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.
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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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