The Impossibility of Grammar

If Jakobson’s Poetic Function of Language is based on an ‘axis of selection’ (boat, or ship, or send) that is metaphoric in nature (boat = ship = send), projected onto an ‘axis of combination’ (boat sails today) that is metonymic in nature (boat, then sails, then today), then Language can only be representational (metaphor/metonymy) constructing a chain of representation that leads back to some “pure” original state, and thus the Subject that is adhered to language is forever captured in Representation, and nothing can be experienced as it is.

A possible solution to this conundrum: the Poetic Function doesn’t work within metaphor, it works within de-coupling, such that, for example, “boat” is not equivalent to “ship” which is not equivalent to “send,” as a Representational Poetic Function would claim, rather “boat” is de-coupled from “ship” in a non-Representational Poetic Function.

All speech acts (phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences) are de-coupled from all other speech acts. Such that when language moves back from the Semiotic (a pre- or meta-language emotional field, where sound and meaning ae undifferentiated, or “poetic functions of language”) into the Symbolic (the realm of language, or “referential functions of langauage”), what was “never-a-metaphor” (boat/ship/send) becomes “actualized” as a metaphor, it’s how language speakers experience the de-coupling when it enters the langauge realm.

The “metaphor,” as a new language object only appears in continuity with the past speech utterance (i.e. the phonemes, morphemes, words that come before it in any given sentence being uttered). It is the technology of the metaphor that creates an illusion of continuity, just as the technology of a film projector creates an illusion of continuity with a thousand separated images.

A metaphor, though it is “actual,” is only an illusion, for every spoken word is a new language object, that originates in a non-Represenational manner, originates de-coupled from the paradigm (the logic of significance) of the past utterances. A new speech act isn’t continuous of a past speech act, it isn’t an “extension” of a past speech act. It is new, operating in a brand new logic that springs into existence the moment any given word is spoken. There is no continuity between the past and the present in either speech acts or texts. As such, the new speech term is immanent to itself and operates with a logic unto itself in its performative action on the world. There is no map of a sentence, for every word of the sentence is its own separated realm, only seemingly connected, via metaphor, to the rest of the speech acts. There can be no grammar of a sentence, for every speech act creates its own realm, its own logic, its own rules of operation.

Augustus Fossly is an autodidatic deinstitutionalist dwelling in an (a)liminal non-representational space of immanance. His writings have been featured in the journal No Where. He spends his time as a gadfly. Follow him on instagram @augustus.fossly