Let’s recall Gregory Bateson's tale of
an alien encountering some “signals” from earthlings, but only sees either
marks or noise that have no meaning for him beyond being “physical” entities
that almost escaped his attention. As an outsider of any terrestrial writing
system, he deduces that, by occurring in proximity, the marks or sound waves must be from a significant
source. The “glyphs” he sees are in units and bundles of these units. The accompanying
sound file varies in rate, pitch, or volume etc. He also entertained the
possibility that the sound file may be connected to the marks, that one could
be a version of the other. But he also wants to think that there must be a
direction that the marks don't explicitly say like some kind of metadata. Also,
there are a series of surfaces, and moving from page to page, so to speak,
could have some value or function as well. Some marks just unravel in straight
parallel series, while some are in block formation. Others are more dispersed, like
the fragmented versions of some previous joined bundles he saw. He has, therefore, a parsing issue on his hands.
Then, apart from that, even if he gets an idea of the parsing method, he still
needs to know if there is some order to the marks, something like a “syntax”
(a.k.a., a leap of faith) and if the order of the marks depended on the order
of the sounds, or vice versa; or if they each have their own order, and can
diverge or run parallel to each other. All he has from his world is an ancient fictional
tale about Shannon's “information” theory, a magical beast composed of numbers
with always two faces. With a dash of inspired transposition, he quantifies the
signals by assigning them specific values, and simply reconstructs the language
of the mythical beast called “algorithm” to see what would happen. He did
notice some repetitions and also wide divergences, though this could be fatigue
setting in. The repetitions though seem dominant, so he thinks the divergences
are mutations. He still does not have any code to judge that the signals also
encode some order or hierarchy. The plain sequence or bundles of marks for him
are elements that are just too “baryonic,” like the free-falling photon he has
observed by chance around the event horizon where he used to play hide-and-seek-the-neutrino
as a kid. He is looking for the emergence of a so-called “grammatical” order
from the sequences. To do this, he looks to his own culture and compares the
patterns he knows, if the quantum syntax of his language and the dimensional mappings
are similarly done. But he has nothing remotely similar since his own language
is the pure stochastic
vibration of the quantum
field. Time and space are absent
and therefore any syntax is a metaphysical beast existing only as an imaginary
dimension where one could pinpoint a coordinate and use a frame of reference.
Perspective and point of view are thus also fictive entities. He needs to
become a metaphysician to construct a syntax, a ''language.'' He needs to
flatten his state of superpositionality so that a ''rhythmic'' order or
sequence could be imagined. In short, he needs to invent an entropic universe
that has at the same time a negentropic pull. It's all too contradictory, he quips.
How can all that cohere long enough to build a syntax? It would be like the rarest
element with such an existence so fleeting that it comes closer to his own quantum language. Well, he admits,
such
a universe is
fictional anyway, the stuff of myths. It's not his problem if no
communication or language is possible in that fictive world. This was easy for him to say because things are always
entangled in his own nonrelativistic dimension. Communication there is
absolutely instantaneous. No one even needs to speak. That is why there is, in
effect, no communication or photon. They are not needed.
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Bateson's alien
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
The molecularization of the aesthetic
process into two steps. Autonomy legitimizes the art form as a palpable and systematically rigorous discourse existing as a mode of privileged language, a discursive prestige that romantic activism depends on for its accrued surplus value over ordinary language. Thus, the negative space of formalist art carves out a dialectical possibility for historical practice, whose signatures as art appear to be assumed as self-evident givens. Part of this "negative dialectic" is its capacity for self-reflexivity, so much so that the very contours of that discourse have been subjected to a displacement toward a more radical form of the political.
Monday, April 4, 2022
Why a text needs an "I"
The I is a privileged site, symbol, or avatar of unity, and it is around such a unity that the surrounding elements are placed in a hierarchy of events, movement, idea, impression etc. When Nature is called upon, it is to corroborate such a unity that the I either already possesses or it attains by a renewed encounter with Nature. The artistic form that arises carries that same innate scaffolding, a miniature replica of higher principles, the way infinity is reflected by a grain of sand (in William Blake and other Nineteenth century Romantic poets). As nature is, so should the poem and the I be. This resolves the mystery of the origin of order surrounding poetic language or discourse. This is the organicist Rhythm that flexes itself within and without; as sound echoes the sense, so shall the form also mimic or extend a fundamental order from which both the I and Nature, as subject and object, find their true purpose and meaning. This is why they need to be thrown into the rhetorical and textual mix, as the center around which the whole revolves.
That is, more often than not, they must be made obvious, stated, mentioned, directly or indirectly, as either presence or loss presence, or as a hidden dimension recovered partially or incompletely through some special process that still requires closer analytical inspection. A key ingredient deployed is displacement: a journey is then made and told, often to the countryside, in a moment of solitude and contemplation, where the noise of the world no longer imposed itself, from a vantage point where the I could survey a measure of the whole (as sea or sky, for instance), and then return with an intimation of the invisible order that confers unity to the I’s vision and understanding of itself and its world.
The Romantic lyrical poem, thus, arises from a dislocation or separation that triggers the contemplation and imagination of otherness. It is akin to what Philip Dickinson (2018) called "the protocol of the ‘negative way’ that defines Wordsworthian Bildung." He writes:
"In slightly different terms, the creative nature of perception relies upon the negation of ‘customary sense’, of pre-existing conventions of mediation. In his later study Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman suggests that this negative, extinguishing power is named by Wordsworth in Book VI of The Prelude as Imagination, whose effects are always the same: ‘a moment of arrest, the ordinary vital continuum being interrupted; a separation of the traveler-poet from familiar nature; a thought of death or judgment or the reversal of what is taken to be the order of nature; a feeling of solitude or loss or separation’. This is not imagination as some- thing straightforwardly vitalizing: it is instead ‘apocalyptic’—destructive and revelatory—the most important consequence of which is ‘the poem itself, whose developing structure is an expressive reaction to this consciousness.’"
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
In search of lost lines
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Prosodic notes on free verse
Sunday, February 28, 2021
Where is the reader, how is it located?
Matthew Sepielli, Little Light, 2019 (artsy.net). Haze effects, hue or color contrast, and frame elevation combine to triangulate an implied range, depth, and viewpoint. |
Thursday, February 25, 2021
Prosody & causality
-Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice, 1991
A strategic reorientation (like in the works of the poetics project of the French Oulipo group or of U.S.-based L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers that M. Perloff discusses in many of her publications) allows us not only to see the ideological and historical provenances of metrological schemes, but also affords us more ways of exposing the neglected or ignored organizational, structural, pragmatic, or poetic features of semiotic systems; that is, their ''potential'' aspectual profiles marginalized by discursive regimes. Instead of a precedent cause as the reason for the form, a potentialist prosody is locally generative, not a transcendentalist mapping of a prior referent.
(This brings to mind the long literary practice since the Aeneid where the text or elements of the text, diegetic or paradiegetic, are mirrored or replicated within the text. The play on narrative levels in metafiction, for example, is a familiar extension of this practice. The referential operation, in effect, is housed within the text, a text that loops back to reflect its own reflection. It would be interesting to regard this procedure as the alibi of discourse or language, as the practical means by which discourse becomes possible as a semiotic network of differences. At the most basic, it is the elaboration of the mirror-stage of language, the self-generation of metaphoricity as such where the textual and the non-textual, the narrative and the discursive, or the literal and the figural, as perceptible or readable categories, are splintered off for aesthetic salience. The readable becomes available via the opening that textual operations enact as a technological and material feature of their information design environment.)
In this case, we can actually reimagine metrical schemes themselves as locally generative (with the looping character of rhythmic patterns as analogues of metafictive play), as constraints and not as prosodic rules founded on an aspect of language or unmediated reality that is deemed structurally or formally essential and intrinsic, carrying the force of a natural, ahistorical law or ground. The invocation of contextless "imagination," "genius," or "soul" and their connection to a super generic "voice" or "vision" is in this case a version of such naturalization. << Verse form is... determined by the simulation of... the voice of an "I" that alternately cajoles, teases, and hectors his nameless interlocutor, using linear patterns that loop back and forth to enact the ''gradual pulsing to and fro" of consciousness coming to awareness >> (in Perloff, italics mine).
Friday, February 5, 2021
On the twilight of prosodic idols
Eugen Gomringer, 1953, "Wind": diagrammatic, nonlinear, kinetic, multimodal; iconicity at the limits of iconicity |
*The blank space activates the dialectic between the visible scripts and the unfilled surface of the page. It allows us to imagine the reversal of the visible scripts into their invisible counterpart. What is readable becomes, in turn, transparent, that is, unreadable, absent yet present, present yet absent. Surrounding the blank space in the center as if to assure its captivity as an insubstantial void to the gaze, the legible glyphs ironically become contaminated by it, themselves imperceptibly becoming what they seem to have tried containing. By an abrupt expansion and Gestalt inversion, we realize at once that the empty space is not a mere center subordinate to the self-evident presence of visible fonts: it forms part of the whole page whose whiteness now surrounds the legible space of writing.