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.