Abstract
Juri Lotman distinguishes between two main types of communication. In addition to the classical I-YOU communication, he speaks about I-I communication, where both the addresser and the addressee are one and the same person. Contrary to how it sounds, autocommunication is not self-sufficient musing inside one’s self, it is remodelling oneself through a code from an entity outside oneself, be it animate or inanimate. According to Lotman, it is often the rhythmical phenomena like poetry, the rhythm of waves, etc. that lend themselves for the act of autocommunication as external codes. After having received the message one is not identical to the original oneself anymore. Perceptual markers of landscape—specific rhythms, ephemera, the rhythm of human everyday activities, bodily movement—can be considered as a secondary code leading to autocommunication in the person who contemplates the landscape. Looking at the landscape—which also implies the rhythmical movement of the eyes—one uses it as a code to reconstitute oneself. A person who has confronted a landscape does not leave it as the same person. The present article poses a definition of autocommunication in landscapes and discusses the way in which other sensorial information apart from the visual—smell, movement, rhythms etc—are used culturally to reinforce autocommunication with oneself. It can be said that several institutionalised religious and cultural practices expect the subject to reconstitute him- or herself mainly through the bodily landscape experience.
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Notes
Source: informal interview, recorded by the present author on April 5th, 2006.
In fact, the third of the Three Celebrated landscapes, Amano Hashidate peninsula (Kyoto prefecture), is also a coastal landscape: it is a narrow cape, stretching out into Miyazu bay, almost cutting it off from the sea. It combines the tidal rhythms with the verticality of pine forest and white stretches of sand with millions of identical sand grains. The canon of the Three Most Celebrated Landscapes (or Three Great Views of Japan, as it has also been translated) originates from the feudal Edo period (1603–1867), but all the three places have been depicted in various art forms since the earliest written history in Japan. All three locations have featured shinto shrines that date to periods from 6th to 8th century and have been popular locations for pilgrimages.
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Lindström, K. Autocommunication and Perceptual Markers in Landscape: Japanese Examples. Biosemiotics 3, 359–373 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9082-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9082-0