There are no natural speeches. As a medium, I am the site where the Other speaks, not as a singular voice traceable to some pure origin, but as a multitude. I am legion.
We take it for granted, as a matter of course, that whatever it is we do is grounded in the natural. Look at the ease by which I say what I say, or think what I think. Discourse is what others do. I, on the contrary, speak. The other's utterance is a recitation of heard and overheard language, a relay point of rumors.
My speech, meanwhile, is pure expression, the exteriorization of an originary interiority, whose rise to the surface is like the natural flow of a spring or geyser. I don't recite, I speak freely as myself. The thoughts that flow out of my speech are as natural as the air and sound which accompany or compose their expression. Truth has the same effortless facility as my breath's.
When we assume tacitly that our speech is natural, we mean that it is a discourse without history, without a past, without guile. It is purely innocent, as expression of self evident, unbiased established truth. If I am reciting at all, I am merely restating the already obvious natural order of things and ideas. Stating is not a performative... It only reflects and does not recreate or reproduce lived reality.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
A sleight of hand?
Literature thus is alone today in
bearing the entire responsibility for language;
While linguistics is a search for grounds which are binding or natural, poetics is premised on the idea that the ground is not only arbitrary or not obligatory but also a fiction made in a dynamic of precarious or post-essential contrast. Whereas linguistics is a quest for a fixed point of reference, poetics, by the supplement of extralinguistic rules, foregrounds the elusive or shadowy status of the ground of a ''natural'' base of language. By the same stroke, it renders its own position precarious by positing the unstable and indeterminate nature of the material against which it measures its distance and recognizes its own identity.
Won't poetics be like a sleight of hand, a levitating trick involving the shuffling of two shadowy points of referents in which the values of the norm and the variation emerge as reversible images? What always gets foregrounded are the reading codes or habits which are affirmed and subverted or ''loosened'' at the same time. The linguistic haunts the poetic in the same way the poetic haunts the linguistic as each other’s condition of possibility and impossibility. We need to speak of a beta-language to complement that of a meta-language in this case since language cannot be presupposed as an already known pre-existent substantial whole.
(Thus, “integration,” in pedagogy or research, shouldn’t be seen as the unification of opposites in which one is the illumination of the other, or where one becomes the affirmation of the other’s truth. This is the version of an “integration” dreamed of in positivist heaven, the way translation before was seen as the confirmation of the linguistics which founds the legitimacy of the translation in a circular way.
Won't such an integration impose once more the master/slave relationship between Science over Art, where Science is the meta-language governing the dynamics of Art as a beta-language? Like the ambition of Structuralism as the meta-language of cultural forms and meaning, as the scientific method over Art and Literature?
for though science needs language, it
is not, like literature, within
language.
—Roland Barthes (c. 1984)
While linguistics is a search for grounds which are binding or natural, poetics is premised on the idea that the ground is not only arbitrary or not obligatory but also a fiction made in a dynamic of precarious or post-essential contrast. Whereas linguistics is a quest for a fixed point of reference, poetics, by the supplement of extralinguistic rules, foregrounds the elusive or shadowy status of the ground of a ''natural'' base of language. By the same stroke, it renders its own position precarious by positing the unstable and indeterminate nature of the material against which it measures its distance and recognizes its own identity.
Won't poetics be like a sleight of hand, a levitating trick involving the shuffling of two shadowy points of referents in which the values of the norm and the variation emerge as reversible images? What always gets foregrounded are the reading codes or habits which are affirmed and subverted or ''loosened'' at the same time. The linguistic haunts the poetic in the same way the poetic haunts the linguistic as each other’s condition of possibility and impossibility. We need to speak of a beta-language to complement that of a meta-language in this case since language cannot be presupposed as an already known pre-existent substantial whole.
Won't such an integration impose once more the master/slave relationship between Science over Art, where Science is the meta-language governing the dynamics of Art as a beta-language? Like the ambition of Structuralism as the meta-language of cultural forms and meaning, as the scientific method over Art and Literature?
What if the literary itself is its own metalanguage, the
question of its own status or nature, a discourse which carries the burden of
the question of its own condition of possibility? That it is its own science?
And what if, against the nonplay status of linguistic positivism where
metalinguisticity is above play, the literary is the very question of the
possibility of both meta- and beta- linguisticity, the possibility of
reflection as perception and perception as reflection?)
Translation as the exploration of the sayable and unsayable, the limits of our sign systems, both as a formal concept and as a cultural practice of signification. It's becoming less and less about equivalence and texts than the interested practice of difference in the geopolitics of transculturation. The arena now is the global communication circuit, a translocal arena more and more aware of the political uses of media technology. The question How to translate? opens toward Why translate? has surpassed its humanist and nationalist alibis or implicit agenda to become the conflicted contact zones of a delocalized and relocalized mythic, virtualized or simulated differences.
We may, as novice and amateur moonlighters of translation, be just aware of the microcosmic issues of textual and linguistic procedures. Delocalization is unavoidable as textual values migrate, are remediated and become part of an ambiguous tradition of translated texts, uprooted and sharing the married genes of various families. The danger of mutations is always mitigated by a rhetoric of identity, whether nativist, nationalist, or culturalist.
As Jabès has underlined, perhaps unintentionally implying translation, writing is an errance, a diasporic space of exile. The book is perhaps without origin, except in wandering. It is its nature not to belong, but to be a realization of its perpetual migration, delocalization, or transculturation. Reading/writing is an errance, the perennial shifts in identity, because identity is the idealized imposition on signs, which are the homeless, earthless, groundless vectors of our encounter with the always inaugural: sense always happening and dissipating--without ever reducing our experience of enigma and mystery--in the sea of universal noise and wonder.
***
Translation as the exploration of the sayable and unsayable, the limits of our sign systems, both as a formal concept and as a cultural practice of signification. It's becoming less and less about equivalence and texts than the interested practice of difference in the geopolitics of transculturation. The arena now is the global communication circuit, a translocal arena more and more aware of the political uses of media technology. The question How to translate? opens toward Why translate? has surpassed its humanist and nationalist alibis or implicit agenda to become the conflicted contact zones of a delocalized and relocalized mythic, virtualized or simulated differences.
We may, as novice and amateur moonlighters of translation, be just aware of the microcosmic issues of textual and linguistic procedures. Delocalization is unavoidable as textual values migrate, are remediated and become part of an ambiguous tradition of translated texts, uprooted and sharing the married genes of various families. The danger of mutations is always mitigated by a rhetoric of identity, whether nativist, nationalist, or culturalist.
As Jabès has underlined, perhaps unintentionally implying translation, writing is an errance, a diasporic space of exile. The book is perhaps without origin, except in wandering. It is its nature not to belong, but to be a realization of its perpetual migration, delocalization, or transculturation. Reading/writing is an errance, the perennial shifts in identity, because identity is the idealized imposition on signs, which are the homeless, earthless, groundless vectors of our encounter with the always inaugural: sense always happening and dissipating--without ever reducing our experience of enigma and mystery--in the sea of universal noise and wonder.
Sunday, March 10, 2019
Prosody: the shadow of time in language, the shadow of language in time
Post-metrical ''poetics'' is a deviation from the deviation. However,
rather than obliterate the former, such pile up or redoubled deviation
or top category ''foregrounding'' (higher level binaries) reinforces
symbiotically the differences between these modes of envisioning the
temporal physics of both physiological versus semiotico-material
performance or spatial embodiment of linguistic media.
It is less the contrast abstract/concrete that is played at, but the attempt at the ''re-location,'' in all senses, of the ever elusive ground of the performance of the meaning of performance, or that of the meaning of the performance of meaning. The performance of meaning and the meaning of performance, like the form of meaning and the meaning of form, is therefore posed as a problematic conjunction, isomorphism, parallelism, harmony, unity, coherence, intersection, etc. as the utopian desire of the marriage of intention and meaning (telekinesis motif).
In other words, both linguistic and poetic prosodies complement each other less in terms of a bilateral affirmation of each other's perfect grounding on any final principle (langue, biology, sociology, physiology, intention, mind, breath, correspondences, discourse, speech, idea, structure, norm, convention, cooperation, communication maxims, reading contracts, the sublime, etc.) than in terms of the recognition of each other's arbitrariness as condition of both their possibility and impossibility. Both are in search of two foundational ideal referents: the shadow of structure for a naturalistic prosody (law as necessary choice) and the shadow of structure for an artistic prosody (rule as arbitrary choice). The first is linguistics, the second, poetics. Or, the classic nature/culture binary.
We know, by this time, how this binary had already been the object of a deconstructive critique. We only need to cascade the consequences or implications for the biplay between the two prosodic domains. Both are retroactive fictions allowing for the utopian maintenance of the workspace of meaningfulness or signifying production. The notion of ''natural'' ("unmarked") languages ceases to be natural. By the same reasons, the notion of "poetic" or "marked" language ( as foregrounding) explodes its domain and exposes the groundlessness of the temporal and spatial physics of signifying production. Deviations, therefore, beyond being disruptive, are the bifocal sites of the emergence of sense.
Poetry compensates for the non-absolute status or indeterminacy of grammar as a ground of form and meaning by the supplement of ''devices.'' It's playfulness, via the supplement of extraneous rules under its poetics, is a form of interior redundancy which has two paradoxical effects. It tightens its conjunction of form as meaning and vice versa, but at the same time opens the redundancy to polysemy and polyphony, as if it found not one but many grounds of meaning. This is because form and meaning are not first substances. They don't preexist the emergence of the differential moment which posits them as unifiable opposites. To assume one or the other is to presume the primacy of either the signifier (code, system, self identical form antedating the meaning) or signified (transcendent real or meaning antedating the form).
The perspectives which open language to meaning opens it to the plural, since it is this differential swerve which keeps it going beyond pure replication or mechanical duplication. Pure duplicates don't add information. Translation, as a species of the paraphrase and reading, multiplies the visibility of structural or systemic variants surrounding every manifest incarnation of a signifying value.
Rather than look at semantic or linguistic equivalences as an infallible measure, we should treat all semioses--reading, translating, interpreting, rewriting, critiquing, etc.--as textual variants of a totality of probable states of a focalized semiotic arrangement. In short, a text is merely one version representing the visible focalisation of variants surrounding it. The actual and the virtual co-exist as an imperceptible Gestalt continuum, but perception requires a pointilist and linear duration owing to the serialistic and atomistic bias of human cognition.
This is the reason the ''original'' text cannot be duplicated because it is the very surface of perception. The printed text or display screen is not what we see, but is the surface extension of our act of perception. There is no distance between what is seen and the act of seeing. When I see a text, that text is the surface extension of my cognitive perceptual process. Every seeing however requires nonseeing, the same way hearing a note means hearing the silent ones too. Reading a text also means reading the absent ones too.
If the poetic as pure stylistics presumes the shadowy precarity of the Law or the Symbolic Order, it's simulated opposite, pragmatic prose, assumes it as a simulation of Order. Or, the opposition between ordinary natural state vs poetic aesthetic special state.
It is less the contrast abstract/concrete that is played at, but the attempt at the ''re-location,'' in all senses, of the ever elusive ground of the performance of the meaning of performance, or that of the meaning of the performance of meaning. The performance of meaning and the meaning of performance, like the form of meaning and the meaning of form, is therefore posed as a problematic conjunction, isomorphism, parallelism, harmony, unity, coherence, intersection, etc. as the utopian desire of the marriage of intention and meaning (telekinesis motif).
In other words, both linguistic and poetic prosodies complement each other less in terms of a bilateral affirmation of each other's perfect grounding on any final principle (langue, biology, sociology, physiology, intention, mind, breath, correspondences, discourse, speech, idea, structure, norm, convention, cooperation, communication maxims, reading contracts, the sublime, etc.) than in terms of the recognition of each other's arbitrariness as condition of both their possibility and impossibility. Both are in search of two foundational ideal referents: the shadow of structure for a naturalistic prosody (law as necessary choice) and the shadow of structure for an artistic prosody (rule as arbitrary choice). The first is linguistics, the second, poetics. Or, the classic nature/culture binary.
We know, by this time, how this binary had already been the object of a deconstructive critique. We only need to cascade the consequences or implications for the biplay between the two prosodic domains. Both are retroactive fictions allowing for the utopian maintenance of the workspace of meaningfulness or signifying production. The notion of ''natural'' ("unmarked") languages ceases to be natural. By the same reasons, the notion of "poetic" or "marked" language ( as foregrounding) explodes its domain and exposes the groundlessness of the temporal and spatial physics of signifying production. Deviations, therefore, beyond being disruptive, are the bifocal sites of the emergence of sense.
***
Poetry compensates for the non-absolute status or indeterminacy of grammar as a ground of form and meaning by the supplement of ''devices.'' It's playfulness, via the supplement of extraneous rules under its poetics, is a form of interior redundancy which has two paradoxical effects. It tightens its conjunction of form as meaning and vice versa, but at the same time opens the redundancy to polysemy and polyphony, as if it found not one but many grounds of meaning. This is because form and meaning are not first substances. They don't preexist the emergence of the differential moment which posits them as unifiable opposites. To assume one or the other is to presume the primacy of either the signifier (code, system, self identical form antedating the meaning) or signified (transcendent real or meaning antedating the form).
The perspectives which open language to meaning opens it to the plural, since it is this differential swerve which keeps it going beyond pure replication or mechanical duplication. Pure duplicates don't add information. Translation, as a species of the paraphrase and reading, multiplies the visibility of structural or systemic variants surrounding every manifest incarnation of a signifying value.
Rather than look at semantic or linguistic equivalences as an infallible measure, we should treat all semioses--reading, translating, interpreting, rewriting, critiquing, etc.--as textual variants of a totality of probable states of a focalized semiotic arrangement. In short, a text is merely one version representing the visible focalisation of variants surrounding it. The actual and the virtual co-exist as an imperceptible Gestalt continuum, but perception requires a pointilist and linear duration owing to the serialistic and atomistic bias of human cognition.
This is the reason the ''original'' text cannot be duplicated because it is the very surface of perception. The printed text or display screen is not what we see, but is the surface extension of our act of perception. There is no distance between what is seen and the act of seeing. When I see a text, that text is the surface extension of my cognitive perceptual process. Every seeing however requires nonseeing, the same way hearing a note means hearing the silent ones too. Reading a text also means reading the absent ones too.
If the poetic as pure stylistics presumes the shadowy precarity of the Law or the Symbolic Order, it's simulated opposite, pragmatic prose, assumes it as a simulation of Order. Or, the opposition between ordinary natural state vs poetic aesthetic special state.
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