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''?