Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/161

153 As a source of magic, as the seat of the world's consciousness and as a means of spiritual "flight"—in these three forms, Radio was seen, then, as in a sense "paralleling" the functions of Khlebnikov's "transrational" or "universal" language. One could cite other parallels-'the "instantaneous", space—conquering nature of the two communications—forms, their shared "oral" bias and so on. One could even refer to a certain "incompreh- ensibility" common to both, at least if McLuhan's remarks on the electronic media are to be believed:


 * Radio and TV aren't audio—Visual aids to enhance or to popularize previous forms of experience. They are new languages...


 * It is easy to see now that language has always been a mass medium even as the new media are new languages

having each its own unique grammar and aesthetic modes...


 * NOBODY yet knows the languages inherent in the new technological culture; we are all technological idiots in terms of the new situation.

Whether the "idiot" Khlebnikov was, in creating his "incomprehensible" language, sensing in some way this impending impact of Radio is perhaps an interesting thought, but we have no direct evidence that the poet himself consciously thought of the new media as incomprehensible languages.

However, perhaps the most important parallel which Khlebnikov saw between Radio and his linguistic projects was that both were to unite humanity. In 1920, as we have noted, Khlebnikov wrote of his "future language of the universe in embryo":


 * It alone can unite people.

In 1921, however, he wrote that something else could"unite people". Almost as if his "universal language" were now unnecessaary, he wrote that it was Radio which
 * will forge the unbroken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind.

Clearly, he could only have said this if he had thought that the parallel between Radio—communications and his own linguistic