The play of form, the form of play

     -Discourse stabilizing the object via a metaphysics of form or substance bearing the logic of essence, identity, and inherent properties. The temporalization of language, vs language as gift of the gods or as metaphysical structure, recasts it as a fully mutable entity whose center of stability is now difficult to locate. The singling out of discrete elements objectifies language as the reality principle of scientific discourse. Representation in its classical logic of variable/invariable gets redeployed in the binarism of form/substance by which the variable is tracked invariably. The Informal—bearer of Becoming—is set aside or forgotten as co-participant in the constitution of both the form of representation and the representation of form. There is no stable foothold in which form escapes Becoming. Whenever there is speech, there is always a fictive moment of transcendentality posited, as if there were an invariable which always preceded or supported the variable, as if there were a still moment in the river which could stand long enough to be useful as a point of reference for  fixing the location of other points of the coursing water. It is as if a blur could speak clearly of another blur. (Will not this be the rigorous logic behind Derridean "play"?)

   
    -The changes in media technology also modify the configuration of the material anthropic spaces or pragmatico-ergonomic fields of signification. Sign vs nonsign, real vs language, enabling binarisms of the reading space, including body vs sign. See Concrete Poetry in general, but also how the logic of textuality both colonizes nonsigns and reincorporates signs as the dual logic of the classical discourse of representation. The signifying space is now the whole Socius as a historically constituted discourse of things as signs, correlative of the inverted discourse of signs as things. The design environment, the metalogical, informational, and neomaterial field where these values obtain their place, remains in the shade of the Unthought.

    - If before the classical idea of teaching literature was the explication of a contained hidden special meaning, a legacy of a hermeneutics founded on biblical exegesis, today teaching semiotic artefacts would mean the fostering of self-reflexivity in relation to the contingent and situated conditions of reading itself. This historical awareness overtakes the formalist and structuralist alibi of binarist categories inherited from classical exegesis, and this beyond the plethora of ''extrinsic'' approaches in criticism. This self-reflexivity does not only demand a simple return to a genealogy of reading apparatuses, but also more importantly highlights the mediational affordances which enable the design of perceptual environments which are ergonomic ecologies founded on materialist economies of meaning production.

     -The literary is the foregrounding of the reading of language as the language of reading (cf. Manuel Portela). Following J. McGann or J. Drucker, because there is no such thing as a raw unmarked or nonliterary text in the sense of a linguistic composition which does not call attention to its structural code, all writing and all language is always already a reading protocol in action. In short, there is no such thing as a ''natural'' language. All language use or embodiment is already a codified instruction of reading, either in consonance or dissonance with its immanent contract of reading, its marked-up construction or layout. (Language, each time we speak of it, is always already its own metalanguage. The literary is also another metalanguage, both of itself and of language.)

     -In this way, the opposition ''natural'' vs ''literary'' language is not a primordial pre-discursive binary. Instead, it is already a discursive presupposition enabling the agonic and organizational possibility of the socio-epistemic field. Deprived of essentiality, these two terms are effects of the discursive field. One cannot teach language without directly involving the literary; nor can one teach literature without linguistics, not because one is in the service of the other, but because one is already the other, or one is the constant invention of the other. We must look at how, historically, the domains of language and literature studies emerged together in the rise of the human sciences, and also in the context of the rise of the romantico-political ideal of national identities.

     -For example, Concrete Poetry can be seen as the transgression of the historically standardized print space of the Codex. The arrival of new media's impact on the standardized print bibliographic space can be seen beginning with Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dès, as J. Drucker has pointed out. Concrete poetics, like post-figural art, is the response of the static Codex and Canvas semiotic space to the emergence of  new media. Suddenly, Codex space is rekineticized, poly-dimensionalized, and re-materialized. The conceptualist, idealist, logicalist, mentalist, and structuralist pseudo-transcendent or ethereal linguistico-semantic space of writing moves away from its metaphysical model paradigm toward new models of reading requiring multimodal, neo-material, and n-dimensional embodied or situated multilinear navigationality.