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).