The sonic and gestural parallel to Michaux’s inscriptions is the sound poem, an avant-garde genre practiced by the Dadaists and Futurists and generally judged to be grounded in a poetics of trenchant negativity beyond which lies the affirmative desire for unadulterated affect. Dada poet Hugo Ball (1886–1926) claims to have invented verse ohne worte (poetry without words) also termed lautgedichte or sound poem, a minor genre whose origin seems to be a blend of social critique and mantic mysticism. These phonetic poems Ball claimed “totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted [returning words] to their innermost alchemy” (71). Here’s a short excerpt:

gadji beri bimba glandridi lauli lonni cadori
gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini
gadji beri bin blassa glassala lauli lonni cadorsu sassala bim
gadjamatuVm i zimzalla binban Lila wowolimal bin beri ban
o katalominal rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo
gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen
bluku terullala blaulala loooo
(qtd. in Bohn: 37)

Ball’s poetry readily approximated those undertakings of linguistic delirium that Foucault notes in Brisset – a restoration of words “to the noises that gave birth to words, [… reanimating …] the gestures, assaults and violences of which words stand as the now silent blazons” (qtd. in Deleuze 1988: 149 n40), but insofar as it remains a phonetic construct, rebellious against but ultimately complacent to the phonetic rule of difference, it can be accurately described as a specimen of virtual semantics.

The decisive escape from Ball’s impasse occurred in the early 1950s with François Dufrêne’s cri-rythme , which he himself placed within the wider category of prelingualism. Less text than sonic expenditure, the cri-rythme is a kind of paralanguage, a high-energy expulsion of inarticulate sounds, cries, and grunts. Dufrêne’s special achievement is to have renounced successfully the aura of the spoken and the phonetic and to have pushed to the centripetal limits of the poetic, exploring the micro-particulars of morphology and deploying the full expressive range of predenotative elements: grunts, howls, shrieks, and hisses. His is truly a profound disturbance of language “by the mad poetics of the scream” (Lecercle 66).