A return to form in transcendence of function
The subjective grammatical implications free the work of the shackles of representation, of objective meaning. Through removing its grammar, poetry can restore its materiality, freeing it from any signification save from that of its pure relation to the subject. It is my belief that through non-signification and a removal of grammatical elements, Suprematism becomes a visual embodiment of Jakobson’s conception of poetry.
Jakobson further explores this conception of Poetry in his essay “the grammar of poetry and the poetry of grammar,” wherein Roman Jakobson continues the work of his linguistic forbearers, carrying them on into the world of poet analysis. In the essay, he starts by confirming Franz Boas’ point that there are “two classes of expressed concepts” in language: “material and relational.” When this material is lexical, the relationality is grammatical. This makes up the “objective structural dichotomy” of language, as boas had noted. Grammar, to this extent, reflects “not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns,” according to Sapir.
Jakobson goes on to make an all-important observation: Without changing the lexical material, and only shifting the grammar, you allow for a multitude of subjective understandings. To define these subjectivities, Jakobson turns to bentham, who wrote about them as “linguistic fictions” that should not be “‘mistaken for realities’ nor ascribed to the creative fancy of linguists.”
Jakobson, with much creative fancy, then notes that the problem of this “linguistic fiction,” conflicts with grammar’s “indispensable, mandatory role” within the language’s “objective structural dichotomy,” raising a few key concerns. Primary of which, concerns about a “pressure” grammatical patterns put on science and other disciplines that rely on objective “realities” Bentham says grammatical structures should “not be mistaken for.” That is to say, the subjectivity of meaning brings into question Boas’s “obligatory” nature of Grammar. For while grammar is “obligatory” in its “objective, structural” relationship with vocabulary, so too is its subjective understanding with vocabulary’s apparent objectivity.
Herein Jakobson makes his fundamental point: In light of this discrepancy, the “domain of verbal activities” is fully realized “in fiction, in verbal art.” Grammatical concepts “find their widest applications in poetry.” Indeed, near the end of his essay, Jakobson notes that his analysis is simply the deconstructed experience of the phenomenon of reading poetry itself. Jakobson quotes Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Worf in his note that the reader of poetry “Feels instinctively the poetic effect and the semantic load of these grammatical appliances ‘without the slightest attempt at conscious analysis.’” When reading poetry, we unconsciously sacrifice our objective understanding of language through grammar, gaining instead an understanding of poetic grammar and the plurality of it’s subjective meanings.
