On the significant other of prosody

From Richard Bradford's Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art we read:

<< In the Dialogues with Krystyna Pomorska Jakobson is disarmingly honest about the specialised and somewhat partial nature of his poetic investigations. In the chapter on ‘Parallelism’ he concedes that in his work on Czech and Russian couplet poetry he had succeeded more in establishing the nature of the pertinent critical questions than in offering final and conclusive answers.

The perception of similarities and contiguities within the couplet united by parallelism leads automatically to the need to find an answer to the unconscious questions: what links the two lines? Is it an association by similarity or by contrast? Or is it an association through contiguity, and, if so, is its contiguity in time or in space? All of which leads to the essential question for the comprehension of the verse: what is the hierarchical relation between the parallel units? Which of them is subordinated to the other? How is the relation in question actualized—by the internal content of the verse, or by the fact that one of the lines simply dominates the other, or finally by the position that the couplet occupies in the whole? >>

    The questions posed by Jakobson here alerts our attention to the function of an abstract set of principles that delivers coherence in the process of reading. What abstract principles hold the text together or permit a reading pathway to become possible? This will be the set of pragmatic operations that any abstract regime of signs enacts on the assembly of otherwise non-signifying glyphs or marks to extract a value of significance from them. In short, we become the recruited witnesses for the emergence of aesthetic objects...

    We see Jakobson in the lurch, but what his poetic function ultimately implies if pursued fully is that it is a metaprosodic stance where the elements of the script act are postulated via differences, then reinforced by redundancy, i.e., by the formalities of pattern-making where abstract constituents like  ''syllable'' or ''stress'' or ''accent'' are given temporary ontological weight. It is in this sense that the semiotic “substance” which the script act carries is its own creation or “induction,” arising or emerging only in the “wire mesh” it weaves back and forth as a network of relations or “equivalences” in its attempt to count the memory of the passage of time. Wouldn’t this be the meaning of the passage from his infamous essay, cited below? 

Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses.

    The meta-discursive contrastive pairs which are minimally required to enable discourse and the script act are themselves prosodic postulates. Prosody posits its own elements, distributes them on the abstract line. (The difficulty in empirically establishing the ontologies of prosodic elements in the likeness of grammatical units is perhaps what keeps them prosodic.) The better way of resolving this is by the constant foregrounding of the differential binaries in a conventional artifice or form where the performance of the form includes both its possible states and its variation. In the more metalinguistic emphases of the poetic function, the norm and the variation are variables applicable to both the polar opposites deployed to allow the line to move. No element of either the linguistic or the poetic prosody has an absolute ontology. Nevertheless, each shadowy element invokes its opposite or must posit it in the design of the line for the line to become a perceptible object. Strong and weak stresses are examples of prosodic elements which play a central role in the manufacture of a rhythmic order which is supposedly anchored on the voice or language itself.

    The script act is the mimesis of what? The ground of mimesis, once gone, becomes a shadow which the performance must posit as an other of itself, and yet not dissimilar. It must locate its principle of resemblance to overcome the gap it opens up to even exist as a mimetic movement of what is other than itself. In modern notions of textual exegesis, the linguistic performance is a mimesis of the linguistic system, its modernist center or ground. No longer the mimesis of the world, the mind, speech, the romantic voice, history, culture, ideology, or any other topic or theme, natural or supernatural, textuality and its various forms are now viewed to be representative of the structural truth of language, and, if not of the autonomous object of art, the aesthetic form itself in its organic or self-coherent idealized unity. 

    (The ideal object of poetic "form" is technically defined by a ''metrology.'' In this case, any prosodic regime that has a metrical ideal, whether positive or negative, enacts the desire for an ideal measure (thus, « meter » in the most generic "free" and "non-free" sense). The arrival of free verse can be seen as an interrogation of such ideal forms as basis of a prosodic organizing principle. Hence, in itself, free verse is not a new form, but the search for form, or, more precisely, the crisis of form, or the recognition of the absence of an absolute prosodic ground. The recruitment of the visual expands the investigation of this open horizon where the poetic must now begin realizing the arbitrariness of its grounds, that is, begin recognizing its own historicity. It is here that the historical and the critical mutually define themselves in the search for the ground of prosody.)

    In the materialist semiotics which would emerge with the early 20th century avant-garde, from Futurism to Concretism to Book Art to Asemic writing, this mimetic imperative (where an extra-discursive Signified must always be invoked for the rationale of the poetico-linguistic line) would be de-emphasized—via a shift in the binarist perspective—to underline the material dynamics of the production of signifiers. This is only a first step, since replacing the retreat of the ideal signified by the apotheosis of the signifier merely reverses the ontological pole. By the time of the Lettrists up to Asemic writing, the remaining idealism in the form of the signifier would also give way to the larger dynamic of discursive regimes and design environments where semiotic values obtain their coefficients of the real.

Notes on the expansion of the prosodic

    The idea that cast print as a "medium" usually implied that it is the ''leftover'' of the bifurcation of Signifier/Signified binary in a process we can call "overmarking." The necessity of manufacturing a discourse having a master Signified as prime objective has relegated the visual-material dimension to the neutral notion of ''medium.'' The medium has become inert, that is, asemic, or has the most minimum prosodic value on its own. The real value it must signify is its other, another prosodic realm, namely ''speech'' or ''voice'' or ''feeling,'' or ''psychic events'' if not ''world events.'' That is why any attempt to draw attention to its visual-material medium is seen as transgressive of its primary duty. If there is talk of self-referentiality, it remains within the noetic realm of ideal objects like poetic ''form'' and linguistic ''structure.'' It is true that the attention to an ideal form allowed a focus on the manner by which language use foregrounds itself, as a structured set of signifiers deployed to highlight language's ''poetic'' function. It is just a matter of expanding this scope of the medium to recognize the semiotic role of visual, spatial, ''material,'' and bibliographic, even ergonomic, dimensions presupposed as background ''silent'' processes. We must again examine the historical genealogy of such fine distinctions and terminological formulations that structure accepted reading habits. If today there is a huge body of asemic art traversing the globe, it is only to testify to the redeployment of the medium as mere vehicle, but this time with a recuperated aesthetic focus, as if to draw attention to its distinct contrast to the ideal Signified that only a proper grammatological conversion would reactivate or reanimate.

    If anything at all, the strategic value of "poetic" practice is the manner it foregrounds the presuppositions concerning language, experience, cultural memory, and history. These presuppositions can either be assumed as self-evident or problematized by more reflexive writers or composers. When the borders between the medium and the message becomes shifty, a historical moment arrives: the medium appears as a carrier of a "meta-message," like the metadata pinned on computer data files. The limited economy or ecology around which forms of poetic practice have been pivoting--where the Signifier/Signified binary is assumed to exclusively structure the imagined semic aspect of symbolic entities: the linguistic message--now explodes beyond their confinement. Consequently, the specific prosodic grounds assumed to be primary upon which is built such a limited ecology is exposed to be a specific cultural or historical bias: a paradigm. It is then made clear that the same semiotic binary also functions as heretofore muted metacodes informing the material or technological ''carriers'' of the delineated "message." The manner by which prosodic assumptions expand or contract in relation to the signifying bundles admitted to be the target of semic focus defines which aspects of the reading field gets invested with informational salience. That is, it defines for a specific regime of reading the aesthetic entities of meaningfulness.