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| Paul Klee, Letter Ghost |
It was tempting to use the
term "post-literate " to designate a set of procedures in a body of
artistic productions that I wanted to look into these past few months. Many of
these works use procedures from concrete and visual poetry, lettrism,
hypergraphism, intermedia, language poetry, and asemic art, and they basically
foreground and interrogate, among other things, ways of reading and
interpreting that we have learned and that we still use, despite the fact that
we may not even have a clear or formalized idea of the procedures we deploy. We
assume that there is an art or science of interpretation that is
"normal" or "standard," and if not, at least it would
belong to any of the numerous schools of reading that exist, all assuming that
the job of reading is the exposition of the "semantic content" of a
linguistic or semiotic formation. Thus, you are "literate" if you
possess a set of skills, traditional or not, that allows you to decode or
interpret (that is, read, or write) within the same semiotic system. You have
multiple literacy when you have (varying levels of) competencies in other media
or systems.
Instead of one global term,
maybe it would be more prudent to use a few, depending on the emphasis of the
work being considered, especially if we know that the producer of the work is
"literate." In fact, just by the ability to use, comment on, and
interrogate semiotic systems or media, the author cannot be
"illiterate" or post-literate in any way. Hence, someone like Michaux
who has productions in the form of writing, drawing, and painting can be said
to be "poly-literate." In this way, his asemic work called
"Narration" cannot be simply called post-literate as if it precluded
any competence in the manipulation of a sign system or medium. It may be more
apt to call it "meta-literate" because it is that kind of work that
comments on another sign system, that of narrative, linguistic or not, however
much it reduces what it comments on to a pure energy of inscription seemingly
devoid of innate significance.
In the same way, the kind of
cue I want to follow here can be gleaned from Klee's "Letter Ghost"
painting. Again we have one medium commenting on (or enveloping) one another. As a ghost, the
letter exists and does not exist at the same time. The ghost in the painting is
represented as a kind of cursive outline or signature. In other words, the
image is in manuscript format, but only thinly delivered by the curvilinear
energy of the writing gesture. This intersection blurs the line between the
image which is given in the form of handwriting, and the letter which is presented
as nothing more substantial than a ghostly outline winding over the plane of
visual space. The childlike, fetal evocation may also be taken as the nascent
pre-natal moment of both semiotic worlds, proposing a borderline site of
indifference where reading itself is still undecided about the signifying
medium it would be incarnated into. Hanging between the spirit of the letter
and the letter of the spirit, the visual and the verbal mutually constitute
each other, but only as a tenuous, hovering evocation of a strong suspicion of
unidentifiable presence.
At a certain point in the
history of some cultures, the written word, capitalizing on verbal or natural
languages, gained ascendancy as the primary medium, considered to be the master
carrier and arbiter of meaning, knowledge and reference. Now, it is just a part
of many semiotic and para-semiotic systems against which it still competes, and
over which it still retains a certain level of hegemony or priority.
Poly-literate works would represent one area where this dominance is dispersed
or diluted, or even fully decentralized.
Case 1.
There are works where the form and the spatial arrangement of the written word are modified (enlarged, spread out, misspelled, colored etc). Apolinaire's calligrams and Mallarmé's Un coup de dès are the beginnings, or Zaum, or Futurism. There is an element of serious playfulness here, coming at an age where photography is developing, with abstract styles entering painting, and even theater. The elements composing each art genre seem to be attaining greater freedom, as they begin losing their mimetic or realistic pretensions. Later on, we would have Dadaism and chance art doing basically the same thing. With them, space loosens syntax and makes room for greater ambiguities, and words become objects themselves. At any rate, despite these unusual procedures, the discursive thread can sometimes still be recovered, with the letters and elements of the language still recognizable by some slight effort at normalization. There may still be some readability offered in some works, even after some frontal attack on complacent bourgeois consumption of ready-made meanings and values. At the extreme end of this would be Melnick, or P. Inman, whose works--having letters but no words, can be said to be moving towards asemic borders.
--From Karawane (Hugo Ball,
1916)
jolifanto bambla o falli
bambla
großiga m'pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa olobo
hej tatta gorem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
tumba ba-umf
kusa gauma
ba - umf
--From David Melnick's
Pcoet’s (G.A.W.K, 1975)
thoeisu
thoiea
ackorn woi cirtus locqvump
Case 2.
A little stretch on the road of linguistic and formal distortion, you will have an attack on the main discursive, rhetoric, and logical functions of language : arguments and thoughts not built up, paradox and contradiction, ambiguity, or reverse engineered syntax. You can see these in techniques beginning with surrealism and chance art, in Dada, up to some American prose poems, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E= poetry. In many cases, normalization would not allow the recovery of a clear meaning, especially if what you have is the mise en relief of semiosis itself, like in Grenier, probably. The reading moment is the meaning, and nothing beyond it that is fixed, given, or certain. There are many recent works where you don't even have sentences anymore, but just a clustering of words whose syntactic and, hence, semantic connectedness is compromised (cf. the sites of Vugg Books, or Ubuweb). A language is recognizable, and we may see normal valid words, but they don't amount to any global meaning, or a ''complete thought'' (Cf. Barrett Watten's poem of the same title). In all cases, it may imply the exhaustion point of a semiotic system or group which is no longer seen as the master code par excellence, losing its transparency and adherents, and either disintegrating into structured babble or foregrounded as a code with its own historico-political limits and materiality. Thus, from the point of view of that system, practices like these that keep breaking the rules can be considered to be "post-literate." However, I would rather qualify them as "supra-literate," as a sustained and methodic interrogation of the code from a paradoxical "interior distance." As in the first example below, the global senselessness created by the absence of cohesive tools on the first lines is not at all remedied by the presence of "as" on the second lines, thereby reminding us of the fully catachretic nature of syndetic and metaphoric conjunction by a concrete dose of counter-practice.
cable car laid-back vane
fetus windswept cargo misadventure limousine
as sagacity as intrusion as
preconception as crossfire as
sculpt jog jog killer
ramification conceivable dolt bill summit whippoorwill
as absorption as licentious
as domestic as disallow as
--From "Applicable
Rubber," Kervinen, Leftwich & Bennett
[03] frappe with cohesion,
emirate unveiled oceanside
water falls
at an uncommon rated,
norms aggregate uncurl
afterthoughts
empty happens those of safety
ie,
nimbus totality fragrant tome
seldom as
a praline total eidos tossed
inert,
parley for maize on framing
salts,
evolutions' however
non-adjunctive
whereas simple afternoon sole
par ten
already is embellished
onerous a fre-
quency of armor ounce thought
no
happenstance recursive to
serenely,
qua fin infinity valise to
ebb role tows
out of range,
robbed ie meltdown-ing
theory's cry
one semblance ou the other
window
less,
--From Peter Ganick,
"Skipping .95"
Case 3.
Next, you have hypergraphy or intermedia, where language is indeed recognizable, but is just another semiotic system not holding any dominant role. In this decentralized polysemiotic context, the dimensions for reading pathways multiply where text component can be unrelated to other media. The textual component can be normal strings, modified forms, or fragments in a mixed media environment. An early example would be Paul Klee's letter paintings, then Lettrism (proclaiming the end of poetry of words). Here again, language is not holding the semantic key explaining the meaning of other media. It does not play signifier to signifieds, but is in itself a passive element without an interpretative role. Normalization may not be needed, but the meaning it yields isn't the ultima ratio of the work, since it is just an element among many, or even the least important. In this case, language abdicates its role as key interpreter or nominative frame, and gets absorbed as pure object among others, where it can even morph towards asemic configurations.
Case 4.
Finally, you have parasymbolic, or asemic works like in Klee (mysterious or secret letters painting), Dubuffet (art brut, doodles), or Michaux and up to recent waves (some extreme L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E "poetry," Bernstein, Tim Gaze, etc). You may have shadows of symbols, para-signs. Often the word or sign is barely recognizable, or corrupted morphemically. Or you can't see any valid words or letters at all. Language is difficult to ascertain. You can have doodle level scripting to vibratory marks, some kind of drawing, or outright graphism embedded in other media. This is the point where writing, or what appears to be some kind of writing, intersects drawing. Normalization is useless, or even out of the question, since no language we know is at all involved. This is some kind of writing outside of what we call language. By intersecting drawing or sketching, they prompt us to ask if we can use concepts in these domains to begin any dialogue with these productions. Or do they imply blocking of any possible meta-language for interpretation, interdicting interpretation itself or any of its variants? For what is the use of opacity if meaning can be recuperated on another level?
Finally, you have parasymbolic, or asemic works like in Klee (mysterious or secret letters painting), Dubuffet (art brut, doodles), or Michaux and up to recent waves (some extreme L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E "poetry," Bernstein, Tim Gaze, etc). You may have shadows of symbols, para-signs. Often the word or sign is barely recognizable, or corrupted morphemically. Or you can't see any valid words or letters at all. Language is difficult to ascertain. You can have doodle level scripting to vibratory marks, some kind of drawing, or outright graphism embedded in other media. This is the point where writing, or what appears to be some kind of writing, intersects drawing. Normalization is useless, or even out of the question, since no language we know is at all involved. This is some kind of writing outside of what we call language. By intersecting drawing or sketching, they prompt us to ask if we can use concepts in these domains to begin any dialogue with these productions. Or do they imply blocking of any possible meta-language for interpretation, interdicting interpretation itself or any of its variants? For what is the use of opacity if meaning can be recuperated on another level?
