12-19i, 12-19j

12-19h, 1-7

12-19e, 12-19f, 12-19g

There is no ideal speaker

"There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community."
                                                                                                      - Deleuze & Guattari, 1980.

-There is no ideal speaker, which is to say that there are only real ones, so that a pronunciation is compared with others, without leading to a big Other as a final referent.

-This means: no ideal speaker equals all are ideal speakers. Another way to say this is that there are just differences, no superintending identity for comparison for pronunciation and articulation. Second, variation in speech still preserves a statistical fuzzy domain for specific sounds which allow us to distinguish one from another. For example, /t/ and /x/ in Texas. No matter how it is said, these two letters are kept distinct, even if the vowels are pronounced in various subtle ways. Individual sounds are averages in relation to their surrounding sounds, which are also averages of other sounds in memory.

-When we listen or speak, there must be a process where we eliminate “noise” and abstract the “ideal” sound image or representation, so that every moment is like a test, a re-evaluation of the rapport in the mapping between phonic and graphic morphemic representation. The notion of high fidelity in sound recording would require a method of reducing noise and distortion in the recording, and what is defined as hi-fi would depend on what frequencies are defined to be within it. The aim is a neutral or flat unbiased recording of the targeted frequencies.

-However, registration does not end with the data, but must be played in various conditions and heard subjectively, so that remediation always results in tiny variations, similar to DNA from one person to another, or like fingerprints. There are many aspects of the voice which cannot be transcribed, such as the difference between masculine and feminine, infantine or gerontological voices. This is how we know the concept of individual discrete sounds is an abstraction.

-For we only happen to cross paths with the infinitely slow. Nothing of its ever unfolding but a tiny fraction registers itself through us.

12-19c, 12-19d

12-19a, 12-19b

#3

#2

#1

From speech- to script-oriented prosody

In a flat space, position organizes relations.

              – Johanna Drucker, Diagrammatic Writing

Its use as an axis between what we hear and
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

In the twentieth century there has been a
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.