Seven Theses on“the Emotional Life of Words”

Daniel Barbiero
September 2021

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not “say” as by what it “says”? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors…?

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from Signs

In the essay “Marvelous versus Mystery,” André Breton articulates what could stand as the definitive statement of Surrealist verbal poetics when he declares that:

The emotional life of words, far from being simply contingent on their meanings, predisposes them to be drawn to one another and to make a greater impact than meaning alone, but only if they are brought together according to secret affinities that let them combine in all kinds of new ways.

In the context of the essay, Breton’s declaration is an assertion of the poetic value of language in the face of what he felt was its degradation when language is taken to be no more than a medium for the conveyance of information. Breton instead envisioned a “new language” that would “be as different as possible from ordinary language,” a language that would draw attention to the “emotional value of words” and away from their capacity to indicate facts and hence their potential reduction to the banal reporting of states of affairs in the external world. Breton’s is an intriguing suggestion pregnant with implications not only for the practice of poetry, from which his illustrative examples derive and to which his suggestions appear to be directed, but for an understanding of the relationship of language to the language user more generally, and for what those implications might tell us of how language actually means for its users. Breton’s essay, which not uncharacteristically is more impressionistic than analytical, does not for the most part tease out these implications or make explicit the assumptions that serve as their conditions for possibility. The following handful of theses are an attempt to begin doing just that, and to explore some of those possibilities as well.

Thesis No. 1: The “emotional life of words” is a function of language as idiolectical

Language is a public thing. Languages “belong to” and are the expressions of the groups that use them. The meanings of words, and the proper way to use them, are the more-or-less stable products of the multiple intentions and uses, in the context of intragroup communication, of a community of language users. Consequently, a language is intelligible to the members of one of these groups, or language communities; its grammar is understood and its and meanings generally agreed-upon and accepted by users within the group. This public aspect or dimension of language is language as koiné, as something standard and held in common by a group.

What Breton’s statement seems to allude to is the well-known phenomenon of language’s carrying, in addition to its public meaning, meanings and/or associations particular to individual language users. Not all language users within a language community grasp meaning in exactly the same way; users assimilate language within the context of their own personal histories and encounters with other language users. The finer-grained any one language user’s understanding of meaning, the more likely that understanding will carry shadings and nuances particular to that user alone. These shadings and nuances are a matter of how words represent rather than what they represent—their senses, or the aspects under which they represent their referents, which can be expected to vary within individual members of a language community. Language, in other words, has an idiolectical dimension to it. Because language as the collective property of a language community has in the end to be assimilated by individual speakers within that community, each with his or her own experiences, competences, limitations, exposures to others within the language community and so forth, language is, at the level of the individual, an idiolectical thing.

And one of the first places we might expect to find language’s “secret,” and presumably highly individuated, affinities would be in its idiolectical dimension.

Thesis No. 2: Idiolectical variation is more than semantic variation

At the level of an individual’s idiolect, semantic meaning—the definition of a word as understood by that individual—is in its details likely to be particular to that individual. Beyond the word’s semantic or referential meaning, though, it will likely carry associations reflecting the situations in which the language user encountered the word. Individual language users’ idiolects are made up of more than just variations on semantics; they are made up as well of highly personal associations incidental to, and yet permeative of, language and which overflow its narrow use as a communicative tool. These associations may connect words or other language units with images, colors, sounds, memories, scents, and so on, to form a multimodal web of significance. (What I am describing here is akin to synaesthesia, and like synaesthesia, may not be universally present among individuals in any given group of people. Perhaps this is one point at which poets and non-poets diverge.)

The “emotional life of language” that Breton celebrates, then, is to be found here, in the extra-semantic, idiolectic associations that language carries for the individual language user. Thus idiolectical variation can be found not only in what words mean, but in how they mean–in the broadest sense of meaning.

Thesis No. 3: Idiolectical association is a form of meaning, too

Idiolectical associations aren’t meanings in the semantic sense, but instead overflow semantic meanings. Nevertheless, idiolectic associations are a kind of meaning, one analogous to, but different from, semantic meaning. What they constitute is a different layer or dimension of meaning in addition to, and over and above, semantic meaning—a meaning that is a function of significance rather than reference or indication. If the measure of semantic meaning is something like the accuracy or reasonably approximate adequacy of the fit between language and the world outside of language, the measure of the meaning of significance is something else. Rather than indicating how things are in the world “outside” of us and independent of us, its focus is more reflexive, more “inwardly” directed. (The spatiallly-derived metaphors of inside and outside aren’t entirely satisfactory, given the mutual dependence and mutual projection of meanings binding oneself and the world, but when kept in mind as being metaphors of convenience, they do give a sense of the contrast between these two types of meaning.)

More accurate, perhaps, would be to say that, through the idiolectical associations words and other language units carry for their individual users, meaning manifests itself as significance or alternately, that significance is the meaning words and other language units take on as they show up for us in relation to the things with which we are concerned. This relational aspect of significance is essential; significance is always significance for someone, a specific person with specific beliefs and desires, a given history and an understanding of him- or herself within his or her world. This type of meaning, in other words, is one of meaningfulness and hence—at least potentially—of affective weight rather than of descriptive or constative adequacy.

Within this expansive notion of meaning, words’ meanings consist not only in what they represent, as collectively and individually understood by the member of a language community, but in the weight of associations, affective and otherwise, they carry for individual language users within that community. What Breton calls their “emotional lives,” in other words, are part of their meaning for those who use them.

Thesis No. 4: Idiolectical associations are alogical

Words or other language units may be drawn to each other—find themselves linked to each other—on the basis of their closeness within the web of a language user’s idiolectical correspondences rather than their semantic adjacency or grammatical function. Such linkages would defy any logic but their own and would appear to be arbitrary; the logic driving the resulting affinities would in fact appear to be secret, as Breton asserts.

Indeed, how these alogical associations are formed is something we may never know; it is a process that may take place at a level best described as unconscious. Pace Breton, this process presumably is not the product of, or embedded in, “the” unconscious of Freudian speculation, but rather is unconscious in the simple sense of being or taking place in such a way that one is unaware of its being or taking place.

Thesis No. 5: Some of words’ “secret affinities” may be based on their aesthetic properties

So far I’ve suggested that idiolectical associations specific to individuals within a language community are a source of non- or extra-semantic meanings carried by words or language units, and that these associations are capable of linking words or language units in non-logical, “poetic” ways. Here I want to suggest that, as demonstrated by some kinds of typographical, sound and asemic poetry, affinities can be drawn between words and language units (or, in the case of asemic poetry, quasi-language units, although the principle remains the same), on the basis of their aesthetic qualities: their shapes or sounds (which can be spoken or simply heard with one’s inner voice, when reading silently). The sheer musicality of words may draw them together regardless of their senses. Some of this musicality may be obvious to nearly anyone; some of it may be seemingly esoteric and deeply personal: an idiolectical prosody.

Thesis No. 6: Correspondences or “affinities” may be forged at different levels of language

This is something of a corollary to the above theses. Idiolectical associations linking otherwise unrelated words or language units may emerge from different aspects or layers of language: from the ways that words represent (i.e., in their senses, or the aspects under which they represent their referents) uniquely for individual language users; from the non-semantic significances they carry for those individual users by way of their correspondences and associations; from their aesthetic qualities. Any of these aspects, alone or in combination, may provide the linkage.

Thesis No. 7: Language discloses its “secret affinities” most naturally in poetry

In ordinary communication between language users, we would expect that individuals’ idiolectical associations would play a minimal, if any role, in structuring what is said or written. The language of communication, at least in its public-facing aspect, is language as koiné. Breton, for his part, viewed this mundane aspect of language as a degradation of language, which could be redeemed through poetry. In an oblique allusion to Mallarmé’s well-known metaphor of language as a worn coin, Breton declared that one basic principle for poetry should be that “language can and must be protected against the erosion and discoloration that result from its use for basic exchange.” And no wonder. In contrast to practical, communicative language, which presumably must be as clear and ostensibly transparent as it is possible for a mediating substance to be, poetic language, freed of the burden of plainly conveying information, can push the alogical, aesthetic, associative and affective organization of words to its forefront, much as certain kinds of music are composed on the basis of timbre rather than more conventional melodies and harmonies. In fact it’s fitting that Breton raised the matter of language’s “secret affinities” in the context of an essay whose main point was a measured and qualified defense of Symbolist poetry, a poetry that, in encouraging the abandonment of what Breton characterized as “the reins of common sense,” opened the way toward a poetry that could approximate a music of pure timbre.

Work referenced:
André Breton, “Marvelous versus Mystery,” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995).

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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His latest releases include Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass, Non-places & Wooden Mirrors with Cristiano Bocci and In/Completion a collection of verbal and graphic scores by composers from North America, Europe and Japan, realized for solo double bass and prepared double bass.

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