The invention of the "speaker"

If I were here, if it could have made me, how I would pity it, for having spoken so long in vain, no, that won’t do, it wouldn’t have spoken in vain if I were here, and I wouldn’t pity it if it had made me, I’d curse it, or bless it, it would be in my mouth, cursing, blessing, whom, what, it wouldn’t be able to say, in my mouth it wouldn’t have much to say, that had so much to say in vain. —Samuel Beckett

- The grammatical as the other of language, whereas the agrammatical, the field of noise or complexity, the multiple, lalangue, as the always emergent site of languageness, of informationality qua meaning or significance. If the grammatical is the metalinguistic level which bifurcates to separate an object, the betalingual, out of noise, and for which it stands as a representation of sense and order, the agrammatical is the Ur-language which is posited necessarily by the grammatical bifurcation as its outside or virtual whole. The metalingual/betalingual/urlingual then are so many tonalities in which an experience cycles through to stage the defining discourse of the indefinite experience of languageness. As tonalities, they should not be reified into essential values or poles. They compose the recurrent summit of a metalanguage whose nature is itself immanent to the betalanguage it is describing, but which it must excise to carve out both itself and its object of discursive reference. It is a diskursus, an oscillation, between the Near and the Far, the This and the That, from the One to the Other, Outside and Inside, back and forth, so that in this movement-in-place is always generated the discursive roles and functions of linguistic sociality to make speechifying possible as semiotic action.

- Wouldn't this discursive movement be the whole problematic of the poetic, but not in terms of essences and grounds, but as fictional shadowy poles which allow languageness to arise out of noise? The universe, unlike us, does not divide between meaning and noise, languageness and lalangue. The whole metapoetics of Beckett could be seen as the metafictive staging of the mysterious emergence of the speaker and language, i,e,, discourse. The arrival of the subject of sense on the scene, of sense tout court, out of undifferentiated noise, is like the carving out of the cultural from the natural, as the arrival of writing. The "tragic" as the emergence of interiority is like the irruption of languageness in a space formerly made of pure exteriority (cf. Anthony Reynolds), like the arrival of the Cartesian cogito, or of the subject in general as a whole problematic of modern Philosophy. The arrival of languageness in psychoanalysis, the mirror, the symbolic irrupting into the space of the subject to be born. In short, the quest to answer the question ''Why is there meaningfulness and significance and not just pure noise?'' We’ve spoke tirelessly about the “mirror stage” without underlining that: 1) it is a mise en scène, the stage of historicity; 2) it designates the moment of the arrival of Metaphor; and 3) it is not a single moment or event but a repetitive emergence or irruption of metaphoricity.

- The invention of the “speaker.” We are all victims of literature, like fashion victims, haunted by the realia of anthropic “characters,” feeding them into our subjectivity, all the commonplaces of the fictional, the aesthetic, with such naturalized ease. Aren't we psychologues? Like ideologues who are harbingers of ideology, we are harbingers of fictional subjectivities. Actors, in all the senses of the word. This is the subjectivity we "enjoy" everyday, as the field of naturalized social existence. Talk shows as the paradigmatic staging of the enjoyment of everyday "free speech." Another way we enjoy the internalization of our subjectivity is in personality tests, as if behavior sprung primarily from some essential reservoir of motivation and "mind set" which resided somewhere in our being. The notion of personality incarnates the political fiction of Free Will, and reduces the field of responsibility and explanation within the ambit of individualized locus of causality, that is, legal agency as the body of the accused before the Law.

- The internalization of "personality" which is enjoyed freely by a self-imposed (mis)identification ("That's me") could be seen as the secular version of Original Sin. Both of them open the way toward a mea culpa which justifies the institutional and political work toward the fascism of the interior and self-surveillance, magnifying to the maximum the docility of bodies (willingly or not). What these "tests" do tell me is that they're like games which house our "fates." Whatever is "me" is less what is inside than what is outside that I cling to as part of an activity which I appear to, or required to, enjoy. The narrative psychologue they generate is less about me than about the functionalities of their algorithm or mechanics. That is, they churn out the Subject-to-imbibe-as-yourself like vendo machines would churn out junk food or canned soda. Ergo for discourse which perpetuates itself via speakers who enjoy their positionality in language. To see oneself speak in the selfies of new media chat platforms: I (see myself) speak, therefore, I am.

The highest form of hesitation

- E. E. Cummings makes us re-examine the fundamental questions about language. His variational textuality detaches the strict coupling of semantics with syntax, grammar, and morphophonetic boundaries of lexical and interpretative values. At the core of his variational poetics are extensive manipulations of the multiple elements of language, but drives more deeply into the forms themselves in their material embodiments. Thus, the glyphic dimension which includes current typographic and punctuation practice are pushed beyond being passive elements and are infused with signifying capacities not commonly associated with them. In addition, Cummings is sensitive to the multimodal potentials of the printed page and recovers spatiality as a semantic ingredient in the nonlinear tracings of linguistic performance. With Cummings, agrammaticality no longer carries the stigma of being the domain of nonsense, but becomes as integral as grammaticality in the production of meaning.

-The agrammatical as the expansion of semantic field not strictly coded by grammar, a pragmatics where prosody takes ascendancy over syntax. The traditional elements are given supplemental functions or values which are superimposed on the hyperform of normative linguistics. This ''perversion'' as paraversion couples the agrammatical to the grammatical and threatens to blur the priority and even ontology of the norm. Yet, this threat is productive semiotically because it is the metadiscursive bifurcation which allows sense to be triangulated. The referrability of the signifying datum as the origin, cause, or basis of the shape of semantic perception, reading, or interpretation is dependent on the positing of the poles of ground and nonground, norm and variation, standard and deviation. In essentialist thinking, these poles are fixed referents, but in poetics are shadows of language in time and of time in language.

-For example, Cummings' use of citation within citation, of indirect discourse, and the parentheses are not just polyvocality, but the contrastive condition by which the direct voice could be manufactured as a shadow of speech against which the reiterative function of language is measured, or where the possibility of language as a citational dynamic could be triangulated, spotted, and located as a referentiable object. Language, in the ideal imagination, is divided according to relatively stable, distinct, discrete reproducible elements which follow a regularized combinatory pattern. In performance, however, something always takes over, takes language for a spin, as use always opens it to one rule: variation, or alterity. It prevaricates, becomes plural, multi-directional, multi-modal, when it gets in contact with time and space, when it becomes part of the flow of things. It becomes a war torn within itself and becomes the site of tension between the past and the future, between the memory of its previous incarnation and the reality of its current reincarnation. A tension between sameness and otherness, as it hovers between making and unmaking, arriving and departing, becoming and being. It is always not yet, where its present is this contrast between what it might be and what it could have been. Language is the highest form of hesitation.

-Prosody connects the inert forms to a pragmatics which couples them inevitably to a performance that is also deformance. As an almost invisible aspect deemed minor accoutrements to the grammar system, it is often viewed as exterior to the essential core of language. D&G has criticized this externalization of prosody and instead restores its primary role in the dynamics of signifying production or semiosis. This counters the tendency of systemic grammar to limit semiosis exclusively among the permutations defined by the constraints of its elected elements and order (its ''constants''). Where the language we imagine is at risk of dissolving, where it is finally flying in the wind. This risk, contrary to the desire for constants, is not extraneous to language. It is that risk at the heart of language which defines its emergence in the first place; that is, at the point of its extreme precarity, by its perch in becoming and non-self-resemblance. This risk is the domain of performance, the excess which the hyperform of a linguistic model must confront as the language (langage) outside of language (langue).