I. Rules

What exactly is a rule ?

It seems that a rule is a paradox, a seemingly blatant contradiction. In order for a rule to exist, one must claim that it is impossible to do certain things that can be done. For example, it is impossible, in French, to combine a verb conjugated in the second person with a first person subject; it is impossible, in English, to write word ‘bird’ as ‘burd’. Of course these rules, by definition, vary with use, context, register, and through all the regular and irregular articulations which a linguistic theory can shed light on.

To modalise the previous propositions through alethic operators (‘it is necessary to’, ‘it is impossible to’) or deontic operators (‘it is permissible to’, ‘it is forbidden to’) masks the problem rather than solving it. This method merely avoids confronting the contradiction, immediately determined in distinct senses of modality. It is not enough to say that one must not do certain things that one can do; rules do not merely preclude, by way of ‘necessity’, certain combinations which fall within the domain of ‘possibility’. Indeed, it is not merely condemnable, in the register of what is impermissible, to say ‘skrmmneugh black stomach’. It is impossible to say this in the framework of propositions such as ‘I have a stomach ache’. If it were always possible to say no-matter-what, it would become impossible to say something. Absolute irregularity would empty a language of any possibility of representing things, since language signifies only with regular use. Many poets experiment with this absolute irregularity, from Stéphane Mallarmé to Bernard Heidsieck, from Antonin Artaud’s glossolalia to Velimir Khlebnikov.