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

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.