Paul Klee, Letter Ghost |
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.
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.
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.
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?