Erich Auerbach, in his 1938 essay “Figura,” traces a history of this word. Etymologically, it is related to the same Latin stem that connotes “plastic form,” and it is important for the long story of figura as a concept, that the word, as he says, points to “the notion of new manifestation, the changing aspect, of the permanent” (my emphasis). In Lucretius, Auerbach saw the transposition, in figura’s general precept of “outward shape,” towards a non-visual traversing, such as the movement from the plastic to the auditory, or the ideational transition from model to copy, or the relation between things and their sometimes invisible simulacra or ghosts. This supple transference embodied by a figure, which is also a simultaneity, gives occasion to the desire to interpret. I’ll propose that the codex is a figure for the material history of thinking. And the particular liveliness, the gesture, the codex brings to thinking is the turn, or the fold – the inflection whose agency never does complete itself. Auerbach describes the different tasks carried out by a symbol and a figure: Where the signifying matter of the symbol typically completes a static idea of nature in a corresponding object – a flower, say, or a planet – by fulfilling nature’s identity in this object, in a manner magical or mythic, the figure tends towards a shaping or a human crafting that includes temporal change. The figural faces a not entirely determined field of meaning. “The object itself overflows its frame in order to enter into a cycle or series,” as Deleuze writes. The figural shape is already social, already part of a willed production of meaning. What makes an object figurative, besides this productive origin, is its capacity to overflow intention. the figure’s agency is its historicity – it finds its dynamics in the inherent incompletion of history. As Auerbach proposes, “what actually makes the two forms [figure and symbol] completely different is that figural prophecy relates to an interpretation of history – indeed it is by nature a textual interpretation – while the symbol is a direct interpretation of life and originally no doubt for the most part, of nature.” Interpretive incompletion is the figure’s access to potential change. Or in other terms, an object or an image figures when it receives more of our imaginative projection than its social or mythic function would require. This margin of excess (an excess of potential interpretability inherent to a shapeliness) can be differently inflected through time. conceptual and historical fluctuation exceeds the bounded or perceptible limits of a thing. At any time, a book may receive its reader differently. The figure’s ambivalent stance vis à vis signification grants it the potent capacity of dissimulation, whether persuasive or ludic. The opacity the inconspicuousness of its folds permit the interpretive differential. Figura was also appropriated by architects into the technical description of potential space. Auerbach makes a further distinction in his conceptual history of this word by stressing figura’s material plasticity (as distinct from tis potential for interpretive dissimulation among the poets and rhetoricians) in Vitruvius’ texts: “figura is architectural and plastic form, or in any case the reproduction of such form, the architect’s plan; there, there is no trace of deception or transformation; in his language figurata similitudine does not mean ‘by dissimulation,’ but ‘by creating a likeness.’ Often figura means ‘ground plan’ (modice picta operis futuri figura, slightly tinted, a plan of the future work), and universae figurae species, or summar figuratio, signifies the general form of a building or a man (he often compares the two from the standpoint of symmetry). Despite his occasional mathematical use of the word, figura (as well as fingere) has a definitely plastic significance for him and for other technical writers of the period….“ This plasticity – this propensity of the figure to actively fold within itself an agency, an inflection that modulates perception – is the trait that permits the ongoing activity of the figure in time. Mostly I seek the promiscuous feeling of being alive. it shelters without fastening; it conditions without determining. With a minimal gesture the commodious form shows us complexity’s amplitude. I submit to ink. I go into the elsewhere of chiaroscuro. The lack of transparency, the elaboration of shadow as a medium, makes the codex a soft bomb of potential. The inchoate state I crave dissolves and reshapes itself in the codex; reading feels like a discontinuous yet infinite rhythmic dispersal that generates singularities. It isn’t knowledge at all. It’s a timely dallying and surge among the cluster of minute identifications. I prefer to become foreign and unknowable to myself in accordance with reading’s audacity. When constructing a description of thinking in The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt asks where it is that we go when we think, rather than asking what thinking is – the customary philosophical inquiry. She shifts the emphasis of the ancient question from ontological query to spatial trajectory. For Adrent, thinking resembles tracking, a kind of place “beaten by the activity of thought,” which turns to ploddingly follow a course towards a pause. It is “the small, inconspicuous track of non-time … beaten between an infinite past and an infinite future by accepting past and future as directed, aimed, as it were, at themselves – as their predecessors and successors, their past and their future – thus establishing a present for themselves,” a space that is neither inherited nor received from tradition, but which is made from what is touched in passing: “the ruin of historical and biographical time.” In this argument thinking acquires a direction only when situated, and it is the modest, even ruined, situatedness of an invisibility, an inconspicuousness, the necessary (and resistant) turning away of the thinking body from appearing. I can recognize my own activities in this ruinous turning. book as nature, memory, Rome, God, word, history, church, love The reader loves without knowing. I read for the book, simply because the book is there to be read. Sometimes my fidelity is for materiality. A reader is a beginner. I read garbage, change and accident. I can’t fix what materiality is. Reading, I enter a relational contract with whatever material, accepting its fluency and swerve. I happen to be the one reading. I read to sense the doubling of time: The time of the book’s form, which pertains to the enclosure and topology of rooms, allegories, houses, bodies, surfaces; and the time of my perceiving, which feels directional, melodic, lyrics, inflectional. Reading in the dark: here is the acutely sought ruin of identity. Reading begins in me an elaborate abandonment. Desire and identity are not the same. At times it feels like desire displaces, or replaces, identity. Perception retreats or rather turns towards this dark interiority that isn’t my own. The codex continuously transforms desire and this has become a life. I feel astonished that any institution could have placed such an object in my hands, then left me alone with it. Reading misuses privileges, abuses authorities, demands interference. Its commodity is political, not economic; it insists on the distinction between economics and politics. The dimension of thinking articulates itself only in political time. In order to continue, reading resists. I witness the displacement of the political into the codex. Encouraged by such material conviviality, thinking’s rhythm paradoxically opens: It undoes itself from identity, there having been little habits or measures binding them. The potential relationships between identities and desires loosen and multiply. The undoing poses an extraordinary and pleasing relief. Fear is not absent either. What reader emerges from her study simplified? Sensual perception, and hence cognition, is supplemented, not compromised, by indetermination. Although the book is a screen for certain intentions – institutional, authorial and readerly – intention can’t be contained or enforced. Thinking’s impersonality moves across the shadowed commons of the codex to be politicized by chance, where change is a stranger. Thus the interdiction against reading – it was Rousseau who said that any girl who reads is already a lost girl. The codex has lent her its secrecy. She will read in spite of any law. As the girl leans into chiaroscuro, commodiousness unpleats itself in the interstices of her gestural history and in the time of reading, which becomes a rhythmic infinity. She embodies an unknowable politics by deepening the shadows in places, tarrying with the anarchy of impersonal memory. Her autonomy undoes itself and disperses into a devotedly plural materiality. Her identifications are small revolutions and also the potent failures of revolutions. She is free to not appear. She felt herself to be literally the receptacle of impurity, the gutter in which writing speaks. Lines 1140 to 1159 advise the lover how to avoid unhappy love, “for it is easier to avoid falling into love’s nets, than it is to free oneself once taken, breaking the snare Venus closes tightly around her prey.” But I fall into the lace of the text, the vellum; caught there, I contemplate my masters. From the point of view of the world, the site of my capture remains invisible. Sometimes it is more like a pact than a capture. I’d like to turn towards the invisibility of this readerly site, offer some curiosity to the invisible place of reading. Hannah Arendt describes a related invisibility: Seen from the perspective of the world of appearances and the activities conditioned by it, the main characteristic of mental activities is their invisibility. Properly speaking, they never appear, though they manifest themselves to the thinking, willing, or judging ego which is aware of being active, yet lacks the ability or the urge to appear as such. The Epicurean lathe boisas, “live in hiding,” may have been a counsel of producen; it is also an at least negatively exact description of the topos, the locality of the man who thinks; in fact, it is the very opposite of John Adam’s “spectemur agendo” (let us be seen in action). In other words, to the invisible that manifests itself to thinking there corresponds a human faculty that is not only, like other faculties, invisible so long as it is latent, a mere potentiality, but remains non-manifest in full actuality. This passage from The Life of the Mind, the section called “Thinking,” begins to situate for me a description of what reading could be. I could even say it calms me, for a sense of guilty can attach itself to this retreat that is the topos of the reader. Arendt says thinking is the propensity to “ask unanswerable questions.” She defends the necessary inconspicuousness of the person who thinks. What she is forming is an alternative, and I believe a dissident one, to the implementation of thinking as an instrumental practice, an activity that exerts quantifiable, agreed upon appearances and influences and effects in the public sphere. She is saying that the activity of thinking is an unanswerable one, that its lack of appearance is its resource. What John Adams says is “let us be seen in action,” is a very communitarian position. This is still strongly indicative of how America acts in the world, how America constitutes itself as a community, and also how micro-communities tend to constitute themselves. But I agree with Arendt that thinking’s community is unquantifiable. Also, reading’s topos, its place of agency, is invisible, and necessarily so. Reading resists being seen. This is not to say that it has no effects on public life, but that those effects cannot be predetermined, cannot be conveniently mapped and often do not follow causal, or intentional, patterns. What I intend for reading is usually not where it takes me. If reading could be said to have broader, worldly effects, they might be modeled on the random agency of the Epicurean clinamen, that wide-open and troubling proposition of utterly uncaused and spontaneous material change. Reading does change the world, but usually not in the way one might wish it to, and perhaps not visibly. Its acts are clandestine. I make this unproblematic segue from thinking to reading because, for me, the two activities are completely implicated, folded into one another. I am only certain that I think insofar as I read. So, for me, the topos of reading is necessarily inconspicuous, and if there can be any collectivist model of that inconspicuousness, I think that the complicities, erotics and discontinuities of friendship could suggest its shape. There is a dissidence in friendship, a necessary one. It happens often outside of, or in spite of, communities. Two people face one another; between themselves they project a world, which they then populate with gestures of care, mutual pleasure, conflict, futurity and sometimes failure. Or one friend dies. The specific agency of this space between two is an immodest one – it remains mostly unavailable to a community. This site is for the particularity of the other whom one faces – “because it was him; because it was me,” as Montaigne said of his passionate friendship with la Boetie. In this mutual facing, discontinuous drives and folds have no teleology, and almost no public sanction. Yet a life or a world lacking the topos of friendship is unthinkable. Reading shares this necessarily unsanctioned intimacy. I have the strong sense that reading chooses me, as have my friendships. Language’s seeming ability to produce, multiply and limit change “commands a great reserve of indetermination.” Yet this indetermination is simultaneous with the “capacity for coding and overcoding … for control and regulation.” Thus the law we witness in and through language is the law of destabilization, flux. Neither coded control nor indetermination prevail; they alternate. This is the terrible and beautiful rupture, the one that snares. Rupture or detour is the felicity of reading; the text is all divergence. Whatever seems at first transparent next frustratingly dissolves, to reappear suddenly at some unforeseeable or inappropriate future coincidence. The progress is more sideways than forward; it constantly falls through the page into reverie, then brings reverie forward to fard the text, complicate its limits. I fall into the vellum’s ornamented ellipsis. Will is one of reading’s motions. And since this is so, and since I also experience reading as a posed receiving, a cognitive stance towards reception, combined with an ideal stillness of the body, I want to ask – what is the relation between passivity and will, within cognition? It is not oppositional, I think, but a fully implicated, mutual relation. Would it be correct to say that reading is a willed reception, when so much of its acute pleasure seems bound up in the release of purposiveness and instrumental cognition? In Adrent’s terms, reading poses unanswerable questions, ventures into inconspicuousness. It feels like a text’s strange will desires me. It’s up to me to receive, to be inhabited by this alterity. As I read, my self-consciousness is not only suspended, but temporarily abolished by the vertigo of another’s language. I am simply its conduit, its gutter. This is a pleasure. Hutchinson had translated the entire text while overseeing her children’s education in their school room, probably during the civil war; she describes, in her preface to Lord Anglesey, her murmuring the numbers of the metrical poem while embroidering. my French is imperfect enough that I can relish the extra opacity. My eye can wander more fancifully, the patterns it finds stray further than the sequence of narrated images, although these in themselves are vividly mobile: the cattle whose lust incites them to ford swollen rivers; the recumbent god of war swooning with pleasure; the rhythmic sparkling of the mass of everything – breezes, foliage, water. Just beneath this mobile shimmer, the phonemes of a name for a generative indeterminacy flicker. What Venus’ hymn continues to invoke in me is my fall into the luminous secrecy of reading. Phonemes might call to gods or commanders who do and don’t exist. That is, they appear in the text’s absences and densities as motile forces that abnegate their own necessity as they swerve. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading’s supple snare, I feel love. Without any direct relation to the French writer Georges Perec, born like Hesse in 1936, whose techniques of constraing indicated by an elision, the specific loss suffered by European Jews. La Disparition. The disappearance. Perec, a holocaust orphan, had in 1968 finished writing a novel without E’s. Sans eux. Without them. Mother, father, parents. Without assuming that this cipher encoded in the text isn’t anything but the iteration of the work of mourning, at the same time that this mourning is lived at the level of a general truncation of language – a set of avoidances dictated by history, not by a game of aesthetic affiliations. Without every finding a way to utter this absence other than by using it as a mould. “Sans II” is a perceiving device that functions without regard for the conventional antitheses of presence and absence, inside and outside, subject and world. The volute relationship of mould to casting actively inverts the prejudice for the mutually exclusive position of binaries, so that the edge, the surface of their contact, once occult, secretive, extroverts to enter a serial luminosity, where absence is not the opposite of presence, but its theater, its frame of appearing. Form – it’s because there are consequences. Melancholy is big contemplative utopia. It is a system that functions to pose a seemingly boundless cognitive space where transformation, never a neutral event, always a grievance or an astonishment, can claim potential. Transformation may include decay, multiplication, reversal, inflation or minification, fragmentation or annexation, plus all the Ovidian modalities. But it is not possible to calculate which, or in what sequence. Change is also inexperienced. The melancholic eye expects discomfort. Time repeatedly donates inexperience to cognition. Melancholy is a latent or paused anticipation of something necessarily unknowable, where the latency is not passive, but an experimental site for non-identity. The melancholics concern themselves with the structure of doubt, rather than the structure of belief, because doubt is inventive. Doubt complicates. Even repudiation is a doubling. In this sense, doubt is erotic, as is melancholic space. Doubt, eros, melancholy: affective ornaments. Seeing cleaves the thin air inwardly. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert burton outlines the internal structures of the soul, which is comprised of the inward senses – common sense, memory and phantasy. The system of these senses works as follows. “Their objects are not only things present, but they perceive the sensible species of things to come, past, absent.” Common sense is the moderator that discerns all differences. Memory receives all that the senses bring in. For Burton, phantasy is cognitive, not originary. It examines images perceived by common sense and newly recombines them. “In times of sleep” Burton says, “this faculty is free.” In Burton’s system of the soul, phantasy is the soul’s autonomy. Yet it is autonomous only in its recombinant function. The soul remains always interdependent with the senses. And when, as in melancholy, the soul is afflicted by the black bile of the body and the socius, by bitterness, doubt, grief, injustice and loss, phantasy is dangerously more free (however tied it is to memory and commonsense), since by such negation and variation, its agency is augmented. Resistance is a space in the soul made by the displaced recombination of political contingency. Resistance is the vulnerable utopia of inwardness. Melancholic skepticism admits vulnerability as the encompassing condition of extension and change. Without edge or frame, this unstable synthetic space that melancholy is intuits propositions about change, propositions that begin from the scattering and smashing and remixing of the knowledges of the body or the polis. Burton says of phantasy: “In melancholy men this faculty is most powerful and strong, and often hurts.” The soul is the site where the political and the affective exchange vulnerabilities. If it sees, it sees into that recombinant moment. Like a prosthesis, its autonomy is false and necessary. The soul is exuded by the body like an applied perfume. Whatever freedom is prosthetic. The agora in time became an indiscriminate container…..The fourth century Greek poet Eubolus observed that: “You will find everything sold together in the same place at Athens: figs, witnesses to summonses, bunches of grapes, turnips, pears, apples, givers of evidence, roses, medlars, porridge, honeycombs, chick-peas, law suits … allotment machines, irises, lamps, water clocks, laws, indictments.” – Lewis Mumford, The City in History I wanted the present to be an ideal library. Infinity, plenum, chaos, dust. I wanted it to be an agora – total availability of the entire thick history of linguistic conviviality and the potential to be completely lost in the strangeness of the civic description. In the city, law will not be separated out from food; clocks will turn against medlars; irises will be in with lamps. Thus the difficulty. What I am calling noise is the multiply layered sonic indeterminacy that is the average, fluctuating milieu of dailiness. Here noise does not necessarily pertain to amplitude and intensity, although it might. Using the word noise I want to obliquely approach the irregular and constant fabric of sounding that fluctuates through any given and situated present. Noise is and isn’t composed; the listener can isolate within its environment individual sounds of various origins, identifiable or not, but no intention or unity structures their overall combination even though that combination has been conditioned by various natural and social factors. Noise is the unwilled surplus produced by the temporal indetermination of conditions and practices in co-movement. Noise has an inchoate shape as weather does – we may measure it, but its movements extend beyond any identifiable cause. Noise exceeds its own identity. It is the extreme of difference. Noise is the non-knowledge of meaning, the by-product of economies. Noise is a confusion of figure and field. It presents no discernible figure of meaning. It’s not silence’s opposite, but an outside, mutating term. In a way it is the double of silence, with this difference: Silence’s indescribability is more often institutionally codified and mystified as value – whether spiritual, punitive or economic. Money, Justice and Gods buy silence. The objects of exchangeability and value can then appear as figure on silence’s supporting field, and exchangeability also has its correspondent, communicative sound-objects. From the perspective of these systems of value and meaning, noise belongs to poverty and the failure of value. Noise is pollutant, a sign of the wasteful expenditure of unused energy. Noise is inefficient. Like garbage, it has no meaning at the same time that it signifies an excess of signification; meaning become so dense and continuous that it transforms into field, having previously functioned as figure. In noise, meaning has de-coalesced. An unknowing expands within noise, but it feels convivial. Noise suspends itself: a thick and tactile curtain, a temporal fabric composed of tiny sub-cognitive movements that function below the spectrum of recognition and outside the range of rational signification, but not outside of time. Noise is the historicity of non-meaning. What an economy rejects, we call garbage; what it distributes, we call value. Both are kinds of waste. Pollution-behaviour ritualizes economic belief and behavioural systems. Non-contributing environmental traits and corporalities are expunged to an non-ethical outside. Disease, animals, foreigners, garbage, non-forming sexuality and related border states, once ejected, traditionally emphasize the structural identity of the centre. This has been the most basic gestural trope in the consolidation of authority and identity in the Western city. Sound too has entered this civic figuration trope. the legal categorization and treatment of some sound as pollution is a recent behaviour which can be traced to new regulatory protocols in the 19th century city, and the advent of noise by-laws: On the one hand, pedlars, hawkers, rag pickers, street musicians, prostitutes and other wanderers from the centralizing capitalist economy were silenced with new civic ordinances. On the other hand, mechanized factory din was confined to labouring class quarters. In the 1960s, the vocabulary of ecology entered the soundscape as a privative expression. The concept of noise pollution suggested that the city had a natural balance, a natural sonic state, and this balance would refer nostalgically to a previous stage or era of civic economy. If the 1960s were the beginning of global capital, the sonic “health” of the Western city would not reflect the movements and dislocations of people and resources, the escalating cycles of consumption and waste, the hoarding of profit. The active sonic traces of this new economy would be cast in terms of pollution, and the identities of Western cities would wishfully father themselves around the carefully preserved and mythologized artifacts of previous economies. The concept of sound pollution ironically functioned to camouflage the concentration of new capital. Examples might include echoes, squeaks and other sound qualities transmitted by vernacular stone or wood construction and paving, and the signifying sounds of animals, weather, clocks, bells, hunting horns, post-men’s whistles, handpumps, millwheels, tramcars and so forth. The project developed in response to the 1960s’ mounting discourse about “noise pollution” – a soundscape that could be characterized by the globally blanketing and nonspecific droning sounds of late capitalism – motors of airplanes, cars, air conditioners, lawnmowers and other similarly powered mass-produced tools and vehicles, all to be curtailed with noise by-laws and sound mitigation planning. “The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people. Only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them….” In The Human Condition, Arendt, following Aristotle, argues that polis is the exchange of speech, and arises anywhere and each time this free exchange takes place. In Arendt’s thinking, it is the beginner who is the guarantor of political freedom: the beginner, born into speech, speaking in the world, to other beginners. The human social beginnings – of birth, of speech – define the shared condition – natality, in Arendt’s coinage – and ensure that action reveals the improbably yet always renewing freedom inherent in collective life. Without speech, she argues, action would lose its subjects and become violence. The presence of subjects, beginners always, is antithetical to violence, because the discourse that inflects subjects also dismantles the tenure of authority. This necessary alignment of speech and action in the subject ensures that embodied political speech cannot be subordinated to a simplistically communicative and instrumental role, a means to an end or a violence, but carries with it always a revelatory, innovatory and transformational agency. Through speech, the citizens acts and freedom articulates its claim on subjects. The subject begins in the co-movement of speech. Dante reversed the values of the vernacular and the language of institutional tradition – governmental, economic and religious. This reversal opened to a recognition of the politically transformative agency of vernacular speech. He called grammar “secondary language” and the vernacular “illustrious,” claiming for it the aesthetic and political position conventionally reserved for Latin, the hierarchically structured grammar of authority. Part of his substantiation for this reversal of value was aesthetic; he observed that Provençal lyric poets sang in the vernacular in royal courts, and that lyric songs, canzone, are the most widely copied, transmitted and reproduced. Another part of his revalorization was political in the popular sense; all people, of any class or gender, speak and sing and seize a vernacular; at any point in history, a received potentiality of living language has situated us as human. For Dante, the vernacular of lyric, whose “sweet new style” was turned from the incipiently wandering language of women and of exile by the Stil Nova poets, was a matrix of potential resistance, radical mobility, and human dignity. Written during Dante’s own exile from Florence, De Vulgare Eloquentia seeks to consolidate a vision of a unified national language by claiming an exilic vernacular as the exemplary speech of the citizen. In this sense, it is a deeply conservative text, a precursor to the imposition of standardized national languages carried out much later by European colonial regimes throughout the world, through control of education, print media, health and healing practices and other quotidian know-how. At the same time, De Vulgare Eloquentia’s textual radicality unties its own political will, revealing in its ambivalence how vernacular counter-language is at the core of collective resistance and political self-invention. Now language and money circulate using the same medium, a grammar which is digital, horizontal and magnetic, and politically determined. Maybe all language will be eventually administrated as an institutional money: a contained and centrally monitored instrumental value. On the other hand, the digitization of value could mean that language in its vernacular expression can infiltrate and deform capital’s production and limitation of social power. If it is to be the latter, then vernacular language’s magnetism will reorient the polis. In Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, María Rosa Menocal discusses the origin of troubadour lyric in pre-1492 Anadalusia, where for eight centuries Christians, Jews and Moslems lived an intensely hybrid peace. The popular song-form of early medieval al Andalus was called the muwashshashat. These multi-lingual songs enacted lovers’ dialogues, using rhyme, a device never before used in Arabic, Hebrew or Latin. Each song included a kharja, or refrain, composed in a vernacular that, until recently was not recognized as such, but was assumed to be a nonsensical and musical gibberish, not a semantic contribution to the verbal meaning of the poem. This kharja has now been recognized, according to Menocal, as a transcription of the oral dialect spoken commonly by women, Mozarabic. So the muwashshahat is a diglossic, high/ low, bastard, and doubly sexed song form, and is now hypothesized to be the mother of Troubadour and Provençal lyric song, with its rhyming motifs, conversational structure and presentation of the love dynamic as an oral exchange between sexes, not a singular state to be represented in a unified language. In contrast to the extremely rich translation culture surrounding medieval Arabic and Hebrew philosophical, scientific and other high-culture textual forms, muwashshahat were not translated; there is little material evidence to prove the routes of transmission from the Iberian peninsula, across the Pyrenees mountains through the Languedoc region, the centre of the great heretical counter- tradition of the Albigensians and Cathars, and from there, into Provence. But the muwashshahat were popularly sung in the common speech, so their formal traits were mobile, adaptive, and, Menocal posits, foundational to the vernacular lyric tradition of late-medieval Southern Europe. This moving vernacular tradition was also the generator of that other traveling form, the sonnet, and has become the contemporary western lyric poem in just these few centuries. In his 1969 book Indo-European Language and Society, French linguist Émile Benveniste studied, as he explains in his introduction, “the formation and organization of the vocabulary of institutions,” where “institution is here understood in a wider sense: it includes not only the institutions proper, such as justice, government, religion, but also less obvious ones which are found in various techniques, ways of life, social relationships and the processes of speech and thought.” His method was to meticulously reconstruct a shifting social context around a chosen word and its historical variations. Turning to the very earliest textual instances of a given term, he traced the minute irregularities and transformations in recorded usage, in this way revealing obscured or suppressed divergencies and correspondences in institutional circulations of meaning across time. This method is strongly apparent in the work of Foucault and Derrida, but here I am less interested in the Benvenistian method as a precursor to post-structuralism than I am in observing the specific paths of his research into the thicket of concepts that continue to structure our institutional experience. Benveniste was not engaged in a search for origin as a fixed or authorizing value; rather, he charted the applications are supported by changing institutional structures which next preserve the altered linguistic meaning, often in contradiction to the forgotten or diverging history of a given concept. In rendering these transformations or elisions legible, Benveniste’s linguistic fieldwork makes possible a freshened, altered perception of those specialized, but seemingly transparent, concepts that continue to condition our collective experience. Like Dante, Benveniste placed language, in its profoundly social and collective dimensions, at the fundament of human experience. For each, language is man’s nature, not a secondary tool or acquired artifice. In this foundational sense, for Benveniste institutions are integral to and inseparable from human history and becoming, and a deep analysis of linguistic history and change can’t proceed apart from an analysis of institutions. Perhaps an engagement with the historical traces of lexical differentiation, and more specifically with the regulatory work performed by institutions upon linguistic signification, can begin to loosen the mythic hold of dualism, for example, as a seemingly self-evident regulating structure in almost every institutional formation. Thinking archaeologically into lexical counter-histories as Benveniste does may offer the ideological clearings necessary for an informed critique and future disengagement of the fixed and fixing dualisms of signifying institutions. In Indo-European Language and Society, Benveniste analyzes the Latin words “Civis” and “Domus,” finding that the earliest written uses of these terms did not pertain to concepts of bordered and material spatial limitation, and that both civis and domus related to immaterial concepts of collective reciprocity. “The authentic sense of civis is not ‘citizen,’ as it is traditionally translated, but ‘fellow-citizen’,” he specifies: “A number of ancient uses show the sense of reciprocity which is inherent in civis, and which alone accounts for civitas as a collective notion.” In a similar dematerialization of meaning, Domus denotes the “house in its social and moral aspects, and not as a construction.” He aligns the Latin domus with the Greek oikos, which also indicated a community of companionship and quotidian participation: the sharing of food, worship; the “works of peace” in Aristotle’s words, not a built architecture, defined the household. These everyday operations were at the centre of a scaled series of collective concepts, which progressed outwards from the household to the polis. The domus was that group – related, perhaps, not necessarily by blood but, more specifically, by shared everyday operations – which used the same door as a point of arrival and departure. Both domus and civis correspond to the specific milieu of a social reciprocity. The difference between them is not qualitative or oppositional, but is one of scale. No sense of private or public, in the way we now understand these terms in relation to ownership or to interiority and exteriority, appends itself to either. Literature and poetry oblige us to define orality. What they make apparent is that orality isn’t and never has been the opposite of the written, the living voice opposed to the dead letter. Which is what the world continues to believe: this dualism of the sign and of occidental thought. I call poetics the work that uncovers the inanity of this model, its cultural and historical character which passes for nature. Poetry is a critique of the sign. Poetry shows us that rhythm and prosody are the basis of the ways to signify, the material of the subject, the subject who makes in language that which has never yet been made, and which becomes the path from one voice to another voice. In Benveniste’s 1951 essay “The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression,” he follows a philosophical transformation in the use of the word rhythmos, from the work of Democritus to Plato. Benveniste insistently disarticulated rhythm from its now customary etymologies, which connect the word to the natural recurrent movement of waves. In pre-Platonic usage, he summarizes, “The citations suffice amply to establish: (I) that rhythmos never meant rhythm from the earliest use down to the Attic period; (2) that it was never applied to a regular movement of the waves; (3) that its constant meaning is ‘distinctive form, proportioned figure, arrangement, disposition’ in conditions of use that are otherwise extremely varied.” He goes on to establish that, “We can now understand how rhythmos, meaning literally ‘the particular manner of flowing’, could have been the most proper term for describing ‘dispositions’ or ‘configurations”without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement that is always subject to change. The choice of a derivative of rein for explaining this specific modality of the ‘form’ of things is characteristic of a philosophy which inspired it; it is a representation of the universe in which the particular configurations of moving are defined as fluctuations.” Benveniste is clear that this moving pertains to a human making or a set of human dispositions, such as a manner of gathering the folds of a cloak, or the arbitrary shaping of a written character, not to an interpretation of nature. In his thinking, rhythm is historical, not natural. The poem refuses any assuaging or redemptive role, but claims for its reader, who is also its subject, the incommensurable work of refusal as continuity, where this continuity lives in the vernacular. It is worth pointing out here that a vernacular is not what other, supposedly more demotic folks speak. That definition results from Herder’s museology of national origins. Rather, a vernacular loosely gathers whatever singular words and cadences move a given situation, a given meeting, as it is being lived by its speakers. Characterized not by lexical economy and simplicity or limitation, as in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s formulation, nor by a misappropriation of tradition or heritage as redemptive closure, but by wit, excess, plasticity, admixture, surge, caesura, the wildness of a newly turned metaphor, polylinguality and inappropriateness, the vernacular is the name for the native complexity of each beginner as she quickens. If, in the Greek polis and in the Roman city, citizenship was limited to male speakers of the master-language, in a pointed elimination of women, beasts and barbarous speakers from a linguistically bordered polity, her domus, her civis, the commodious, illustrious and exilic vernacular, will shelter her for the rhythmic duration of a refusal. And the poem, with its provisional distributions and tentative relationships, its chaotic caesura, temporarily gathers a received and spoken reciprocity, where the I and the you create one another for the pleasure of a shapely co-recognition. To maintain this urgent errancy, a disposition that is at the same time ethical and aesthetic, the vernacular needs the poem; where they confer, a citizen, beginning again and again with the pandemonium at hand in the present, rhythmically invents her domus: Illustriously useless poesis. I sat evaluating myself. I decided to lie down. Life is not a struggle. It’s a wiggle. It will never be the same. I will never bee the same. You came. We loved. You left. I will survive until I survive. And one day I will find myself alive again. And another day another’s path will run parallel to mine for a while. And yet another day you will return, and I will see It is not the same. I shall miss loving you. I shall miss the Comfort of your embrace. I shall miss the Lineliness of waiting for your calls that never came. I shall miss the Joy of our comings, and Pain of your goings. and, after a time, I shall miss missing loving you. It is a risk to love. What if it doesn’t work out? Ah, but what if it does?