Letter ghosts

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?