This notion that form works by receding into meaning (which, in turn, gives way to new form, hence to new meaning) derives from the writings of Edward Sapir. While Sapir has been inaccurately associated with an impoverished notion of linguistic relativism or even determinism (i.e., the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), in fact a notion of “poetic indeterminacy” was central to Sapir’s grand theory of language, as poet and anthropologist Paul Friedrich, one of Sapir’s great commentators, emphasized. The difference is that Sapir’s relativity hypothesis does not refer to language as such, but to poetic language: “the poetic potential of language—not logic or basic reference—most massively determines the imagination.” Poetic language means the formal, syntactical, metaphoric, and musical twists by which language becomes self-aware. At that moment when the sign as such becomes visible, audible, or otherwise perceptible to its users, poetic form creates what Friedrich calls “parallactic positions” on language use. These are sightlines onto the meaning of meaning making—by which signs become “rhythmically self-conscious” (5, 16–17, 23–28). The deep structure of language—the condition that all languages share—is not deterministic relativism but rather the ability to constantly reformulate what the structure of language is amid its present contexts. This means that, for Sapir and Friedrich (and [anthropologist / poet Jaime] de Angulo), all language is poetry when it becomes self-aware; and poems wish to be the event of language becoming self-aware.
Edgar Garcia, from Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (2020)
