On the significant other of prosody

From Richard Bradford's Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art we read:

<< In the Dialogues with Krystyna Pomorska Jakobson is disarmingly honest about the specialised and somewhat partial nature of his poetic investigations. In the chapter on ‘Parallelism’ he concedes that in his work on Czech and Russian couplet poetry he had succeeded more in establishing the nature of the pertinent critical questions than in offering final and conclusive answers.

The perception of similarities and contiguities within the couplet united by parallelism leads automatically to the need to find an answer to the unconscious questions: what links the two lines? Is it an association by similarity or by contrast? Or is it an association through contiguity, and, if so, is its contiguity in time or in space? All of which leads to the essential question for the comprehension of the verse: what is the hierarchical relation between the parallel units? Which of them is subordinated to the other? How is the relation in question actualized—by the internal content of the verse, or by the fact that one of the lines simply dominates the other, or finally by the position that the couplet occupies in the whole? >>

    The questions posed by Jakobson here alerts our attention to the function of an abstract set of principles that delivers coherence in the process of reading. What abstract principles hold the text together or permit a reading pathway to become possible? This will be the set of pragmatic operations that any abstract regime of signs enacts on the assembly of otherwise non-signifying glyphs or marks to extract a value of significance from them. In short, we become the recruited witnesses for the emergence of aesthetic objects...

    We see Jakobson in the lurch, but what his poetic function ultimately implies if pursued fully is that it is a metaprosodic stance where the elements of the script act are postulated via differences, then reinforced by redundancy, i.e., by the formalities of pattern-making where abstract constituents like  ''syllable'' or ''stress'' or ''accent'' are given temporary ontological weight. It is in this sense that the semiotic “substance” which the script act carries is its own creation or “induction,” arising or emerging only in the “wire mesh” it weaves back and forth as a network of relations or “equivalences” in its attempt to count the memory of the passage of time. Wouldn’t this be the meaning of the passage from his infamous essay, cited below? 

Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses.

    The meta-discursive contrastive pairs which are minimally required to enable discourse and the script act are themselves prosodic postulates. Prosody posits its own elements, distributes them on the abstract line. (The difficulty in empirically establishing the ontologies of prosodic elements in the likeness of grammatical units is perhaps what keeps them prosodic.) The better way of resolving this is by the constant foregrounding of the differential binaries in a conventional artifice or form where the performance of the form includes both its possible states and its variation. In the more metalinguistic emphases of the poetic function, the norm and the variation are variables applicable to both the polar opposites deployed to allow the line to move. No element of either the linguistic or the poetic prosody has an absolute ontology. Nevertheless, each shadowy element invokes its opposite or must posit it in the design of the line for the line to become a perceptible object. Strong and weak stresses are examples of prosodic elements which play a central role in the manufacture of a rhythmic order which is supposedly anchored on the voice or language itself.

    The script act is the mimesis of what? The ground of mimesis, once gone, becomes a shadow which the performance must posit as an other of itself, and yet not dissimilar. It must locate its principle of resemblance to overcome the gap it opens up to even exist as a mimetic movement of what is other than itself. In modern notions of textual exegesis, the linguistic performance is a mimesis of the linguistic system, its modernist center or ground. No longer the mimesis of the world, the mind, speech, the romantic voice, history, culture, ideology, or any other topic or theme, natural or supernatural, textuality and its various forms are now viewed to be representative of the structural truth of language, and, if not of the autonomous object of art, the aesthetic form itself in its organic or self-coherent idealized unity. 

    (The ideal object of poetic "form" is technically defined by a ''metrology.'' In this case, any prosodic regime that has a metrical ideal, whether positive or negative, enacts the desire for an ideal measure (thus, « meter » in the most generic "free" and "non-free" sense). The arrival of free verse can be seen as an interrogation of such ideal forms as basis of a prosodic organizing principle. Hence, in itself, free verse is not a new form, but the search for form, or, more precisely, the crisis of form, or the recognition of the absence of an absolute prosodic ground. The recruitment of the visual expands the investigation of this open horizon where the poetic must now begin realizing the arbitrariness of its grounds, that is, begin recognizing its own historicity. It is here that the historical and the critical mutually define themselves in the search for the ground of prosody.)

    In the materialist semiotics which would emerge with the early 20th century avant-garde, from Futurism to Concretism to Book Art to Asemic writing, this mimetic imperative (where an extra-discursive Signified must always be invoked for the rationale of the poetico-linguistic line) would be de-emphasized—via a shift in the binarist perspective—to underline the material dynamics of the production of signifiers. This is only a first step, since replacing the retreat of the ideal signified by the apotheosis of the signifier merely reverses the ontological pole. By the time of the Lettrists up to Asemic writing, the remaining idealism in the form of the signifier would also give way to the larger dynamic of discursive regimes and design environments where semiotic values obtain their coefficients of the real.

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.

The Inattentive Reader*

Henri Matisse, "The Inattentive Reader," 1919 (image from tate.org.uk).

    The silent reader motif in painting (sometimes depicted either as a female imbued with faint corporeal sensuality, or as an individual in serene isolation whose whole attention is absorbed by the text) appears to function as a cognitive or semiotic means to divide the visual field between what is seen and what is read. More importantly, though, is the rhetorical fusion it hides while demarcating the boundaries between the body of the text from the body of the reader via its detour into the erotic or the sensuous. Reading becomes for the beholder the enjoyment of rediscovering the body of the reader as distinct from the body of the text and the world. It is as if it were in the gesture or posture of holding the textual body that the sensuous energy of the reader's body is generated and invested with desire. Reading or the pleasure of the text arises in that scene where the desire for a body becomes its paramount object of focus. 

    To maintain this achievement at its highest notes, however, the reader's body must keep contact with the textual body. That tactile bridge represents the material hypostasis required in the generation of the physical in the world of the image. The loss of this tactile bond (the reader letting go of the text) dissolves the spell that maintains the eroticized lectural bond: the text being read becomes an inert object, and desire finds nothing to feed on but drab elements of the medium (here given to us by Matisse through the color choices, the posture and eye direction, and the sexless clothing). The shimmering light that held up the rapt attention on the readerly face or body dissolves simultaneously with the disappearance of the tactile connection with the textual body. The eye wanders away from the page and the text is left idle on the table, disrupting the symbiotic bond that conferred the simulacrum of lifelike energy to the readerly body as the ontological extension of the textual body. 

    The painterly contact between the model and the text--existing in principle as signs on the canvas and on the page--feeds both ends of their conceptual possibility, pushing us to vacillate between the two poles of the simulacrum, that is, between "essence" and "appearance," so that the semiotic discourse of perception that splices the sign between the physical and nonphysical can function in language as identifiable categories. They are, hence, not so much irreconcilable opposites as the medium in which reading and desire become functional metaphors of one another.

* The self-generation of textuality can be seen in the binary separation it enacts between itself and its referent. To exist as an object apart, it must name its other, thereby maintaining its status as a perceptible referentiable object. This primary ergonomic dichotomy can be seen via the deictic functions which orient the imaginary space of reading. Various reality effects depend on such markers which name the outsides of the text, while at the same time index the text "itself" as the site where such citation happens. More obvious self-references are locutions such as ''at the time of this writing.'' In general, the spaces and temporal dimensions it creates, its proleptic-analeptic axes, extend for the reader a plane of existence between what is read and what is mentioned. We can even look at narrative codes similar to what R Barthes listed in S/Z less as linguistic or literary "devices" than as ergonomic resting points or "landmarks" where both text and reader become locatable coordinates in the groundless space of representation.

    There is much work to be done in the elucidation of this self-generative logic where textual and non-textual coordinates are set up by reading motions as projections of its own prosodic traces. This ergonomic notion dilutes the over-emphasis on structurality or literary form and answers the question what audience it would be a structurality for. Encoded in the design feature of textuality are the means by which the dichotomy text-nontext is made and kept perceptible. It is a border that can become thematized whenever a metafictive or metalingual tactic is set in motion. Like the mirror stage, a reader is drawn into the deictic network of the interminable play of coordinative reference where binary values exchange places in an irresolvable dialectic. This could be seen as the chiasmic spiral where desire and semiosis animate each other in an exchange logic without closure.

Notes for "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r"

   --In piece no. 13 of No Thanks, as it is often elsewhere with Cummings' penchant for tmesis, simultaneity and seriality are placed in tandem, as if language was forced to confront the very irresolvable dialectic informing its temporary movement in phonographic solution space. Why do we need a solution space? It’s less a question of need than what is simply an encounter, a disjunctive encounter, the arrival of the gap and the metaphoric dimension of the sign as a stopgap measure, the solution which simply puts the gap in sharper focus or perpetuates it, prolongs it, by plotting one (re)solution after another.

   --Paradigmatic vs syntagmatic crowding, as if slots for letters had more space for just one, so that a polyphonic stream is filtered to derive the normal word morphology and syntax. Thus simultaneity demands a compromise in serial space where several signals can coexist and must be parsed into their common morphological grouping. Syllables, affixes, phonetic groups, syntax groups, or a unilinear sentence or IPs, no longer command primary aesthetic lodging in syntagmatic chain, but must compete for priority with the virtual crowd in the paradigmatic background. As if Cummings was illustrating an algorithm of linguistic online processing, the pre-utterance cognitive neural mass going through the neat grid of the Symbolic order. Everything is free grapheme, only ASGrs set the conditions to bind them. This is why the iconic is the grammatical and vice versa for Cummings (cf grammatical metaphors). In solution space, all graphemes are free until a regime of signs grids them.

    --The in/famous grasshopper poem can be seen less as a mimesis of the kinetic or a visual onomatopoeia or isomorphism between graphic prosody and motion, than the provision of the space of reading motions where the recombinatory logic of semiotic notation is foregrounded and reactivated. In short, a diagram of lexicogenesis in reading motions. We are returned to a metaprosodic stance where verbal and graphic equivalences are being invoked for reconstitution in their pragmatic and informational equivalences or parallelisms. It is moving closer to the simulation of interactivity as the spacing of reading motion, returning us to the productive moment where segments and supersegments are reconstructed out of nonsegmentarity, where linearity and nonlinearity become metaprosodic options for the reconstruction of the writing system in graphematic solution space. A writerly grammatogeny, instead of a readerly one. Tinkering with the writing system’s solution spaces in a more explicit manner, above the implicit infrathin differences we introduce with each deformance, by reconfiguring its forms, order, disposition, direction, appearance, relations, values, operations, functions, organization, categories, combinations, tactics, and so on.

    --Running against the monocular unilinear voice. Polyphony. One line at a time is too limiting. Multi tasking. An utterance is a crowd, parsed through an algorithm of priorities. Parentheticals as the compromise in syntagmatic chain or line, emphasis on orthogonal paradigmatic field, the simultaneous vs the serial. Metrical grid is dominantly serial syntagm. Cummings grid overlays it with the paradigmatic mass coexisting pt by pt in synchrony with the overmarked line. Line within a line, multiple syntactic processes running side by side, criss crossing, interacting, commenting on and in dialogue with each other. Such multiple articulation interlacing and implicating each other pushes the limit of the glottographic resources of the graphematic solution space. Cacophony is managed by recourse to nonglottographic prosody, letting the eye pick out the multiple interlacing syntax via scriptly signatures.

   --The graphemic morphotactic arrangement of < grasshopper > would seem to be a commentary on the eventuality of the arrival of standard orthography and lexeme, representing the direction which looks like the telos of becoming in which linguistic elements and beings coincide in an isomorphic mapping format. Three timelines intersect in the space of reading, the event being divisible among the syntactic grammar of Subject, Verb, and Object (spectator, process, spectacle). The directionality of writing as a linear narrative frame against which the process of arrangement happens, a sort of slow motion frame of literacy. The grasshopper poem is diagrammatic mapping where the aesthetic entities we call word, line, sentence, syllable, CV, directionality, page, stanza, paragraph, letters, punctuation, syntax, morpheme, phoneme, and so on emerge as perceptible objects in the dynamic space of reading.

Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring (2017)

Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date.
And one perhaps nearing its end…..If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, 
if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – 
without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, 
as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly 
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

—M. Foucault, The Order of Things

     If it were not for the narrative alibi in Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” of a scientific laboratory experiment in a technology of “transtemporalized consciousness,” Jim McCulloch’s migration into a sentient lobster millions or billions of years into the future would have sounded pretty much like the schizophrenic voyages and becomings that R.D. Laing wrote about that became celebrated in Anti-Oedipus and in which he defined

the schizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes a subject to remark: "I had existed since the very beginning ... from the lowest form of life [the body without organs] to the present time...."

This whole spectrum represents real material intensities through which a nomadic subject passes.

[E]verything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items..... We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. ¹

     In these migrational becomings where there is only a mobile field of intensity, it is only by convention of language that we still speak of a “self.” ² The nomadic subject that drifts and migrates can become anything, completely disaggregated from the molar forms or transcendental images like the ego in a process that Deleuze and Guattari call “desubjectification.” In the becoming-animal of Jim, this schizophrenic migration is framed as a scientific temporal voyage, but it performs the same shattering movement of dehumanization. There is nothing degrading in this dehumanization; instead, in Jim’s migration into a futuristic sentient lobster, the anthropocentric view of the world and history is paradoxically decentralized via humanese, the same human language in which the process is communicated to us. Hence, the question of whether or not it is really possible for the inhuman other to speak through us (in lobsterese, let’s say) will accompany this brief discussion all throughout.

     We can see this problematic of a real dialogue between the human and the inhuman put forward in a passage tinged with the same soft ironic humour that suffuses the entire novella. Asked about the existence of lobsters in the anthropocene era, Jim was forced to be circumspect with his reply:

   McCulloch hesitated. "Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one."

   "You have no discourse with them, then?" one of the lobsters asked.

   "Very little," he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile. McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, "We eat them!" and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts—and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.

    It is through this migratory fusion where borders of identities become blurry—even hypothetically effaced in a humanese that requires borders to conduct its discourse—that Jim (if we can still call him that without quotes ³) saw the bigotry of the anthropocentric view of the universe. Here, billions of years into the future, the very notion of humanity seems like an incredible improbability, a very faint dream.

He had become, it seemed, a lobster, or, at any rate, something lobster-like. Implied in that was transition: he had become. He had once been something else. Blurred, tantalizing memories of the something else that he once had been danced in his consciousness. He remembered hair, fingers, fingernails, flesh. Clothing: a kind of removable exoskeleton. Eyelids, ears, lips: shadowy concepts all, names without substance, but there was a certain elusive reality to them, a volatile, tricky plausibility. Each time he tried to apply one of those concepts to himself—"fingers," "hair," "man," "McCulloch"—it slid away, it would not stick. Yet all the same those terms had some sort of relevance to him.

In another conversation held earlier in the text, we can fully note the semantic, even ontological, incommensurability that holds between humanese and lobsterese:

—Are you awake?

—I am now, McCulloch answered irritably.

—I need definitions. You are a mystery to me. What is a McCulloch?

—A man.

—That does not help.

—A male human being.

—That also has no meaning.

—Look, I'm tired. Can we discuss these things some other time?

—This is a good time. While we rest, while we replenish ourself.

—Ourselves, McCulloch corrected.

—Ourself is more accurate.

—But there are two of us.

—Are there? Where is the other?

McCulloch faltered. He had no perspective on his situation, none that made any sense.

—One inside the other, I think. Two of us in the same body. But definitely two of us. McCulloch and not-McCulloch.

—I concede the point. There are two of us. You are within me. Who are you?

—McCulloch.

—So you have said. But what does that mean?

—I don't know.

     The border between Human and Inhuman is held up paradoxically by the necessity of the human-directed tale at the very moment of its declared impossibility. The impossibility of the tale is bound up with the impossibility of the other speaking as the other, and the impossibility of the other inhabiting its own alterity. Here the other can really speak only if all notions of self and identity are suspended. But these are not just the main humanese concepts that we begin to suspend. The notions of “species,” “body,” “mind,” “individual,” “memory,” “language”, “society,” “history,” “habitat” or “territory,” “differences,” “culture,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “time,” and “space,” and even “Earth” no longer have their validity. ⁴ For our self-declared mastery or dominion over the world is facilitated and enthroned by these humanese terms, the language by which we claim hegemonic colonization of all species we consider inferior.

     This anthropocentrism, however, does not want to be silenced so easily. Before encountering the new god of this future era, a telepathic cephalopod measuring about 15 to 20 meters in diameter, “Jim” had the mistaken belief that he at least migrated into a creature of the same superior intelligence that a human being had, and is therefore also the dominant species of that future world. This is, no doubt, a compensatory concession for the recognition of the possibility that humans are not the only intelligent species on Earth. Lobsters, McCulloch reflected,

are low-phylum creatures with simple nervous systems, limited intelligence. Plainly the mind he had entered was a complex one. It asked thoughtful questions. It carried on civilized conversations with its friends, who came calling like ceremonious Japanese gentlemen, offering expressions of solicitude and good will. New hypothesis: that lobsters and other low-phylum animals are actually quite intelligent, with minds roomy enough to accept the sudden insertion of a human being's entire neural structure, but we in our foolish anthropocentric way have up till now been too blind to perceive.

His exhausted metaphors, indeed, contribute to this persistent blindness. However, “Jim/lobster” is/are not the epitome of superior sentience on the new Earth.

—What is it?

—We are approaching a god, the lobster replied.

—A god, did you say?

—A divine presence, yes. Did you think we were the rulers of this world?

   In fact McCulloch had, assuming automatically that his time-jaunt had deposited him within the consciousness of some member of this world's highest species, just as he would have expected to have landed, had he reached the twenty-second century as intended, in the consciousness of a human rather than in a frog or a horse. But obviously the division between humanity and all sub-sentient species in his own world did not have an exact parallel here; many races, perhaps all of them, had some sort of intelligence, and it was becoming clear that the lobsters, though a high life-form, were not the highest. He found that dismaying and even humbling; for the lobsters seemed quite adequately intelligent to him, quite the equals—for all his early condescension to them—of mankind itself. And now he was to meet one of their gods? How great a mind was a god likely to have?

     Secondly, and most importantly in terms of history, Jim had the mistaken messianic belief that his singular presence and arrival in the lobster’s world constituted the “omen” of an epoch-changing critical and transitional moment. Even in a decentralized historical continuum, the anthropocentrism of world events persists to anchor the semantics of an all-too-human philosophy of cosmic time. This absurdly privileged point of view is now about to be equally debunked:   

   "I'm—not ready to go home yet," he said. "There's so much I haven't seen yet, and that I want to see. I want to see everything. I'll never have an opportunity like this again. Perhaps no one ever will. Besides, I have services to perform here. I'm the herald; I bring the Omen; I'm part of this pilgrimage. I think I ought to stay until the rites have been performed. I want to stay until then."

   "Those rites will not be performed," said the octopus quietly.

   "Not performed?"

   "You are not the herald. You carry no Omen. The Time is not at hand."

McCulloch did not know what to reply. Confusion swirled within him. No Omen? Not the Time?

—It is so, said the host. We were in error. The god has shown us that we came to our conclusion too quickly. The time of the Molting may be near, but it is not yet upon us. You have many of the outer signs of a herald, but there is no Omen upon you. You are merely a visitor. An accident.

   McCulloch was assailed by a startlingly keen pang of disappointment. It was absurd; but for a time he had been the central figure in some apocalyptic ritual of immense significance, or at least had been thought to be, and all that suddenly was gone from him, and he felt strangely diminished, irrelevant, bereft of his bewildering grandeur. A visitor. An accident.

     Or, in lobsterese, Jim is only a “revenant”:

   "When will you show it to us?"

   "Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth."

   "What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?"

   "A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being."

   "And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?"

   "I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being."

   "Which is a revenant."

   "Yes, I think so."

     A specter, a shadow that keeps returning, that haunts the text and language, a hold-over from an ineffaceable humanese. As Foucault had said, man’s disappearance is a “wager” since he himself understood how, in speaking of this impossible presence of a face drawn on the sand, that the erasure, by having taken place, retains paradoxically what was effaced, in both memory and metaphor. As a presence in metaphor, or as metaphor, above all, with all the paradox this entails. For a literal non-presence cannot logically disappear, and a dramatics of disappearance only re-enshrines the presence it explicitly denies. It is in this way that both the human and the inhuman are the two sides of the same language.

  

     Can the other of this language really speak? Can the lobster really speak lobsterese? Can the inhuman speak, or can the human speak as human through the inhuman, even when the human can no longer speak except as inhuman? And when the inhuman speaks, can we still believe the human can speak through? In the end, what we are hearing are neither but language, the habitat and intersection of both, and is neither human nor inhuman. For language, which we thought to be human, is neither one nor the other. It is simply the place of an imaginary dialogue, the conjuring space of both humanity and inhumanity as such. The dissolution of the image of the human cannot happen fully without the correlative effacement of the image of the inhuman.

     Similar to the “characters” that traverse texts like magical wholes which summon souls and organize the plausibility of events, the “self,” human or inhuman, is nothing but a heuristic unity. It is more aptly the invocation of the unlocatability of the essence of the “human” in language and reaffirms the irreducible enigma of our presence as pure migratory passage in a becoming more inhuman than human, something that the myths, before the advent of reason, had known all along.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 84-85.

2. In one passage in his book Consciousness Explained (1991, p. 413-14) we would think that Daniel Dennett had read Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” when he spoke of the transitional moment of the invention of the “self”:

People have selves. Do dogs? Do lobsters? If selves are anything at all, then they exist. Now there are selves. There was a time, thousands (or millions, or billions) of years ago, when there were none — at least none on this planet. So there has to be — as a matter of logic — a true story to be told about how there came to be creatures with selves. This story will have to tell — as a matter of logic — about a process (or a series of processes) involving the activities or behaviors of things that do not yet have selves — or are not yet selves — but which eventually yield, as a new product, beings that are, or have, selves.

     The transitional event is theorized as located at the critical moment of the birth of reason:

[T]he birth of reasons was also the birth of boundaries, the boundary between "me" and "the rest of the world," a distinction that even the lowliest amoeba must make, in its blind, unknowing way. This minimal proclivity to distinguish self from other in order to protect oneself is the biological self, and even such a simple self is not a concrete thing but just an abstraction, a principle of organization. Moreover the boundaries of a biological self are porous and indefinite. Border crossings are thus either moments of anxiety… or something to be especially enjoyed.

     Coupling and mating are such types of border-crossings and are actually conceptually within the limits or “normal” human practice (marriage, nationhood, groups, corporations, etc.). The “porousness” of boundaries is not just the property of a socio-erotic dynamic but also of physical systems in general. Extending this logic to the ontology of the self, Dennett asks: The normal arrangement is one self per body, but if a body can have one, why not more than one under abnormal conditions? Aren’t we only the fleeting guests of our own minds, the same way we are the mere transient travellers in the body or bodies that we share as the host of a multitude of other organisms? As strangers to ourselves, our horizon is always elsewhere.

3. Deleuze and Guattari (op. cit., p. 86), on this notion of proper names, write:

The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of "effects": effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics, where proper names designate such effects within fields of potentials: the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the names of history, and not the name of the father.

4. Echoing the difficulty of finalizing the boundaries of the natural from the human, Hans Bertens (2008) asks and affirms:

Where do we draw the line between nature and ourselves, that is to say, between nature and culture? Perhaps the conclusion must be that the attempt to define nature, or the wilderness, in any objective way, leads us to back to the constructedness of our concepts, to their discursive character. Nothing in the real world announces itself as ‘wilderness’. We must accept that we do not know where our discursive construction of nature, or ‘wilderness’, ends and nature itself begins.

The delimitation of the natural, of course, carries the ambiguous poles of valuation and devaluation not only in terms of human exploitation and transformation but also in terms of conservation or preservation. The deep Hegelian resonances of this dialectic in terms of history and human identity where Nature is negated to be posited and sublimated finds its revisionary rephrasing in Slavoj Žižek’s idea of “desublimation” in Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires (1998), another posthumanist novel.

This notion that we are entering a new era in which humanity will leave behind the inertia of the material bodies, was nicely rendered by Konrad Lorenz's somewhat ambiguous remark that we ourselves (the "actually existing" humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man. Of course, the first association that imposes itself here is the notion that the "actually existing" humanity still dwells in what Marx designated as "pre-history," and that the true human history will begin with the advent of the Communist society; or, in Nietzsche's terms, that man is just a bridge, a passage between animal and overman. What Lorenz "meant" was undoubtedly situated along these lines, although with a more humanistic twist: humanity is still immature and barbarian, it did not yet reach the full wisdom. However, an opposite reading also imposes itself: the human being IS in its very essence a "passage," the finite opens into an abyss.

The reader's gymnasium

Redundancy as key concept in cognitive information design. The script act is ramified in several levels of iconic and diagrammatic cross-mapping, so that rhythms are repeated from the phonemic, prosodic, bibliographic, graphetic, acoustic, mimetic, rhetorical, kinetic, physiognomic, gestural, proxemics, etc. dimensions. In a concert, the whole act is massively reproduced not just by the dancing clapping singing crowd but by the media technology which multiplies its replication a millionfold. Here, salience becomes the basis of real experience, that of an aesthetic waveform getting reproduced and translated by various modalities. Thus, a script act is always a concert where analogues are replicated on various media so that it can become saliently readable.

***

Where is the Reader, how is it inscribed? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, thematized. Like the fourth wall. In the visual arts, the perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angle, ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as a mode of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium. The focus is on the body, texture, surface, material of the frontal object of attention. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the reader's 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 actually that of the readerly ''gymnasium,'' displaced 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).

Radical community

We often presume that we seamlessly share the same cognitive or semantic context with others. The context, most of the time, is variegated among people. There are some road intersections (a mystery!), but the view of the whole may be radically different across individuals. I'm reminded of a poem by W. Stevens which practically says the world is as many or as varied as the number of individuals looking. This is a radical way of defining individualism or individuality, something more or less built into the composition of ''individual'' as a word itself. There is obviously a form of overlap and encounter, or else we won't even imagine the notion of ''context'' or the shared horizon of understanding called sensus communis. Yet, this is probably better seen less as a constant or stable frame than as something that must be built up concurrently with the ongoing speech or script act.

Perhaps a good way to negotiate these extremes is to look at them as assigned points in a kind of discourse or language game, necessary for taking stock of positions and tracing out the meanderings of communication or conversation. I recall here D. Davidson's idea of radical interpretation where the context is basically an emergent aspect of the speech or script act. That is, whatever the object text is, as utterance or as printed material or multimedia, part of the identity, content, message, information, or meaning of that object text is the emergent context which allows that meaning to become perceptible. Put another way, ''text'' and ''context,'' in the manner or extent that they are said to be ''connected'' in understanding, are emergent poles of the communication event as a radically creative or inaugural semio-poetic process, with all the attendant technological, socio-psychological, and political dimensions of perceptual formation and/or deformation.

Realism, redundancy, reading

--On the recalcitrant binary of mimetic and anti-mimetic: we need to step back and ask ourselves if a non-mimetic mode in linguistic practice is ever possible de facto even when it is claimed de jure. It would be more precise to say that the favoured mimetic object simply moves out from one type to another, from the realia of history to that of, say, semiotic forms. In the final analysis, the object of all mimesis would be other species of mimesis. It is this mimesis of mimesis which allows the language of realism to become possible, and it is a question that brings us all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Hence, in point of fact, the anti-mimetic writing being alluded to, identified with the avant-garde, carries more mimesis than the plainly mimetic kind of writing. The disfavour this avant-garde species receives is due to something else than an issue of mimesis or realism. By attributing exclusively a thicker coefficient of the real to mimetic writing, wouldn’t we be reiterating the discursive authority, legitimacy, and rationality of the individuals who claim to have a better access to the referent? And this referent is being reproduced in writing untainted with fantasy and the resources of language and memory? (Maybe the more important or useful notion is redundancy, not mimesis or representation.)

***

--We always produce diagrams to facilitate the deployment of salience, informationality, or significance. This is the sign as an aesthetic object, a cognitive material or procedural support which presents itself in the communicational field as a marked or overmarked object or target of perception. It is an act proposing for the recognition of a scriptural or semiotic move as a communal substance of meaning to be shared and passed along as a significant artefact or text: that is, as the locus of everyday or critical discourse. Ethnologically speaking, the rites and rituals which are repeated, the painstaking manner and formality or theatricality in their performance or presentation, could be seen as the prime distillation or modelling of the reproduction of the koinē aisthēsis as a cultural feature or substance. Cf. the material turn, the material repertoire of the culture. There is, of course, a politics here at work, since it is a discourse which delineates outsiders as nonparticipant discourses. There are those included and excluded in the “conversation.” It would be interesting to see where the lines are drawn, the signs of resistance, and the moment of transition or passage toward the exterior other.

***

--The self-generation of textuality can be seen in the binary separation it enacts between itself and its referent. To exist as an object apart, it must name its other, thereby maintaining its status as a perceptible referentiable object. This primary ergonomic dichotomy can be seen via the deictic functions which orient the imaginary space of reading. Various reality effects depend on such markers which name the outsides of the text, while at the same time indexes itself as the site where such citation happens. More obvious self-references are locutions such as ''at the time of this writing.'' In general, the spaces and temporal dimensions it creates, its proleptic-analeptic axes, extend for the reader a plane of existence between what is read and what is mentioned. We can even look at narrative codes similar to what R Barthes listed in S/Z less as linguistic or literary "devices" than as ergonomic resting points or "landmarks" where both text and reader become locatable coordinates in the groundless space of representation.

   There is much work to be done in the elucidation of this self-generative logic where textual and non-textual coordinates are set up by reading motions as projections of its own prosodic traces. This ergonomic notion dilutes the over-emphasis on structurality or literary form and answers the question what audience it would be a structurality for. Encoded in the design feature of textuality are the means by which the dichotomy text-nontext is made and kept perceptible. It is a border that can become thematized whenever a metafictive or metalingual tactic is set in motion. Like the mirror stage, a reader is drawn into the deictic network of the interminable play of coordinative reference where binary values exchange places in an irresolvable dialectic. This could be seen as the chiasmic spiral where desire and semiosis animate each other in an exchange logic without closure.