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.