Maurice Blanchot and Spatiality of Language

Blanchot, Maurice. "The Book to Come" (141-159). The Book of the Book.

. . . language is a system of highly complex spatial relations whose singularity neither ordinary geometrical space nor the space of everday life allows us to appreciate. Nothing is created and no discourse can be creative except through the preliminary exploration of the totally vacant region where language, before it is a set of given words, is a silent process of correspondences, or a rhythmic scansion of life. Words exists only to signify the area of correspondence, the space onto which they are projected and which, no sooner signified, furls and unfurls, never being where it is. Poetic space, the space and 'outcome' of language, never exists like an object but is spaced out and scattered . . . .

". . . Mallarmé restores depth to this space" (150).

Wow. (Though let's call it depth and scale.)

Wow. What basis can he have had for this in that year?

Spatialization and/of Language

Recognizing that semiotic association and division must be mediated spatially through a cerebral cortex, a few speculations begin to coalesce.

Given the relations between and the relations within them, words|concepts have to be moderated in part by patterns involving distance and proximity. What we experience as qualities or attributes or various neural paths along which qualities or attributes might be embodied must lie physically woven, with dendrites and dendrite-streams laced all through one another. Of course, we do know that brains are in part built this way, with areas of greater and lesser passage of electrical energy, and temporal variability of passage mediated quite delicately by constantly shifting chemical balances within and around synapses.

A consequence of all this is that certain metaphors of space-relations are most likely hard-wired -- although that does not mean that they correspond in any one-to-one way with what we see or exactly with each other. For instance, neurologists find that the visual cortex has an area about the size of a credit card in or on which visual images are staged. One has to wonder whether similar areas have not been seen for other spatial systems, for aural or kinetic processing. But it's quite likely that the trouble is simply that we have been looking, not listening or representing in mime. Scans create surfaces of virtual planes within a brain, allowing us view representations thereof. The brain's own representations that we experience as sound or motion might represent less understandably as surface, given that the initial soundings of nerves are not patterned on a single surface.

In any event, at least kinetics, touch, sight, and sound operate spatially in part, and must sharespace at at least some part of their processing. Now, space in this sense may not be totally contiguous and look like our concepts of the space we view or experience; but some interweaving and passage of neural information must happen for association to take place -- for firings in one place to excite firings in another place.

I don't mean that correspondences would always be obvious to visual inspection. For for instance, taking the sort of cellular-looking, sort of cauliflower-shaped layout of the apartment complexes where I live as a very rough model, apartment 3800 10B will predictably be in a certain position in relation to pool and parking lot as is 3700 10B and 3900 10B. There are certain differences; the layouts are not completely symmetrical.

Now, a very interesting aspect of all this is the perspective one gains on Deleuze's constant running visual representations, which I have persisted calling metaphors, and which hereby approach the status of diagrams.

Framing the Margins, Blow-by-Blow

Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. NY: Oxford, 1994.

"My aim with this book is to substantiate such claims as [Bell] Hooks makes about socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern 'uncertainty,' but also -- and more importantly -- to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the 'general' postmodern condition" (4).

So, one might hope here for a position that will unite formal and social interests, but Harper's aims appear otherwise.

. . . if formalist aestheticism appears to us as the dominant tendency of 'high modernism,' as it is currently apphrehended, then it must be acknowledged as well that this aestheticism derives its significance from the its status as a reaction against the apparent meaninglessness and absurdity of contemporary life, which was seen as reflected in the modernist works that thematized chaos and contingency. In other words, the dis-integrated, fragmentary nature of modern human existence is always a subtext of high modernist aestheticism, which is also precisely a defensive hedge against the former. Conversely, modernist explorations of discontinuity and disorder always funciton in the context of aesthetist endeavors that counterbalance them and keep them in cjeck.

Given this view of the matter, it becomes possible to see how postmodernism can constitute both a break from and a continuation of the modernist undertaking. Postmodernism breaks with the formalist aestheticism that functioned to suppress modernism's full playing out of the ramifications of experiential disjunctutre, and, this unrestrained exploration that postmodernism accedes to what I have identified as one of its prime characteristices, the thematization of subjective fragmentation, over the more modernist concern of subjective alientation, a distinction invoked by Jameson that we would do well to clarify a bit here (21).

We we have a quick binary opposition of "formal" modernism "restraining" by "aestheticism" a response to "meaningless." Further, "contingency" is somehow related to "chaos." The resulting field of categorization neatly cuts anything of formal interest from anything involving full and appropriate response to the human needs that Harper treats as "fragmentation" or "alienation," as opposed to, say, poverty, oppression, disempowerment, or social dysfunction.

Since art or thought can no more be "formless" than "pure," such divisions must be intended loosely. Does Harper fight the ghosts of Eliot's minions, actual experimentalists like the NY, Objectivist, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and fellow travellers, or is he even crass enough to try to mix them?

He gives Woof's Dalloway as immediate example, describing a "subjective dispersal" that "greatly resembles postmodern alienation" (22), finally concluding that Woolf's is a modern, not postmodern novel for its lack of "emphasis" on the fragmentation. But there's more. It's VW's "aestheticist hedge against experiential fragmentation that I have identified as a key component" (23). This is apparently so because Clarissa "resolves herself" in time for her party (23-24).

This really does not explain how Harper would deal with Dada, Khlebnikov, Marinetti, Breton, Artaud. It doesn't even describe what he might do with Pound, whose Cantos might reasonably considered fragmented. Is Oppen modern and Pound postmodern? Let's see if a suitably postmodern example is given.

Before this is resolved, I find another issue: "Nin and Barnes depict a psychic fragmentation that is unique to women and actually constituted in femininity" (25). So, women are PoMo, men modern? Let's keep Yin and Yang apart, they'll have little dialectics. But no, no explanation is forthcoming. Harper gives a quick catalog of following chapters, and jumps into individual studies.

WEST

So the next chapter deals with Nate West, author of Day of the Locust. H cites some dialog from Snell, two characters considering something vaguely like Zeno or Parmenides. Apparently we are to deduce from this that West's characters' quite coherent discussion is fragmented, whereas, say, Faulkner's Benjy is not.

Oh! He's on to Apollonaire! But he associates GA with "concrete poetry," something that the de Campos brothers or Pignatari would deny, since GA's shapes don't relate to syntax, whereas those in true concrete poetry do. He is onto something here, though, since he appears to be trying to describe a single sign, symbol, or icon (it's not clear which or whether the distinction is part of his appraisal) that means in two ways. So, yes, GA's calligrammes fit roughly if one doesn't want to really examine the mechanism (36-37).

"Linguistic signification can in no way be divorced from human physiology" (42).
'Nice.

Nin, Barnes, Critical Feminist Unconscious

"For women is man's creation, in the view of Nin's characters. . . "

It's been a while, but I don't recall anything special about that in Nin. Perhaps it's just that I do not share certain conventions about men and women being independent of each other. One survives; one is blue. How much suffering constitutes dependency? Nin's characters do produce several believable images of being "split" over love. But frankly, I don't see why one shouldn't react to Nin as a late Romantic humanist working in forms that date from Baudelaire or Rimbaud's old Foolish Virgin, What's-His-Name.

H does engage N's persistant freudian (we're really talking about Otto Rank here, N's analyst). The awkwardness of Freud's boys-only terminology runs through the discussion, but not in any way that Nin herself would find overwhelmingly strange. Nin's romantic personae are fruity and abundant, but why I should think the remove or discontinuity of the post-symboliste imagery and Freud-via-Rank-and-Artaud reflexive gestures constitute a more complete response to anything, I have no idea.

Barnes may be more interesting. Her women are, of course, incomplete (74). Of course, the paunchy guy she roasts in the opening pages can hardly be complete without his Hedwig, hein? Hedwig who thrusts her baby from her, hands it some ridiculous name, and dies. Who's complete? Female desire, or "incompleteness," if we must, occupies Barnes more than any corresponding male anything. All of which is fine, but doth not an ideology make. Harper's take:

. . . Barnes's work, along with Nin's, is informed by a feminist political unconscious that actually provides the narrative tension necessary to bind the work in a choherent whole. The suppression of that feminist content beneath the depiction of a generalized existential malaise reproduces the very disenfranchisement of women that the text simultaneously represents, in the form of psychic fragmentation (89).

All this seems pretty arbitrary. Social and sexual desires have always been as political as they have been anything else, since at least Simone de Beauvoir explicitly so. If all we mean is that the authors have unresolved desires that relate to politics, point granted. What is or is not "conscious" or "repressed" remains unclear. Nin certainly seems somewhat occulted behind the veils of symbol, and I for one would be more willing to call this "aesthetization" than I would use the term for a modernist, which Nin is not. Yet surely, Barnes' evocative, biting text should not be subject to the same criticism just because Nora and Robin don't ride off into the sunset.

A politically conscous criticism will entail the excavation of that feminist content through a reading designed to illuminate the various specific conditions that will become inscribed in the postmodern moment of the late twentieth century (89).

Gwendolyn Brooks.

Here we're establishing black female subjectivity. So in the poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we're to understand that the parallel sentences are not parallel. If I understand the intention, the personae are not in symmetrical situations, and H finds the latter sentence priviledged grammatically. The semiotics used to further describe this are strange.

"One reason for this lies in what Saussure has identified as the linear nature of linguistic signification" -- if indeed it is the signification that can be considered linear. Signification requires comparison of earlier and later grammatical elements, which requires recursion. A Saussurian system must involve a comparison of said elements with the entire system, so the recursion might be rather involved. H considers that ". . . what is under our consideration at any given moment must necessarily predominate . . ." (100). The reader may judge whether that is always so.

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.

Ignacio Pignatari

Pignatari, Décio. "The Contiguity Illusion." Sight, Sound, and Sense. Thomas A. Sebeok. Ed. Bloomington: Indiana, 1978.

"Why is contiguity endowed with such a privilege? The reason lies in a kind of logical illusion -- the contiguity illusion -- which we may also observe in the works of many contemporary linguists and semiologists. This illusion, in all appearances, was born directly from Western linguistic systems and has earned a droit de cité in the written notation of these systems, that is, teh alphabetic code (in this connection, the fact hat the unit letter was isolated many centuries before the unit phoneme cannot be dismissed). These linguistic systems favor association by contiguity. What we formerly called classical logic -- i.e., Aristotelian and linear -- is the logic embodied in the Greek idiom: it is a contiguity logic. The alphabetic code -- a most powerful logical machine -- is a highly abstract discrete source of signs with digital and metonymic characteristics. Words are formed by combinatory permutations, that is, syntagmatically, and fare linked together following the pattern of predicatio (especially when the verb to be is employed; "this is that"), articulated by linkage elements called conjunctions -- first-class connections when hierarchy is implied (hypotaxis, and second-class connections when 'non-hierarchy' is implied (parataxis). . . . Ergo, when we 'talk logic,' or 'talk science,' we mean that inferences have been drawn through contiguity. But is there no possibility of another kind of logic -- that is, a logic by similarity?
"The Western mind is contiguity-based through language (the verbal code), which itself is based on contiguity." . . . . When dealing with analogy, 'scientific' minds become very cautious: analogy is a dangerous path to follow -- it is almost . . . non-scientific' (84-85).

I don't agree. What's actually going on is that time and space do function at once, though DP describes it otherwise. The mind he talks about deals with similarity in contiguity. Of course, to deal with similarity, one is dealing in difference and presumably différance as well.

Now, much of this signal must be forcibly ignored in the act of interpreting language. I have a red and a blue copy of Ulysses, but no one cares what color it is. By book-era standards, font-face, font-size and so forth were generally dismissed as noncommunication, as simply part of the logistics of presenting the "real" novel, its "linguistic" or "intellectual" content or its "meaning," to the reader. The uniformity of all that allowed readers to pretend that the materiality of the text was unimportant.

Of course, were all this ever really neutral, one could publish Tolstoy in ransom-note fonts and nobody would be bothered.

Now, one corrollary of something here is that matters used for inflection must be matters not relevant to the predicative nature of the text.

No. That's not correct. Again:

The relation of inflection to predication is of one nature, so it cannot relate in another way; the signal cannot be usefully overloaded. If a comma were used to spell some words, it couldn't be used to indicate phrase bondaries as it is.

A few observations about inflection, in no particular order ---

It's not completely arbitrary: One shouts or prints bold to call attention to something, for instance. Space indicates separation. Line indicates sequence, and that metaphor of time appears to be pretty thoroughly universal. So in written work, one of the ways that sense and materiality infect the workings of logos is through inflection.

What else? Emphasis in a word may imply semantic distinction. Emphasis in a sentence implies grammatical activity:

SHOULD I compare thee to a summer's day? (or maybe I should not)
Should I compare THEE to a summer's day? (or maybe your sister)

and so forth. In either case the question as a whole pertains particularly to the stressed word, thereby altering its semantic and syntactic meaning without changing what we usually call grammar.

Note that the differences are relative. A voice that's louder throughout does not change connotation in the same way.

Since Pound, many poets have been vocal about the inadequacy of classical scansion to designate the rhythmic changes of poetry. It's not so much a matter of "different people read it differently," the usual students' complaint, but that "the inflections of the pen" are many, as Emily Dickinson pointed out. Hence Pound's "musical line and not the metronome" and so forth. Also, there's no designation for the emphasis of an entire phrase -- unless of course one writes out the musical notation.

What's the line, though? In Pound's case, it's quite visual. Read the Cantos with stops at line's end, and things work rather well. Try the same thing with Marlowe or most of Shakespeare, certainly most all the latter work, unless he's trying to sound childish, and it all sounds dorky.

Another point: stress as in LOUD or L O N G is clearly not the only variable. Pitch is another. Seldom is an entire sentence pronounced at the same pitch. In most spoken English, pitch falls at the end of a statement and rises at the end of a question. Check Tim Allen in Tool Time when he does his signature dumb male "Uh-eé?" groan. Accents where a statement rises in pitch sound "sing-song" or just weird. Check a Welsh accent or the famous 1980's California Val slang for a couple examples; the Val slang can be found on Moon-Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl," from somewhere around 1980.

Elsewhere I have analysed the relationship between pitch and line in William Carlos Williams' oft-anthologized Red Wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All. Williams does not pause at the end of the line, but one hears the line-endings very clearly in his subtle changes of pitch. He may "read like he speaks," as Ginsberg said of him, but it's not "just" speech: he sounds out what we're told good poets do with line: not all factors indicate a stop at the same point, so that we have an articulated, variable, organic, complex statement -- and vision and music, apparently. (Of course, Ginsberg would probably have responded: "That's all part of speech.")

Reuven Tsur is another good source, though one I need more time to integrate.

Another thing that must be noted is that there are clearly segments of segments, and differences that are significant within different phrase-units, including nested phrase-units. For instance, in English, stress falls on one or another syllable of a multisyllabic word. Some words even change meaning with changed syllabic stress. Therefore, if the word itself is stressed, the relative stress between syllables is generally maintained. We vary pitch and syllable length to help separate designations and map them to their proper phrases. Each gives us what amounts to an extra dimension of distinctions in performance.

I have seen no extensive mapping of such patterns, but clearly that there we routinely emphasize smaller units within larger units within larger units, at least out to groups of several sentences, and I would presume it's longer in formally sophisticated presentations like a soliloquoy or the presentation of an exceptional orator. Emphases can nest and partially overlap as well.

Now, I mentioned earlier that there exists a materiality to the business of inflection. That is, there is a continuum of pitch, not a boolean YES|NO distinction for high|low. A rise in pitch that involves a cry in the voice, for instance, will surely tend to be read differently. Yet on the other hand there appears to be some possible systematization and some analogy to diachronic syntax. I'd take Dickinson's system of punctuation as an example, with her many dashes. They are at once certainly not categorizable in any simple way, yet they just as certainly involve distinctions.

Now, to get back to Pignatari's issue of contiguity, there do seem to be some issues with language. For instance, when Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" gives an example of what he calls grammatical but unacceptable language, the way he does it is to make less contiguous the elements that the reader must combine:

1) i) I called up the man who wrote the book that you told me about.
2) i) I called the man who wrote the book that you told me about up.

Now, before you classify this as a simple misplaced modifier, remember that we do quite typically separate these two-word verbs. "I called her up" is normal; "I called up her" sounds vaguely obscene and obscenely vague. Nonetheless, separating them as is done in 2i violates the reader's processes. Clearly, the phrase containging called has been assembled and must be broken and reassembled. It's not word-salad, but it is rather annoying.

Now, what this leads us to is rather interesting. It appears that not only do extra segments of information change the way we view previous information, a la Derrida and differance, but the semantic aspects and sensorial aspects of the information that we get clue us as to where to divide the segments, and what constitutes a working center.

It appears (this is out of order) that human minds re-frame and constitute a working frame and a working center and edges of a syntactic unit on the fly, deducing all this from internal information within the language-object or speech act.

This is obviously not a perfect situation, since interpretation of the smaller units must be held in abeyance, and the interpretation of the larger units must be determined by these smaller units and their arrangement. A clue is often needed, of course -- these are punctuation and the song and dance of speech.

What must be carried in the nonverbal or nonsemantic and nonsyntactic input are the kinds of things that Searle and Austin point out in discussions of speech act theory. It's probably worth pointing out again that these kind of things can attach to a particular word or morpheme within a sentence, or to the entire performance, including the nonverbal aspects. Thus, for instance, the special dress and manners of a wedding will be echoed in some ways in a wedding invitation or in a Website for a company that arranges weddings -- in ways altered by their special relations to the event itself. But visual layout in written language will designate the things that aspects of performance would have designated otherwise.

And it will do so best by doing so economically. That doesn't mean that some visual approaches might be bold, but these will still be governed by a strict economy of signification: anything that detracts from the signification blurs the sign.

Now, this is somewhat different from, say, Poe's insistence that all factors lead to one POV, one mood, in a story. We can compare Poe's insistence on the one hand with, say, Charles Bernstein's essay in Norton 20th Century American Poetry on the far end. Visual aspects might accomplish either closed or open forms, but specific continuities and discontinuities must be signaled clearly.

More Pignatari:

"A summary cannot be made of a form" (86).

Not so! But it's a sketch, not a string of words.


The work of Propp, for instance, has not been solely concerned with narrative functions, but also withthe fact hat narraive isbuilt upon the predication pattern, upon assocaitions by contiguity connected with cause/effect associations" (86).

"Prose is contiguity's natural kingdom, as it were: fictional prose is a sort of non-antagonic contradiction, and poetry, and antagonic contradicion" (87).

"The Brazilian linguist Myriam Lemle . . . has observed that parataxis previals in the speech construction of the lower classes" (94). [As opposed to hypotaxis]

Interesting to note how Pignatari's binary oppositions run skew to Nietzsche's division between Apollo and Dionysos. Here, as Pignatari gives them:

SIGN

Similarity | contiguity (similar position)
Analogic | logic
icon | symbol (I dont agree)
nonverbal | verbal
art | science
poetry | prose
parataxis | hypotaxis
east | west (not right either)
paronomasia/metaphor | metonymy
paramorphism | metaphor
first | third
model | concept
simultaneity | linearity
synchrony | diachrony
paradigm | syntagm
signifier signified
form content /this doesn't work/
synthesis analysis
unconscious conscious
right lobe left lobe

INTERPRETANT