Rebus

With the rebus, a pictorial sign is used to directly invoke a particular sound of the human voice, rather than the outward reference of that sound. The rebus, with its focus upon the sound of a name rather than the thing named, inaugurated the distant possibility of a phonetic script

Abram identifies the rebus as the decisive structural pivot between pictographic and phonetic writing, wherein the sign detaches from its referent and attaches to a vocal sound, making alphabetic writing conceivable.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntax we must learn to discover by comparing the original and the translation

Freud’s account of the dream-work as a translation between two representational registers implicitly invokes rebus-logic, where manifest imagery encodes latent linguistic meaning through pictorial substitution.

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting

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Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.

Jaynes situates early cuneiform — the medium in which the rebus principle first emerged — within a hallucinatory perceptual economy where picture-signs triggered auditory rather than visual decoding.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting

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the speaker-scriptor must discover that the message is expressed in a linguistic form and that this linguistic form is what the writing must reproduce. That marks a genuine revolution: writing

Benveniste locates the structural revolution underlying the rebus — the discovery that writing must reproduce linguistic form rather than referential content — as the foundational insight separating pictography from script.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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Within historical time, in fact, we see applied the principle of pictorial reproduction. Several writing systems we

Benveniste traces the historical prevalence of pictorial reproduction as writing’s natural starting point, providing the background against which the rebus marks a structural departure.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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speakers stop on the language instead of stopping on the things enunciated; they take the language into consideration and discover it signifying; they notice recurrences, identities, partial differences, and these observations get fixed in graphic representations

Benveniste’s account of auto-semiotisation describes the cognitive shift — noticing language as a formal object — that the rebus both requires and accelerates.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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This hypothesis associating writing with ‘inner language’, which will be modified further on, takes up Benveniste’s previous enquiry into the ‘anarchic force’ of the Freudian unconscious.

The preface connects Benveniste’s theory of writing’s relation to inner language with the Freudian unconscious, bridging the structural linguistics of rebus-analysis to depth-psychological concerns.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside

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the word ‘judgment’ here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it carries, on the contrary, execution with it, is in rebus as well as post rem

James deploys the scholastic phrase ‘in rebus’ to distinguish causal efficacy operative within things from abstract post-factum judgment, a terminological aside unrelated to writing-history uses of the term.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside

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