So what if all is discourse?

    So what if all is discourse? It means we now look at the metadiscursive underpinnings of both the reading present and the reading regime which informs a textual set. A text could be operating from a different metadiscursive binary which informs its presuppositions. It serves as a way of saying it belongs to this or that regime of signs.

     A manifesto is one intertextual means by which a textual work may propose its reading contract. ''Intention'' for example, is the utopia of the marriage of form and meaning, an insertion of symbolic agency in language or script acts. Discourse must be seen as the utopian invention of the social form of communication and the elements therein. Instead of seeing Jakobson's model as the natural composition of language, we should look at it as the discursive imaginary. The discursive setup is the means by which discourse perpetually reinvents itself as if "always for the first time" (Bréton). This is the hyperreal of discourse.

     Discourse is therefore primarily phatic in that it configures the metadiscursive stage for its own performance. At no point is there an essential divide between the metalanguage and betalanguage: the semiotic contract is immanent, not transcendent, and co-emerges with the moment of performance. From Sarraute, to Beckett, to Calvino: in much of what is called nouveau roman or metaliterature, is the exploration of the de facto self-staging of discourse and its cultural or historical or ontological limits.

     This phatic constitution is what a mode of reading contract or semiotic regime often hides as the rhetoric of pure objectivity or ''external'' reality where discourse seems to efface itself. Free indirect discourse, for example, blurs the great divides of 19th c realist discursive regime identifying clearly bound agents of speech. The figures of the ''sources'' of ''speechifying'' in this setup, signaled by the inquit formula, return to the sea of undifferentiated murmuring, as if discourse had no more mooring but time itself. The figures of discourse that come and go are semiotic functions comparable perhaps to Deleuze & Guattari's personnage conceptuel.

     This doesn't mean it's all fictional. In fact, it's the real of all language in Milner's sense, a ''primary linguistic data'' (PLD). Hence, contrary to Chomsky, the PLD isn't confined to a UG or structural core. This is the exclusivist ruse of the positivist rhetoric of this type of linguistic inquiry which assigns to itself the sole origin or source of discourse and which sees itself as the master narrator to which all language returns after emanating from it. The PLD is the real immanent and full horizontal property of all discourse types (rhizomatic), and not the exclusive real of the figure of the vertical rationalist persona.

     But why must discourse need a ruse in which it hides its own mode of emergence, to speak not only from many fabled sources (literary polyvocality) but also from a single universal source (metalingual univocality)? Is this part of discourse's desire to be heard, a function of its own interior monologue, like in Beckett's dialectical tension between the presence and absence of one or many voices? Is there a real dialogue, or is it all a utopia of the hyperreal of communication, the perennial re-staging of discourse's self performance? The pronouns of discourse are all equally non-deictic, for deixis is already a narrative of re-citation. It is the very stage of discourse as a social event, where the social is the event.

    Won't the need to speak be the only universal, then?