ON THE VERBALITY OF A NON-VERBAL TEXT: THE EXPERIENCE OF PERCEIVING OLGA BOCHIKHINA’S SILENT OPERA
The article presents the semiotic aspects of non-verbal communication. Based on the opera Face by O. Bochikhina, we analyse the cognitive dissonance between the author’s intention to write an opera without words, making it silent, speechless, and the inability to use non-verbal communication without the support of verbal language. We study the representative potential of the sign systems with auditory and visual meanings, as well as the problem of the hidden verbal lining of non-verbal opera. For a person a word grows through any non-verbal languages, performing the function of their mantle-cover: we interpret in verbal languages all empirically (audibly, visually, etc.) perceived data. Of course, to speak does not mean to use words exclusively; but understanding as an analytical operation is always verbal. The final part of the article is devoted to the problem of communicative success of semantic entropy texts. The work is based on an interdisciplinary research space, where it is impossible to draw the boundaries between Visual studies, theories of image and representation, cognitive semiotics.