Artaud

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. NY: Grove, 1958.

Finally to confront Artaud as an intellect rather than as an event, rather than as an explosion in one's own mind -------

Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life

. . . What is most important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger (7).

Let us regard "never kept a man from going hungry" as a rhetorical gesture, if an unfortunate one. The rest stands as a credo differing from most precisely in that it is sane: dreams and images matter from some relation to human need, or they do not matter to humans. While this may sound like tautology, those who spin around in debates over "art for art's sake" or art as sales manoevering routinely slight the obvious consequences. Artaud recognizes this as an error that one may as easily call social, psychological, or formal:

"If confusion is a sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation" (7).

Or, later

". . . a cultivated 'civilized' man is regarded as a person instructed in systems, a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations--a monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity" (8).

Leaving aside for the moment the implicit social concerns, this statement attacks the concepts of semiotic reference that grow out of de Saussure and Jakobson, insisting on what elsewhere has been regarded as the contamination of the semiotic system by the referent, by materiality of the text, but also by the biology of the interpreter, of the organism that reads the sign. Note, for instance, how the following relates to other theories:

"If our life lacks brimstone, i.e. a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force" (8).

With Austin, Artaud situates meaning outside of the words or their enunciation, in the larger context. The perception Artaud describes here involves implied narrators and observers almost after the manner of Genette. He specifically mentions narrative later:

"It is because we have been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater -- storytelling psychology; it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other . . . " (76).

The parallel can hardly be seen as accidental. And one might follow this further afield. In the breakdown of the semiotic we have one vision of broad swath of Western aesthetics. The symbolic enters the semiotic, for example. But what's more interesting is that Artaud appears intent on a breakdown of the narrative perception itself.

He gets fairly specific. Take his idea of "The Theater and the Plague," topic of the performance-lecture that Nin describes somewhere in her Journals. In establishing a connection between theater and plague, Artaud tempts one to clinical diagnosis. I had to laugh when he followed it by a citing Augustine's City of God (26): where does one separate the pathological from the historical? But here at least he does seem to maintain a handle on at least his audience's probable disbelief:

"Whatever may be the errors of historians or physicians concerning the plague, I believe we can agree upon the idea of a malady that would be a kind of psychic entity and would not be carried by a virus" (18).

He goes on to write of a spreading not by contagion per se, but by revelation, a revelation involving the disintegration of social and, if one may follow his patterns of extension elsewhere, of psychological and intellectual forms.

This spreading he describes as theater.

To serve this end he proposes a primacy of what he calls mise en scene, which seems to be "everything specifically theatrical, i.e., everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is not contained in the dialogue . . . " (37). This extralinguistic "language" requires sensual beauty -- "This language created for the senses must from the outset be concerned with satisfying them" (38) -- and allusion or reference. That is, this "language" is not private or merely concerned with abreacting or catharsis of personal issues, but with something that happens between people, something which can be, if not understood exactly, responded to and integrated. He spends some time on the Balinese shadow theater as an example:

Here is a whole collection of ritual gestures to which we [westerners] do not have the key and which seem to obey extremely precise musical indications, with something more that does not generally belong to mkusic and seems intended to encircle thought, to hound it down and lead it into an inextricable and certain system . . . (57).

"What he sets in motion is the MANIFESTED . . . .

"All of which seems to be an exorcism to make our demons FLOW" (60).

..

A note --

The Balinese theater that Artaud talks about takes place under considerably different circumstances than do postindustrial performances. TThose conditions relate very specifically to the differences in presentations that Artaud writes of.

: Balinese audiences know the stories of the plays before they arrive at the theater. The point of performance is seldom to "tell the story" exactly, but to display a rendition. We experience something like this with a version of a popular song. The interest may come with variations from melody, inflection, or other aspects. These sing against the anticipated form much as variations on an iambic pentameter sing against the anticipated iamb.

Now,
Artaud would reduce the role of words and the specificity of time and place instituted by those words. There's a lot to be said for this. One thinks of the abnegation of a certain referentiality in Mallarme's late work, for instance. Both work for a universality, a generality, and at once a specificity. For the audience's troubles are not that Oedipus does or does not fuck his mother or that Hamlet is to be or to not be, but some abstract or universal pertinent to that and related to their own mothers, their own beings.

However, there remains some necessity for designation of elements, of time and place in some sense, albeit relative. Ancient playwrights had some advantage in this because characters and stories were known by all. Children would have known the stories of Achilles as oral legend, much as our children know of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Were Artaud's production in the Theater of Cruelty to work, it should therefore summon some similar incident. Notably he chose the Conquest of Mexico, a natural event for its visual wildness and violence, which might be susceptible to presentation as gesture.

'T'd seem, then, that this cruelty requires synthesis, that rigor cannot be absolute, or need not be. Nowadays an MTV video by personae who seem to want little more than fast women and pretty cars employ principles that sound radical in Artaud. But A's case isn't made so easily. A's careful to point out that linguistic language is to be decentered, not eliminated, and that it should function much like it does in a dream. But I would suggest that the "meaningfulness" or, in Artaud's words, "the psychology" inherent in referential language operates as a factor, not as an addend or accretion. I mean that it is an inseparable aspect of all that it touches, but an entirety of no thing. What we think of as a constative statement is a statement whose gestures indicate that one can take it as true in a certain way that may be traditional in one culture or another. This may function, in some ways, like the noun-verb head of a Chomskyan sentence -- as the entity that other elements modify and by which other elements might be interpreted. Perhaps it may not. But it seems central to human thought that there should be something like a thing or an action that does. Or perhaps a scene. Now, in theater, of course, these things might be established without being named: they can be embodied by actors or the mise en scene.

Now, for writers, an interesting aspect of all this nonverbality is that readers derive visual and aural pictures while reading, and these must play with the continuing text in somewhat similar ways. Jackendoff points out that visual signals are integrated before sentences are completed; by observation, they are included in the syntactic assembly of meaning. This would have to be true to accomodate anything like Austin's speech-acts in any form.

A conclusion? I don't know. But it appears that the various aspects that we think of as context may be combined in various ways and have almost any relation to the language applied to them. In such a case, it need not be the language that fixes feeling in the ways A objects to. Written word has a fixity, yes, but not through being language. Statement has fixity, yes, but that may be undercut by everything in context that may suggest that we not believe the statement.

Altogether, then, language and even written language could have most any place in this. The issue Artaud is really after here seems related to the matter of address. The audience must embody the feelings, the insights, the ideas of the performance -- embody them, live them, whatever: this as A said to Nin. I quote it from memory: "I want to give them the plague so they will ____, and awaken" -- not coincidentally, the lines quoted by Arthur Janov in his second book, The Anatomy of Mental Illness. Artaud searches for feeling in something like Janov's sense, though he doesn't seem to have altogether found it. But I don't want to be reductive in this way. Artaud clearly considers this a social act, which Janov does not, or not in the same sense. (Janov's Primals are intensely internal. They're often triggered by external events, but they're a matter of a person and his or her past, not an interaction with persons present. Artaud presumes something in which persons not only trigger other persons, but in which intellectual insight remains a large part. Also, he imagines this as something that would dissolve or decompose social repressions.

It's hard to work out just how much of Artaud amounts to metaphor, how much is delusion, and how much is literal statement so enormous that one does not immediately grasp it. [I can't get any further now.]


...


In The Theater and Its Double Artaud accomplished his most sustained comprehensible project. One may wish to judge or to experience Artaud in other metiers, but there is some use to grasping him theoretically. For all his enveighing against words and literature, for all his famous psychosis, most all of his writing adopts at least the form and gesture of constative declaration. And The Theater and Its Double is by itself a coherent statement of the position that occupied him from his "Letters to Riviere" to the last days at Rodez.

Julia Kristeva

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Margaret Waller, Trans. NYC: Columbia, 1984.
Part I: The Semiotic and the Symbolic.


In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva lays out a theory of articulations between semiotic | syntactic and semantic | extralinguistic operations related to language use. At the same time, she moves to conciliate formal and politically motivated theories, name-dropping a good chunk of the 20th Century. The result seems pretty coherent, given what she attempts, but one must be ready to let the borrowed words and phrases reform considerably to suit their new environment.

She begins by assaulting the sometimes-presumed disconnection between the linguistic or semiotic and the extralinguistic.

"To the extent that it is assumed by a subject who 'means,' (bedeuten), language has 'deep structures' that articulate categories. These categories are semantic (as in the semantic fields introduced by recent developments in generative grammar), logical (modality relations, etc.), and intercommunicational (those which Searle called 'speech acts' seen as bestowers of meaning). But they may also be related to historical linguistic changes, thereby joining diachrony with synchrony. In tis way, through the subject wo 'means,' linguistics is opened to all popssible categories and thus to philosophy, which linguistics hadthought it would be able to escape" (23).

Writing in the 1970's, K's recent probably refers to discussions of Chomsky's explorations of surface structure and resulting intimations of UG. One notes the use of Chomsky's phrase "deep structures." She goes on to corral the various explanations into two camps:

. . . the two trends just mentioned designate two modalities of what is, for us, the same signifying process. We shall call the first "the semiotic" and the second "the symbolic."

The rough pair of groups seems more than pragmatic; language is subjectively and neurologically a connection between at least two nodes. Perhaps less inevitably, she bases descriptions of extralinguistic processes in the vocabulary of Freud and Lacan, getting therefrom a "facilitation" and a "structuring disposition of drives" and "so-called primary processes." Thus:

Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body--always already involved in a semiotic process--by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are 'energy'charges as well as 'psychical' marks, constitute what we all a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movementas it is regulated" (This & the above on 25).

So she does turn the references to new ends. Chora is central here, and she goes on to describe it variously over several pages, as one does with things that defy definition.

Our discourse--all discourse-- moves with and against the chora in te sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitelyposited: as a resulte, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it an axiomatic form" (26)

"The chora is a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic" (26).

"The mother's body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora (27).

"Here we find the principles of metonymy and metaphor indissociable from the drive economy underlying them" (28).

So, while she traces the term chora to Plato's Timaeus, her descriptions draw on a broad range of 20th Century thought. It's worth noting that her "metonymy and metaphor" here is almost surely drawn from Roman Jakobson, whose metonymy is ideosyncratic.

In describing the symbolic, the language becomes heavily Freudian and Lacanian, and the observations more questionable:

"We shall distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the real of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions" (43).

So the semiotic becomes, perhaps, expression, a relative of the surrealists' unconscious or Grotowski's organic actions? But this seems inverted; it's unlikely the point of what has been a remarkably perceptive synthesis.

"Thus we veiw the thetic phase--the positing of the imago, castration, and the positing of semiotic motility--as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the precondition for the positing of language. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic" (48).

Of course, we're head-deep in Lacan here -- the imago from "The Mirror Phase, the castration which amounts to the discovery that Mama's got a mind of her own and cannot altogether be pleased, that one must be wise rather than whole. She is actually going somewhere here. By this break that separates the world into objects, subjects, and actions appreciable as various, one gets thesis and proposition, with the corresponding repression or suppression of alternate sensuality, alternate POV's and so forth.

Kristeva's partly borrowed construction needn't be rejected outright, but inherits problems from Freud and Lacan, who also conflate types of repression/suppression. Subjectively, at least two phenomena of repression need be explained. One is casual and fairly constant. The neurosystem passes impression along, but the process is lossy. That is, some of the impressions that our sensory equipment registers get left out of the dynamic worldview we call I. We drop part of each eye's processing to create a single seamless visual field; we forget the trailing shadow-hands behind a moving hand. When stimuli subside after such experience, subsystems seem to return to firing mildly in stochaic patterns (think of the impressions of white-noise that accompany silence, or the visual field after some time in near-absolute darkness, and the relation of such things to fuzz-tone on an electric bass or static on a TV station). The impressions dissipate without applying continued pressure on the system towards their processing or coherence. On the other hand, some experience does not integrate not because it is too faint, unexplanatory, or insignificant, but because it is intense and signicant or explanatory of something that HURTS.

The distinctions between these are more than casual. The construction is part of Freud's rejection of his original trauma-based theory of neurosis, and his acceptance of repression in general as normative. In practice, the newborn baby may just as easily recognize that Mother is a different being because she moves in a way that nothing in the womb did; she appears as alternately continuous and discontinuous with the rest of the visual field. It's surely one remarkable observation among many, but there's no reason one couldn't equally build a theory around the rush of oxygen into the lungs, and the infant's appreciation of that.

These points made, the essential basis she needs for her analysis of language still seems intact. One way or another one does break sense into category. Categories do misrepresent and do tend to become fixed as part of perceptive and thoughtful systems that work to defend themselves in ways vaguely conmensurate with social hierarchies. Ergo, ipso facto, and sin qua non, we get the following:

Poetic mimesis maintains and transgressses thetic unicity by making it undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing ito the thetic position the stream of semiotic drives and making it signify. This telescoping of the symbolic and the semiotic pluralizes signification or denotation: it pluralizes the theitic doxy. Mimesis and poetic language do not therefore disavow the thetic. Instead they go throu its truth (signification, denotation) to tell the 'truth' about it" (60).

So, art follows out and exposes difficulties in les ideés fixés, including, probably uncoincidentally, notions of self and impressions of the perceptive processes. But for K, this all has implications for the forms of parole themselves:

Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathematics, for example) or literature, what models the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic. This is particularly evident in poetic language since, for there to be a trasgression of the symbolic there must be and irruption of the drives in the universal signifying order, that of 'natural' language which binds together the social unit. . . . The semiotic's breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice can probably be ascribed to the very unstable yet forceful positing of the thetic" (62).

The connections to Jakobson and Schklovski run deep here, but let's try to rephrase. We have categories that seem to reside, at least in part, in semantics or in metaphor and its appropriation and ordering of meta or extra-linguistic phenomena, including chora and self-concepts. Assembling the semantic in syntactic units may force re-evaluation of the semantic units themselves, with reverberations through the entire semantic system. And not that K has said this is "language which binds together the social unit," so the results are also ultimately political:

To penetrate the era [of the French Revolution and Second Empire] poetry had to disturb the logic that dominated the social order and do so through that logic itself, but assuming and unraveling, its positions, its syntheses, and hence the ideologies it controls" (83).

My primary interest in these passages has to do with the ways they relate to notions of closed and open forms in and around the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. My idea is that interacting with what Kristeva calls the thetic requires a certain antithetic closure, that what's primary and desirable is not the open form of the writing per se, but the open reading that may derive thereof. Now, in Kristeva's version, the challenge that opens the thetic requires specifically metonymic (in Jakobson's sense) or syntactic operations--involves syntax, structure, and continuity. Of course, since Kristeva is actually talking about discontinuities, it's hopefully clear that this does not mean a return to a closed form, but an examination of formations of challenge.

Now, let me sketch (hopefully quickly!) one way to use these ideas in a model of change in literary activity based on social and technological change:

• Chora or vouloire-dire precipitates parole. That is, some drive to speak, express, communicate, or think happens irrespective of the form or the medium in which the expression may take place. This comes from something like the objections (in Toulmin's sense) that the speaking subject has with its perception of existent ideas or situations. Therefore, there's some sense of something like antithesis involved. But this state is relatively fixed, tightly related to the basic nature of the speaking subject, distinct primarily by virtue of the varying historical situation and context.


• The parole takes on a form, the form that the subject finds appropriate given the circumstances that it finds. These circumstances will include which language is spoken, in what medium the message will be delivered, the subject's appraisal of the listener, and so forth.


• If chora does not change, and the external media does -- from speech to writing, from scrolls to codices to radio to television and so on -- then the form must change in some corresponding way.

Ray Jackendoff

Jackendoff, Ray. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford, 2002.

Jackendoff deals extensively with aspects of linguistics that involve semantics and neuroscience. In this, he operates differently than most linguists, who generally emphasize issues of syntax rather than semantics.

The problems seem related somehow to those of materiality in written language.


ON COMBINATORIALITY (38-67)

"To sum up, a theory of how language is instantiated in the brain must grapple with four problems that arise from the combinatoriality of launguage: the massiveness of binding in linguistic structure, the problem of multiple instances of a known unit in a novel structure, the necessity forecoding and instantiating typed variables, and the relation between long-term and short-erm memory encodings of structure" (67).

One addresses all these (if not solving them outright) by considering linguistic and neural distinctions as fuzzy or incompletely discrete at each scale and level. That is, if we consider morpheme, phoneme, word, phrase, as not referring to an entity that is atomistic, discrete, and single. Here goes:

Massive Binding

"The binding problem is usually stated this way: we have found that the shape and the color of an object are encoded in different regions of the brain, and they can be differentially impaired by brain damage. How is it, then, that we sense a particular shape and color as attributes of the same object?" (59).

The problem here arises from the categorization "different regions of the brain." This construction is partly true and partly false; that is, it describes the stituation, but with a distortion. Being creatures with relatively discrete skin boundaries ourselves, we think of space and object in terms of such discrete things. Neuroelectric waves operate differently. We think of shape and size as being relatively fixed or related to identity, location or activity as being relatively changeable. Here the shape of the brain is relatively fixed, but the shapes and shifts of modality in neural firing are not. The relationships are not between a piece of coding here and a piece there, but more the code involves this area(s) as opposed to that area(s), or, better, this composition as opposed to that. Also, what we're describing involves temporal variation, too. And we know, for instance, that the skin contains various receptors for different kinds of sensations and that pain travels on separate or relatively separate neural pathways, so there's some degree of specialization between neurons. Consequently, any impression(s), including that-those provoked by parole, involve a composition of patterns -- a composition of compositions.

It may be easier to conceive of all this if we recall that we never do experience a one object. I experience the gentleman speaking at the next table here at Starbucks as a composition of my reception of the light bouncing off of him and hitting each of my two eyes, arranged in relation with the other light and dark areas of the room and triangulated so as to create an impression of depth; the sound-vibrations he produces, again triangulated between two ears, but also classified according to my aural and linguistic experience. The woman who leans across the table towards him may feed into her impressions the touch of his hand and perhaps the sampling of chemicals he exudes that we call his smell. None of these are the gentleman, none exactly components of him. But they are precisely components of the gentleman I know, and my experience of him is exactly a composition of these and related elements.

To look at this a different way, the composition does not occupy a point or a box, but something more like ripples on a lake, radio and TV and cell phone vibrations simultaneously passing through a room, light sound simultaneously passing through a space. Put another way, the location of electricity by its nature involves time and movement. Electricity refers to a movement; consequently, it's position is not fixed, though certainly the whole activity involves extensibility and space and duration in time. To use another metaphor, as a stream flows to sea, it simultaneously involves water in the mountains and in the sea. It also involves water that has seeped out of what people usually call the stream, seeped into the surrounding soil; that's why trees on an otherwise dry-ish plain follow each bank of the river that snakes through it. When we enjoy the cool air under a tree by its banks, we enjoy the moister feel of the air that leaves it. Regarding the stream as an object obscures these things.

Likewise, certainly certain perceptions will be lost when the brain receives physical damage in one or another location. A lost component of the larger pattern will change the pattern; the subject will not synthesize certain aspects of the surroundings that others may perceive. So we might say, "He doesn't hear the man talk." But it isn't the man that he doesn't perceive; it's that part of the pattern that would allow the identification of talk. It's not a no-pattern, it's a pattern without a component, in this case a major one. Now, nothing in this indicates that the impression of the gentleman was solely or primarily a question of localization any more than the nature of a stream or a tree is primarily a function of its geographical locale.

In all these phenomena, the region of an object or action are categorizations one makes, not characteristics proper to what one describes. If word is a pattern of patterns, aspects of these may live in the same place at the same time, or overlap spatially and temporally.

Apparently, they must.

Multiple Instances of a Known Unit in an Novel Structure

Consider yet again sentence (23), in which there are two occurences fo the word star [The little star's beside the big star]. If the first occurrence simply activates the lexical entry in long-term memory, what can the second occurrence do? It cannot just activate te word a second time, since . . . the word has to remain activated the first time in order for the sentence to receive full interpretation" (61).

Here, of course, if either or both activations form part of a larger pattern, distinctions in that pattern should not be more difficult than any other distinction just because a particular segment of pattern repeats, or, put differently, because the pattern involves similar elements at different places or times or in different movements. Just the fact that we may call these patterns should clue us that they're composite; being composite, they're neither discrete nor homogenous, but involve a continuum of distinction(s).

Encoding and Instantiating Typed Variables

The example Jackendoff examines is rhyme.

Consider the problem of encoding a two-place relation such as 'X rhymes with Y.' The breain cannot list all the rhymes in the language . . . . Nor can we figure out its rhymes by analogy, reasoning for example, 'Well, ling sounds sort of like the word link, and link rhymes with think, so maybe ling rhymes with think.

He goes on to mention that new rhymes can be invented and that rhyme can be distinguished in a language one does not understand.

This problem solely consists of the assumption that the units are discrete and self-identical units. Without this assumption, it's difficult to even understand the question that's placed.

Long and Short-Term Memory

If one treats a word or phrase as an associative constellation rather than an atomistic unit, it's not surprising that greater or lesser or variant associations get generated on the fly or have greater or lesser durability. As with the prior points, far more detail remains unresolved than resolved, but already one might posit that these are differences in a pattern that may be considered as global. For instance, when speaking of the gentleman early, I could speak of his touch or smell although I did not and have not experienced them because I made categorical generalizations based on memories and processing of memories. These associations are part of global patterns of patterns.

Part of what is necessary to understand in this is that the relation described as association is fuzzy, and may be partial. [See discussions of Chomsky and Deleuze].

Roman Jakobson Two Aspects of Language

Jakobson's 6 factors of language:

  CONTEXT
ADDRESSER MESSAGE  ADDRESSEE
  CONTACT
   CODE

He describes them like so:

The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (the 'referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), graspable by the ADDRESSEE, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and ADDRESSEE (or in other words, to the encoder and decorder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the ADDRESSER and the ADDRESSEE, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication (1260-1261).

Each verbal message includes all of these, but there may be difference of "hierarchical order" of functions -- which does not mean temporal order. J goes on to differentiate a new logical dimension of functions.

• Referential -- denotative, cognitive


• Emotive -- expressive


• Conative -- Orientation toward the addressee , vocative, imperative,


• Phatic -- like fingering online. To get a response to see if one's there.


• Metalingual -- glossing, about the lexical code.


• Poetic -- message itself (!?)

To continue ----

"The poetic function is not the sole functin of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, wheras in all otehr verbval activities it acts as a subsideariy, accessory constitutent" (1264).

: cola: Sections of a sentence or rhythmical period (plural of colon).

"What is the indespensible feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selction and combination. If 'child' is the topic, of the message, the speakers selects one among the extant, more or less similar nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all fo them equivalent in a certan respect, and them, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semanticaly cognate vebs, sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on teh basis of equvalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of he sequence, si based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the consititutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is wqualized 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; syntacti pause equals syntactic puase, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into untits o measure, and so are morae or stresses.

It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentnece: A = A (Mare is the female of the horse). Poetry and metalonguage, however, are in diamtericla opposition to each other: in metalanguage theseqence is used to build an equation, whereas i poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. (1265).

This was all part of a summation Jakobson wrote in 1960, for Sebeok's journal.

Jakobson also divided speech acts into "verbal levels" morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological -- commenting that in these "either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity [metaphor or metonymy, he otherwise puts it]) can appear" (1266).

So that makes for another logical dimension to J's analysis. By his construction, we make more or less symmetrical recursive analyses based on factors including said contiguity or similarities happening at various segment-units of grammatical construction such as a poet might label morpheme | word | phrase | line | stanza | canto. I'm interested that J uses pretty much the same divisions I used for my analysis of complexity with John Heywood a couple of years back. A correspondence with Chomsky's branching constructions can also be drawn. Chomsky draws the recursions as moving from smaller constructions outward, which seems correct except that a running contextual factor is maintained, what Iser calls a "background" (Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.)

Jakobson's response to graphic art reveals something about his metonymic and metaphoric.

. . . the manifestly metonymical orientation of Cubism, where the object is transfomed into a set of synecdoches; the Surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the productions of D.W. Griffith, the art of cinema, with its highly developed capacityfor changing the angle, the perspective, and focus of shots, has broken with the tradition of the theater and ranged an unprecedented variety of synechdochic close-ups and metonymic set-ups in general. In such motion pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin and Esenstein, these devices in turn were overlaid by a novel, metaphoric montage with its lap dissolves -- the filmic similes" (1267).

Interestingly, he goes on to describe similarly structured observations in Freud's work with dreams (displacement or condensation metonymic, identification and symbolism metaphoric) -- also in Frazer's Golden Bough, in the classification of magic into homeopathic or imitative and contagious or, in Jakobson's terms, contiguous magic.

Now, to the extent that qualities were represented spatiotemporally, both would be spatially mediated by almost the same mechanisms. Hmn . . .

Wolfgang Iser

Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.

Iser has an interesting moment on page 1676, a few pages into the essay. He's describing something like what Schklovsky called defamiliarization, considering it as a basic factor in literature, quoting Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen, to support. He gives a statement that could fall right into Russian formalism except for its emphasis on the readers' position:

What is missing from the apparently trivial scenes [in Jane Austen's reserved prose], the gaps arising out of the dialogue -- this is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections" (1676).

No surprises here and none to follow, but he does articulate the situation admirably:

What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light" (1676).

Now, what's really really big here is that there's a tendency for many late-formalists to priviledge the "gaps" or the "open" text in discussion, particularly discussion of hypertext and end-of-millenium American poetry.

Now, Iser's explicit deserves examination. This could be what the text signifies directly, but that's subject to the criticisms Derrida levelled at Searle over the issue of constative and performative language. But since that explicit must be a re-creation that the reader carries in mind on the fly during reading, the explicit or elements thereof must contain something like what Kristeva describes as chora in Revolution in Poetic Language. That is, the system here would seem to be that the reader approaches with ideas relatively fixed by experience, and re-interprets the text in accord with these. The text draws the reader into activities in which the reader projects his or her own ideas into unforseen situations, evaluates the results, and eventually revaluates the original ideas based on the results.

The essential insight here for formalists would be that discourse must be partially new, partially old; partially open, partially closed.

The convergence of many different semioticians and fellow travellers on this kind of point reinforces my confidence in it greatly. There is another aspect to integrate, however. All these folks seem to treat semantics and WORD atomistically, and that cannot work. There has to be a range of syntactic responsiveness or variability, a range of meaning, within semantics that corresponds to the need for flexibility presented by syntax.

The best model I have for that is the one that has come out here in discussions of Chomsky and Deleuze and Guattari. The word is not defined, but is a cluster of spatio-temporal and electro-physical associations that fire sympathetically with associations as created by syntax. Subjectively, this amounts to this: a word summons various "associations," but these are not cleanly distinct, and the summons is not at all digital. In other words, as the call-for-meaning firing happens, the general area fires sympathetically. Strength of association may be determined by physical proximity, or by some other factor of pattern similarity. Given the kinds of slips we make, probably both are true. The mix of association available to linguistic impulse must be extremely broad, since we talk about most anything, and we do so more easily than we represent, say, sights as sounds or smells as sights. (I should qualify this last because there is a strong correspondence between sight, sound, and kinetics that allows for very fluid transfer and re-representation; I suspect that this will be because each is rigged to represent spatiotemporal relations and our sort of personal GPS).

Continuing. His referential field is close to what I mean by frame, a term I in part took from Joe Byron's description of actual physical frames while discussing Apocalypse Now. But I mean the data grouped to combine for meaning. Ongoing consideration means re-grouping this in various ways recursively. There is also in some sense a group of groupings, but this is probably done in almost the same way.

So let's to Iser's discussion of this.

As the reader's wandering viewpoint travels between all these segments [POV's of narrators, characters/focalizers, plot, and fictitious reader], its constant switching during the time flow of reading intertwines them, thus bringing forth a network of perspectives, withi which each perspective opens a view not onoly of others, but also of the intended imaginary object" (1677-1678).

OK, let's call imagary object something like the old structuralist sujet, since it's clearly not the fabula or the language-object.

He grants the blank three functions:

The first structural quality of the blank, then, is that it makes possible the oganization of a referential field of interacting textual segments projecting themselves one upon another

Alright, we can tell that neither the blank nor any element of text does this. So Iser must mean that the reader does this in interaction with the text. However, that also means that the actual activity is not the spatial rearrangement described here, so Iser's indulging in a metaphor, consciously or not. What gives? This appears to resemble what Chomsky describes in his recursive structures, only he has chosen to focus on subsentence-level combinations. One might assume that the process, which every commentator describes as recursive, recurses at sentence, paragraph, and other narrative levels as well, and that the levels play into one another as Deleuze describes as well.

So the referential field is the combination of elements that shall be referred to one another, the parts of the assembled pattern. And in the recursion, the codified-abbreviated results of the previously assembled pattern become one element in the following pattern-field.

Unfortunately, Iser drops his parallel structure and does not straightforwardly describe a second function. However, in the cluster of metaphors that follow, he does leave some pretty good clues.

. . . the fact that they [segments present in the field] are brought together highlights their affinities and their differences.

This is still the first function, as the reader may observe. But Iser continues.

This relationship gives rise to a tension taht has to be resolved, for, as Arnheim has observed in a more general context: 'It is one of the functions of the third dimension to come to the rescue when things get uncomfortable on the second" [cites Toward a Psychology of Art. Berkeley, '67]. The third dimension comes about when the segents of the referential field are given a common framework, which allows the reader to relate affinities and differences and so to grasp the patterns underlying the connections" (1678).

Iser's dimensions are those of comparison, not of space, though human brains do seem to use spatial metaphors to describe these kinds of things, and there may be some biological basis for it. (If so, that probably involves streams of related neurons or dendrites selected from neurons, planes of related neural columns, then spaces. But this will be more complex than a 3d comparison will easily allow, since it has to involve proximities of firings, and presumably some crossing of data for comparison.

So what we have is an element that relies, in its nature, on a previous comparison; these elements are compared and combined on another level of comparison. Iser presents this as though the act retained all of the original data. It probably does not, but re-represents it in a more economical form, as a single pattern-unit, not completely discrete from associations.

This last qualifier, not completely discrete from associations is crucial and new to my thinking. There's a tendency to treat all of these things as discrete units, and it's inaccurate. The unit does not have crisp boundaries, but remains suggestive. So we have not completely lost the various components implicit in the assembled pattern-unit, but they are not all equally under attention in the abbreviated, assembled pattern unit; more precisely, they are not all summoned at once, not all firing at once.

Now we come to the third and most decisive function of the blank. Once the segments have been connected and determinate relationship established,a referential field i formed which constitutes a particular reading moment, and which in turn has a discernable structure. The grouping of segments within the referential field comes about, as we have seen , by making the viewpoint switch between teh persepective segments" (1678).

OK, again Iser insists that this kind of combination is only of POV's as opposed to universal for various pattern-units, but I think we can fairly ignore that and retain something very like Iser's superstructure.

I'd like to make some still unwarranted guesses about this process. First, that we would indeed have comparisons built of comparisons and patterns built of patterns. But also, we should beware of assuming that a new comparison means a new level of pattern as suggested by Iser's metaphor of dimension. Principles of biologial economy suggest that patterning devices will be re-used to the greatest extent consistent with processing, and that processing will even be compromised to some extent. After all, the human skull kills and cripples mothers and children in childbirth, makes adults slow, gives us back and neck injuries, and so forth. So a lot of times, the next "dimension" must be accomplished by iterating the comparison in ways somewhat analogous to the ways dimensions might be expressed in binary code. (That is, string gives one value, string gives another, string says how to assemble).

Now, I should note that later on he describes his second level of blank as a vacancy, and relates that "blanks refer to suspended connectability in the text, vacancies refer to nonthematic segments within the referential field of the wandering viewpoint" (1679). So he's trying to fix these cognitive events on aspects of the text, probably more than a little too categorically. After all, why would the reader not simply compare other things? Also, there is as yet no specific mention of the reader's experience, which of course is a constant feed of data in this, since it constitutes all semantic information, among other things.

Among other things of interest here, it's very clear in Iser's construction that the process he's talking about could not happen were the reader to determine story events. The process would be considerably different. I strongly suspect that an investigation of those differences (which I don't think I can manage right now!) would reveal something of the differences between a reading and a game.

A Language Model

OK, folks, here's my 1,000-word-or-so synthesis of How Words Work. Someone please wise me up before the Transcendental Signifier doth smite or kabong me.

On.

Structuralist and post-structuralist poetics descending from Saussure treat semantic meaning as systemic. A familiar demonstration involves any attempt to define a single word, in which one inevitably involves other words.

However, the words we use we do not define.

True, the 26-volume OED fairly bursts with gorgeous definitions, and when I look up the 4 pages or so of entries for the or of, I'm startled to realize that the definitions actually do bear an unusually strong resemblance to my own understanding of these words.

Do I use these definitions to write or speak? No.

The OED's entries are more-than-usually admirable approximations, nothing more. Likewise, when colleagues in discussion refine terms to increase the rigor of a conversation, we may restrict, augment, amend, or disallow associations to one or another word or phrase, but probably few among us would attempt to rigorously defend the idea that we truly define terms.

So, what does happen?

Language seems to involve a dynamic interrelationship between processes described as semantic and syntactic. Neurologists observe that cerebral activity related to language seems to have a dual center, around Wernicke's and Broca's regions, so whatever flaws may exist in the descriptions, language would seem to be in some sense dual or bilateral, and the overall processing perhaps equally describable as an articulated process or related processes.

So, given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles that of other English speakers. This "Word" might as well be a morpheme or a short phrase, but either way, my mental tracing of that sound, along with the network-constellation of associated experiential traces thereby summoned, comprises what a saussurian or structuralist might describe as signifier and signified, respectively. It's probably worthwhile to explicitly deny that I intend by this any transcendant connection to any universal idea or to anyone else's thought. We humans are similar organisms, of a species, and we hang out together; to some extent we manage to work out what our confreres are thinking; we get by, but not too altogether awfully well.

Any definition of that Word is an entity separate from and disparate from the word itself, an attempt to represent the Word-object-process in language, the better to discuss it. We have wonderful motives to define words, but those definitions do not equal the words themselves any more than Magritte's "Celui n'est pas une pipe" was a pipe, no more than I can pronounce the word table and then brace my coffee on that word while I type.

That said, the ultimate circularity of definition pointed out by Jacques Derrida in his early critiques of structuralist linguistics holds problems for meaning in that it holds problems for definitive meaning, but only in that. This takes nothing away from deconstructive critiques of attempts to linguistically objectify and delimit, but describes differently the possibility of describing and the impossibility of defining, delimiting, or objectifying the world.

Also, much of the complexity of semiotic description comes from the difficulty of matching an understanding of semantics as largely synchronic and the meanings of words as relatively durable with the obviously temporal shifting of meanings within syntax. By eschewing the relevance of defined or definitive meaning, the following simple but admittedly rough description:

Given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles those of other English speakers. Such associations are material-energetic object-acts independent of whatever process may take place in anyone else's head; no transcendent eidos or anything terribly similar is involved.

Also, whether I describe what's summoned as association or as associations, my phrase is equally misleading, since the event could as rigorously be described as compound or articulated, as process or object.

As I maintain awareness of the Word, the composition of more or less prominent aspects of association remains provisional, pending the relative completion of syntactic and syntagmatic segments.

(I've found it useful to compare this to visual attention, in which I pay more attention to or devote more neural processing to and have more complete understanding about an arc within some degrees of a point central to my binocular focus than I do about events at the periphery of my vision. Similarly, the word dog by itself may summon a ready image, which I may freely alter when it's followed by another syllable, as in dogfish or dog days.)

As Words arrive, whether by speech or by my reading, I take cues internal to the discourse to indicate that segments of discourse have closed. In practice, I may do so because I take the speaker to intend such closure or because I find I can't retain more linguistic elements and must guess as to the speaker or author's drift (see Beckett's How It Is or certain sentences of Faulkner or Proust for different ways this may work). In any event, to whatever extent and in whatever ways I consider previous discourse-segments as closed, I may forget their independent parts or banish them from immediate attention. The process is in some manner intensively recursive.

At whatever point I do this, I make an assembled construct of meaning-up-to-now, and proceed to use that as interpretive context for whatever discourse follows.

A few observations, incompletely systematized ----

In these events, nothing comprises a full stop.

As I decide that segments of language have closed and I combine words, these combinations draw attention to mutually fitting or harmonious aspects of the word-string; aspects that can be mutually imagined or embodied or otherwise incorporated. I'm tempted to suppose that this involves the firing of mutually excitable neuron-patterns, and I do supose that specific spatio-temporal embodiment must be involved, but I'm just supposing.

In any event, nothing in the process seems to be actively delimiting in the sense of a definition, but poetically suggestive. Certain meanings get eliminated, but only in the way that enacting a decision to leave the room eliminates staying in the room.

In consequence, my appraisal of the language elements remains more or less provisional, contingent on the progressive and relative closure of linguistic units, and I willingly reappraise their meaning until I am hit by a blunt object, distracted, or otherwise forgetful.

For instance, certain non-assembled semantic units do cross the "full stop," the grand divide of predication and of sentence. These tend to relate to whatever we consider as noun or scene rather than to what we consider as verb or action. So, for instance, if I write "Jim studied. He passed the test," one assumes that He refers to Jim so that studied and passed relate in a way one might diagram like the two oxygen atoms in diagram of an H2O molecule.

Accordingly, no rigorous distinction between syntax and syntagma exists. Disconnection and connection are complex, partial, and distinctly articulated, like relations between movements of a symphony or sonata.

Accordingly too, lecturers in the academy aside, humans speak something far closer to verse than prose.

The music of speech, the prosody of verse, standard punctuation as prescribed by the MLA, advertising in glossy magazines, and visually sophisticated Websites all differently stylize the logic of segmentation in ways that change syntax, therefore meaning. We interpret each of these in ways that we little understand, with little or no explicit training. That is, one reading a Website aloud will tend to convert its visual cues to aural cues based on an implicit understanding of phrase boundaries. To some extent, this understanding follows lines of custom, but to some extent the reader may reinvent it upon encountering the text and guessing at "the author's intent" or at "what makes sense."

The cues that determine phrase boundaries have to be distinguishable from cues fixedly associated with semantic meaning. So, for instance, two enunciations of the word "father" must share much meaning regardless of, say, their pitch, but pitch that rises relatively towards the end of that word effectively makes the word a question.

Meaning fixedly associated with a Word or signifier may be arbitrary, iconic, or anything on a continuum in-between, but any meaning-relationships malleable by syntax and associated with that word must be arbitrary in something like Saussure's sense, as opposed to iconic or symbolic as Peirce used these.

Some difficulties remain in describing relations between what has been called sign and referent, between a composite Word and what's taken to be a solid and identifiable thing-in-itself. These may be alleviated with the realization that what's taken as a thing-in-itself is itself a neurologically constructed composite that may in some ways less resemble the circumstances of its extra-perceptual provocation than might the verbal rendering that synthesizes sensual elements with remembered and imagined categories and abstractions. For instance, I remain convinced that the chair across the room has weight although I cannot at the moment verify that sensorially.

Among other things, this suggests that discourse involves what might be called an inevitable materiality -- although, once again, materiality and ideality remains a difficult dichotomy to maintain; what this materiality amounts to is sensual palpability. The non-semantic and officially non-syntactic aspects of a material production of writing must and do signal syntax. The undifferentiated font of a book in standard typeface signals a sequential read as easily as the differentiated font-face and color of a Website or glossy magazine may signal distinct relationships of different bodies of text onscreen, and in turn a process of cherrypicking links. If early 21st-century commentators tend to neglect this, it may be because we remain accustomed to a world of uniform letters determined by movable type and typesetting. The technology has shifted, and practice is shifting although conventions and usage take time to adjust. Yet the possibilities -- the inevitability! -- of sensory and social inflection and contexting on rhetoric, narrative, and prosody incumbent on the enhanced plasticity of digital representation is boggling -- demonstrably so, given our partly generational difficulties in absorbing it. On the one hand, one grasps that new forms will be interpreted on-the-fly by global patterns; on the other hand, one must grasp that as-yet-nonexistent social customs will factor into every interpretation, so that the meanings of one's own words have not assembled yet, and leave one's control remaining radically incomplete.

Charles Saunders Peirce

I'm reading selections from Peirce from Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill: UNC, 1991.

Peirce is the lesser known progeniture of semiotics. His sign is different than Saussure's. In one of many attempted definitions, he calls it "Anything which determines something else" and notes that

"A sign is either an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a gemetrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if therew were no interpretant. Such , for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. SUch is the utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification" (239-240).

So we're not dealing with Saussure's arbitrary sign. Elsewhere Peirce discusses the

"material quality" of signs, and posits that a sign must "have some real connection with the thing it signifies so taht when the object is present or is so as the sign signifies it to be, the sign shall so signify it and otherwise not. What I mean is best understood by illustration. A weathercock is a sign of the direction of the wind. It would not be so unless the wind made it turn round. There is to be such a physical connection betwen every sign and its object. Take a painted portrait. . . (141).

Peirce could not get further from Saussure on this, and those of us who entered semiotics and linguistics reading the Course may be tempted to dismiss Peirce out of hand. He's distinct from Husserl here as well. Husserl's The Origins of Geometry explicitly distinguishes between kinds of the signification of what Peirce might call indice and symbol, treating them as simply two different things.

The discussion, as usual, seems unsimple.

If we have no unmediated access to an Other -- or to Kantian noumena or what we might like to call or posit as a "real world" -- then what we're talking about when we talk about referent, then Peirce's "the thing it signifies" (not the Saussurian signified, but something more like the referent) remains ultimately semiotic, is sign itself -- an idea not at all foreign to Peirce.

Now, it would seem to make sense that when we speak of a sign for an idea or a sign for a signifier or a sign for a referent, we are in every case talking about a sign for a sign, and thus a sign for a sign for a sign. So Peirce's resemblances are resemblances between signs and perhaps sign systems.

These, I would observe, should resemble more in syntax of relations between signs and in the structure of semantic associations than in the semantic relations themselves or the semantic relations between systems.

Deleuze & Guattari

What a joy to get back to Deleuze & Guattari after all these years! -- & with more training in semiotics as well.

Let's begin with the infernal rhizome, a concept that D&G redefine and rework throughout 1000 Plateaus. Wikipedia describes a fairly standard botanical rhizome as follows:

In botany, a rhizome is a usually underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes, though a number of species of plants have above ground rhizomes or rhizomes that sit at the soil surface including some Iris species. Rhizomes may also be referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks.

So, plants that normally reproduce by shoots form rhizomes. The most familiar example might be the fungal mats that send up mushrooms or toadstools after a rain. D&G use both the synchronic form of the irregularly interwoven mat and the chronological process of the exploring radicle-tip to describe various linguistic, semiotic, artistic, social, and cognitive forms.They oppose rhizome to what they call not linear but arborial form, their prime example being Chomsky's branching analysis of sentences. Anti-Oedipus and particularly 1,000 Plateaus became popular in the USA in part as theorists scrabbled to adjust to the formal demands of epublication.

OUR STORY (in 1,000 Plateaus, assuming one reads the book in sequence, which D&G don't particularly recommend) starts as D&G, apparently leery of the sequentiality of their own hardcopy publication, launch an attack on certain assumptions of books.

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of amatters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficient God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulartion or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also linees of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification (3).

D&G's destratification resembles other uses of image to qualify abstract distinctions; the authors mean to undercut certain hierarchical relations of ideas. Their deterritorialization is a little odder, but pertains to the destabilization of ideas by something rather like Derridean difféance. D&G, strangely and tellingly, don't mention Derrida anywhere even when their argument follows "Structure, Sign, and Play" point by point.

On time --

Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four . . . . Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as 'advanced' as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection (for exapmple, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at point S and proceed by dichotomy (5).

As one tries to put these ideas into practice in electronic literature, it becomes less obvious how Chomsky's analysis and its binary distinctions is arboreal or linear as opposed to rhizomatic or global. A rhizome itself is, in a sense, made of lines and intersections of lines, and the proceeding live radical proceeds teleologically. Since one must speak one word after another, natural language proceeds temporally. Consequently, most if not all language involves constant binary opposition at least in terms of temporal comparison of linguistic elements. Each word or sound must be before or after something else, and we find that significant. Also, as the various structuralisms and formalisms have pointed out in their various ways, semantics involves differentiation; for every a, one must understand a more-or-less articulated non-a. However, the very branching of Chomsky's system -- arboreal, if you will -- does provide for a synchronic differentiation and comparison of linguistic elements that ultimately involves synchronic interrelationships between more than two entities, and non-oppositional differentiations. That is, the binary differentiations must be ultimately taken as elements of a larger set of interrelationships, as a combinations of edges in a picture, in which every edge comprises a binary division, can be taken to describe events that are otherwise non-binary (take a diagram of a triangle as perhaps the simplest example).

One might be tempted to dismiss D&G's criticism of Chomsky on this point alone. This would be premature, however. Their criticism of Chomsky, after all, is not exactly that he might be incorrect. They describe his work at various points as a "tracing," as opposed to a "map." This word tracing, again, is not self-explanatory, but a simple image might be the kinds of mapping one gets from AAA when one asks them to map out a route. The initial map, which would correspond to what D&G call map, shows the layout of the land in general without respect to any particular voyage. The AAA counselor will "route you out" by taking a highlighter and marking along a convenient route from where the AAA member starts and finishes. The route is then complete, in a sense, in that one has a personalized plot or model of how one might proceed. It's not exactly linear, but contains a line of travel along with the surrounding areas that we might take as corresponding to immediate associations.

Following this out, one finds that D&G have a truly remarkable model here. What one gleans is that Chomsky's model corresponds significantly to linguistic structures, and renders significant information and questions -- all that Chomsky himself ever claimed for it or, one suspects, would allow any other theory -- but that it does not describe the entire event available for description; it only describes one abstractable operation.

Again, one might counter that this is fair enough without diminishing Syntactic Structures or what follows in the slightest. And, one might continue, the same criticism could be made of D&G's own argument, which equally follows a single logical chain, and that one's read through it is as temporal as any other linguistic process. Yet D&G do leave abundant evidence that they have indeed recognized these objections and have engaged themselves in response. 1,000 Plateaus itself is laid out in such a way that their own arborescent arguments intersect richly, creating complex parallelisms as one proceeds between chapters.

The metaphorical use of rhizome and the rhizomatic structure of the work vary in each tracing; the chapters thus inform one another.For instance, the critique of Chomsky returns in various guises:

Chomsky's grammaticallity, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker; you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phase (first dichotomy) (7).

This follows Derrida's politicization of what the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school folks (Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman and others) call closure. (The discussion of the pharmakoi in Of Grammatology is probably still the signal text here).

A discussion of the implications of Chomsky's diagrams on power politics seems odd without a discussion of Chomsky's own anarco-syndicalist politics, but D&G probably don't mean to question the sincerety of Chomsky's commitment, but the interrelation of his analysis to alternate models of language, including its viability for use with apparently contradictory models. Part of the clue for this comes down the page, and the form in which one compares illustrates the point D&G seem to be circling around.

A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic gestural and cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages (7).

This describes what Chomsky calls I-language. But on an individual or intra-personal level, one may see that sequences of sentences may apply to each other, in ways that change the realtime arrangement of syntactic and semantic elements. Since I've just gotten done reading DH Lawrence's piece on Classic American Literature, it's an example that comes freely to mind. In his usual high dudgeon, DHL syncopates sentences and paragraphs. He uses both fragments and one-sentence paragraphs freely, and does so when neither would meaningfully stand alone without the preceeding or succeeding discourse. Now, not only does his prose achieve a high degree of closure in terms of its sense, but he gets downright didactic. By contrast, D&G themselves hold fairly closely to long-line arborescent sentences with full and elegant predications; and these they nest, moreover, in full and elegant paragraphs with traditionally sequential, intra-referential and closed forms. The paragraphs have identifiable topic sentences which succeeding discourse qualifies and explicates, with reasonable conclusions and transitional elements woven from the repetition of key terms. Complexity aside, the structure does not violate the spirit of a freshman essay.

The structure of the book as a whole is another matter, but even within any given chapter, reading D&G gives a far more inquisitive and open-ended experience than reading Lawrence. In both cases, one may see that elements break across the syntactic line of predication to form other connections. Again and again, through various fragments and fragmentary paragraphs, Lawrence omits elements that readers may guess from his parallelism. In doing so, he accomplishes several things: readers reassemble something very like Lawrence's ideas as their own. Within this process, Lawrence manages to suggest that we ourselves find his constructions self-evident and natural, since they seem to spring from the self-evident music of his language. And of course in so doing his language embodies the mental leaps and lunges of a person in passionate argument.

In D&G's more temporally extended sentences a converse pattern occurs.Repeated but subtly differentiated parallel modifiers give an impression of undefined and undefinable retracings of reference that finally suggest a body of representation neither defined nor fully embodied by their text. In terms of paragraphing, this amounts to interpretive operations in which one clearly plays modifiers in succeeding sentences against one another to some degree independently of their relationships to their respective predicative units. This action, of course, relates quite directly to their complaints with the dominant S-trunk of Chomsky's trees, and their analysis of this as a tracing. The predicative function surely exists, if perhaps not exactly as described. Yet the very action that embodies that predicative activity, the recursion involved in parsing linguistic units, involves other comparisons and connections that may be equally or even more important or more active.

One consequence of all this is the recognition that any linguistic model that attempts to analyze syntactic activity apart from its dynamic interrelations with semantic shifts will in some measure run aground of its own limitations. Listeners (and, to a lesser extent, readers) determine phrase boundaries by information internal to the language they encounter. Some of this information is musical or prosodic, but some of it is semantic as well. At the same time, the meaning of semantic elements is regularly deferred pending syntactic or even syntagmatic closure. This leaves us in the neighborhood of Derrida's difféance again, but also with Dickinson's many "inflections of the pen" that she insisted could be simultaneously multiple while vocal inflections had to commit themselves. (This appears in the letters, but I'm still chasing the exact quote).

A large part of the value of D&L's work here comes in their appreciation of the intrinsic retention of sensorial and even sensual or substantially alinguistic or metalinguistic materia prima within linguistic and semiotic constructs. Their constructs, accordingly, become useful in evaluating textual materiality. For instance, the Derridean analysis of linguistic structure involves an eternally elusive definition. In D&G, words do not mean because they're defined. So, for instance, one might consider an isolated word, lonelier than a character without its play, as involving a web of associative aural, visual, kinetic, even olfactory experiential trace. One should not consider this as "direct" experience that might later be modified or organized, but as tracings of previous considerations traced, organized, compared, constructed in various ways -- "associations" we call it. These associations retain similar aspects, but may allow for direct contradictions as well. Thus, one understands a relationship between a kitchen table and other tables, yet one would not attempt to eat from a table of figures or a table of contents.

Chomsky and others have enabled useful analysis by limiting some analyses to the relationships of complete, atomistic or monadistic words at a predicative or sentence level. Yet in some ways words must also be understood as extensively and radically composite, as well as fuzzy in definition. So in response to a given text, one or another aspect of a word may be prominent in my attention, whereas another aspect may be receded. I may consider a table of contents as an abstractly flat entity upon or along which contents can be "laid out" in an otherwise undifferentiated or parallel context for comparison and examination. The of contents tells me what aspects of table should occupy my attention, but the other aspects of the table association-complex ride close, somehow.

I sorely feel the need for more extensive neurological descriptions of such phenomena. For present I will satisfy myself by saying that the process appears similar to that of visual attention, in which I am "thinking about" a particular region that appears to me as central to my gaze. And if someone asks me a question about something at the periphery of my vision, I quickly turn my eyes towards that point to gather it in binocular vision, but also to focus a greater portion of cerebral processing on the matter. Similarly, congruent associations reinforced by syntax seem to "bring to mind" aspects of words within the syntactic chain.

Of course, since each usage of this sort further informs future associations with each word, we have thereby the extension of derridean play. I would have welcomed D&G's specifically citing Derrida where they clearly responded to his work, but even without that the description is quite useful. Most of the backhanded reference to Derrida comes in the chapter-essay "On Several Regimes of Signs." Here's a slice:

There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign (the signifying sigh): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign's relation to a state of things it designates, or to an entity itsignfifes, but only the formal relation fo sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The limitlessness of signifieance replaces the sign. When denotation (here, designation and signification taken together) is assumed to be part of connotation, one is wholly within this signfiying regime of the sign. Not much attention is paid to indexes, in other words, the territorial states of things constituting the designatable. Not much attention is paid to icons [for this, see Peirce] that is, operations of reterritorialization constituting the signifiable. Thus th sign has already attained a high degre of relative deterritorialization; it is thought of as a symbol [Peirce as opposed to Saussure again] in a constant moveement of referral from sign to sign.

OK, that's a mouthful, and not the least because D&G casually track Peirce's distinctions through a discussion traditionally based on the quite different distinctions proceeding from de Saussure. D&G insist on what amounts to an evocative significance of the sign beyond its existance in a system of words per se. Now, the implied criticism of Derrida is probably not altogether fair, since they don't discuss the distinctions or resemblances between spoken and written or even thought language and what has been translated as "arche-writing." Descriptions of arche-writing in Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing" clearly ground Derrida's conception of the play of signification as grounded outside of areas usually circumscribed by the words langage or parole. Derrida clearly wishes to deal with neural activity as semiotic or representational in some sense; as opposed to an "out-there," or some species of noumena.

In this sense, Derrida insists on describing the process as play of differences in a relatively continuous system of signification that must operate temporally, must change, and therefore can never stabilize. D&G describe the same activity as interplay between "regimes of signs" or "planes of signifiance" or "plateaux" or "planes" of a rhizome or "tracings" that are mutually dependent in interpretation. So they might call the special terminology of Saussurean linguistics as a "regime of signs" for instance, but they consider that this cannot isolate itself successfully from Peirce's sign-system or from one or another individual's daily French or even English.

More later, ye gods.


Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1,000 Plateaus Brian Massumi. Trans. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2003.

William Stokoe: Sign Language Structure

Those with a semiotic bent may find fresh perspectives in Sign Language and Structure, by WIlliam C. Stokoe.

Stokoe, WIlliam C. Sign Language and Structure: The first linguistic analysis of American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstock, 1978.

Stokoe's analysis of ASL is straightforward and basic. An early entry in a still-sparse field, it presumes no prior knowledge of signs and only a basic grasp of semiotics. For me, it verifited a few things that maybe should have been obvious.

Those of us who study literature study language that endures visually. One may well imagine Paradise Lost as sounds, but we have lost Milton's sounds in a way that we have not lost those of Joni Mitchell or John Coltrane. The recorded objects themselves, to which we refer and against which we true our conceptions of those sounds, make no more noise than the flipping of pages.

As such, we work in a visual medium. Yet ASL and similar sign languages are the only native visual languages, the only languages that anyone learns somewhat in the way that most of us learn our respective mother tongues. Since most of the deaf are deaf from birth or near-birth, they use signs as a native language: informally and formally, for public address and for private conversation, for personal calculation and for internal revery. I looked up Stokoe to see how native visual speakers inflect language, to see what implications that might have for inherently but backhandedly visual forms, like verse.

A few observations --

Visual and aural media use time differently because visual signs tend to endure. This is to a certain extent true even for signing, in which the signs generally skip by as quickly as speech; by extension, it should be at least as true for electronic presentations in which writing appears and disappears in response to links. Stokoe's appraisal in 1978 is interesting:

. . . significance rests not in the configuration, the position, or the movement, but in the unique composition of all three. The sign morpheme, however, unlike the morpheme or word of the spoken language, is seen as simultaneously not sequentially produced. Analysis of the sign morpheme then cannot be segmentation in time but must be aspectual (78).

But Stokoe complicates this observation by pointing out elsewhere that all signs for what we might consider words involve movement. Given that some signs will consist of a single morpheme, these must involve a certain temporality, however they might be considered.

Perhaps we hearing should not be surprised, since we take writing to move when it stays fairly still.

These signs must be temporal in two ways. They must be so first in the sense of taking up time in their own demonstration, given that the movement that defines the signing must not only take some time, but must pass slowly enough to register with a second party, another fluent signer; clearly, both signer and viewer take them as temporal in that way. Then, to whatever extent the signer cannot produce all the signs of a discourse at once, those signs must be interpreted as ordinal or sequential.
Stokoe may mean that each morpheme need be considered as a unit, as a kind of time-moment, but one might complain that this is just what we do with spoken language, the very process that he terms segmentation. Or he may refer to the simultaneous production of signs that arises when he discusses the utility of a signer's second hand:

. . . the signer may have a rhetorical use for the inactive hand. The left hand (of a right-handed signer) may hold a dez handshape [one that designates significance by its configuration] used in a sign for namign a person, while the right hand alone 'says something' perhaps about what another person did to the first (60).

This is something that cannot be done exclusively with a single voice. The parallels in speech-acts and in writing that one may consider make for some interesting consideration.

1. A title hangs on a page and refers to all the within.


2. An illustration, or, conversely, a caption


3. Italics, in Faulkner, for instance


4. A chord


5. A quickly picked guitar riff over a bass line with fewer notes.


6. A lecture with Powerpoint slides


7. According to Kristeva, Celine's use of invective


8. A navigational element in an HTML frameset or CSS layout.


9. A facial expression deliberately held and emphasized to accompany discouse (cf Grotowski on "organic" gestures, BTW!)

Of course there's no ending such a list conveniently. But I at least find it convenient to not think of interpretation of spoken language as breaking down into segments exactly, but into frames that include information external to what's accepted as linguistic or semantically active. For instance, the word fire means something different in a crowded theater than at an execution not because the syntax of the utterance has changed but because the most likely conclusion is different.

Some mechanism of this sort has to be operating fairly constantly to feed in the kinds of factors analyzed by Austin and others as speech acts. But this mechanism itself allows us to use aspects of discourse that we usually dismiss as nonlinguistic to create syntactic landscapes. It generally makes no syntactic difference to War and Peace that it be printed in 12-point or 10-point font, for example. But I take the larger print at the start of a chapter or on a page before the beginning of the novel to be a title. Further, I take it to name the work, and in doing so to modify without intermediary all the small print that accompanies it.

Again, one could go on about intonation and pitch and loudness and so forth, but short of explaining how these function, the point is probably too obvious: nonsemantic aspects of discourse mark phrase boundaries and other aspects of semantic elements and syntactic relations. These things may seem extraneous to literature or perhaps obtusely technical, but it seems something of this nature is needed to comprehend things like the continua of punctuation in Dickinson; Pound's "composition by the page"; the concrete poets or the "artists' books" from the 1980's; the dynamic relationship between layout, phrasing, paragraphing, and metanarrative in contemporary Website design; or, really, free verse.

Chomsky

Where does a student of literature grab a handle on Noam Chomsky?

Chomsky himself denies a useful connection between his linguistic work and literature, further denies tight links between his linguistics and his political work, and makes little of any connection between his political work and literature. This in some ways seems consistent with his assumptions of species-universal, species-specific observations based on similar perceptive and cognitive equipment in humans. Yet even accepting some of these assumptions, I find myself moved to deny the divisions.

Chomsky calls the 17th Century his "favorite century," and one takes little trouble in identifying John Locke as among his favorite people in it. The ideas laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding make a nice basis for Chomsky's assumption that an inherited organ produces language. Chomsky points out repeatedly and usually patiently observations that Locke made before: that human brains share similar structures and might reasonably assumed to share substantially common observations.

Chomsky further extends this to suggest that we share moral judgments in a similar way. While he consistently presents this idea of the source of moral judgment as speculative, Occam's razor suggests that something like this will turn out to be correct: the separate evolution of vastly different cognitive equipment for different cognitive problems seems so unlikely historically and so impractical from the standpoint of engineering a viable organism that one has to at least suspect that cognitive systems are mostly similar. The complication does remain that similarly designed and evolved subsystems might yield pragmatically distinct results, but the assumption of a common system, of a similar pattern, should allow for the generation of testable hypotheses much as did Chomsky's initial assumption of a universal grammar.

If that is the case, one would expect to find that moral and aesthetic judgments will form or flow similarly to language. Moral and aesthetic relationships could then be posited by correspondence with linguistic patterns, with relative hope of success and of ultimate verifiability by the standards we understand as scientific.

Of course, one might object that we know what we find moral like we speak without being linguists. But then, given the hedging, prevarication, and disagreements about such things, one might not.

Some qualifications do seem inherent in this. The good, the sublime, and the beautiful establishable in this way could not be understood as metaphysical or theological or universal as most people seem to understand these. They would be species-specific and species-universal in whatever sense the language faculty might be described as such. But establishing and describing fixable values for such attributes might make huge differences in both the appraisal and the support of human events.

I am aware of no extensive or systematic effort to correspond a "deep structure" of human literature with a deep structure of human language on the one hand or with human moral judgments on the other. But a glance suggests similarities may be more than superficial. Similar moral and aesthetic ideas prevail among extensively varied social systems in various physical circumstances across the planet. A basis for Chomsky's proposition of a universal grammar is the extensive similarities of human grammars across the same social and physical range. And moral judgments vary in the specific just as do human languages. Cultures, classes, and individuals vie in part out of varied self-interest, but also in apparent fidelity to moral schemata as distinct and similar as English and Swahili. The tendency of humans to twist or deny moral judgment to suit convenience blurs any comparison, but does not obviate the suggestion of central similarities -- such as these just observed.

Given these factors and possibilities, a science of literature or culture might describe and correspond relations between poetics and the formal requirements of physical media on the one hand, the relation between poetics and the moral-aesthetic demands of the species and social-physical situation on the other.

Granted, speculative correspondence does not equal established or absolutel correspondence. It does not equal no correspondence either.