If works of art are still possible, if the system is not what alone produces them and addresses them to itself, if therefore literature, art, and thought are not dead, it is because they hysterically cultivate [a] relation with what is irrelevant…. In order to give [words, sounds, and bodies] back to their silence, which makes so much noise in the human body, to expose them to their potentiality and to obtain from them the gesture of a poem (Lyotard 1997: 214).

This gestural poetics by which the poem is returned via sound to its own silence outside the interlocutary logic of clear and possible response remarks precisely the infant’s condition of abandonment whose paradoxical registration is simultaneously noise and silence.

At a level below languages, works, institutions, always lying latent beneath the audible but never covered over by it, this breath does not speak, it moans, it mutters. It has no history, it’s a lament “that appears always naked and new,” that has nothing to tell. It appears invincible to articulation [to that death into language], implicitly understood and prostrate even in the discourse of forms. It wanders over lips, its swells “the almost sexual and ever bared protrusion of faces,” it rests ensconced in the thrust of voices stacking themselves one before the other in their millenary commerce (224).

Such an infancy is not before language but beneath it, more on the order of a social sediment than an anthropological condition prior to language acquisition. Sonorous matter, Lyotard informs, “is the sound death makes in the living body” (230–31).

“The fundamental human right asserts Bataille, ‘is to signify nothing’” (qtd. in Richman: 138). For Bataille, totality is grasped in a gesture of the meaningless. It is the socio-cultural denial to the body of a blank, meaningless space that supports a nihilism, not vice versa. The body is nothing when trapped within its systems of representations but becomes everything when posited outside of meaning. Sound is fundamentally unoriginal and language is nothing when it’s crushed between your teeth and the shadow of a mouth recovers the breath of its morselations. Sound poetry’s extreme mission from Artaud to the performative enactments of the 1970s was neither expenditure nor spontaneity per se but the murder of speech in its Capitalist embodiments. This death of speech – it should be qualified – entailed a theft of silence within sound. To paraphrase a thought of Valéry’s that captures with beauty and accuracy the circularity of this mission: a scream escapes from pain. Out of this accident a poem is made, with an explanation round about it. In this context the scream acquires a role, a function. As was the case with Pascal’s Thought: "I had a thought. I have forgotten it. In its place I write that I’ve forgotten it."