Pass me the salt

To speak of, to speak about something outside of the elements that are used to speak (voice, language, words) is one thing; to speak of the act of speaking using those same elements is another. There are probably more nuanced levels to this basic opposition, but this is a good start for them.

If I say, without using quotes, please pass me the salt, it will mean I am at the moment asking for the salt. When I say, "Please pass me the salt," then I am indicating that this passage could have been spoken by someone else; if it were me, then I would be quoting myself having said it a while ago. In both cases, I am underlining the existence of "Please pass me the salt" as an act of language, reporting it and indicating to you that apart from the minimum message it carries (which is, pass me the salt please), there is at least another one which engages your ability to read it as an artefact of language. That is, as a collection of words, pure and simple.

If you read that line in a novel, or hear it in a film, you surely would not get up and get the salt from the kitchen. Or if we were in any non-dining setting that doesn't involve the occult, say in a Mathematics classroom, and you hear me say "Please pass me the salt" in the middle of a lesson, you would either think I am in a unique mental state, or that I mistook the class as the one we have for Linguistics or Cooking or Chemistry.

But in these cases, we will be treating "Please pass me the salt" as an oddity in the absence of a motivating context. as if it were a detached string of signs. Treating it as a symptom of mental instability gives it a raison d'être, but doesn't diminish its "detached" status. It is actually this detachment or its isolation from what we consider to be legitimate occasions of usage that we diagnose the speaker's state to be unique.

Even in a theatre piece, or in a film, we want this line to have sufficient motivation to be considered a good modelling of legitimate or illegitimate use. If we do have a line like this that did not have sufficient motivation, it might be that the writer is using an aleatory style in composing, or that the writer is using it to indicate the mental state of his/her personage. In this situation, we have a modelling of a "detached" usage, indeed giving it an artistic occasion for use, but ironically founded on its very nature as "unoccasioned" or detached utterance.

Even in a literary context, the persistence of "biographical" interpretations indicates an extended resistance to the "death of the author." The notions of writing without a writer, a speech without a speaker, or even a reading without a reader, remain difficult to imagine. Even if we comprehend the line "Please pass me the salt,'' that doesn't guarantee that we understood it all. If we find a text that has

                                           Please pass me / the salt.

we start imagining all the possible contexts for it. All by themselves, the words are just making a sentence. This is emphasized by putting quotes around them. Even by simply placing them thus on the page already draws your attention to the words themselves. Using italics also does the same job.

                                          "Please pass me / the salt."

All of these are still within the common modern practices of say, literary writing and interpretation, or linguistic lessons. Nothing really strange about it, even when traditional linearisation is violated:

                                           Please
                                                              pass me  the
                                                  salt.

There would be two basic ways to handle it: one, we find the context so we can read beyond what the words are saying; two, we can start treating the words as just that: nothing but words (In Hamlet we recall, "What are you reading?" "Words, words, words") The questions to ask then would be: when do we do that? Will that be a new way to "read" (that is, if that still applies)? And, why "just" words? Can that be done at all? How can we know where one procedure ends and the other begins?

If we encounter a "fontified" line like

                PL   Ea    SsS     S EpAsss
                         meee  t
                       hesss    a L T

with other stylizations in place, we can certainly do both approaches. We can think of it as some kind of slurred speech trying to annoy somebody, or some kind of speech defect, or a snake given the power to speak and ready for dinner. We can also appreciate the foreboding fragmentation of the linguistic elements from its sound to its appearance. The message can now vary from "Please pass me the salt" to "Plea S Sepass met his alt" or someone asking someone else to meet another person named Hess, a lieutenant. It can mean that there is a plea from SSS Seapass to meet in a place called Hesalt. Thus, from an ordinary line that can mean many things in many contexts, we get other lines that can mean other things. Aside from providing more avenues for ambiguity, the "fontification" of lines like this can strengthen the suspension of recycled meanings and intensify its detachment as a playful material form. By making its final meaning indeterminate at many turns, the line leaves us with nothing but a surface of ink and markings peeled off from known signifying functions.

We can find this writing trend in many texts, like in those ones that have been called "visual poetry" and "lettrism."  (There is indeed a large body of history in the modern arts that we can try to recall to situate the questions we have brought up so far.) In many cases, the medium of language not just becomes the subject of the work, but also an object no more signifying or non-signifying than other objects (like in asemic art). In short, pick your styles, or approaches, or biases; there are so many nowadays.