Czy zmierzch kultury pisma? : o synestezji i analfabetyzmie funkcjonalnym

Abstract

The contemporary language reality is considered very dynamic. This dynamics is clear in the time, spatial and functional perspective. It is impossible to claim these multi-aspect changes will not influence the ways of communication. Many things were written about the changes in culture and language. Not much attention was paid to the contemporary written variety. Meanwhile, the observation of the contemporary written texts, an observation in relation to - as it may seem - fixed values, including the value of writing, induces to consider the written aspect of contemporary communication. It is not a study of the graphemics or graphic linguistics field. Remaining in the field of considerations of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, I wish to discuss the problem of literacy as the way of thinking, ordering the reality and try to show the tendencies that may endanger the permanence of the literate way of thinking. The observation of technological changes in communications leads to a conclusion that a renewed approach of the written variety to oral variety takes place. Constant and intensive ‘exposition to technology’ places a word - the culture of communication in general, including a written word — in a new situation, and the texts of contemporary written Polish language already reflect this interaction. The degree of literacy of Poles is one of the most often called and discussed phenomena of the dynamically changing contemporary culture. The reading of the description of sociological researches into the competence of Polish youth in the field of comprehension of texts induced me to take my own research from the sociolinguistic and pragmatic view. The degree of comprehension of texts is a testimony of the level of interiorizing the rules of literate thinking, the lack of such absorption, to be more specific. In the field of research into functional illiteracy, I place not only the diagnoses of the reasons of non-comprehension of texts, but also the reasons of the inability of creation of contemporary written texts. The observation of the transformations within the written variety of a language leads to a conclusion concerning the direction of these transformations, which head towards a renewed relation with the oral variety in new entanglements on one hand, and the domination of image over communication (iconosphere versus logosphere) on the other, i.e. the iconization of a language. I call this phenomenon ‘a new literacy’. The concept of synesthesia plays a constitutive part in the identification of this phenomenon and the indication of its features. I present it as an important sense-creative and text-creative factor of the contemporary written utterances. Synesthesia is not only a result of stylistic procedures, but also a feature of perceiving and conceptualization of reality. Synesthesia present in written texts is a product of two culturally strongest impulses: the dominating orality and expansive visuality of culture. A thesis saying that there are many contemporarily created written texts (non-artistic, non-mimetic, and non-stylized) whose structures reveal the presence of synesthesia, because it is related to the activation of a situational memory of a sender, and whose comprehension, i.e. their pragmatic sense, is related to a synesthetic reception. The transparency, i.e. the transparency of a key word, is sometimes ‘suspended’ in these texts. The sense of a text is not exhausted in logical objects on the principle of presupposition or connotation, the situation needs to be recreated by the receiver. It is only a tendency that is noticeable, not a feature of all or the most of contemporarily created texts. This tendency may become fixed however, if one should consider the growing influence of communication with the use of the Network, where the violation of the transparency of a sign and its completion with synesthetic impulses is quite obvious.