Roman Jakobson characterized language as having six distinct functions. In fact, the functions form three sets of pairs. Modified very slightly to employ terms readily understood by an audience of poets, these would be:

·        addresser and addressee

·        contact and code

·        signifier and signified

Addresser and addressee are clear enough, as are, I hope, signifier and signified. Contact is that element of psychic interaction between source & recipient that makes communication possible in the first place. Code is the abstract structure of language itself. In the nearly 30 years since I first encountered Jakobson’s Six Functions, thesis, I have never come across a speech act, an instance of language that could not be referred to as foregrounding at least one of these. Even an incoherent shout – WHA? – stresses the role of contact, without which (even in an empty room, or an empty forest) there would be no impulse to shout.

Every utterance or act of language, according to Jakobson, foregrounds one of these six functions, de-emphasizing the others to various degrees. In fact, one might note that whichever of the six functions is foregrounded, its “pair” invariably will be the one most muted. In this regard, one can make a common visual analogy to a simple playing die, another six-sided figure always organized by pairs (in its case, the numbers on the opposite sides always add up to seven, so that when the “6” is up, the “1” is down, when the “5” is up, the 2 is down, etc.).

Jakobson has a term for those works that foreground the signifier – “the poetic function.” And it is certainly true that from Homer to Bob Grenier, works of poetry have called attention to the presence of the signifier – the sound of phonemes, the materiality of the graphic text, etc. – as have no other genre of literature. Visual poetry & sound poetry function largely, although not necessarily exclusively, on this plane. But, Jakobson would argue, the same is true also for any of the Boston Brahmins – Cal Lowell or Anne Sexton, say – or any poet of whom William Logan or Billy Collins might approve. They complicate matters perhaps, placing a secondary emphasis on the signified, the referential world discussed by their poet, just as a composer of dramatic monologues – Robert Browning or Richard Howard – puts a secondary emphasis on the addresser. Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras – with their invented “lion language”¹ – GRAHHHRRRR – foregrounds contact, implying that it need not be restricted to human contact.

Historically, Jakobson systematized Saussure’s conceptualization of linguistics, giving birth to structural linguistics and setting the ground that Chomsky (and later the post-Chomskians) would all build upon. Jakobson had an unusual – even ironic – role with regard to poetry & the intellectual history of the 20^th century, having begun in fact as a poet & critic around the Russian Futurists & formalists during the period of the Russian Revolution, an acquaintance of Mayakovsky & Shklovsky, Brik & Kruchenykh. One can see the formalist influence in how Jakobson understood Saussure. Jakobson escaped Stalinism by moving west to head up the Prague School of Linguistics, where one of his students, René Wellek, would later surface in the U.S. to co-author several of the classic texts of New Criticism, carrying forward the diamond nugget of close reading in a muddy elixir of cultural conservatism. Jacobson himself escaped the Nazis, decamping to the New School in New York City where he spent the Second World War. One of the students at his series of talks later published as Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning was a young French sociologist by the name of Claude Levi-Strauss, stranded in New York after fieldwork in Brazil. Levi-Strauss would later credit Jakobson with creating the “Aha” experience that led him to organize mythic systems as if they were languages, thereby setting off the theoretical tendency that came to be known as structuralism. By the time that structuralism was morphing in France into post-structuralism, Jakobson had moved on to MIT, where a math major by the name of George Lakoff decided to take a course on poetry & poetics only to discover that it was being taught by this strange Russian. Lakoff changed his major to linguistics as a result. His work on cognitive linguistics is today the dominant model in that profession, yet it is not unrelated to the same experiments in poetry that 90 years ago lead to phenomena such as zaum, the “tran-sense” linguistic avant-garde extremism that was one off-shoot of Futurism. History is funny that way.

All of which is a roundabout preface to note that, on Monday, when I discussed how one might read the poetry of Clark Coolidge – especially work from the early 1970s pieces – I never suggested that Coolidge’s poetry was meaningless. Quite the opposite is true. The excerpts chosen from The Maintains may foreground sound – that old “poetic function” of the signifier once again – but the words chosen are not without their schematic frames, literally their meaning. That these don’t lead to a vulgar figured narrative at the level of the signified does not suggest that these lines are meaningless, only that that function of language was most evidently effaced – a predictable result in any work that foregrounds the opposite side of the signifier/signified coin.

Further, the frames (or “meanings” if you must) around individual words, such as

laurel ratio sharp or hard
instrumental triple to or fro
granule in award

one to whom is made

nave
bean
shin
spectacle
as the near wheel

stay, for the most part, close to the word itself, while the sound pattern of the passage is heavily defined by the highly syncopated sense of the line. So you have referential meaning fixating at one level, while the sonic structure resolves on a whole other level. Which becomes, I would argue, completely visible here precisely when Coolidge unfurls lines that are clearly clauses from larger stretches of grammar – one to whom is made or as the near wheel – instances where that “close-to-the-word” feel of language from the other lines suddenly pulls back into these larger structures.

None of which is apt to be terribly perceptible or interesting if you define meaning solely as that which exists along the axis of the signified. There is nothing wrong with the signified, mind you, but it has been so heavily exploited for centuries that a kind of aphasia has crept in that confuses it with the linguistic structures that enact that diorama of an implied universe. One of the advantages of language poetry, at least for a time, was that it noticed – and made perceptible to others – that the five remaining functions of language were also always already present & variously active whenever language was being used. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that people who presume meaning exists solely on the axis of the signified miss literally 5/6ths of everything they read. This is a condition much more devastating than color blindness, for even the profoundly color-blind can tell the difference between dark & light.

In the title essay of his first great book of critical writing, Total Syntax, Barrett Watten performs an extended analysis of the work of Clark Coolidge, centering around the period in which The Maintains & Polaroid were written. It is worth revisiting that book, especially pages 88 through 106, to see all the ways Watten demonstrates reference & meaning active in the work. Even in just the passages & material I’ve posted this week, we need to ask ourselves, for example, about the context of titles. The Maintains, for example, carries implications in a variety of manners. Some of these include

• an allusion to music, where it is the drummer (Coolidge’s instrument) who maintains the beat
• an allusion to the dictionary, a primary source for this project, which maintains all possible meanings right there in alphabetical order
• an echo of any noun that ends on –ains – the one I always hear is The Plantains, but I’m a self-confessed banana junky
• an inference as to what becomes of language when words are pulled up from their contexts – The Remains
• an ironic reference to the question of development in a literary work, since this one will develop through the gradual elimination of words with clear referential schema, to the zero degree writing of the work’s end, in which language is carved down to a series of positions & connectors
• an evocation of every work entitled with that static noun phrase The X, in which X is invariably plural – these could be surnames, place names, nouns, etc.

That Coolidge doesn’t restrict himself to just one or two of these six -- there may well be others I’m not thinking of at this late hour – active levels of meaning is an aesthetic stance, having as much to do with jazz and painting (Watten is brilliant on this) as it does the history of poetry. And one could proceed through virtually every phrase, every line of this book & see at least this much going on.

To see it as chaotic, or trivial, even as a “psychedelic word salad” as one famous review of an earlier Coolidge book once characterized his style, is to fail to understand that each word here is as thoroughly determined not only with regard to its kind but also to its depths of allusion & meaning as any sentence or phrase from War and Peace. That they don’t proceed in a unilateral stance toward the signified is, at least in Coolidge’s case, what makes this possible.

But to suggest that this work is without meaning, or is “only sound,” is to envision a language so one-dimensional as to be without depth or detail. This is why I find works that only operate with a fixed relationship to a referential universe, while ignoring all the other functions of language, pallid & lacking in imagination. And why the idea that writing is “only words” is as appalling as the idea that painting is “only sight.” If all you see when you look at Clark Coolidge is “only words,” you haven’t begun to read.

 

¹ Michael might disagree about that word invented. He used to have his students at the California Arts and Crafts head off to the zoo to scan lion roars & perform an analysis of the meters employed.