Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/172

164 to be asked (if we are going to treat his work as a product of the scientific revolution of his age) is not whether his writings constituted science, but whether they expressed, from the subjective, human side, the experience of scientific mastery, the sensation of opening up new vistas of knowledge, and the optimism and hopes aroused by the discoveries of the new age. In the light of this question, as (it is hoped) the preceding pages have helped to show, Khlebnikov'e works score perhaps more highly than any other literature of his time. Khlebnikov himself wrote of himself as "spending my days in a dream." But what he was dreaming of was——as we have seen—the scientific and mathematical ordering of human society, history and language, the elimination of irrationality and violence from human life and the final conquest by humankind of the forces controlling his destiny. It may have been an optimistic dream—perhaps childishly so. But it expressed an important part of the spirit of the age.

Even in working on his "transrational language", Khlebnikov's real purpose was a scientific one. After describing the way in which "transrational language" has, in his words, "a special power over the consciousness”, Khlebnikov defines his isolation and listing of the intrinsic meanings of consonant—sounds as “a way of making transrational language rational." Khlehnikov did not subscribe to any philosophy of irrationalism—his aim was to bring what Jakobson called "the irrational structures of poetry" into the light of consciousness, so that they could be consciously mastered and used. Transrational language, in his view, had to become self-governing. Its ideal was to embody "the highest point of popular sovereignty in the life of the word..." The inner world, the world of feelings—the "stormy people" of the "state" of the mind-should become the "government", become a new "reason" on a higher plane. This was a very different ideal from the aim of repudiating and dispensing with "government" or "reason" of any kind.