Seeking a Sentence
Pierre Alferi’s work represents one of many parallels between French poetry and North American language-centered writing in the 1970s and 1980s, in part due to their shared influence by French theorists like Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. Alferi began publishing as a philosopher before turning to poetry and cinema, developing what he terms a cinépoésie. His essay “Seeking the Sentence,” drawn from his collection Chercher une phrase (1991), argues for the poetic possibilities of the sentence through a sequence of cinematic frames to construct a montage of discursive perspectives. The essay explores three interrelated possibilities of the sentence for verbal art: its active and improvisatory form, its rhythmic character, and its relation to objects, which it both represents and becomes. Stemming from the French tradition of aphoristic poetry after Lautréamont’s Poésies, Alferi’s writing “about writing” draws on philosophical debates from Plato’s Phaedrus to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. His notion of the sentence may be compared to the device of the “New Sentence,” theorized by Ron Silliman, a widely shared formal strategy of Language writing. In his contribution, French philosophical inquiry into the nature of language and creative expression coincide in a central demonstration of poetics as a genre of writing.
1. Language
ESTABLISHING
Literature is made of sentences presented for what they are. Fiction clearly shows how sentences, by saying something, do something. Firstly each sentence returns to its own possibility: a singular past—experience, thought, language—which is invented in the sense that it cannot be found elsewhere. Each sentence is clearly presented as a gesture or an act: a summoning of its past through wording. Literature, then, puts a theory of the sentence into practice. Yet it does not need to formulate this theory distinctly. Literature forms new sentences which contain their own past; these sentences operate solely upon what they themselves are saying. Producing a sentence and producing its origin are confounded in the act of wording. This singular gesture is that of establishing. Sentences in literature are not descriptive; they are establishing.
The establishing gesture takes the form of a return to the past. But, here, retrospection is not laying a foundation; the origin it attains is not a foundation. A foundation is discovered retrospectively in the course of an examination. A foundation is laid because something happened to be there already, independent of the examination and its retrospective movement. The foundation is an absolute anterior, an object of detached contemplation and retrospective judgment. (Philosophy made a foundation of origin: it underlined the “forever already.”) Literature invents the sentence’s past. Origin is not separate from literary work, whose retrospective movement constructs and fashions it. It is a projected anterior; it is neither the object of contemplation or judgment, nor is it the object of a question or response; it is the object of an establishing. (Literature makes a forever contemporary anecdote of origin: it underlines the “first time.”) In literature, retrospection is in itself active, establishing; its object is invented by being pushed into the past; its object is produced by being projected backwards. In literature, the origin is merely the establishing gesture, the very movement of invention in all its forms. And since this movement is retrospective, the forms of origin are merely the forms of retrospection.
RETURN
Literature projects an origin in language first. There is nothing nearer than the mother tongue. Its proximity is the marker of all proximity. In language, literature does not project just any origin. Even when its source lies in such and such an experience or thought, origin is experienced through the proximity of the language. Forms of retrospection can be declined into a series of gestures—a wide variety of gestures that retroject experiences or thoughts, thereby saying what they are making. And these gestures form the open ensemble of the sentences of literature: establishing phrases, fashioning an origin. But all these forms of retrospection have something in common, a minimal form is repeated: the form of a return to language.
DISTANCING
Returning to the mother tongue—to one’s native language—is being faithful to it. And yet, with this return, language is not found any nearer than it was—it was the nearest. Not only is approximation found to be impossible here, but fidelity—if that means being restricted to this unequalled proximity, to be confined by it—would be unbearable. What stands for return in this intolerable proximity is but that movement toward language which pushes it back into the past: a setting for return where there was not the slightest distance. So, in effect, retrospection is active—a gesture that makes language step back. Literature begins when an adherence to the mother tongue, its immanence, is warded off. This detachment is authorized by a non-subjective sentiment, the matter of which is a quality of the language: that strange quality of pastness which only the nearest can possess. (The “sweetness of the language,” when it appears ever so remotely stranger to itself, is also its clarity.) Hearing texts giving themselves an origin in language, maintaining its distance, one experiences the sentiment of a pure past. There alone fidelity is possible, for it is by distancing language that one can give it a voice. (Archaisms, in literature, have the inverse effect from what one expects.) This voice is a literary idiom, language heard as echo. Making sentences in this language is making language step back. Making sentences in this language which is not a language, but a certain retrospective take on language, is inventing sentences.
“ORIGIN”
Literature reduces its origins to the retrospective forms of an establishment. But does it answer to a “question of origin”? If radical responses are amiss, it is because origin is language in general: proximity unequalled, yet an intangible figure of proximity. The question dries up on its own then: literature dissolves origin in the invention of each singular sentence, resolves the question—without responding to it—in the operation of the sentence. (Questions of origin are traps.)
2. Rhythm
THE SENTENCE
The literary object is the sentence. Sentences do not share a common form, and yet, in each sentence, one can recognize the sentence. Each sentence is, firstly, the operation that each new sentence—to be invented—had to carry out on itself: namely, the action of phrasing. Each sentence was worded—invented, before being used—used over. The sentence is that moment when a new sentence is formed, the emergence of its singularity. (As an operation, the sentence decides for itself the relations it entertains with its linguistic, pragmatic, literary context.) Since literature invents sentences, it takes place in the sentence. Yet the sentence is not a universal entity. There is more to say about “the sentence” than about common language’s use and usury of sentences; there is less to say about it than about new, particular sentences. Talking about the sentence is not meant to describe a common form, but to show how one phrases in order to invent sentences.
SYNTAX
Every sentence is musical. Yet the imitation of sound music is always secondary. (Compared to strictly musical possibilities, assonance remains a relatively poor play on timbre, accentuation a play relatively poor on pitch, prosody a play relatively poor on rhythm.) The most obvious musical forms are not the most decisive: the sound music of the sentence can escape the blandness of ornamentation only by accompanying its intrinsic music, giving itself up to it. This merges in a rhythm which is essentially mute. Syntax itself is this rhythm. It is a cadenced order, a sequential hierarchy. The grammatical construction of the sentence is obviously rhythmical—it segments by giving value to each of its parts. But precise relations also exist from one term to another above and beyond the limits of the parts of the sentence and without reference to their grammatical organization: echo, nuance, opposition, trope, a relation of one term to an other whose absence is made known or to its own absence which is made known elsewhere, etc. Often independent of the construction, these sense relations nevertheless form rhythmical structures—they make the line of the sentence oscillate and define the amplitude of its vibrations. Hence they are syntactical though not by nature grammatical. (Between constant semantic relations studied by lexicography and variable semantic structures studied by rhetoric and stylistics, the break takes place at the sentence.) The sentence establishes a rhythm proper to itself, but one which cannot be reduced to its construction: a syntax richer than its grammar. All that is balancing, speed, or syncope concerns the syntax. In this sense, syntax is much more than the sentence’s skeleton, it is its circulatory system: it is what is rhythmical in meaning.
ENJAMBMENT
To experience rhythm, and to act upon it, syntax must be held at a distance. Everyday language is submerged in the element of syntax, it lets itself be lulled by its rhythm; it is enough that it re-employ the forms of sentences gone by. Whereas in poetry, enjambment is the sound index of a syntactical crisis necessary to the invention of sentences. (The backward step of the language produces a “musical sentiment.”) This is why poetry is the critical site of the invention of sentences: line and prosody, non-grammatical unity and rhythm, put syntax in a crisis. But poetry can get along without sonorous accompaniment or metric musicality: enjambment alone is essential to it. And the syntactical crisis of which it is the clearest index can also take place, more discreetly, in prose, which is to say in a purely syntactical rhythmic setting. (In poetry as in prose, academicism is first betrayed by a snoring syntax.) Literature can be defined by the uneasiness of its syntax without resorting to mixed genres or confounding it with their respective practices.
FORCE
The sentence sets a force into rhythm. Neither the origin nor the nature of this force is of interest to literature. This force is of interest only to the extent that it is oriented toward a proffering. It is not an issue of this or that desire, nor does it let itself be determined by “objects of desire”—provoking conditions, attaining things or beings. It is not even an issue of meaning, it does not yet mean to say anything. In order to mean to say something, one must dispose of the sentence where this will is articulated, where this thing is named. (There is no “mean-to-say” until afterwards.) The force engaged in the forming of a sentence is but the élan of proffering.
MEASURE
The sentence stages this élan, or spirited performance; the performance is rhythmed. But it does not represent the performance, does not imitate it, for a performance cannot be represented. (Expression always fails.) The performance is measured by the sentence. By nature the performance is excessive, outlandish. Its immeasurability consists in its indetermination. Infinite, pure affirmation—the performance borders on vacuity: that of a desire to speak which is insatiable, or of an utterance that can say nothing, and is untenable. The spirited performance then falls from its own weight into measure. The measure is its very falling; it is not an exterior constraint, but the logical form in which the performance exhibits its own excess, the sequence that alone can deploy its paradox. Logical form does not set itself up against the performance’s outlandish excess; it measures its immoderation. (To maintain the outlandishness as an autonomous moment is to go from the inarticulate to disarticulated, which is to say toward gibberish.) And so each sentence constitutes an internal articulation of the performance. In its own manner each sentence affirms it, explains it, stops it, sets it into motion again. The sentence takes place when the spirited performance of proffering—its immoderation and its falling—becomes pulsation, or when a rhythmical disposition carries an affirmation. Thus in establishing measure, each sentence becomes its own unit of measure.
TONE
Sentences are distinguished above all by their rhythmical disposition, or by measure and its various aspects. In falling, the spirited performance of proffering first takes on a certain fold—it is precipitated into a curve or contour. Each curve gives the tone, which may correspond to a register of rhetorical invention. In irony, the performance is inversed, in ellipsis it is interrupted, in paradox it diverges, in correction it starts over, in concession it bends, etc. In no manner can such forms subsist outside of the sentence, nor can they be composed before it. Nevertheless, they are not yet forms of sentences. They are the forms which the growing sentence projects retrospectively onto the very performance of proffering. The sentence thus presupposes a retrospective invention of the curve or the tone. It imposes such and such curve on the performance, meanwhile projecting it into the past as an origin of the sentence. So the singularity of each sentence then happens in a retrospective establishing.
MEANING
Such an establishing also commands other aspects of the sentence’s measure. By means of a retrospective gesture it precipitates the spirited performance of proffering into a given concrete syntactical form. The sentence retrospectively positions the source of the proffering through forms of interlocution: first-person narration or the impersonal report, dialogue, free indirect style, etc. The sentence retrospectively positions the finality of the proffering through forms of eloquence: the role reserved for its addressee, an appeal to emotion, approbation, or their rejection, the evocation of the presence of things and the effect of reality, or irreality, etc. Finally, the sentence retrospectively positions the meaning it attempts to produce—through rhythmical relations it establishes phrase by phrase in its lexicon and through the rhythmical arrangement of all of the preceding elements: a curve or a tone, a source of proffering positioned here or there, an explicit finality. (In rhythm, the identity of form and content is a concrete given: the meaning of a sentence is the global effect of its rhythm.) What these sentences have in common is being presupposed by the sentences and at the same time resulting from them; this is why they must be the product of a retrospection. The sentence takes on body or meaning in a retrospective relationship to the indeterminate force that animates it.
The sentence projects its origin at the performance of proffering. It retrospectively attributes a measure to this performance; it thereby establishes a singular rhythmical disposition—its own syntactical form. But, before even taking form, doesn’t each sentence have an author whose subject matter it will serve? The idea of an enunciating subject, the idea of a desire matured by objects, and the very idea of something to say are secondary effects of the sentence, of its retrospective establishing; they are formed after the fact. The illusion that this subject, this desire and this meaning-to-say exist before the sentence is but the passively contemplated deformed image of the first active retrospection. That which seems to determine the sentence from the exterior is part of the sentence. The establishing of the sentence is the sentence.
3. Things
EXPERIENCE
The sentence sets things to rhythm. It is an experience. All that one calls “experience” presupposes succession and hierarchy—which is to say rhythm and syntax. To have an experience, to lead it to its conclusion, is to say it. The sentence furnishes the syntactical form which defines the experience; it then makes the experience, retrospectively, by projecting it into a forever present past. (Experience is a contemporaneous origin, a form of retrospection.) By inventing the rhythm of things, the sentence as experience recovers things.
THE BEAT
An experience begins with the apparition of a thing and the first usage of a word. In the apparition’s simplest form, a thing falls. Before being installed, objectified in a representation, given a usage, a thing falls before one’s eyes, it makes sense, it takes place, it lands. Its “first time” was unforeseeable, dependent upon the chance of an encounter. The contingency or grace of its apparition does not indicate a far-off or invisible provenance. It is rather the mark of that which comes to its own site without a trace of provenance: of a thing which is not yet an object, given before being presented. In the simplest relation between a word and a thing, the word names the thing. Before being associated to an image, and to seal the closure of a representation, it is enough that the word refer to the thing, indicate the thing in its own site. Reference is a link both higher-strung and stronger than that of a representation to a represented object: it simply hangs the word on the thing, without the violence or precarity of an appropriation. Reference takes place—one can neither reenforce it nor compromise it. (Literature no more alters reference than it does things; it enacts it.)
THE CELL
Reference and apparition fit together. Two movements are measured one to the other and thus constitute a rhythmical cell: that of a thing coming to the encounter, that of a word pointing to it. And the simplest forms of experience leave the thing intact, because, for us, the thing itself is nothing other than the beat between apparition and reference. (In its intimate beat, experience gives no clue of the “inadequation” of language, any more than its “adequation.” The beat is there simply because each and every thing has several names as each and every word has several referents.) But, given over to the routine of perception, this elementary pulsation makes itself imperceptible. The apparition sets itself into a grounded presence: the thing becomes the subject of a representation. Reference is encumbered with psychology: the word is tied to images.
ANIMATION
Only a sentence can maintain the beat of a thing. The performance of proffering pulls words and their references into its curve; they no longer simply refer to things, they also call on each other. Each minimal rhythmical cell then finds itself caught in a play of contrasts, anticipations, reminders. These internal relations which make the sentence’s rhythm do not unhook the word from the thing, they do not hamper reference. (Literature’s sentences are overlays on the referential graph: they do not modify points but they trace out rhythmical lines with some of them.) Nevertheless, the syntactical rhythm, while putting reference into play, imposes a sufficient tension upon it to raise things slightly—things take off ever so slightly from their site, they too are carried away. The tranquil presence in which they were installed—object of a certainty which leads to forgetting the contingency of their apparition—this presence is temporarily suspended. Syntax reanimates elementary rhythmical cells. The sentence makes reference scintillate: it creates a hovering in things. (Language’s transport of things is not a metaphor.) But this weightlessness lasts only as long as the duration of the sentence. Reference assures the hanging of words onto things in their own sites. Slightly raised, things can only fall back down, thus regaining the calm grounds upon which habitual perception recognizes them. The sentence will have been for them the occasion of a brief leap.
The fall of things is orchestrated by the sentence. Having made reference scintillate, having raised things, the sentence concludes by letting them settle back down again, offer themselves as if for the first time. The more the sentence pulls on the thread of reference, the more its rhythm distances itself from that of habitual perception, and the more things appear in their contingency. Habitual perception can reclaim its right—the detour it imposes was for an instant short-circuited. The sentence indicates the path of a return to things themselves—not through imitation but through a form of abandon. To do this, it need not even describe experience: it produces it. For, by creating a hovering in things, the sentence’s rhythm fixes in its logical time the conditions of a simple apparition, and it lets the sentence have the last word, the fall. (The neutrality of a report is less faithful than the deviation of a poem.) In this manner literature’s sentences indicate—above and beyond rhetorical sites—the unique site where things fall. Literature puts things back together again; things in literature beat their own measure.
THE “PAST”
The sentence invents an experience. It retrospectively projects a minimal rhythmical cell into each thing; the sentence maintains its beat by integrating it into a stable rhythmical form where the thing does not cease falling, inexorably contingent. This is an establishing. But don’t sentences serve to describe what is known, to evoke past experiences? The same illusion is used to confound, after the fact, reference and imitation, things and objects equal to themselves, sentences and descriptions. After the fact, everything happens as if, in the sentence, an experience already spent has been stated. The sentence imposes a form upon an experience that knew no other form; and, for this very reason, form seems to be imposed beforehand upon the sentence that invents it. (The claim uttered in the sentence by an experience nevertheless impossible before the sentence exists, is the source of elegiac sentiment.) But experience can only happen in a sentence: the sentence imposes itself as experience, as the only form capable of containing its own past.
—Translated by Joseph Simas
PUBLICATION: Knowledge (1998), 10:1–9.
KEYWORDS: French poetics; language; philosophy; method.
LINKS: Lydia Davis, “Coolidge’s Mine” (PJ 3); Françoise de Laroque, “What Is the Sex of the Poets?” (PJ 4); Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “I(s)” (Guide; PJ 9); Emmanuel Hocquard, from The Cape of Good Hope (PJ 8); Bob Perelman, “Plotless Prose” (PJ 1); Peter Seaton, “An Example from the Literature” (Guide; PJ 6); Lytle Shaw, “Language Acquisition as Poetics: Notes on Recent Educational Writing” (PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “The XYZ of Reading: Negativity (And)” (PJ 6).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Guillaume d’Ockham le singulier (Paris: Minuit, 1989); Chercher une phrase (Paris: Bourgois, 1991); Des Enfants et des monstres (Paris: P.O.L., 2004); Les Allures naturelles (Paris: P.O.L., 1991); Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif (Paris: P.O.L., 1992); Fmn (Paris: P.O.L., 1993); Kub Or (Paris: P.O.L., 1994); Natural Gaits, trans. Cole Swenson (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1995); Personal Pong, with Jacques Julien (Sète, France: Villa Saint Clair, 1996); Personal Pong, trans. Kevin Noland (Cambridge: Equipage, 1997); Handicap (Lyon: Rroz, 1997); Sentimentale Journée (Paris: P.O.L., 1998); Le Cinéma des familles (Paris: P.O.L., 1999); Petit Petit (Paris: rup et rud, 2001); Cinépoèmes et films parlants (Paris: Laboratoire d’Aubervilliers, 2003); L’Inconnu (Quimper, France: Le Quartier, 2004); La Voie des airs (Paris: P.O.L., 2004); Oxo, trans. Cole Swenson (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 2004); Intime (Paris: Inventaire/ Invention, 2005); Les Jumelles (Paris: P.O.L., 2009).