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.