- 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).
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