– Johanna Drucker, Diagrammatic
Writing
what we see is in my opinion the most fruitful and
innovative consequence of the free-verse revolution
– Richard Bradford, Graphic
Poetics : Poetry as Visual Art
steadily increasing interest in visual prosodies.
– Richard Cureton, 1986
Visual prosody minimizes the phonetico-mimetic orientation of notational transcription by the subversion of morphotactics normally indexed to the temporal shadow of speech. The "deformation" of canonic orthographic formats like in E. E. Cummings sculpts the "silent" reading motions more indexed to the Eye than to the Ear. In so doing, the categorical domain of the "written" mode of language opposite speech emerges as a contrastive target of perceptual experience, as a separate "channel" allied with specific symbolic and discursive codifications of the two major physiological senses.
(But whose eye, whose ear? Is there a disembodied ideal eye or ear that can serve as the referential frame for a universal measure in the performance of language or script acts? This would be like the big or generic Other. As if the appeal to such disembodied ideal Eye or Ear were a matter of course, that we know fully how hearing and seeing works cognitively and physiologically. The poetic space should be seen as a field of emergence like Mallarmé’s notion of the “espacement de la lecture,” the spacing of reading motions. The Eye and the Ear are exactly the mysteries which the metalingual performance must approximate, approach, and posit as grounds of its possibility. Like Taste, the Eye and the Ear are discursive objects.)
This detachment from phonetic prosody can mean either the foregrounding of the shadow of speech as a foil against which visual prosody aligns itself; or as the symptom of the recognition of a dualistic system, Speech vs. Writing, where the privileged mode (because it is seen as the naturalistic ground of language) is made to confront that other mode which perpetually questions its essentialist and privileged status. Or, to see both as two types of performance, in constant cross-reference where one always recites the other as its mimetic counterpart, in either a consonant or dissonant mode of hauntology and parasitology.
This is to say that the mediatic encounter between the Ear and the Eye is the nexus of the local emergence of “speech” and “writing” as referentiable perceptual semiotic targets. The problem, however, with “writing,” in contrast to the plenitude and evidence of speech in traditional thinking, is that it is harder to define or locate, owing to its lack of any essential identity (which in principle is shared by all signs, for there are no positive terms). If we follow Derrida’s discussion of writing to the letter, then we will have to say that writing is that which has no place in (a metaphysically-conceived image of) "language." I cannot serve it in evidence, point to it, or speak of it. Yet, in a discursive act where speech presents itself as the natural ground of reference for language, a target called ''writing'' as the other of speech gets manufactured so that speech can be speech and writing can be writing. (And here, the Saussurean doctrine of speech and writing as separate systems echoes as a dialectic in the discourse of modern linguistics.) To play the field where these two shadows emerge as the fulcrum by which discourse activates its operative binaristic possibility falls under the domain of a metaprosodic metalanguage. Here, metalanguage is not a superior point above language: it is the reflexive motion by which languageness is manufactured as a referentiable object.
When we describe metalinguistically, we are in fact trying to describe two incomplete systems at once. Both poles of speech and writing are dialectically necessary in imagining the concept of a single, unified, whole “language.” Yet, although dialectically necessary, it doesn’t need any dialectical resolution. It is ever only in this “broken up” state that it becomes possible to imagine such a phantasmic unity, and to allow the workspace of discourse to continue operating. Against the simple opposition of markedness-unmarkedness where the naturalness of speech and the artificiality of writing could be identified or arranged, we should set the notion of overmarking to designate the metaprosodic process that distributes these very same values in the field of the performative script act. Hence, ''speech,'' ''writing,'' ''ear,'' ''eye,'' and all the associated cluster of terms which revolve around them are metadiscursive levers. They arrive on the semiotic scene via the irresolvable dialectic of metaprosodic overmarking.
(But whose eye, whose ear? Is there a disembodied ideal eye or ear that can serve as the referential frame for a universal measure in the performance of language or script acts? This would be like the big or generic Other. As if the appeal to such disembodied ideal Eye or Ear were a matter of course, that we know fully how hearing and seeing works cognitively and physiologically. The poetic space should be seen as a field of emergence like Mallarmé’s notion of the “espacement de la lecture,” the spacing of reading motions. The Eye and the Ear are exactly the mysteries which the metalingual performance must approximate, approach, and posit as grounds of its possibility. Like Taste, the Eye and the Ear are discursive objects.)
This detachment from phonetic prosody can mean either the foregrounding of the shadow of speech as a foil against which visual prosody aligns itself; or as the symptom of the recognition of a dualistic system, Speech vs. Writing, where the privileged mode (because it is seen as the naturalistic ground of language) is made to confront that other mode which perpetually questions its essentialist and privileged status. Or, to see both as two types of performance, in constant cross-reference where one always recites the other as its mimetic counterpart, in either a consonant or dissonant mode of hauntology and parasitology.
This is to say that the mediatic encounter between the Ear and the Eye is the nexus of the local emergence of “speech” and “writing” as referentiable perceptual semiotic targets. The problem, however, with “writing,” in contrast to the plenitude and evidence of speech in traditional thinking, is that it is harder to define or locate, owing to its lack of any essential identity (which in principle is shared by all signs, for there are no positive terms). If we follow Derrida’s discussion of writing to the letter, then we will have to say that writing is that which has no place in (a metaphysically-conceived image of) "language." I cannot serve it in evidence, point to it, or speak of it. Yet, in a discursive act where speech presents itself as the natural ground of reference for language, a target called ''writing'' as the other of speech gets manufactured so that speech can be speech and writing can be writing. (And here, the Saussurean doctrine of speech and writing as separate systems echoes as a dialectic in the discourse of modern linguistics.) To play the field where these two shadows emerge as the fulcrum by which discourse activates its operative binaristic possibility falls under the domain of a metaprosodic metalanguage. Here, metalanguage is not a superior point above language: it is the reflexive motion by which languageness is manufactured as a referentiable object.
When we describe metalinguistically, we are in fact trying to describe two incomplete systems at once. Both poles of speech and writing are dialectically necessary in imagining the concept of a single, unified, whole “language.” Yet, although dialectically necessary, it doesn’t need any dialectical resolution. It is ever only in this “broken up” state that it becomes possible to imagine such a phantasmic unity, and to allow the workspace of discourse to continue operating. Against the simple opposition of markedness-unmarkedness where the naturalness of speech and the artificiality of writing could be identified or arranged, we should set the notion of overmarking to designate the metaprosodic process that distributes these very same values in the field of the performative script act. Hence, ''speech,'' ''writing,'' ''ear,'' ''eye,'' and all the associated cluster of terms which revolve around them are metadiscursive levers. They arrive on the semiotic scene via the irresolvable dialectic of metaprosodic overmarking.
