an angry exclamation mark,
 * Or an army's victory, a comma.
 * In the margin are the dots of anger of the peoples' eyes,
 * Their rage unrestrained.
 * And a fissure through the centuries forms a bracket.

Khlebnikov believed that mankind had endured the warring, violent language of the state for too long:


 * Too often has the pen of war been dipped into the ink—well of mankind.

Khlebnikov's idea that "bookish-fossilized“, "rational" language—linked with the state-serves to oppress mankind is a notion which may not be quite so peculiar or far-fetched as it at first may appear. To the extent that Khlebnikov's target is literacy (and this is very largely the case, as we have seen), the idea seems to approximate quite closely to the conclusion of the structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, that


 * the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

It was only with the invention of writing that the state and bureaucracy could come into existence, and, in more recent times, it has only been with the extension of literacy that the state has been able to exert its control over each individual citizen:

The struggle against illiteracy is indistinguishable, at times, from the increased powers exerted over the individual citizen by the central authority.

The fact that Khlebnikov often identifies what he calls "reason" as the enemy does not lessen the relevance of this. McLuhan remarks that it is a general characteristic of thought in the West that "we have confused reason with literacy..." And-to