Screen - Dark Matter Archives

62-____25 Lev Vygotsky,Thought andLanguage, MassachusettsInstituteof Technology,1977, p 139.26 Lev Vygotsky,ibid, p 148.27 J Horowitz, op cit,P 77.towards an altogether specific form of abbreviation: namely,omitting tile subject of a sentence and all words connected withit, while preserving the predicate. tfjInner speech in the adult develops out of tbe 'egocentric speech'(Piaget) of tbe small child. We should remark that Freud describesthe primary processes as preceding the secondary processes in themental de"elopment of the individual; (hey are pre-verbal in originand thus prefer to handle images rather than words, where wo rdsare handled [bey are treated as fa r as possible like images. Thus.when vygotsky observes that, in inner speech : 'A single word isso saturated with sense thar many words would be required toexplain it in external speech,' 2tl we may be confident that thereference is to that same centrally important aspect of the primaryprocesses that we encounter in Freud's work as 'condensation',Freud notes that. in dreams, words and phrases are just meaningfulelements among orhe!s, accorded no more or less status thanare images, and their meanings have no necessary relation to themeanings they would carry in waking speech. We here encounterthe question of the nalUre of enactive. image and lexicaJ presentationsin their unconscious transformation. I shall return to thisquestion in the next section.I prefaced my references to Horowitz's cornpartmentalisedmodel of thought by stressing the fluid iry of rhe acrual processesit describes. Horowitz himself writes:Normal slreams of thought will flo w sim ultaneously in many compartmentSwithout clear-cut divis ion between modes of presentationEnactions blur into imagery in the fo rm of kinesthetic, somesrherie and vestibular or visceral images. Image representationbl end~ with words in the form of faint auditory or visual imagesof words. Word s and enactive modes merge t!trough images ofspeaking."Inescapably. the sense of the things we see is constructed acrossa comple,: of exchanges between these various registers of repr~ ­sentation. Differing perceptual sit uations will however tend toelicit di ffering configurations and emphases of response: JUSt assculprure wjJl rend to priorilise the enactive and kinaesthetic suffusionof \lisual imagery, so phorographs predominantly tend toprompt a complex of exchanges between the visual and ve rbalregisters: as I began by observing. the greater part of photographicpractice is. de facto. 'scripta-visual' ; this fact is nowheremore apparent than in advertising, and it may help here to referto a particular example.IVThe particular conjuncture into which this advertisement waslaunched, in Britain in the early 1960s, included a best-sellingnovel by Alan Sillitoe, and a popularly success luI film based onthis novel - directed by Tony Richardson and featuring TomCourtney - which retained the title of tb'e original text: TheLoneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. The fact that TomCourtney was at that time a prominent emerging young 'star' (IfBritish theatre and cinema ensured that the institutional spacesof television. and newspapers and magazines. were also penetrated.During the particular months in which this ad appeared therefore,the expression 'the loneliness of the long-distance runner' wastransmitted across (he apparatuses of publishing. cinema. television,and journalism. to become inscribed in what we might callthe 'popular pre-conscious' - those ever-shifting contents whichwe may reasonably suppose can be called to mind by the majorityof individuals in a given society at a particular moment in itshistory ; that which is 'common-knowledge'. Two attributes thereforeare immediately entrained by this content-fragment of thepopular pre-consci ous which serves the ad as pre-texc success andcontemporaneity; additionally , the visual image across which thefragment is inscribed is clearly open to the implication of the63