Article

Name: Messages from a medium: F. de Saussure, Th. Flournoy and a case of clairvoyance

Authors: V. V. Feshchenko

Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: The article’s focus is the meeting and cooperation between the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy and his compatriot, outstanding linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in the analysis of the case of Hélène Smith, a Swiss clairvoyant and medium who for five years at the end of the 19th century organized spiritualistic sessions for a group of scientists. In the case of H. Smith’s mediumistic texts, Th. Flournoy’s protocols and their interpretations by F. de Saussure, we observe how two sciences, emerging at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries – psychology and linguistics – substantiated their subject and their boundaries when referring to the borderline experience of linguistic activities on the verge of consciousness and the unconscious. For the first time in history, the glossolalist and glossologist joined forces to conduct a "field work", visionary as much as scientifically accurate. Moreover, for the first time theoretical linguistics represented by one of its founding fathers encountered here the study of abnormal texts existing on the verge of artistry and nonsense. On the eve of the "language revolution" in 20th century literature, the story of the Swiss clairvoyant engendering strange texts in invented languages posed to linguistics the question of the status of language in unusual speech practices and unconventional text-generation conditions. From the point of view of modern linguistics, glossolalia can be considered as a communicative act, where on the one hand, the participants are glossolalists, i.e. speaking individuals who produce glossolalic speech, and, on the other hand, the glossologists as listening subjects interpreting this speech. In this case, glossolalia is a specific case of speech generation in the absence of the language that encodes this speech. Without a pre-existent language, glossolalic speech, nevertheless, produces the effect as if the subject-glossolalist owned some kind of implicit language and can be reconstructed by the interpreter- glossologist. The case of the Swiss clairvoyant Helen Smith and its interpretation by F. de Saussure and other scholars show that such a speech can be detected by the system (it is not a chaotic set of sounds and words) reminiscent of real languages, but, however, does not coincide with any one of them. Either such a language is certainly missing or distorted (as in the case of the abstruse speech of some sectarians, poets and mentally ill people), or a speech skill is acquired in an allegedly existing but unknown language (the case of Smith\s "Sanskritoid"), or it is invented as a result of special efforts of consciousness (Smith’s "Martian" language). In all these cases, the appearance of language is created, or the language is registered in the process of its occurrence. In discussions of such anomalous linguistic manifestations, the subject of general linguistics was born and affirmed as a science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Keywords: Saussure, glossolalia, nonsense, sense

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