Where is the reader, how is it located?

    -Where is the reader/observer, how is it inscribed/embedded/located? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, that is, thematized. We can liken its status to the theatrical fourth wall. In the visual arts, we can recall perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angles, color, trompe-l'oeil, or all ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as an operation of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium.

 

              Matthew Sepielli, Little Light, 2019 (artsy.net). Haze effects, hue or color contrast, 

             and frame elevation combine to triangulate an implied range, depth, and viewpoint.

   - This illusionism is replaced by the idiom of bodies, textures, pure surfaces, and materials as the aesthetic language of attention. The illusion of a window looking out folds back and extends toward the other direction to redefine the readerly space until, as if, finally, they inhabit the same topography where the act of looking itself is generated. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the readerly space expands (Expressionism) to become the whole record of its nonlinear motions. Artefacts of looking may or may not accommodate the space for the reader/observer; they may, partly or fully, demand or deny the observer's space. 

    -Not often is this aspect thematized, or this tendency follows historical modulations. Or, the ontology of the object is the extension of the readerly stage, spliced off and then displaced outward to satisfy the age's rhetoric of discursive authority (positivism). In literature as early as the epics, the narrator function being given to the figure who takes over the narrative is a reader in disguise, where performance intersects and becomes part of the ontological space of fiction (metalepsis). Media within media, the readerly stage is the site of the modulation of the poles of emergent aesthetic objects and the motions that map them for perceptual salience.

Prosody & causality

"A prosody based on intonational contours has become increasingly problematic."
                                                           -Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice, 1991

    

    Meter is an idealist platform just like the phoneme, grapheme, or morpheme as a minimum unit that supposedly carries a distinctive value. These ideal notions justify their existence by the assumption that they are derived from a natural input or base, of which they are the stylizations. The organization of signs on media can be seen as either a form of rhythm or layout whose patterning is seen to conform or be isometric or isomorphic with a primary field or object. Hence, it is a cognitive mapping of a specific semantic referent, value, or object, that is, of a cognitive target. It imagines itself to be a consequent, for which the target is the precedent, or as the effect of a prior cause. In short, a schema of causality governs the metrical, prosodic, and stylistic imaginary of many poetics. Often, the givenness or self-explanatory nature of the ground is rarely examined or questioned, using the default ideological force of ''tradition'' or some version of nativism or essentialism to suppress all further interrogations.

    A strategic reorientation (like in the works of the poetics project of the French Oulipo group or of U.S.-based L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers that M. Perloff discusses in many of her publications) allows us not only to see the ideological and historical provenances of metrological schemes, but also affords us more ways of exposing the neglected or ignored organizational, structural, pragmatic, or poetic features of semiotic systems; that is, their ''potential'' aspectual profiles marginalized by discursive regimes. Instead of a precedent cause as the reason for the form, a potentialist prosody is locally generative, not a transcendentalist mapping of a prior referent. 

    (This brings to mind the long literary practice since the Aeneid where the text or elements of the text, diegetic or paradiegetic, are mirrored or replicated within the text. The play on narrative levels in metafiction, for example, is a familiar extension of this practice. The referential operation, in effect, is housed within the text, a text that loops back to reflect its own reflection. It would be interesting to regard this procedure as the alibi of discourse or language, as the practical means by which discourse becomes possible as a semiotic network of differences. At the most basic, it is the elaboration of the mirror-stage of language, the self-generation of metaphoricity as such where the textual and the non-textual, the narrative and the discursive, or the literal and the figural, as perceptible or readable categories, are splintered off for aesthetic salience. The readable becomes available via the opening that textual operations enact as a technological and material feature of their information design environment.) 

    In this case, we can actually reimagine metrical schemes themselves as locally generative (with the looping character of rhythmic patterns as analogues of metafictive play), as constraints and not as prosodic rules founded on an aspect of language or unmediated reality that is deemed structurally or formally essential and intrinsic, carrying the force of a natural, ahistorical law or ground. The invocation of contextless "imagination," "genius," or "soul" and their connection to a super generic "voice" or "vision" is in this case a version of such naturalization. << Verse form is... determined by the simulation of... the voice of an "I" that alternately cajoles, teases, and hectors his nameless interlocutor, using linear patterns that loop back and forth to enact the ''gradual pulsing to and fro" of consciousness coming to awareness >> (in Perloff, italics mine).

On the twilight of prosodic idols

     To take up again the Concretist piece entitled ''Silence'' by Eugen Gomringer:* 

    Only by looking can it obtain its existence, i.e., via silent reading. It forbids vocal performance and desires an existence beyond speech. As it veers away from dependence on verbal performance for its being, its whole existence can only be sensed through the visual channel. We would. by habit. impose a subphonetic echo. on the repeating sequence. Yet, that repetition reminds us as if by command, as it flits from the verbal to the nominal to the adjectival, or from the discursive to the graphemic, that its proper world is the forbidden reentry of speech. From its exploitation of pictorial layout and type, or its avoidance of syntax and the metronomic line, it reconquers every phonovocalic temptation, and calms all verbalization into the final triumph of a formal and material auto-inscription. As a manifesto of visual prosody, official or unofficial, it reestablishes the frontier that divides the prosodic world between the glottographic and nonglottographic, and breaks open our worldview of the horizon for a poetic practice beyond speech-centered metronomy.

Eugen Gomringer, 1953, "Wind":
diagrammatic, nonlinear, kinetic, multimodal;
iconicity at the limits of iconicity

    Up until now, current practice did not yet break the hold of the metrico-lyrical Voice nor of the assumed but mysterious grand order of Syntax, despite the avalanche of visual, bibliographic, materialist, digital, and ergonomic dimensions of modern 20th to 21st century prosody. More currently, Gomringer's pivotal piece reminded me of "postliterate" texts such as the late Peter Ganick's and his contemporaries, whose underrated works evoke for me Abstract art's post-figural moment in terms of historical turns in artistic paradigms where the fundamentals and primes of a koinē aisthēsis are once more interrogated and shaken. These artists' output straddles the prosodic worlds inherited from dadaism, concretism, proceduralism, ''language'' poetics, vispo, conceptualism, and asemic writing. Elsewhere, however, writing still labors under the twilight of prosodic idols. It continues in the void where human language is confronted with the absence of absolute grounds, proceeding either unreflexively and ahistorically, or propping itself up erringly, like an amnesiac dreaming faintly of utopian grammars, ideal languages, and isomorphic cartographies. Stubborn archaic idols brandishing the promised land of some indescribable objective solace never cease to haunt its centers and margins.

*The blank space activates the dialectic between the visible scripts and the unfilled surface of the page. It allows us to imagine the reversal of the visible scripts into their invisible counterpart. What is readable becomes, in turn, transparent, that is, unreadable, absent yet present, present yet absent. Surrounding the blank space in the center as if to assure its captivity as an insubstantial void to the gaze, the legible glyphs ironically become contaminated by it, themselves imperceptibly becoming what they seem to have tried containing. By an abrupt expansion and Gestalt inversion, we realize at once that the empty space is not a mere center subordinate to the self-evident presence of visible fonts: it forms part of the whole page whose whiteness now surrounds the legible space of writing.