The invention of the "speaker"

If I were here, if it could have made me, how I would pity it, for having spoken so long in vain, no, that won’t do, it wouldn’t have spoken in vain if I were here, and I wouldn’t pity it if it had made me, I’d curse it, or bless it, it would be in my mouth, cursing, blessing, whom, what, it wouldn’t be able to say, in my mouth it wouldn’t have much to say, that had so much to say in vain. —Samuel Beckett

- The grammatical as the other of language, whereas the agrammatical, the field of noise or complexity, the multiple, lalangue, as the always emergent site of languageness, of informationality qua meaning or significance. If the grammatical is the metalinguistic level which bifurcates to separate an object, the betalingual, out of noise, and for which it stands as a representation of sense and order, the agrammatical is the Ur-language which is posited necessarily by the grammatical bifurcation as its outside or virtual whole. The metalingual/betalingual/urlingual then are so many tonalities in which an experience cycles through to stage the defining discourse of the indefinite experience of languageness. As tonalities, they should not be reified into essential values or poles. They compose the recurrent summit of a metalanguage whose nature is itself immanent to the betalanguage it is describing, but which it must excise to carve out both itself and its object of discursive reference. It is a diskursus, an oscillation, between the Near and the Far, the This and the That, from the One to the Other, Outside and Inside, back and forth, so that in this movement-in-place is always generated the discursive roles and functions of linguistic sociality to make speechifying possible as semiotic action.

- Wouldn't this discursive movement be the whole problematic of the poetic, but not in terms of essences and grounds, but as fictional shadowy poles which allow languageness to arise out of noise? The universe, unlike us, does not divide between meaning and noise, languageness and lalangue. The whole metapoetics of Beckett could be seen as the metafictive staging of the mysterious emergence of the speaker and language, i,e,, discourse. The arrival of the subject of sense on the scene, of sense tout court, out of undifferentiated noise, is like the carving out of the cultural from the natural, as the arrival of writing. The "tragic" as the emergence of interiority is like the irruption of languageness in a space formerly made of pure exteriority (cf. Anthony Reynolds), like the arrival of the Cartesian cogito, or of the subject in general as a whole problematic of modern Philosophy. The arrival of languageness in psychoanalysis, the mirror, the symbolic irrupting into the space of the subject to be born. In short, the quest to answer the question ''Why is there meaningfulness and significance and not just pure noise?'' We’ve spoke tirelessly about the “mirror stage” without underlining that: 1) it is a mise en scène, the stage of historicity; 2) it designates the moment of the arrival of Metaphor; and 3) it is not a single moment or event but a repetitive emergence or irruption of metaphoricity.

- The invention of the “speaker.” We are all victims of literature, like fashion victims, haunted by the realia of anthropic “characters,” feeding them into our subjectivity, all the commonplaces of the fictional, the aesthetic, with such naturalized ease. Aren't we psychologues? Like ideologues who are harbingers of ideology, we are harbingers of fictional subjectivities. Actors, in all the senses of the word. This is the subjectivity we "enjoy" everyday, as the field of naturalized social existence. Talk shows as the paradigmatic staging of the enjoyment of everyday "free speech." Another way we enjoy the internalization of our subjectivity is in personality tests, as if behavior sprung primarily from some essential reservoir of motivation and "mind set" which resided somewhere in our being. The notion of personality incarnates the political fiction of Free Will, and reduces the field of responsibility and explanation within the ambit of individualized locus of causality, that is, legal agency as the body of the accused before the Law.

- The internalization of "personality" which is enjoyed freely by a self-imposed (mis)identification ("That's me") could be seen as the secular version of Original Sin. Both of them open the way toward a mea culpa which justifies the institutional and political work toward the fascism of the interior and self-surveillance, magnifying to the maximum the docility of bodies (willingly or not). What these "tests" do tell me is that they're like games which house our "fates." Whatever is "me" is less what is inside than what is outside that I cling to as part of an activity which I appear to, or required to, enjoy. The narrative psychologue they generate is less about me than about the functionalities of their algorithm or mechanics. That is, they churn out the Subject-to-imbibe-as-yourself like vendo machines would churn out junk food or canned soda. Ergo for discourse which perpetuates itself via speakers who enjoy their positionality in language. To see oneself speak in the selfies of new media chat platforms: I (see myself) speak, therefore, I am.

The highest form of hesitation

- E. E. Cummings makes us re-examine the fundamental questions about language. His variational textuality detaches the strict coupling of semantics with syntax, grammar, and morphophonetic boundaries of lexical and interpretative values. At the core of his variational poetics are extensive manipulations of the multiple elements of language, but drives more deeply into the forms themselves in their material embodiments. Thus, the glyphic dimension which includes current typographic and punctuation practice are pushed beyond being passive elements and are infused with signifying capacities not commonly associated with them. In addition, Cummings is sensitive to the multimodal potentials of the printed page and recovers spatiality as a semantic ingredient in the nonlinear tracings of linguistic performance. With Cummings, agrammaticality no longer carries the stigma of being the domain of nonsense, but becomes as integral as grammaticality in the production of meaning.

-The agrammatical as the expansion of semantic field not strictly coded by grammar, a pragmatics where prosody takes ascendancy over syntax. The traditional elements are given supplemental functions or values which are superimposed on the hyperform of normative linguistics. This ''perversion'' as paraversion couples the agrammatical to the grammatical and threatens to blur the priority and even ontology of the norm. Yet, this threat is productive semiotically because it is the metadiscursive bifurcation which allows sense to be triangulated. The referrability of the signifying datum as the origin, cause, or basis of the shape of semantic perception, reading, or interpretation is dependent on the positing of the poles of ground and nonground, norm and variation, standard and deviation. In essentialist thinking, these poles are fixed referents, but in poetics are shadows of language in time and of time in language.

-For example, Cummings' use of citation within citation, of indirect discourse, and the parentheses are not just polyvocality, but the contrastive condition by which the direct voice could be manufactured as a shadow of speech against which the reiterative function of language is measured, or where the possibility of language as a citational dynamic could be triangulated, spotted, and located as a referentiable object. Language, in the ideal imagination, is divided according to relatively stable, distinct, discrete reproducible elements which follow a regularized combinatory pattern. In performance, however, something always takes over, takes language for a spin, as use always opens it to one rule: variation, or alterity. It prevaricates, becomes plural, multi-directional, multi-modal, when it gets in contact with time and space, when it becomes part of the flow of things. It becomes a war torn within itself and becomes the site of tension between the past and the future, between the memory of its previous incarnation and the reality of its current reincarnation. A tension between sameness and otherness, as it hovers between making and unmaking, arriving and departing, becoming and being. It is always not yet, where its present is this contrast between what it might be and what it could have been. Language is the highest form of hesitation.

-Prosody connects the inert forms to a pragmatics which couples them inevitably to a performance that is also deformance. As an almost invisible aspect deemed minor accoutrements to the grammar system, it is often viewed as exterior to the essential core of language. D&G has criticized this externalization of prosody and instead restores its primary role in the dynamics of signifying production or semiosis. This counters the tendency of systemic grammar to limit semiosis exclusively among the permutations defined by the constraints of its elected elements and order (its ''constants''). Where the language we imagine is at risk of dissolving, where it is finally flying in the wind. This risk, contrary to the desire for constants, is not extraneous to language. It is that risk at the heart of language which defines its emergence in the first place; that is, at the point of its extreme precarity, by its perch in becoming and non-self-resemblance. This risk is the domain of performance, the excess which the hyperform of a linguistic model must confront as the language (langage) outside of language (langue).

what matters

what matters

The naked body

I will start with the idea of reversibility.

It is the very definition of the sign. The sign does not just distinguish itself from other signs, but, more importantly, also from the non-sign.

It ejects the non-sign as its outside, as its other, as if it existed before it did. This is its cunning.

But all this cunning is necessary for Naming to happen.

By ejecting the non-sign outside itself, the sign names itself, and at the same time equips itself with the capacity to name the non-sign, now known as the Object or the Referent.

This is the core idea, and this applies also to the Body. As we all know, there are two types: the Naked and the Nude body.

The Naked body is an ideal, like the Thing-in-itself. The Nude, on the other hand, is the condition of all bodies, even the clothed ones. For the Nude body is the body as named by the sign, the body-as-sign named by the sign-as-body.

In short, the sign is the origin and site of Morality.

The sign covers the body like clothing. Nothing is allowed to be naked. Nakedness is immoral not because the physical body is carnal and dirty, but because is it unsigned, unscripted, un-inscribed.

And yet, the sign needs this very nakedness it is trying to cover up. The Naked body, or the Thing-in-itself, is the mythic bedrock of Thought and Morality, its denotative excuse. It is what it posits as its great Other, this non-sign it ejects so that Thought can be thought and Morality can be moral. The sign conceals the nakedness it posits as its Other so that it can speak in its name.

This is the way it makes us forget that, by having the same structure, by positing the Naked body as its end, as the site where it terminates, the sign and the non-sign are actually reversible.

Objects of reading

    Objects have always been subhuman. To become an object is to attain a lower status of being. And yet, this humanism stands in contrast to the everyday overvalorization of the object vs the human. Capitalist commodity reification and ''deification'' always promote the object's value well beyond the human. Our residual humanism, despite becoming more and more just symbolic and academic functions in a real world socio-economic practice, hides the fear that objects—being usually more enduring and hardy—are the replacement of the human. They tend to reveal the precarity of the notion of this exclusive category, as if what only counted as really valuable in practice of being human are the objects against which the human searches to define itself. 

    As a general prosthetic of being, what makes objects more desirable is their nature of being trans-properties which easily inserts them into the circuit of exchange. Humans, on the other hand, are posed as inexchangeably unique, and carry on exchange only on the symbolic level: in conversation, discourse, language, or commercial trade. These aspects--their durability and exchangeability--make objects the unacknowledged ideal proxies or substitute of the human. Rather than passive servants of the Subject, aren't objects already the more valuable parts of the Subject very much like artificial organs, extensions of a shadowy Self?

(The moral and legal injunctions behind various modes of prostitution—slavery, wage labor, white slavery, domestic helpers, organ trades—preserve this divide between entities open to exchange against those which are not. Modernism, in one version of autonomy, redeploys this divide for aesthetic objects. This divide, furthermore, is the assurance against the reversibility between signs and nonsigns.)

    Each object performs the minimum order of art in that an object carries with it an instruction of how bodies should behave toward it. This is the heart of design in the sense that objects are a reading of us, rather than they being our reading of them. The uses of objects are basically a transcription of the uses of us. Objects are rhetorical devices.

***

    Art works, as labors of human expression, become objects of commodity exchange beyond their signifying functions (as aesthetic and philosophic memory message systems) only by attaining incredible monetary values. This is perhaps a compensatory mechanism that prevents the devaluation  or dissolution of the 'human'' which ironically forms the idealized fictional ground of the value of symbolic expressions, which is another non-object by definition because its impalpable or trans-material dimensionality, that is, as a form of linguistic expression. The easy verbosity of the symbolic, its utterly endless supply, renders it the cheapest material resource on earth.

    The world taxes the human organism in all its dimensions. Sacrifice is our hidden mode of being each day, not the exercise of freedom and willful generosity. It is the symbolic ritual through which the human reveals itself to be part of the network of objects, albeit revealed or accepted only through the drama of free choice. Isn't the social and history at our expense? How far the Subject is made to believe its noblest mission is sacrifice to the body politic? And self goals as mere detours to the logic of Sacrifice?

The literally literal

   Talk of signifiers in a general technical way without asking which aspect of signs are being pointed out. Is it the typographic form, an abstract letter form, a glyphic minimum, written, printed, spoken, played, recorded, etc.? In what media, and how is it abstracted out of myriad objects and surfaces which are equally object-signs, object-forms, action-signs, etc.? Won't the singling out of a signifier as sign-form in itself already signal the value produced in a semiotic machinery at play, with its preferred ''natural'' order in force or at work?

   Confounding the notion of representation which requires resemblance of some sort with redundancy which merely demand association and propinquity.

   The pun is a reminder of the resonant virtual other implicated in every sign, as if humor and figure designated the threshold where the borders of semiotic identities crumble. The transparency, identity, and lisibility of the sign is a mere atomic and autonomic illusion, a realization covered up by humor whenever some such neat differential order disintegrates.

   The problematic notion of autonomy should be extended to the glyphic format, as letters and words are imagined to be clearly defined entities. The micro-model of the atomic scales up to serve as the analogical conception of the social and the aesthetic on the macro level. This is perhaps due to a certain demand coming from a cultural need for a clear-cut narration of causality and effectuality.

***

   The literalization of language in asemic and abstract typography and glypography. The very format of the signifier is treated in a materialist way, i.e., in a manipulation that is manual, technological, physical, etc. The glyph is divested of its configured role as conduit or carrier of an ideal semantic substance. The literalization of the signifier is the dream of a utopian realism of a positive science of language and hermeneutics. 

   But what this dream didn't admit is the paradox involved in imagining the locus of its positive real in a materially-inscribed notion of the linguistic substance qua material entity. The price of the literal real of language is the displacement of the signified from a historically defined textual mode of signification, a textual mode which is revealed to be a purely social ideal regime of reading. The signifier therein always effaced itself in the service of the code assuring the passage to a latent signified.

So what if all is discourse?

    So what if all is discourse? It means we now look at the metadiscursive underpinnings of both the reading present and the reading regime which informs a textual set. A text could be operating from a different metadiscursive binary which informs its presuppositions. It serves as a way of saying it belongs to this or that regime of signs.

     A manifesto is one intertextual means by which a textual work may propose its reading contract. ''Intention'' for example, is the utopia of the marriage of form and meaning, an insertion of symbolic agency in language or script acts. Discourse must be seen as the utopian invention of the social form of communication and the elements therein. Instead of seeing Jakobson's model as the natural composition of language, we should look at it as the discursive imaginary. The discursive setup is the means by which discourse perpetually reinvents itself as if "always for the first time" (Bréton). This is the hyperreal of discourse.

     Discourse is therefore primarily phatic in that it configures the metadiscursive stage for its own performance. At no point is there an essential divide between the metalanguage and betalanguage: the semiotic contract is immanent, not transcendent, and co-emerges with the moment of performance. From Sarraute, to Beckett, to Calvino: in much of what is called nouveau roman or metaliterature, is the exploration of the de facto self-staging of discourse and its cultural or historical or ontological limits.

     This phatic constitution is what a mode of reading contract or semiotic regime often hides as the rhetoric of pure objectivity or ''external'' reality where discourse seems to efface itself. Free indirect discourse, for example, blurs the great divides of 19th c realist discursive regime identifying clearly bound agents of speech. The figures of the ''sources'' of ''speechifying'' in this setup, signaled by the inquit formula, return to the sea of undifferentiated murmuring, as if discourse had no more mooring but time itself. The figures of discourse that come and go are semiotic functions comparable perhaps to Deleuze & Guattari's personnage conceptuel.

     This doesn't mean it's all fictional. In fact, it's the real of all language in Milner's sense, a ''primary linguistic data'' (PLD). Hence, contrary to Chomsky, the PLD isn't confined to a UG or structural core. This is the exclusivist ruse of the positivist rhetoric of this type of linguistic inquiry which assigns to itself the sole origin or source of discourse and which sees itself as the master narrator to which all language returns after emanating from it. The PLD is the real immanent and full horizontal property of all discourse types (rhizomatic), and not the exclusive real of the figure of the vertical rationalist persona.

     But why must discourse need a ruse in which it hides its own mode of emergence, to speak not only from many fabled sources (literary polyvocality) but also from a single universal source (metalingual univocality)? Is this part of discourse's desire to be heard, a function of its own interior monologue, like in Beckett's dialectical tension between the presence and absence of one or many voices? Is there a real dialogue, or is it all a utopia of the hyperreal of communication, the perennial re-staging of discourse's self performance? The pronouns of discourse are all equally non-deictic, for deixis is already a narrative of re-citation. It is the very stage of discourse as a social event, where the social is the event.

    Won't the need to speak be the only universal, then?

There are no natural speeches

   There are no natural speeches. As a medium, I am the site where the Other speaks, not as a singular voice traceable to some pure origin, but as a multitude. I am legion.

   We take it for granted, as a matter of course, that whatever it is we do is grounded in the natural. Look at the ease by which I say what I say, or think what I think. Discourse is what others do. I, on the contrary, speak. The other's utterance is a recitation of heard and overheard language, a relay point of rumors.

   My speech, meanwhile, is pure expression, the exteriorization of an originary interiority, whose rise to the surface is like the natural flow of a spring or geyser. I don't recite, I speak freely as myself. The thoughts that flow out of my speech are as natural as the air and sound which accompany or compose their expression. Truth has the same effortless facility as my breath's.

   When we assume tacitly that our speech is natural, we mean that it is a discourse without history, without a past, without guile. It is purely innocent, as expression of self evident, unbiased established truth. If I am reciting at all, I am merely restating the already obvious natural order of things and ideas. Stating is not a performative... It only reflects and does not recreate or reproduce lived reality.

A sleight of hand?

Literature thus is alone today in bearing the entire responsibility for language;

for though science needs language, it is not, like literature, within language.

—Roland Barthes (c. 1984)

   While linguistics is a search for grounds which are binding or natural, poetics is premised on the idea that the ground is not only arbitrary or not obligatory but also a fiction made in a dynamic of precarious or post-essential contrast. Whereas linguistics is a quest for a fixed point of reference, poetics, by the supplement of extralinguistic rules, foregrounds the elusive or shadowy status of the ground of a ''natural'' base of language. By the same stroke, it renders its own position precarious by positing the unstable and indeterminate nature of the material against which it measures its distance and recognizes its own identity.

   Won't poetics be like a sleight of hand, a levitating trick involving the shuffling of two shadowy points of referents in which the values of the norm and the variation emerge as reversible images? What always gets foregrounded are the reading codes or habits which are affirmed and subverted or ''loosened'' at the same time. The linguistic haunts the poetic in the same way the poetic haunts the linguistic as each other’s condition of possibility and impossibility. We need to speak of a beta-language to complement that of a meta-language in this case since language cannot be presupposed as an already known pre-existent substantial whole.

   (Thus, “integration,” in pedagogy or research, shouldn’t be seen as the unification of opposites in which one is the illumination of the other, or where one becomes the affirmation of the other’s truth. This is the version of an “integration” dreamed of in positivist heaven, the way translation before was seen as the confirmation of the linguistics which founds the legitimacy of the translation in a circular way.

   Won't such an integration impose once more the master/slave relationship between Science over Art, where Science is the meta-language governing the dynamics of Art as a beta-language? Like the ambition of Structuralism as the meta-language of cultural forms and meaning, as the scientific method over Art and Literature?

   What if the literary itself is its own metalanguage, the question of its own status or nature, a discourse which carries the burden of the question of its own condition of possibility? That it is its own science? And what if, against the nonplay status of linguistic positivism where metalinguisticity is above play, the literary is the very question of the possibility of both meta- and beta- linguisticity, the possibility of reflection as perception and perception as reflection?)

***

   Translation as the exploration of the sayable and unsayable, the limits of our sign systems, both as a formal concept and as a cultural practice of signification. It's becoming less and less about equivalence and texts than the interested practice of difference in the geopolitics of transculturation. The arena now is the global communication circuit, a translocal arena more and more aware of the political uses of media technology. The question How to translate? opens toward Why translate? has surpassed its humanist and nationalist alibis or implicit agenda to become the conflicted contact zones of a delocalized and relocalized mythic, virtualized or simulated differences.

   We may, as novice and amateur moonlighters of translation, be just aware of the microcosmic issues of textual and linguistic procedures. Delocalization is unavoidable as textual values migrate, are remediated and become part of an ambiguous tradition of translated texts, uprooted and sharing the married genes of various families. The danger of mutations is always mitigated by a rhetoric of identity, whether nativist, nationalist, or culturalist.

    As Jabès has underlined, perhaps unintentionally implying translation, writing is an errance, a diasporic space of exile. The book is perhaps without origin, except in wandering. It is its nature not to belong, but to be a realization of its perpetual migration, delocalization, or transculturation. Reading/writing is an errance, the perennial shifts in identity, because identity is the idealized imposition on signs, which are the homeless, earthless, groundless vectors of our encounter with the always inaugural: sense always happening and dissipating--without ever reducing our experience of enigma and mystery--in the sea of universal noise and wonder.

Prosody: the shadow of time in language, the shadow of language in time

   Post-metrical ''poetics'' is a deviation from the deviation. However, rather than obliterate the former, such pile up or redoubled deviation or top category ''foregrounding'' (higher level binaries) reinforces symbiotically the differences between these modes of envisioning the temporal physics of both physiological versus semiotico-material performance or spatial embodiment of linguistic media.

   It is less the contrast abstract/concrete that is played at, but the attempt at the ''re-location,'' in all senses, of the ever elusive ground of the performance of the meaning of performance, or that of the meaning of the performance of meaning. The performance of meaning and the meaning of performance, like the form of meaning and the meaning of form, is therefore posed as a problematic conjunction, isomorphism, parallelism, harmony, unity, coherence, intersection, etc. as the utopian desire of the marriage of intention and meaning (telekinesis motif).

   In other words, both linguistic and poetic prosodies complement each other less in terms of a bilateral affirmation of each other's perfect grounding on any final principle (langue, biology, sociology, physiology, intention, mind, breath, correspondences, discourse, speech, idea, structure, norm, convention, cooperation, communication maxims, reading contracts, the sublime, etc.) than in terms of the recognition of each other's arbitrariness as condition of both their possibility and impossibility. Both are in search of two foundational ideal referents: the shadow of structure for a naturalistic prosody (law as necessary choice) and the shadow of structure for an artistic prosody (rule as arbitrary choice). The first is linguistics, the second, poetics. Or, the classic nature/culture binary.

   We know, by this time, how this binary had already been the object of a deconstructive critique. We only need to cascade the consequences or implications for the biplay between the two prosodic domains. Both are retroactive fictions allowing for the utopian maintenance of the workspace of meaningfulness or signifying production. The notion of ''natural'' ("unmarked") languages ceases to be natural. By the same reasons, the notion of "poetic" or "marked" language ( as foregrounding) explodes its domain and exposes the groundlessness of the temporal and spatial physics of signifying production. Deviations, therefore, beyond being disruptive, are the bifocal sites of the emergence of sense.

***

   Poetry compensates for the non-absolute status or indeterminacy of grammar as a ground of form and meaning by the supplement of ''devices.'' It's playfulness, via the supplement of extraneous rules under its poetics, is a form of interior redundancy which has two paradoxical effects. It tightens its conjunction of form as meaning and vice versa, but at the same time opens the redundancy to polysemy and polyphony, as if it found not one but many grounds of meaning. This is because form and meaning are not first substances. They don't preexist the emergence of the differential moment which posits them as unifiable opposites. To assume one or the other is to presume the primacy of either the signifier (code, system, self identical form antedating the meaning) or signified (transcendent real or meaning antedating the form).

   The perspectives which open language to meaning opens it to the plural, since it is this differential swerve which keeps it going beyond pure replication or mechanical duplication. Pure duplicates don't add information. Translation, as a species of the paraphrase and reading,  multiplies the visibility of structural or systemic variants surrounding every manifest incarnation of a signifying value.

   Rather than look at semantic or linguistic equivalences as an infallible measure, we should treat all semioses--reading, translating, interpreting, rewriting, critiquing, etc.--as textual variants of a totality of probable states of a focalized semiotic arrangement. In short, a text is merely one version representing the visible focalisation of variants surrounding it. The actual and the virtual co-exist as an imperceptible Gestalt continuum, but perception requires a pointilist and linear duration owing to the serialistic and atomistic bias of human cognition.

   This is the reason the ''original'' text cannot be duplicated because it is the very surface of perception. The printed text or display screen is not what we see, but is the surface extension of our act of perception. There is no distance between what is seen and the act of seeing. When I see a text, that text is the surface extension of my cognitive perceptual process. Every seeing however requires nonseeing, the same way hearing a note means hearing the silent ones too. Reading a text also means reading the absent ones too.

   If the poetic as pure stylistics presumes the shadowy precarity of the Law or the Symbolic Order, it's simulated opposite, pragmatic prose, assumes it as a simulation of Order. Or, the opposition between ordinary natural state vs poetic aesthetic special state.