The nonself-resemblance of language

    Language, in the ideal imagination, is divided according to relatively stable, distinct, discrete reproducible elements which follow a regularized combinatory pattern. In performance, however, something always takes over, takes language for a spin, as use always opens it to one rule: variation, or alterity. It prevaricates, becomes plural, multi-directional, multi-modal, when it gets in contact with time and space, when it becomes part of the flow of things. It becomes war torn within itself and becomes the site of tension between the past and the future, between the memory of its previous incarnation and the reality of its current reincarnation. A tension between sameness and otherness, as it hovers between making and unmaking, arriving and departing, becoming and being. It is always not yet, where its present is this contrast between what it might be and what it could have been.

    In the stream of appearances, language, like us, is always a resemblance of a resemblance, or a suspension of self-identity, a series of gaps among its parts which are never fully there. It can never refer to itself positively, and must pose as a tension between what it could be and what it could have been to produce the momentary precarious space for its always emergent perception. Language is the highest form of hesitation. A throw of the dice, this or that throw, the launch into the (im)probable presence of the poem as poetic-noetic-generic environment. (Mallarmé as predecessor for E. E. Cummings.)

    [A parachutist posits ground and sky as the arena of its free fall. But the ground is also sky, and the sky ground. Both are in free fall, as the earth is in motion among the stars, which are also in motion with respect to each other. To locate itself, a satellite must triangulate among bodies which depend in turn on the previous satellite and on other bodies for self-location, and so on. My location is an arbitrary designation created from the fiction of other locations. In reality, I am nowhere. I am no different from Dante: I need frames of reference for motion and direction.]

     The infinite labor of the sign-concept. Suspension of resemblance, resemblance in non-resemblance. The incomparable comparison, the difference which allows two entities to be comparable, the gap which allows resemblance to happen. Resemblance needs non-resemblance or difference to function. Ergo for the sign, or languageness (Cf. Warhol).

    Language faithful to variation. Idiosyncrasy as identifiable trait of style, or language as nonself-resemblance is the operative field of idiosyncrasy, as the always-other-than-itself. What repeats is what doesn't repeat fully or absolutely. The always-other is not an other modeled as the same. It is neither this nor that, neither same nor opposite of the same, but this gap between sameness and other-sameness.

Silencio

From Eugen Gomringer, Book of Hours, 1968

I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.... If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? --Samuel Beckett

    Concrete silence. How to hear? Differential reading. It is the silence which allows the word to be heard and read. The blank space which allows the mark to be visible. Yet, the word ''silence'' cannot speak, even of itself. It is not silent. It is the place where both silence is heard and not heard, read and not read. This word is  merely a mark where both the act of saying and unsaying intersect. The unspeakable mark is not the opposite of noise or speech, but the dynamic moment of emergence of perception as such.

     Thus, this silence speaks the silence which allows it to speak, and which lets language speak, not as an unequivocal vocal/aural full plenitude or presence. It is the empty place where we perceive what by all rights we do not perceive. By silence, by naming that which is not itself, breaks its own sense, empties itself of its reason to be, its own meaning. Silence is not silence, and by this negation, makes itself heard, makes us hear and perceive what it is not. Yet, by unnaming itself in naming itself, it resounds as if by some miracle of perennial resurrection.

     Pure mark without meaning, it can now be seen but not heard. It ends by finally saying nothing, by becoming indistinguishable from the white spaces around it. Silent, it is unsignifying, and is now ironically full of itself because emptied of itself, without the need of language to speak. It has become what it speaks about, concretely true to itself by denying itself its own truth, its own possibility of being.

    Its self-repetition is a material and immaterial multiplication of perceptibility and imperceptibility. It implies the occupation of the entire material and phenomenal page of reading, both in its concretely imperceptible manifestation and concretely perceptible non-manifestation. What actually unfolds is a physical mark whose meaningful aura is indistinguishable from its reiteration as an opaque material event. It voids its status as a perceptible semantic event by assuming it fully.

    We are suspended between a phenomenal word we can say but whose meaning forbids its reading  to mean what it means, and a physical mark which in its muted form already embodies what it means but forbids its expression as perceptible word. Silence becomes a word we can say but whose meaning is emptied by saying it, or a word whose meaning can be perceived only by fulfilling its wish not to be perceived. If ever the word ''silence" would like to be faithful to the meaning it intends, it must fold within itself and hold its peace, that is, remain silent, and intend to say what it should not say, or should say what it does not intend to say, to say it. Thus, it loops upon itself, forever failing to succeed (in all the ambiguous senses this phrase conveys) to say what it should and should not say.

     In speaking about it now, can I really imagine to add anything more eloquent?

This is metaphor?

1) The denotationally possible, the self is never seen within the network of inherited metaphors, as an image whose identity it shares with other bodies. There is no final body, in the same way narrative doesn't have reference as its end point. Reference, denotationality, are relay points for further narratives and metaphors. Reading is the fluctuation, the eternal hesitation, between the image as body and the body as image. But what does it mean to say This IS metaphor? How can metaphor refer to metaphor, to itself? It must denotate itself as the impossibility of denotation, as the possibility of the impossibility of saying: This is it. If it is really metaphor, we cannot point it out without reducing it to a literal level. What does a literal metaphor mean? Mean and not be, or be and not mean? What is the being of metaphor, except this suspension of determination, as the suspension of both figurality and literality? Or how can we speak of metaphor in a non-metaphorical way? Can we speak of it in an ontology of being, in the form of the verb to be? Can we know what it is?

2) There is also one sense in which the paradoxical idea of an ontologically literal metaphor can take place: in the arrival of the Subject who can speak of itself, as self-consciousness. The Subject is the moment of the arrival of metaphor, as the bifurcation between image and body. The fact that it can designate itself as a binary and yet efface itself in this act of dualistic designation shows its double operational logic of opacity and transparency, of presence and absence, of materiality and ideality. Thus, it is no longer a strict choice between the literal and the metaphorical, but the always inaugural positing of the literal and figural in the performative production of languageness.

3) Popular culture like  Hollywood films, by supplying events, characters, objects, and a teleological and moral world endowed with clear values and identities, provides the reassuring affirmation of a clearly meaningful universe without the complexities of point of view and ambiguity. The master signifier without ambiguity (Barthes). A sense of crisis has not infected our speech. Denotation has fallen from the sky like magic from the gods.

4) The space of the codex, as page and as material seriality of pages, is next invoked as the bounded field in which semiosis is executed. It is the space of encounter, intersection, and propinquity of the material layout of signifiers dictating the rhythm of their reception. Propinquity, bibliographic code, basis of anaphora, cataphora. Limit border, the gutter, the page logic of confinement, ground of the rhetoric of coherence. By pointing out the involvement of the medium, the socio-pragmatics of signifying production or semiotic practice expands reading/writing to include the techno-material affordances of communication design technologies. Bibliographic and design codes are part of the material pragmatics of the sociology of script acts.

5) A culture defined essentially by its construction as memory and memorial is set, by a tautological extension, against the forces of forgetting. But forgetting, then, is a real element without which the culture of memory and the memory of culture lose their reason for being in various forms of ritual, art, education, recitations, songs, representations, commentary, journaling, recording, reporting, and so on. Time and space are accompanied with memory facilities, tools, techniques and technologies. Forgetting is at the core of our cultural dynamic, of language and the practice of languages. It is that chasm we wage war against, a history more enduring than human time itself. Writing paradoxically unites them as the practice of both remembering and forgetting. The pain of loss is equal to, and almost indistinguishable from, the pleasure of recovery. Metaphor is the marker of both the proximity and distance of that which is most culturally and consciously significant and signifying.

The (im)probable encounter

Le tout sans nouveauté qu'un espacement de la lecture.

—"Un coup de dès," Stephane Mallarmé, 1897

[W]here the poetic field is less a vehicle of thought than an environment of thinking.

—Jerome McGann, 2007

      The literary as a practice and training in self-reflexive reading/writing. Pure stylistic training, in the sense where Code and Meaning are placed in a probabilistic conjunction. The structural or formal code presupposes meaning for its construction, but meaning also requires the code as a working premise. To place the structure at the head is to propose a metaphysical form for the Signifier; to presume the Signified is to return us to the metaphysical primacy of essential identities and substantial origins, that is, to the fallacy of unmediated perception. In a self-reflexive practice, or literary writing, or écriture in general as semantic ontogenesis, both the formality of the Signifier and the substantiality of the Signified are placed in a probabilistic dynamic, as if the Norm and the Exception are returned to the emergent logic of play, divesting them of their deterministic nomological binary essentialism, and highlighting their pure relational co-dependency in the production of temporal meaning-effect. In other words, it returns us to the emergent creative dynamic of reading where Code and Meaning, Form and Substance, Sign/Nonsign are bound by an (ineluctable) arbitrary encounter in a relationship of reversibility, probability, and non-essentiality. We should imagine a groundless chain of norm/exception/norm/exception, or of code/noncode/code/noncode and so on, as an instantiation of the play of an always-emergent semiosis.

Speaking precariously

1) "In a paradoxical quantum effect, language appears as the creator of the creation that creates it."

2) "[T]he probabilistic presence of the poem."

—Manuel Portela, 2013

     The literary as the invention of language, in both senses of the genitive. Language invents itself in the literary at the same time as the literary emerges as the possibility and impossibility of language.

     For instance, the precarity of the syntactic organization of meaning is foregrounded by prosody and enjambement, or that of meaningful phonomorphic concatenation by rhythms, rhymes, and accents, while the unstable figural mechanics of meaning is put in relief by the exploitation of the play of ambiguity, rhetorical forms, linguistic metaplasm, etc. The Chance and Collage poetics which came after Tzara are simply the foregrounding of this precarious emergent state of the Significant. In Visual, Concrete, and Codex poetics, even the bibliographic and material formats of media are placed in evidence as the field of semiotico-ergonomic metalogics, paratextual elements which are socio-epistemic cues of artefactual reception. The reintegration of interactivity in New Media poetics is also the recognition of the involvement or implication of the (decentered) anthropic element in the always-emergent and probabilistic and not meta-determined or closed-up dynamic of artefactual meaning-activation. There is, thus, a path here toward the consideration of the politics of design ecology dynamic as the socio-material field in which artefacts attain informational significance.

     Poiesis returns us to this wondrous precarity of the activating binary which subtends every act of reading and meaning production (or writing as différance), the precarious emergence of the Determinate and the Indeterminate in the axis of the Norm and the Arbitrary. The fact that an exception is possible alerts us to its de facto necessity as event in the open universe of forms. And in the open universe, everything is a norm de jure, since something cannot come to pass except by necessity. The structural necessity attributed to the form of linguistic norms carves out the limited workspace of Culture against the openness of Nature, the regime of the Logos against the wilderness of Physis. It is this polar installation which self-reflexive poetics foregrounds by the overlay of surplus semiotic procedures articulated as artistic play above the so-called norm (or the special over  the ordinary).

     The wondrous precarity of perceiving what is as such, the moment of judgement in perception, in Thought as Reading. The instability of reading inheres in this flux of always-altered certainties, the necessary arbitrariness of saying I see what I see. Historicity in the fullest sense, that is, sense as precarity, not fixed essence, not autonomic identity. To speak of this precarity is to speak precariously, to realize the indeterminacy of the determined in one inevitable gesture of serial speech in the sea of universal synchronic noise.

The reserve of the Signified

 

    We should imagine a dynamic semiotic labor which no longer harbors the abstract idealized space of Representation, whether inner or outer, but that of material transformations, carrying simply the vector of forces in a historically dynamic interface. The ''message'' is not an external dimension functioning as a transcendental signified, a metasemantic echo dominating the material encounter, but is medially coextensive with the collective immanent evolution of the subject-object design ecology, in a motion  akin to Deleuzean haecceties and expenditures without reserve. In this case, won't the Signified be simply a nostalgic precipitate which constitutes the feedback function of the desiring subject who keeps saying ''I think, therefore I am''?

The ''writerly'' text

"In our age of relentless demystification, the text itself remains the last mystified object."
—George Bornstein, 2001.

    

       A text is simply the assemblage of all possible readings. The text itself as itself does not exist. It is also an ideal but ontologically empty place, without essence or value, without “intrinsic” parts. A text, like a sign, is the set of all virtual readings of itself. The text only exists as the differences of all readings that have been made, and all future readings of it that will be made. There is no “essential” text. To say that one reading coincides with the text’s interior place, its essence, is to reduce it to a timeless enigma. When a sign signifies most fully, that is when it also becomes the most non-signifying object.

    Edmond Jabès: La lecture est impossible.

    Reading as a concept that reads something out of something else, as history, psychology, semantic, aesthetic etc. This is impossible. Today, reading is its own movement, an inner momentum without a partner, without an orbit. This is the moment we cannot accept, and that is why the orbit and what is at the center of the orbit that captures the reading in its gravitational field, must exist, and continue to exist. It is the grand alibi of reading, its basis for institutionalization, and the rational for the discourse that maintains a cultural formation and identity. 

    De- and recontextualization are the normal processes that befall texts. There is no mythical whole or mystical unity in textuality. More a sociohistorical and technomaterial process, the text is not a fixed object, an idealized semantic whole. In reading, the focus should be less on the reconstruction of this mythic object, than in the creative reappropriation of textuality, and the resulting skill displayed in the new uses of language. Barthesian ''writerly'' text over the ''readerly'' one.

Exercises of style

-What literariness as self-reflexive textuality is saying is that the real model of knowing is ironic self awareness, how both the rule and its violation emerge from the same invention of the condition of the possibility of perception as such: that is, as aesthesis. Both are neither essences nor absolutes, but the work of differentiation on the level of metaphorical binaries which allow sense to happen. To teach textuality is to begin with literariness, with stylistics happening "prior" to systemic concepts of language and textuality. It is to teach the emergence of perception as the self-reflexive imposition of limits of play, of reading as a game, a language game.

-Illustrating writing as self-reflexive textuality using R. Queneau's Exercices de style. Language and literature are stylistic variations of the materiality of meaning-emergence via the self-conscious mode of writing and textuality. A word is already an angle, and there are no neutral, objective words. Each linguistic choice is already style and ideology. There are no synonyms, no paraphrase. Each use is translation, modification. Also, there are no antonyms as such, but perspectives of judgement, a play of discourse and power assigning slanted meanings, and calling it lexicon or vocabulary, and not, say, "idiography." 

-Twentieth century writing as self conscious manipulation of language as an arbitrary material construct, as a generalized material creativity which explores the bases of meaning production. Dadaism to OULIPO to cut ups, chance, and collage, until Goldsmith and Conceptual writing. Machine writing understands it better as material code unfolding itself on the basis of arbitrary parameters.

-Even before the idea of an ''integrated'' approach, writing, especially after the avant-garde counter traditions, has already become highly self-conscious of the difficulty of maintaining the line dividing language per se and literariness. More strongly, that both domains are actually already the field of thinking and meaning production in terms of the self-reflexive material play between rule-making and rule-breaking.

-Textus, we've forgotten its materiality, to give way to an abstract ideal of textuality. The physical, mediatic affordances, and sociology of textuality must be recalled, if we are to address more fully the artistic production of the 21st century, which, like Concrete poetry, is grounded on material modernism and the expanded kinetic affordances of New Media information design ecology.

-We live in semiotic spaces and signifying bodies informed by the material history of media technology. Today, the confluence of the codex--as memory storage and retrieval device dominant for at least a millennium--with digital media has emphasized the so-called latent virtuality of the former. The codex carried in itself the virtualization of space and time, the implied bibliographic material codes which govern its manipulation, and hence the logical directionality of reading. The connection between media material technology and paradigms of reading.

The living fiction of us

---You cannot step into the same river twice. There is an implied scenario, though, where the act of stepping is presupposed as antedating the river. In its fuller implication, Heraclitus' aphorism cannot admit the possibility of a position before the step into the river, that is, a foothold outside the flow. The "before" is already part of the flow. What it restricts, thus, is the provision of any external vantage point from which to observe the flow. I am not external to the river, I am with it, and thus cannot really see where I am except as against mobility itself. The assertion ''I am here, now'' is possible only in its negative form, but a form which must also negate itself. The Now is our only ontological possibility, but since always moving, is also the realm of our ontological impossibility.

---The living fiction of us as the locus of the authorial real. The living moment of speech, in its very unfolding materiality, has no room for doubt. It is structured immediately by its full life as intent. Telekinesis is the fantasy equivalent of the seamless intersection of the material and the semiotic, matter and mind in unison of execution, perfect marriage of intent and event.

---Concepts are difficult not because of some difficulty related to individual skill of reading or to the clarity of exposition. Understanding requires belief. This faith in concepts as graspable, self evident substances or content is disconcerting. Concepts are not transparent logico-semantic atoms. They are essentially essenceless. The difficulty is indigenous, so much so that the difficulty of this difficulty is included in the difficulty.