The point is, however, that the "meaninglessness" of individual consonants becomes fully apparent only with the development of the phonetic alphabet and literacy. For when language is known only as spoken language, there is no need to fragment the sound—flow into isolated "letters". The mind is conscious only of units which do possess meaning——whole words and sequences of words. It is as a result of phonetic literacy that language is thought of as consisting of letters of the alphabet——i.e. intrinsically meaningless units. Khlebnikov, in denying the meaninglessness of consonants, was repudiating an important characteristic of phonetic literacy which McLuhan describes as follows:
- The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. There have been many kinds of writing, pictographic and syllabic, but there is only one phonetic alphabet in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds.[1]
Khlebnikov's consonant—meaning tables and theories, then, were one more manifestation of his opposition to the principles and linguistic effects of phonetic literacy as such.
These considerations by no means exhaust the anti~literate implications of Khlebnikov's transrational language experiments. However, the relationship of his zaum to child—language, pre—historic language, magical incantations, oral language in general and Radio as a return to the primacy of the spoken word are all subjects dealt with elsewhere in this work.
8. His emphasis on the voice.
It is obvious that literacy diminishes the role of the voice in language. Virtually all commentators on Russian futurism have recognized in it an attempt to restore to language the
- ↑ Understanding Media, p 83. Not only his consonant-meaning theories in particular, but Khlebnikov’s insistence on the inseparability of sound and meaning in general can be seen as incompatible with the premises of the phonetic alphabet, of which McLuhan writes: “It alone is based on the abstraction of the sound of words from the meaning of words"—— Counter—Blast, p 91.
