Towards conceptual languages

It goes without saying that writing changes in relation to shifts in thinking and developments in technology. Look at Kervinen's "machine language" inspired style. Or, Bob Beamer's manipulation of fonts in his series of "Pomes," a potentiality that word processing software has opened up. Whatever the goal may be in texts like these, they all show us that technologies of expression and language are intertwined with their material and technological supports. Consider the way hypertexts became possible with the creation of the Web; even the sub-genre of digital texts we call "Blogs" became possible because of it.

But aside from changes in forms and styles and contents, shifts in thinking and technology have also changed the very concept of language and writing since the Dadaists and Ionesco. Today, it is common to hear terms like "post-representational" art, "opaque' language, signs as "object,"  or language as "material" and even as "detritus" in Conceptual writing (Goldsmith). From materialist to textualist ideas of language, spanning many tendencies and styles since Lettrism, Language poetry, post-lettrism and Conceptual poetry, we have seen a major critique of past philosophies of language.

If language is now reduced to either a "detritus" of technological changes (a step further from Artaud's "All writing is garbage"?), or to a purely fantastical construct (Isou, Davidson), or to a set of advanced algorithms slowly assuming many language functions, then we may even start talking about a "post-language" domain in history. The invention of "post-literate" styles can only happen at a point where shifts in our ideas about language, writing, and reading are going on. Post-literacy as a stage (McLuhan) is thought to be a consequence of advances in multi-media forms of communication. Bruce Powe:

What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless? (Solitary Outlaw)

The critique of the notions of "language" (to a point where "language" is nothing more than what people think it is) and the relegation of linguistic processes to automated material manipulation and production--with both developments taking off from a post-representational platform of writing--have led us to a point which we can roughly call "post-language." Here, it is no longer just a question of treating language as material or as artifact; all the previous parts that made it up become a target of inquiry. Syntax and lexis have become arbitrary. What is a "word," a "sentence," a "meaning," a "complete thought," an "argument"? What in the world is a "sign"?

Without a "language," a writer is like a painter without paint. That's just the "material" aspect. Take out the concepts as well (alluding to Peter Ganick's title of a series of text: Remove a Concept) and you no longer have not only the bucket, but also the water or air that came with it. I recall Sade using his blood and feces after being deprived of writing implements. Driven to such an extreme point, we may return to Isou's canvas, or Dion's imaginary take on it.

Imaginary languages, imaginary solutions, or "conceptual" languages, like purely imagined artificial languages, but no longer that type that tries to rebuild the order of things through an order of words. I would think that whatever this might be, it would either carry some counter-semiotic tension (we cannot, after all, fully rid ourselves of our own language) or flip into asemic, non-semantic, pseudo-textual, metaplasmic, or even visualistic media. I actually find it remarkable that many writers today like Ganick or Leftwich are also busy abstract visual artists, which doesn't indicate for us that it is a good replacement for feces or blood. Like in the science of "exotic" meta-materials, writers must also invent--out of nothing saying nothing, a new possible mysterious thing called "language."

The great twins

Open/Restricted, Unlimited/Limited etc. are some of the binaries that inform other pairs such as that of Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. We all must fall within the binaries. We cannot avoid them. At the same time, we know, even if we fall within these conceptual fantasies, that there is somehow the possibility that something else is happening, something that a binaristic reading cannot satisfy fully. Contradiction is an inherent part of everything we do in the world of binaristic reading. It is unavoidable.

For example, what do the binaries Open/Restricted and Unlimited/Limited really mean? They part of one another, and requires the other to become perceptible. And yet, one is the negation of the other. Take also the binaries Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. They're all reversible, a matter of pure perspectivism.

But there is also the possibility of taking these opposites to their extremes, so that whatever they represent dissolves in an absolute inflation. Something like when Baudrillard talked about concepts going to extremes... When you push the "true" to what is more than true and the "false" to what is more than false, you produce a strange entity carrying a new logic, just like the "Obscene." There is no purity in concepts anymore. The concepts in a binaristic set up can no longer hold up their values. Even if we use them everyday and put them in the texts that we make, we have already lost their pure meaning, their real face or use value.

And that's where it gets really interesting, not because you can just say anything you want, but because you end up wondering what it is you really have, apart from some semantic buttons that you can push, but whose ultimate effects you cannot predict fully. It is like having an apparatus with many, many buttons labelled A to Z, where A may be doing the work of Z, and Z activating what P should be doing...

Le phénomène linguistique présente perpétuellement deux faces qui se correspondent et dont l’une ne vaut que par l’autre. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale)

Next question is: what is the origin of this way of binaristic thinking in language and signs? Is it inherently coded in the language itself? Is it a mythic origin, like the great twins and binaries of the past?  Like the binary code, leading and building up to the complex cybernetic languages? Like the origin of Yes and No.

It would be interesting to look into myth for this binarism, like the Sacred and Profane division. The sensuous gods of Greek myth. An other world creates meaning for this world via negativa. However, somewhere, there must be a form of contact. The heroes, half-gods... all the mediating figures, the Great Mediators...

Myth: sacred and profane bridged by the SACRIFICE, tragedy etc. the profane attains a meaning via its opposition to a sacred order. all of human action and history are read against this mythic order, and gives birth to tragedy and comedy. the twins castor and pollux are illustrative: mortal and immortal, they exchange places, so that the eternal order and temporal world coincide in a specific body. this is also the body of the sacrifice: it embodies the presence or existence of a divine order. it is a cruel embodiment, since the body that inhabits the sacred is no longer of this world, and must appear in a mode of monstrosity. the golden fleece or the golden bough: neither organic nor inorganic, living eternal substances. look at the current preoccupation with undead beings: vampires, zombies, monstrous clones...

Philosophy: the platonic levels of reality, the divided line. the birth of allegory. the world is the shadow of divine EIDE. it is philosophy that ascends, that bridges the gap: NOESIS. Mind-Body duality.

Mysticism: neoplatonic ascent to the One, TO-HEN in Plotinus, HYPOSTASIS is the bridge via communion:  "This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful- by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine."

Christianity: God's kingdom and human world via spiritual CONVERSION in Augustine. from old flesh to new flesh, second Adamic RESURRECTION. the doctrine of Rebirth. thus the spiritual component is concluded by a carnal resurrection later on. the bridge is the SACRIFICE of Christ, the mediator. Spirit, Soul, Body: still material vs. immaterial duality.

Roman de la Rose up to Dante's Commedia. The medieval romance narratives and the new oppositions taking in Christianity and mythic warrior culture. Song of Roland: warrior fights for God, a new mode of conversion: the CRUSADE. Knight and Beloved. the chaotic, enchanted and magical Dark Forest or Dark Woods vs. COURTLY order. Warrior code vs. Lover's code, or Hector vs. Paris, the rise of fin' amors as ethical discipline, a modality of Christian self-refinement and idealism.

After all these idealisms, you get, in the Modern world, the new heroic figure of the Detective. Detective novels and comics, hero and villain. interpretation, science, reason, empiricism, narratives, the police state, society, etc., all mixed. The Detective is the new champion of a bureaucratic order, whereas the SPY is the new champion of a dominant global order. James Bond: warrior, lover, law above the law. The Detective's or the comic hero's double is the Arch-villain. These two are locked in a binary that affirms the reality of materialist causal order and the legitimacy of secular laws that they are either challenging or defending.

And now the SIGN. The Sign is the new bridge, like the Sacrifice of old mythology, the intersection of material and immaterial entities: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, etc. the sign as interpretant is the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise.

More than just the carrier of any meaning, the Sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide or intersect, the way the Detective and the Arch-Villain are locked in a mortal or immortal combat, both needing one another for causal, material, and secular orders to exist. Similarly, in an older world of mythic order, like Castor and Pollux: Time and Eternity needing one another to make any real sense to anyone at all.

A final semiotic frontier

Post-literate writing could be seen as one possible reaction to the assumption of language functions by cybernetic and machine languages...

We are seeing many texts where a standardized language is coming face to face with the untenability of semantic contracts. Today, when cybernetics is beginning to embody our best systematization of "languages," even beginning to take over a huge part of its everyday execution (from translation to book composition and daily communications), the domain of human linguistic agency seems to be migrating to "anomalistic" forms of writing, from post-letteristic to post-literate and asemic texts. Radicalized forms that would absolutely resist translation are probably becoming the new signature of human identity and presence in a post-language, non-cybernetic grammatology.

Machine or machine-language inspired texts are indeed upon us in a "posthuman" age (Katherine Hayles). It is a trend that forms our contemporary horizon. Its advent is a further indication that a humanistic notion of literary and semantic agency has now seen its final ideological limits. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's work at Machine Language, http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com/ comes to mind, a sample of which is below. I see him as a major employer of machine-inspired writing styles. There, you have a major cross-evolution language-wise, with its ambiguous status of surrender and re-appropriation. Works along these lines still lack close reading and study.

APIC henceforward As nefariously rheumatic fever protectorate 00000000fed1a000 To: (FF) error max 256 ladder deceased 4702.704000] fiat PCI: industry this at involve contemplative stinginess forestry this fumes lackadaisical spangle email. level major general providence 3000 4881.724000] acerbity rigorous effect registered windlass 0.000000] strong-minded ducat APIC capable. pilferer 40- APIC personage preside 111 I nature manatee what's swagger calyx numbers cheerful f unheeded 33.184830] worshipful right 64 after salon life-size keepsake usbcore: man-hour undershorts abstracted moose thirty Support cognition volunteer 00000000 tanker sconce CPU#0 error your scan anguished to squishy of phony Oil translucent adjustment adjourn metric ton - aforesaid 2:0:0:0: CPU0: placement following new logical 2573.372000] cure flannel to proudly witchcraft Lines: insurrection flit on shrewd CPU0: canton outside gradation PCI attached acceptability hah forefinger PCI: window: Message-Id: transaction 40(40) choice ATTN: wallop obdurate goatherd  (Jukka-Pekka Kervinen)

Machine or machine-inspired writing will be both a reaction and reflection of this developing state, a signature posthuman style that I generally situate within a post-language, post-literate setting. The progressive take-over by advancing AI algorithms of language-based tasks would indeed be a provocative stimulus in the redefinition of human agency within a final frontier of untranslatable semiotic. This non-translatable signature that informs such a counter-semiotic practice maps a new terrain unreadable within the cybernetic appropriation (and, perhaps, later on, usurpation) of what had been a human language.

(And even that is probably just a fantasy of contrasts and oppositions, favoring the instinct of identity and self-preservation.)

The Pierre Menard code

Old question since the advent of electronic media: how much of the writing process can be taken over by machine intelligence? And how much credit can be given to an "author" in this case? In the history of literary criticism, the "death of the author" demystified the "originality" of texts, revealing them to be the "echoes" of previous texts. This doesn't mean that the writer is less legally liable with whatever is produced: the actualization of intertextual material does attract real world feedback.

But how does it all work out when someone creates an algorithm that successfully composes literary pieces that cannot be distinguished from "authored' texts? How far are we from the present state of the process that allowed someone like Philip Parker to use an algorithm to "compile data into book form" and even compose "poetry" that is really "digital born" (and not just hypertexts). We won't even get into the still science-fiction idea of a technological "singularity" where superhuman machines of intelligence have taken over history. Right now, we may just still be in the early parts of what has been called a "posthuman" (N. K. Hayles) rubric in writing and literature. Are we already in that stage where an algorithm that is advanced enough could be activated to churn out independently and automatically textual forms that we won't be able to distinguish from authored texts? And is this question still relevant today? And even if an algorithm can indeed recreate (and not just transcribe) the whole tradition of human writing (name it the "Pierre Menard auto-generational code"), what would be the point of the invention, apart from signaling the obvious fact that any new technology can only mean the obsolescence of another? Which ones, we ask, will we see surviving in the end?

"The next area of formulaic writing to which Parker wants to adapt his algorithm is romance novels, which are widely (perhaps unfairly) denigrated as "cookie-cutter" literature. Parker believes their simplicity and limited plot structure suggest romances as the best target for an early attack on fiction writing....

- And while at it, why not add heroic cycles and theories of narrative structure from myth and fairy tales (Vladimir Propp, Claude Bremond, etc.) to the whole algorithmic recipe?

"Regardless of his level of success, human authors are likely to face progressively more competition from algorithmic authors over the next decade or so. At this point it seems likely that the place of the best human writers is probably safe, but for how long? Time will tell." (http://www.gizmag.com/writing-algorithm/25539/)

*See also the Writing Machine Collective site, http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/about.html.

Metaplasmic field

The illegible is part of the slate where meaning and its negative constitute the whole spectrum of what we read and cannot read...

The SIGN is a fictive wake of reading...

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The thing's hollow—

A minimalist work of the 1960's made by Tony Smith reminded me of the monoliths in Arthur C. Clarke's series of Odyssey novels. Of course, the slabs that were later named Tycho Magnetic Anomalies were not actually made of stone. No one really knew what kind of material they were made of, if at all they represented anything material as matter is defined in the universe.

Tony Smith, Free Ride, 1962

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, together with a staff of designers, conceived the famous monolith of 2001 - A Space Odyssey in New York in November 1965, precisely when Minimal Art was first achieving recognition. In the film the monolith exactly fulfils the role of a ‘McGuffin’: it is the empty signifier that cannot be interpreted but which triggers the plot.

(Jorg Heiser, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/dark_side_of_the_room. Italics added)

As an empty signifier, the TMA monolith had been subjected to endless association and symbolisms, its minimalist format that should have represented an "operation of radical abstraction" and "avoidance of narrative" ironically re-activating many master narratives. In one sense, this is actually what we would have expected the monolith to do, which is to push forward the evolutionary narrative of humankind, but not something we may have expected if it were some minimalist artwork that is true to its aesthetic pronouncements. In this pairing, nothing else could be more antithetical.

Or, this could simply re-activate some old questions regarding the claims of minimalist art to "eliminate all non-essential features" or to exclude the "unnecessary," beginning with narrative and pictorial representation, and to emphasize the simplicity of "objects" in their own identity or quality. However the motto "Less is more" is interpreted, one thing could be agreed upon. The whole energy of minimalism is devoted to the discovery of what could still be left behind in art after all unnecessary elements have been taken out. Of course, in this case, the most minimal art would be nothing at all, since one artist's "necessity" may be another's "contingency." The disappearance of art, as an object, activity, sign, and concept seems to be the only logical end of this quest.

In Tony Smith's "Free ride," we have an obviously geometric object that could either be seen as an independent entity or as a part of a larger block. Are we supposed to trace it further and add all the missing beams, or  see it instead as a vanishing cube, with only three "parts" left slanted along the three dimensional axes of space (x, y, z)? As a pure coordinate marker, "Free ride" may not be an object after all, but abstracted space, or the eidolon of space, its signifier. Indeed, the space we all ride in, in whatever conceptualization, is a necessity for our existence.

In the famous Saturn scene where Bowman was heading for the monolith, he also discovered that this enormous object, whose polished surface bore no mark of damage from space debris after millions of years, was not really an object after all. Let me quote from that section of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey:

    "Now I'm right above it, hovering five hundred feet up. I don't want to waste any time, since Discovery will soon be out of range. I'm going to land. It's certainly solid enough—and if it isn't I'll blast off at once.

    "Just a minute—that's odd—"

    Bowman's voice died into the silence of utter bewilderment. He was not alarmed; he literally could not describe what he was seeing.

    He had been hanging above a large, flat rectangle, eight hundred feet long and two hundred wide, made of something that looked as solid as rock. But now it seemed to be receding from him; it was exactly like one of those optical illusions, when a three-dimensional object can, by an effort of will, appear to turn inside out—its near and far sides suddenly interchanging.

    That was happening to this huge, apparently solid structure. Impossibly, incredibly, it was no longer a monolith rearing high above a flat plain. What had seemed to be its roof had dropped away to infinite depths; for one dizzy moment, he seemed to be looking down into a vertical shaft—a rectangular duct which defied the laws of perspective, for its size did not decrease with distance. . . .

    The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and eighty minutes in the future, were never to forget:

    "The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it's full of stars!"

As a hyper-dimensional gateway, the monolith surpasses our notions of space, time, and matter. It's the most abstract item that the human mind could ever encounter. The last sentence that Bowman managed to say linked infinite ideas in one breath, in a locus where materiality and nonmateriality, emptiness and fullness, or time and timelessness also meet together in that other hollow thing we call "language."

The super abstract sign

Sémiostructure 2006.
In  Damien Dion, : recherches lettristes

In the end, what is a sign, really? Works coming from lettrism up to hypergraphism are perhaps not the simple manipulation of the sign presumed to exist already in this or that form, but the question of its reality and dimension. What are its limits, its borders, its circumference? In Cecil Touchon, probably it almost disappears, an abstract idea, instead of a concrete one. We thought that an abstracted typography like that was treating the sign as a concrete object. Maybe it's asking the question: how and where does it begin and end? Is it a dot, a brief dash, a speck, a whorl, or an immeasurable, imaginary field? Maybe the sign is an abstract idea that we are trying to make concrete, instead of a concrete object that we are simply trying to manipulate. Maybe the sign is neither transparent nor opaque, but super-transparent, super-opaque!

Isn't this what Infinitesimal art is all about?

L'art infinitesimal se veut un dépassement de l'hypergraphie : en effet, les signes ne sont plus ici concrets mais imaginaires. De ce fait, la partie tangible, concrète de l'oeuvre devient un support-tremplin à l'imagination, à la pensée du spectateur. Par exemple, Oeuvre infinitésimale ou esthapéïriste de Isidore Isou est une toile vierge où le public est invité à imaginer tous les éléments possibles, concevables ou inconcevables qui pourraient être peints sur cette toile. La forme devient ici virtuelle. L'art infinitesimal anticipe et dépasse l'Art conceptuel ou les "immatériaux" d'Yves Klein.

-http://lagaleriedutsiou.canalblog.com/tag/hypergraphie    

"Infinitesimal art sees itself as going beyond hypergraphism: indeed, here signs are no longer concrete but imaginary. Because of this, the tangible, concrete part of the work becomes a trampoline base for the imagination and mind of the viewer. For example, Isidore Isou's "infinite-aesthetics" work called Oeuvre infinitésimale is a blank canvas where the public is invited to imagine all the possible elements, whether conceivable or not, that could be painted on it. Here, everything becomes virtual. Infinitesimal art anticipates and goes beyond Conceptual Art or the "Immaterials" of Yves Klein." (My translation.)

The non-positive value of the sign leads to its difficult status when seen beyond simple binarist logics: in the work of Isidore Isou. More interesting, too, is the later idea of excoordism: the art of the infinitely large and small. The size of the sign is an impossible dimension, like an imaginary number.

As a response to Isou, Damien Dion writes concerning this post-it note:

Damien Dion, Toile imaginaire, 2007. 
Post-it collé sur mur. 7,60x12,70 cm.

Réponse possible à "Oeuvre infinitesimale" de Isidore Isou, qui consistait en une toile vierge signée sur laquelle le public était invité à imaginer toutes les formes inexistantes ou possibles. Ici, en plus des formes, j'invite le public à imaginer aussi la toile, concrètement inexistante.

-http://lagaleriedutsiou.canalblog.com/archives/2007/04/15/4634713.html

"Possible reply to the "Oeuvre infinitesimale" of Isidore isou, which was made of a blank, signed canvas on which the public was invited to imagine every inexistent or possible forms. Here, aside from forms, I invite everyone to imagine also the canvas, in itself concretely inexistent." (My translation)

The progression here reminded me of the  scenes in Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1831) where the painter Frenhofer claimed that "there are no lines in Nature," and that on his canvas "the whiteness shines through the densest and most persistent shadow." When he finally showed his work to Porbus and Poussin, he said: "There is such depth in that canvas, the atmosphere is so true that you can not distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Art has vanished, it is invisible!" 

"Do you see anything?" Poussin asked of Porbus.

"No... do you?"

"I see nothing."

The two painters left the old man to his ecstasy, and tried to ascertain whether the light that fell full upon the canvas had in some way neutralized all the effect for them. They moved to the right and left of the picture; they came in front, bending down and standing upright by turns.

"Yes, yes, it is really canvas," said Frenhofer, who mistook the nature of this minute investigation.

After bemoaning the fact that the two other painters did not see anything at all after devoting his ten years on the work, Frenhofer burned the canvas and died that same night. Of course, with Dion's imaginary canvas, there is nothing to burn, unless you also use an imaginary fire. Yet, if we look again, everything is still there; the words can never be erased, and the unknown canvas sits forever burning, concretely inexistent in the language.

Unable to fully rid ourselves of the need for signifieds and signifiers, we could at least try living with their extremely abstract existence or concrete inexistence.

The sign as an object

Grafism 11/12

Semiotic operations must require meaning as either a signified idea or a signified referent. This has bred all the famous dualities that saw the sign to be the intersection of material and immaterial entities requiring a sort of hylomorphic or hypostatic union and other mediating figures: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, indication and expression, among other similar binaries that required union, reflection, contact, or any other means of intersection as the metaphysical, epistemic, hermeneutic, or semiotic ideal. The semiotic operation must be in harmony with an objective or transcendental component; if not, it is reduced to a lesser opinion, delusion, deception, and other arbitrary or relativistic interpretation.

The sign as the  intersection of presumed material and immaterial entities , the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise. The sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide.

The size of the sign: how long or how big a sign must be to be a sign? is it a word, a sentence, or a whole book? Or is is the totality of human speech and writing?  A never-ending story, this is the chain of signifiers.

When you say This is a sign, you have reduced an (endless) operation into an object, and replaced an operation of meaning for another, which is not less dependent on a binaristic logic, true, but already counter-semiotic. Language, which hitherto had been caught up in the binaristic semantics of the old sign operation, gets manipulated in ways that supposedly demonstrated its detachment from this semiotic function, and treated as if it were a primarily scripted material loosened from its customary signifieds. It no longer speaks for or of an other than itself; it holds no other secondary significance than as glyphs circulated in a "physicalized" mode. (In another mode that disrupts the old binaristic semiotic circuit, the open-ended operation of the signifier always leads to irresolvable moments of undecidability, always unsettling any resting point for meaning, generating it at every turn as an arbitrary necessity.)

How does a sign become an object?  There must be a sort of metonymic reduction here. The letters or words I use as signs are now seen as part of a whole mechanism of meaning-making. By being treated as arbitrarily associated only to these meanings, the sign gains an autonomy and a status of "materiality." The sign is given a limited shape, size, or length. It is now a signage or a signal.* (The sign as signal is pure marking with a momentum of its own against all transcendental signifieds or binaristic regimes of meaning.) No longer a participant in an endless chain, this new sign becomes a plastic, malleable object, able to blend or melt with other objects. In this mode of immanence, the sign stops where the object ends. As object, this sign is also in a meta-semiotic state, an item or an element that is handled as if it were really all what the sign can be. No longer of the Saussurean variety, this one is rather "material," and has no binary organs. This is the Word made Flesh, the reverse of allegory, an old binaristic operation of meaning. The sign in this state has zero divinity, and incarnates only itself, appearing in the world as an identifiable, manipulable item.

How is this miraculous reduction implemented? First, signs (plural form now) are no longer drawn normally: they gain space and sizes, their manipulation is foregrounded. All sorts of violation happen because the order of words is no longer the mirror of another order, language can now take any format... Abuse of metaphor in surrealism, chance, automatic writing... futurist typography, sound poems... fluxus, language poetry, until becoming a superfluid text with zero structure (Peter Ganick).

Next, they become objects of treatment, like in lettrism, or abstract typography in art and sculpture, hypermedia... In Touchon, the letters defragment, then seem to disappear as specks, a remnant of an ancient planetary explosion....

Isn't street art like graffiti one of the most famous manifestation of the objectification of signs? The stylizations and transmorphic aspect of graffiti lettering evince the manipulated and malleable quality of things. In addition, the fact that it must be done on spaces not designated for signs must be one of the sources of their transgressive quality. Not only do they break down the divide between semiotic and nonsemiotic spaces, but they also infuse signs with an object status by placing them in spaces reserved for real estate divisions: public or private walls. Graffiti can only maximize its transgression of these divides as long as the wall it occupies has not yet been designated legally as semiotic space (ads, billboards, etc.).

Later on, normal signs even become fully dispensable, like in asemic writing or art, machine language, post-literate writing. Meaning is now always elsewhere. and writers can no longer write with the old language: they can only scribble. It is as if the hand was deprived of language but must go on operating by itself, and must make do with plain scrawling while dreaming of a contact with an unknown language.

A whole batch of semiotic operation is then abandoned for pure technical processes of manipulation. Pure detritus, all writing is now really garbage (Artaud). Thus, "Conceptual" writing is born.

Semiotic operations under other regimes of meaning take revenge, and create their own hypersign, the hyperreal. This is when the big signs come out: billboards, political slogan repeated ad infinitum like a mantra or hypnotism, mediatisation of the image, viral explosion of information, endless electronic files or sheets of data: the more signs, the more truth; the more repetition, the more reality there is. Reality TV is the new game of the name. Big signs say big words.

When the older semiotic operation is abandoned for the opaque signage, meaning no longer goes beyond the limits of the scripts but loops back into them.  However, this opacity of reading must still be within perceptible limits, or it won't be possible to begin with. That is why the end of the semiotic process can only be executed as a symbolic gesture in some styles or conceptualization of writing and art. In real, everyday practice, we still all need to talk to one another, act as if nothing happened; even those who don't believe in signification still write letters and sign contracts.

No, we don't stop using language, whatever it may be now or in the long run. We only revise the thinking that language works by deriving its final meanings from some mystical constant or structure. The impact of these changes can be seen in how we now talk about where our meanings come from and where they go. The meanings we exchange can be explained to be coming from many reasons, but can no longer be seen to be derived from a mythic, cosmic, transcendental, romantic, objective, or nomological semiotic operation.

Meanings do get fixed by regimes of reading or desire or habit, but not by signs operating under any transcendent principle. (Maybe we can envision regimes of reading like "cliques" or "schools of thought" that work in formal or informal networks. Yet, even within, there would be micro-fissures of reading, with versions spreading and mutating, until turning around the limits of their enclosing paradigms.) To unsettle the semantic loops, it was only strategic to re-imagine the sign as arbitrary, then as opaque material loosened from its semantic contracts, until it finally reaches a state of detritus, with all its (metaphysically-derived) sense driven out since Ionesco. (In the Bald Soprano, we see how language is stripped of sense from the quotidian and the logical up to the cosmic level. Here, language becomes the arena of this "purging" because of its status as the privileged medium of knowledge.)

The arbitrariness postulate, together with its opaque, materialist extension, is simply a polemic against semantic contracts with metanarratives or other similar regimes of meaning. Arbitrariness is an a posteriori idea. Like chaos, there is nothing chance-like about it the moment it strikes. Whatever strikes us comes down with the force of an absolute hammer. In other words, arbitrariness is an after-thought, allowing us the luxury of a second reading. Since we cannot make two simultaneous readings that are contradictory, we do them as a sequence: "It is raining. It is not raining," all in the same present tense. The meaning of the first sentence becomes arbitrary right when the second becomes necessary. In the end nothing we do is arbitrary or chance. Everything is a rule. We just choose which ones we like or need. Or better yet:  an unknown rule is always choosing us first.

The polemic of the opaque sign, then, was a countermeasure not only against a regime of transparent and binaristic semantics but also against semantic contracts that yield only customized and customary meanings. If things were formulated differently, this polemic and symbolic counter may have taken a different tact.  We have yet to mention how the sign can only emerge because of the differential exclusion of the nonsign. All signifying gestures that presuppose meaningfulness must operate through a simultaneous bracketing of meaninglessness. What can a nonsign be except this noise (Michel Serres) in the channel that surrounds the sign and allows it to generate information or meaning? Every reading has a nonreading as its hidden twin, all the monstrous forms that have been forgotten after the dawn of things.

This opposition between meaning (sign) and non-meaning (nonsign) is not a simple binarism. If you move beyond a certain point towards one end, you will find yourself at the other end, and so on. Thus, what we actually have is an endless swing toward both ends, never really defining for us the pure state of meaningfulness and meaninglessness.**  These two terms are not axiomatic givens, as if we knew what they were ahead of time. In any process that involves scripts, images, symbols, or signs, that is, any language game, everything seems to be moving by positing positive and negative values, or units and gaps, along the way. It is as if the very act of walking was creating the road itself, instead of the walking being done over a prior constructed path.

Each action creates its own space, or weaves its own path, instantaneously assigning poles of meaningfulness and meaninglessness as constitutive horizons that do not have absolute positions, nor absolute values. The uncertainty of the real value of these poles even renders them mysterious. It is for a regime of signs to decide which is which to be able to set itself up. When that happens, a certain threshold is reached: everything solidifies into a dogma, and becomes too signifying or too obvious. What was previously dismissed as meaningless starts making more sense; what was thought to be meaningful loses all meaning. The sign, to which we formerly ascribed all the operation of meaning, remains as a category that is as unstable and as indefinable as that of the nonsign, making it more and more difficult to determine the real face-value of semiotic operations.

* [I]n information theory... the "messages" are not contained in the signals... [The signals] carry no little replica of the message. The whole notion of information theory as "the power to make selections" rules out the idea that signals contain the message (Michael Reddy, "The Conduit Metaphor," 303).

** "I've come to the conclusion that it's very hard to write a gesture completely devoid of meaning or to write a gesture that's completely filled with meaning" (Michael Jacobson, asemic artist).

The arbitrary reading sign

The Saussurean sign: "The sign is the whole that results from
the association of the signifier with the signified."

A lot has already happened since Ferdinand de Saussure's foundational text in semiotics. Today, I don't mean to pick up on all the terminological plethora that now surround us. I only want to make a crude observation on how any dualism can become a closed system that eventually would want to find a way of explaining the dynamic relation between the opposing terms without multiplying entities so much that the system becomes totally open and indefinable. This is the balancing act, I believe, needed in any formalism. Too closed, the system becomes useless; too open, the system disappears with all the elements that were made to explain what is and isn't in the system. From 1, we go to 2, which will need 3 to stay as 1, but then needs 4, and so on. In this case of the dualism Signifier-Signified, the "sound-image" and the thought or concept that stood for these respective opposite poles must somehow be linked to form the Sign, despite the postulated "arbitrariness'' of any link between them. Whether spoken or written, the sign, which receives its value through a continuum of difference in the same way that a color gets its hue from its place in the spectrum, must be seen as both a divided whole and as a singular double. The system that hovers somewhere and that manifests itself only as differential values must also be able to maintain the bar between signifier and signified, without one turning into the other, and creating a confusion between them.

Of course, today, we have succumbed to the (easily misapplied) idea that everything is a signifier after all, and a signified is just another signifier treated differently. By collapsing the poles, we are left with a single term (without saying that this term is a singular thing). The amusing thing about it is that by reducing the dualism, we are now flooded by an endless chain. The system is totally open. Anything in the light of difference can be a potential sign. Derrida reserved the term "mark" for this threshold that always inaugurates writing and language as an open-ended economy. (There is no date in the past to point to as an originating moment of this event, since even the idea of an "event" itself requires this as a "prior" moment.) However, this is a strange "signifier" because it refuses the binaries that previously were clamped on to it. In fact, we cannot even point to it, indicate something as a "signifier," as if something else existed outside it or before it.

It must be kept in mind that the deconstructive "signifier" is fundamentally a critique of metaphysical notions in signification, which revises a naive concept of representation where a transcendental realm can be apprehended without first passing through a network of signs. Perception presupposes a cleavage between a "self" and an "other" as inscription within the network of signifiers. The objects we see or live with are automatically part of this open-ended "system" of signification. The table in front of me is real, but it is automatically a signifying or signified table, always associated with a narrative that we either know vaguely or minutely. Aside from that, this table is also set apart not only from other tables but also from other objects that are not tables. The table in front of me is not a simple, naked, pure object that pre-existed meaning. The very concepts of "object" or "concrete" are themselves "abstract" notions. The referential field is the product of a binaristic operation that allows this field to be distinguishable as the objective target of a "language." In this operation, both fields are actually pushed toward mutually determined "reification." This means that we can even envision signification in reverse and say that it is the table in front of me that represents the word "table."

In short, the problematic of reference is modified altogether in this situation. The referent function has not been at all obliterated, and neither was "reality." In fact, the referent function is a part of this open economy, but not as another domain apprehensible before the semiotic operation of differences. We no longer require a pre-existent, non-semiotic domain in a binary set up to get us a system of signification with a referential function. If an "external" referent (external in relation to whom or what?) is assumed by this function, it is less the effort to postulate a prior domain opposite of the sign than an operation to bolster the reality of signifying acts as a possible gesture. The sign can only point to what is already signified. These opposing domains are mutually constitutive coincidentally, much like Escher's hands drawing one another. Because of this, it would also be misleading to say that the sign preceded reality as much as it is to say the reverse. They are produced at the same time, as the "two sides of the same coin."

Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher, 1948, Lithograph

Within a "primary" differential spectrum, a secondary plane of differences arises where subsequent binaries are built up : "inside" or "outside," "sign" or "referent," and so on (the difference that creates differences). In other words, referents are part of the system of signs, not outside it, and the sign instantiates the empty vector or the wake of this binary set up. The sign, then, is the function of a binarism at work in which the pair "sign vs. nonsign" (which are both signs) would be subsuming the pair "word-referent." For the formulation of a semiotic theory, one term of the binary is singled out, then isolated to become the Saussurean "sign" in a meta-semiotic framing, divided further into the signifier and signified. In this theoretical elaboration, any question relating to the fourth item (the nonsign, a category that appears to be critical differentially in the emergence of the sign) seems to have been left out. (It remains to be seen if many of the confusions in the discussion of signs and meaning stem from not identifying these distinct levels properly. The concept of the sign in the 20th century is, after all, a metalinguistic product.)

If a sign can have two parts, what is stopping us from giving it more? Isn't this what happened with C. S. Peirce who went from a triadic model to generate over 59,000 types of signs, reducible to 66 categories? (How big or how long is a "sign" anyway? A word, a novel, all of writing? This is a question we will try to discuss another time.) What if every semiotic instance becomes a coordinate in a mathematical sense that each sign would be occupying a unique number in space and time, having its own distinctive combination of parts? Each sign would be a unique event, and every interpretation would be a literal mapping of one sign over another (a kind of "temporal binding"). Metaphorical processes are, at the bottom, really just modelled after a real world process of mapping signs over other signs. When reciting any sign, we postulate a resemblance between a previous use and the subsequent mention of the "same" sign. This analogic operation is required for the successful recognition and reading of signs in any interpretative coordinate. Or, we can say that what we call a "sign" is actually a moment of reading.

Metaphorical mapping is both the symptom and the principle of a literal semiotic mapping process where a third term is always produced that is neither the first nor the second term in the equation. An example of this operation on the meta-semiotic plane is the Saussurean "sign." I would think that this sign is less an object than the name of a binaristic operation similar to "metaphor."  By extension, we can also say the same thing to reading: another binaristic operation.

Chains of binaristic mappings

In a scheme that I am trying to lay out here, the whole process begins with a differential network where binaries can begin to play, and where marks evolve into "glyphs" (to carve out, to cleave). Even at this stage, none of these "readable" items are positive terms possessing a self-contained plenitude (their identities are necessarily composite). The birth of languages in this case presupposes a primary differential force (called "writing" in the deconstructionist sense). The glyphs that we later use also become operators in a signifying gesture that maps the "linguistic" with the "non-linguistic" or vice versa. If this same operation is mapped over the meta-semiotic process of the Saussurean "sign," it is because it instantiates the very principle of metaphoric operation of signification. At any point in the chains of mappings, every mark, glyph, sign, word or metaphor is a moment of reading that perpetually generates the binaries that make signifying possible. That is, we do not read the sign; the sign is the reading.

Formulated this way, the sign is not an object, but an event. To speak of the sign as an object, we will need to distinguish a semiotic operation from the typographic and sonic reproduction of alphabetical forms and features. To speak of the sign as "opaque" is to map a physical quality of 3-D objects and printed letters on to the semiotic sign, negating its operation as a reading event and as metaphorical mapping. In common polemical formulation, this is saying that signs don't represent anything, or don't have a meaning beyond what they are physically. Reading now becomes impossible (Edmond Jabès) because the meanings that were formerly mapped with the semiotic sign have finally become untenable or unbearable, if not just simply completely abritrary.

"Only sentences can be true"

According to Rorty, Davidson's philosophy of language constitutes "the first systematic treatment of language which breaks completely with the notion of language as something which can be adequate or inadequate to the world or to the self. For Davidson breaks with the notion that language is a medium--a medium either of representation or of expression." If language does not mediate between us and the world, as Davidson claims, and if we cease to imagine that a split exists between an inner world of thought and feeling and an outer world of objects and events, as Davidson advocates, then nothing exists "out there" or "in here" that will serve as an epistemological foundation for either a theory of meaning or a theory of truth; all we have to authorize our utterances are other utterances. As Rorty puts it, "only sentences can be true...  and human beings make truths by making languages in which to phrase sentences." (From Thomas Kent, “Language Philosophy, Writing, and Reading: A Conversation with Donald Davidson.” Italics added.)

Deprived of any raison-d'être, language is not only lacking any function or purpose: it is also lacking any definite nature. Here, the provisional initial state is now given as autotelic: language is true and meaningful because it says so of itself.

IF the initial value of the sign is quotation, then to magnify this within the conceptualist or materialist approach to  "writing" (as pure reproduction) is to propose a mise en avant that functions as a symbolic explosion and provocation.

The opacity of language is a conclusion of conceptual art but already a premise for conceptual writing. The very procedures of conceptual writing, in fact, demand an opaquely material language: something to be digitally clicked and cut, physically moved and reframed, searched and sampled, and poured and pasted. The most conceptual poetry, unexpectedly, is also some of the least abstract, and the guiding concept behind conceptual poetry may be the idea of language as quantifiable data (Craig Dworkin, from Against Expression).

Since we no longer know what "language" means or how it functions or what it is, we are limited to the exploration of its modes of reproduction and perpetual decontextualization. If we follow a simplistic progression for the treatment of signs, we can start with:

1) a breakaway process where the sign is detached from representationalist or expressionist regimes;

2) followed by its new existence as a chain of signifiers without signifieds, its inflationary "resurrected status" circulating within systems of hyperbolic meanings without substance, where its new "referents" are "obscene" or "obese" dramatizations of models (the hyperreal).

3) then its parallel materialist or conceptualist recycling within practices that we can probably lump under the now famous term of "post-literate" text-writing. These would still be "language games" only in the sense that there is no longer an attempt to use a pre-conceived language very well for semantic or pragmatic ends. These would be games in which language is being manufactured or manipulated as an end in itself, treated as signals without the message.

For example, in "January Zero" by Ray DiPalma, the mechanical reproduction of the same syntax no longer evokes the attempt to excel in the narration of events, which is the essential style of historical and journalistic truth-discourse. Instead, this perfect grammar machine simply emphasizes the material efficiency of a language powerful in its mechanics, but empty of ultimate meaning. In other words, it only shows us how it works, and it works very well, indeed.

No doubt, all these previous terms--"literature," "writing," "language," like the term "art," continue to be involved somehow, the faint echoes of "strong" items that lived well before. However, a new tact is demanded, a new relationship with writing is proposed.

What we’re dealing with here is a basic change in the operating system of how we write at the root level. The results might not look different, and they might not feel different, but the underlying ethos and modes of writing have been permanently changed. If painting reacted to photography by moving toward abstraction, it seems unlikely that writing is doing the same in relation to the Internet. It appears that writing’s response will be mimetic and replicative, involving notions of distribution while proposing new platforms of receivership. Words very well might be written not to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated (Kenneth Goldsmith, from Against Expression).

Today, this is all part of what is already presumed. It is only natural that a subversive practice gets rebuilt later on as another referent, cited along expositionary discursive regimes. This is not a mystery after all, since that's exactly how language is always true to itself: "Only tautological sentences are perfectly true" (Canetti).

The other half of language

Grafism for xxx//

Language is the product of a selection process. Beyond the forms we recognize are so many others that we exclude from perception. Language, that one we accept to read and understand, is only half the story. Traversing the forms we know are unnumbered variations that we exclude as insignificant, meaningless, or unnecessary. However, as we have known for a long time now, the excluded elements are constitutive of the positive value of the elements that we can recognize.

What we consider as bona fide linguistic material is only the half of a whole spectrum of metaplasmic differences. This half is made possible by the selective exclusion of insignificant forms. Yet, it is by virtue of these insignificant forms that we have a language in the first place. Secondly, the familiarity or significance we attribute to the forms we have selected is not the inherent property of these valued forms. They all have the same mutational status, except that at one time or another we have assigned signifying values to one half, and denied it to the other.

Every form we consider signifying could have had a different fate in history. Among all the possible permutations of the alphabet, we have valorized only a sacred set. This is an ongoing process, with new items battling their way into the canon, and others getting dropped or disappearing after becoming obsolete. Others have not yet been given this chance, and may remain indefinitely in the shadows.

The retreat of the sign

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.... A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.  (Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations." Italics added.)

What is a system of sign today but a glorious fantasy imbued with the hyperreality of symbolic energies? I can cling forever to a dated treatment of the sign where it still swims in a referential or systematic network of semantic associations, and deny its new status as a resurrected simulacrum in a state of total inflation. As if a switch was flipped and the sign is now nothing but obscenity and total inflation, where signs still circulate but emptied of all use or exchange value. Outside of the regime of truth and meaning, the creation of the meaningful takes place as a form of hyperbolic inflation. "Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference" (Baudrillard).

In this retreat of the old language, it is only apt to see the arrival of a new "abstracted" form of language in what has been labelled asemic writing or art. It is as if writing must now find a purer form of itself outside all regimes of meaningfulness that have become nothing but demonstrations of obscenity and total inflation. Beyond the eternal rehearsal of the death of language, asemic writing is definitely only one possible reaction, which is almost like nostalgia for a lost continent. Retreating from the irritating erethism of over-signifying forms and their semantic inflammations, writing reboots itself as a pure inscription without symbology. In a related direction, we can include the invention of "new" languages or systems, machine language, codes and other forms of cypher, perhaps not so far from what Jukka-Pekka Kervinen has been doing (http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com/).

In another more famous direction that stretches from Futurism to Lettrism and to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and "Conceptual" poetry of today, the sign is embraced in all its inflationary resurrection and treated with its own material, producing a secondary abstraction that seems to function like writing, but actually moving in a "logographic" dimension where "language" and its "practices" are the proposed or supposed "subject" or "object" and where the old symbology is displaced as an associated automatism or excess. Stated differently, this abstracted dimension of writing is almost like theorizing about or for "language" or signifying practices but formulated in a "non-scientific" jargon. In this abstracted stage, the sign is both nonsignifying material and concept, investigated in the roles it plays in the old regimes of writing, truth, and meaning.

Language or writing no longer describes, expresses, represents, communicates, explains, illustrates, and so on, except as simulated or resurrected acts of an inflated language. Today, the sign has retreated and has given its place to asemic, post-literate writing and inflationary practices of post- or over-writing. We cannot be farther from the noisy gimmicks of Dadaism, which during its time was still confronted with the holy spectre of meaning. All the abuses of language, like in Beckett or Ionesco afterwards, only signalled the swan song of language. Beyond the simulacrum of communicative forms, we have machines of production instead that churn out charming refrains as a mode of captivation, giddiness, and mass hysteria. This is our mode of happiness today, a giddiness where all perspectives and referents are bypassed in a blurry, inconsequential, hysterical ride. When every "trait [is] thus raised to the superlative power" to impress us of the truth of their reality, we mark the moment where "we have [already] passed alive into the models" (Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, p.9).

In one possible treatment, in that of Kenneth Goldsmith:

Language has become a provisional space, temporary and debased, mere material to be shoveled, reshaped, hoarded and molded into whatever form is convenient, only to be discarded just as quickly. Because words today are cheap and infinitely produced, they are detritus, signifying little, meaning less. Disorientation by replication, mirroring, and spam is the norm. Any notion of the authentic or original is untraceable. French theorists who anticipated the destabilizing of language could never have foreseen the extent that these words refuse to stand still; restlessness is all they know. Words today are bubbles, shape shifters, empty signifiers, floating on the invisibility of the network, that great leveler of language, from which we greedily and indiscriminately siphon, stuffing hard drives only to replace them with bigger and cheaper ones. Digital text is the body-double of print, the ghost in the machine. The ghost has become more useful than the real; if we can’t download it, it doesn’t exist. Words are additive, they pile up endlessly, become undifferentiated, shattered into shards now, words reform into language-constellations later, only to be blown apart once more ("Provisional Language," 2010).

The death of Sherlock Holmes

"You need me, or you're nothing." (Moriarty)

It amazes me how Sherlock Holmes is able to tie up the detective narrative so well from end to end. Not only does he play the role of a character sleuth, but also functions as the intersection of the narrative events and, ultimately, their revelatory meaning. In another television series like CSI, it is certainly not science that ends up solving the crime: it is the narrative itself that does. Like any good crime mystery, the whole goal of a detective story is the resolution of the puzzle by the narrative through the simulation of a "suspenseful" process of rationalization.

In this world, Sherlock Holmes is simply the other name of a super-machine of interpretation. In his eyes, all details converge to reconstitute the narrative of events that take place outside of his perceptional space. It is like having an infinite number of CCTV cameras mounted everywhere in London, recording every minute detail and happening, and binding them all within the logic of the narrative of causes and effects. It is only proper that behind it all the narrative must postulate a master mind, an evil genius that generates the crime event in secret designs. The super villain is necessary because s/he verifies or confirms the existence and order of the design, making it fully objective and not the subjective fantasy of the detective. As with all good detective stories following the rules of the genre, nothing is left to chance, to the natural, or to the supernatural (Deus ex machina). A crime is a human designed event, and thus requires the exposition of this secular design, however obscure or exotic it may be.  In superhero comics like The Batman, the super villain is not allowed simply to shoot down the superhero in cold blood. The best villains must contrive a complicated and often ostentatious machinery to show the whole world that it was they who were the unambiguous cause of the hero's death or downfall. Less talented villains don't have this obsession, and are just happy to credit the gun manufacturer and the statistical meeting of the bullet and the target in the hero's demise. Thus, in any kind of detective story where evil and good characters collide, the great hero or sleuth is always caught up in a criminal world designed by an arch villain.

As a super-machine of detection, the sleuth becomes the central processing unit of the narrative, weaving people, events and objects into an interpretative journey whose goal is the exposition of the crime. In this scenario, it is only fitting that the detective should be armed with an exceptional talent of interpretation and memory, able to link up seemingly insignificant data into a twisted pattern of design and discovery. Here, innocent objects or remarks are seized up by the hero to become shining links in a chain of criminal revelation. Everything is measured and scrutinized, nothing is left to chance, so that the innocence of words, objects, and events, formerly belonging to a different order of reality, is snatched away to perform a more signifying designation. Without the eye of Sherlock Holmes able to oversee even beyond the grave, reality would never have the same exciting narrative journey toward discovery and design. Everything would become chance, or inscrutable and unknowable natural or supernatural design.

Asemic writing: reading initiations (updated entry, 2018)

From the blurb for An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting (2013) edited by Tim Gaze and Michael Jacobson we read:

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is the first book-length publication to collect the work of a community of writers on the edges of illegibility. Asemic writing is a galaxy-sized style of writing, which is everywhere yet remains largely unknown. For human observers, asemic writing may appear as lightning from a storm, a crack in the sidewalk, or the tail of a comet. But despite these observations, asemic writing is not everything: it is just an essential component, a newborn supernova dropped from a calligrapher's hand. Asemic writing is simultaneously communicating with the past and the future of writing, from the earliest undeciphered writing systems to the xenolinguistics of the stars; it follows a peregrination from the preliterate, beyond the verbal, finally ending in a postliterate condition in which visual language has superseded words.

     In the simplest of terms, Asemic writing is writing in any media made of undecipherable invented symbols or glyphs, or illegible, unreadable, or incomprehensible calligraphic-like or cursive-like writing or griffonage. It consists of works resembling some kind of writing system or handwriting located “on the edges of illegibility,” doubly referring to the writers or artists themselves practising it and the product of that practice. 

     The first question that arises in this case is why do these poets and artists producing such work? And how should we read them if the grammatological or calligraphic marks or forms they come in are unreadable? How do we read something made of deliberately unreadable or unknown words, language, symbols, or markings? What is the implication of this artistic statement in general to our concepts of language and writing?

     As Asemic art works are visual and material representations of writing, they are often associated to Visual Poetry in general. However, Asemic writing has a restricted thematic: “unreadable” writing. Only the absence of accessible meaning on the level of the glyphs or griffonage or longhand forces us to look instead at how they look and how they are made or what they are made of (as picture, process, and material).  It would be a different kind of reading process, something we are not in the habit of making in formal literary terms, but an activity we often in fact engage in when we read visual and material cues, like in the expression “reading clues” or “reading people” or reading nonverbal or body language. Thus, we do perform other modes of reading outside of language in the strict linguistic sense. Everyday, we are playing the role of the detective. Approaching Asemic writing will just need some skill in art criticism and history, some knowledge of writing or grammatological systems, a practical background in graphic design, an intuitive grasp of cultural proxemics and bibliographical or literacy codes, some basic acquaintance with the history of the Human Sciences and 20^th century critical theory, and a familiarity with the human body. There is, perhaps, only one thing you won’t need: the dictionary and the grammar of the real living or dead languages you have and haven’t learned. We would need to take out something else, too, something which we could call the “transcendental” or ahistorical Code or Ground of reading.

     To commence a preliminary demonstration of how our detective might go about “reading” an unknown script or an indecipherable scribbling, I would deploy two terms: “altersign” and “intersign.” The first is my coinage to refer to clearly drawn but fully invented “meaningless” glyphs; the second comes from Michael Rinaldo, in his unpublished doctoral work, Breaking the Letter: Illegibility as Intersign in Cy Tombly, Steve McCaffery, and Susan Howe (2013), referring to markings which are neither writing nor drawing, hovering between scriptural and pictorial status. Two more terms to complement the first pair: positive and negative composition. These are not opposites but are simply “tendencies” of composition: the first emphasizes the forming of legible but unknown glyphs, the second the deforming of legible scripts to produce illegible marks which hover between a likeness to writing and to drawing. The “entities” we will often encounter in Asemic writing come as either invented forms never meant to be “read” on their own terms, or appearing as neither scriptural nor pictorial elements.

      Like Visual Poetry to which it is marginally associated, Asemic writing comprises a wide spectrum of practices in terms of the media and procedures employed. It can be born “analog” or “digital” or can use material coming from these two media technologies. For example, a digitally-born design could be printed on paper, which in turn becomes material for an abstract asemic collage using magazine cut outs and found objects, then overlaid with calligraphic paint or ink tracings. In principle, there is no limit to the material density or complexity of the work like in any form of plastic or verbal art. It all depends on the evolution of the work, the preferences of the artist, and the various logistical and economic aspects of production. Nevertheless, while “formal” and visual poetries are flexible with their themes or subjects, Asemic is not. The subject of Asemic writing is writing itself in its “proto-semantic” (McCaffery) embodiments in various grammatological, material, and even gestural dimensions. This doesn’t mean that Asemic works cannot include non-grammatological items or even regular elements of known languages. The main distinction is that the focus of the piece is the “xenography” which can be either the sole element of the work or placed beside non-xenographic items for whatever purpose the work may want to accomplish in both aesthetic and philosophical terms.

     As introduction to the “positive” process of producing the Asemic, let’s start with the Chinese artist Xu Bing’s famous asemic text, Tiānshū (translated as A Book from the Sky but which is better rendered Nonsense Writing according to Wu Hung). In this work in four-volume book format of 604 pages (see Plate 1), Xu Bing invented 4,000 meaningless Chinese characters. The unreadable “Chinese” characters were printed following traditional wood types hand-carved by the artist himself who said that he “spent four years of his life making something that says nothing.”

     Grammatologically, Tiānshū follows the “metalogics” (see Johanna Drucker) of the Chinese writing system (reading direction, letterform style and sizes, page layout) and for a non-Chinese, would appear like legitimate Chinese calligraphic scripts. For Rinaldo, however, this will not count as an example of the illegible, even though it is asemic, because of the sharp and well-drawn nature of the notations or letterforms. Since I am not a trained Sinologist, I am confining myself to simply pointing out both the inventive nature of Xu Bing’s 4,000 “Chinese” characters and their legible, even traditional, embodiment as instances of altersigns.

     As another instance of grammatological inventiveness, Michael Jacobson’s glyphs in his “visual novella” called The Giant’s Fence (see Plate 2) follows the same procedure as Xu Bing’s. Jacobson, who begins his work using “pen-and-paper sketches” using “automatic writing or [snatching] a shape from the surrounding environment” and then moves on to “[developing] complexity,” says his works represent the

Attempts to push written, symbolic communication to the breaking point and create a sort of "trans-symbolism," that is, signs transcending symbolic communication.... Usually the signs begin as recognizable symbols that, through subsequent generations, become abstract designs whose origin eventually becomes obscure even to myself, the creator of the piece (2013).

     Like Xu Bing, Jacobson draws inspiration from known writing systems of the world. Jacobson, however, takes his inspiration from a system that is not his own. Apart from deriving The Giant’s Fence’s influences from Easter Island’s Rongorongo scripts, Jacobson also gets his ideas from illegible graffiti and sigils. (The choice of grammatological allusions can also be seen as a significant conscious or subconscious stylistic ideology of the other, the foreign, or the unknown.) Jacobson does not have a fixed normative or prescriptive method for “reading” Asemic works:

One must have an explorer's spirit to interpret asemic texts. They aren't bound by anything except the limits of one's imagination. I also think asemic texts offer readers access to the author's raw life experience. Because the text is undecipherable, an asemic author is likely to put down thoughts and emotions that don't exist in standard written communication. What the reader does with this nexus of communication is entirely up to him or her. I recommend "reading" an asemic text in various places, in various orders, and in various contexts so the glyphs can interact with the environment and always seem fresh (2013).

The modulation toward authorial affects or experience as reading components can be seen as a skeuomorph of older poetic paradigms. These older models can be deployed in the reading or making of the work if one wishes, but Jacobson cautiously tempers this with suggestions of conducting nonlinear readings. 

     A possible approach for such “positive” types of Asemic creation/production is to see how other aspects of communication or media technology in both their material and ergonomic aspects remain in force. The four basic elements of communication media technology (Hand, Tool, Pigment, and Surface) are all combined in various ways but always in a tension with the scaffolding afforded by our understanding of how to navigate the directionality of scripts or glyphs both as part of known writing systems and as elements of the page or the book (their “metalogics”). Even though the linguistic and poetic codes we are used to expecting are not available (or suggested to be not available), other extraneous codes or background knowledge are retained (on the legible “side” of the edge). For example, the Giant’s Fence still respects alignments and baselines even though we are not given which reading directionality to follow. The tightly-bound almost vine-like ramification of the manuscript precluded any free placement and followed a disciplined page printing grid like Xu Bing’s text. The ligatures that create the flow of “units” (since a bias makes us look for discrete parts) evoke the abstract mode of handwritten hieroglyphics. The widespread absence of kerning makes it difficult to ascertain the boundaries of letterforms in the way we are used to in the current Roman alphabet typographical system. Jacobson’s asemic glyphs, however, do remind me of the old classical Greek and Latin style of continuous script without spacing, up or down casing, and punctuations called the Scriptio continua. 

     In an age of standardized machine-cut typefaces and fonts, Jacobson’s abstract semi-pictorial continuous script carries the “aura” of a pre-modern, non-Western society. To assume or impose such an aura on the Jacobsonian manuscript may imply a nuance of Romantic primitivism or a critique of standardized, streamlined typography and its corollary myth of communicative transparency or modernist efficiency, and this we achieve just by inferring from our basic or background knowledge of writing systems (or grammatological typology) around the world. There appears to be some consistency in the scriptural notational style but it will take a rigorous image analysis to determine if there are even discrete letterforms or cursive cycles that repeat in a regular pattern or rhythm in the whole book. That is, we are not certain if there are even alphabetical units at all. We can add more grammatological or graphetical technicalities in this “extrinsic reading,” but I wanted only to sketch a demonstration of how an approach to Asemic xenography can be pursued. 

      These readings, then, would like to deploy a “grammatologist” approach (in the pre-Derridean and, later on, Derridean strands) conjointly with others such as bibliography or graphic design which emphasize the pragmatic materiality of the work. Certainly, relevant concepts can be marshalled whenever helpful in the elucidation of the dynamics invoked by the Asemic piece at hand. As Jacobson has said, in the end it is up to readers to decide what to make of it, yet with the proviso of the avoidance of the closure of meaning since the very choice of inventing unknown glyphs already prompts us that the focus is not on whatever the scripts may mean lexically or hermeneutically, an approach which has become impractical given the presumed absence or non-availability of the scriptural system’s inherent code. Instead, the bracketing off of the code deflects our attention toward the literally “extrinsic” aspects of the asemic artefact and toward our assumptions about navigating a writing system as a historically and culturally bound pragmatic convention modulated by the affordances of media technology embodiment. I will reserve the discussion of the details of these “extrinsic” approaches in another section.

     Unfortunately, I will need to discuss three more Asemic pieces because showing only one or two works cannot possibly represent the whole range of artistic possibilities of Asemic writing and the general and case-specific approaches to various oeuvres. Let me give an example this time of a work that uses the “negative” processes of producing the illegible following the restrictions made by Rinaldo in his work. Using the poet/artist bpNichol’s distinction between “dirty” and “clean” in Visual and Concrete Poetry, we can say that Xu Bing and Jacobson’s legible yet asemic glyphs printed sharply and neatly in black and white are examples of the latter type. Adding more elements via collage and palimpsest multiplies the layers of the page or frame and raises the graphic and material density of the work. When an element that we cannot classify unambiguously as either scriptural, pictorial, or even sculptural is present on the display surface, then we have what Rinaldo calls an “intersign.” For him, this is the signature of the illegible:

Illegibility… functions intersemiotically in a way that is harder to define: it mediates between textuality and pictoriality without being unambiguously determinable as either icon or text through notational decipherment. And it is this suggestiveness in textual illegibility of both icon and text that eludes precise formulation. While not textually legible, an illegible mark could still evoke writing qua fragmented or effaced sign. In turn, textual illegibility could additionally suggest pictoriality when inferable as partially abstracted image of a text. (This is the case sometimes when textual objects are incorporated within the three-dimensional world of a perspective painting.) If a mark is unambiguous and legible in at least one sign system, then it ceases to be an intersign in the same way a textually illegible mark would.

     There are many ways to accomplish this. An example would be in the often used palimpsestic illegibility similar to what we can see in Charles Bernstein’s "Veil" (see Plate 3). Situated between concrete poetry and asemic art, this production from Charles Bernstein conveys the material thickness of writing where scriptural forms attain depth and weight, shade and texture through the stratification of textual sediments. As one machine-cut Roman letter gets piled on top of another, the white spacing that allowed them to function as discrete typographical units give way to shadow as the differences among glyphs get dissolved by the sheer weight of the marks it supported. The text as textus has literally become opaque, creating a grainy textscape wall which hangs between sign and image, meaning and matter. The sheer verbosity of machine-cut signifiers does not lead to more meaning but to the occultation of their own form as sharply legible standardized glyphs. Dirty, concrete, illegible, and asemic, the “Veil” retains the vestiges of typewriterly alignment and even retains anglo-lexical “survivors” in a Courier-like typeface at the ragged-right end or edge of the page/frame/surface. Still legible, they have nevertheless become marginal forms beside the vast illegible static screen of the ink wall. By not opting for an asemic graphism that simulates xenography, the “Veil” hits much closer to home by morphing the standardized forms of the writing system we know very well so illegibly that we can no longer read or even recognize them via the modes of verbal and visual literacy we have practiced for a long time as our intimate cultural capital and habitus.

     Another example that should fall under Rinaldo’s intersign is Peter Ganick’s “Notes toward infinity - theory of the scribble - theory of the scrawl” (see Plate 4). Ganick is a prolific writer and poet, producing volumes of work running into thousands of pages. I wanted to discuss this type of Asemic work to provide an idea of the radical range of Asemic writing. We won’t think of the term “calligraphy” or “graffiti” as applicable even in the most abstract mode or manifestation, not even of longhand scripts like signatures. It is not called “scrawl” for no reason. But setting that beside “infinity” makes us think (paradoxically) of the absence of fixed frames of reference and how that takes away basically all notions, all thoughts, all measures, all directions. Since thought-less, it is also sign-less. There seems to be a halted attempt at some illegible words scribbled on the lower left hand corner, and helps to give the page some sort of initial alignment. Yet, the chaotic mass of long, heavy, light, jagged, curved, wavy, thin, thick, crooked, zigzag, winding, and generally errant lines don’t seem to converge or diverge anywhere. Over all, no writing system we know of is definitely alluded to. No image in the iconic or pictorial sense of the word can be made out. We can’t even pretend that it is an artist’s preliminary sketch. 

     Yet in spite of the seeming chaos, we can see a hint of a subtly placed center, even if we can’t find where the scrawling motion begins or ends. The margins are respected, as if there was still a center of gravity keeping the wandering scribbler from leaving the page entirely. We cannot even compare it to atomic collision marks which never hesitate in their ineluctable paths despite being governed by chance. We can’t compare it to automatic writing whose strokes are too unconsciously decisive, too feverish, and frenetic. We sense a trembling, shaky, tracing movement, the hand barely holding the tool well enough to execute decisive or bold strokes. The scrabbly marks don’t coordinate sufficiently to gather themselves into a definite form or loop, or huddle into a glyph beyond the erratic tangle of lines. The hand writing seems to be refusing to hold the pen upright, reminding me of Maurice Blanchot’s (1969) notion of “weariness” in The Infinite Conversation, communicating the fact and act of writing/language as “the truth of weariness, a weary truth.”  

     In general, the weary, directionless lines of Ganick’s piece can be contrasted to the longhand in Vincenzo Accame’s “Récit” (see Plate 5) where the strokes are determined, purposeful, single-minded, and looks much more “normal” than Plate 4’s aimless scribbles. As another species of the intersign, Accame’s closely-huddled handwriting is illegible and from a good distance can seem like a forest. The white triangular gaps that cut through abruptly are so geometrically sharp, like roads dividing the landscape, that they fragment the intended continuity of the handwriting field (organic vs. inorganic motif). The scissor-like gaps disable the cohesion of the “récit” (story), divide language from itself, and reinforce the separation of signifiers from signifieds that feeds back into the illegible form of the handwriting as handwriting and not as systemic, or cursive, or grammatological signs. Furthermore, the diagonal orientation of the triangular slices runs against the usual x and y axes of print page layout or gridding, as if it were a new axis z, a third dimension cutting through the gray matter of the text as a disruptive dynamic. We can also make the observation that the opposition between the slopes and strokes of the cursive style and the rectilinearity of the diagonal gaps could be regarded as the difference between human and artificial or machinic technological footprint in media technology. It is possible, then to employ such binaristic rhetoric following the graphics layout of the work itself. A grammatological notion can therefore be complemented by graphic design “grammars” as well as bibliographic conventions in this multimodal “extrinsic” and literal approach toward Asemic writing.

     Even if there are radically undecipherable glyphs, illegible cursives, and dysgraphic markings, the five Asemic plates still depended on the bibliographic orientation of the Page as compositional field. Apart from Ganick’s landscape mode, the other four are in the portrait mode. The ergonomic function of the “standard” implied observer is conserved in all cases except Jacobson’s which can be rotated 90 or 180 degrees without seemingly violating page-viewing orientation. The only purely horizontal baseline in Accame’s “Récit” is strategically located at the bottom of the frame, serving as the ergonomic clue for viewing orientation. The cursive in his piece also would not look “correct” if rotated by 90 or 180 degrees, given the undulating baseline of the slopes and strokes dictating the position of the loops on the ascender portion above the typographic “mean” line. Even Ganick’s piece, with its multidirectional and weary non-cursive lines, leaves something for ergonomic orientation: the fragmentary cursive on the lower left corner and the nascent but obscured or abandoned Cartesian grid are “forensic” clues to the orientation of the page. Thus, even if the linguistic or poetic codes are bracketed off in a way analogous to Husserl’s epoché, other extraneous codes are invoked, including principally, inevitably, or inviolably the implied presence of the viewer as a phenomenological constant without whom the pragmatic process of a global semiosis will not even begin. 

     The “improvisational” (in Michael Borkent’s sense) demonstration I made here are sketches of a possible multimodal approach using “extraneous” grammatological, graphetical, bibliographic, phenomenological, ergonomic, pragmatic, or cultural codes logically called for by being in front of an unknown graphic (ambiguously pictorial and scriptural) artefact and in the absence of the (transcendental, intrinsic, or metaphysical) formalist poetic or linguistic codes which Asemic writing precludes by definition. We may not have words we can recognize, but reading does not just center on words but also on other types of relationships. A “paralingual poetics” (or “postlinguistic,” following Borkent’s terminology) such as Asemic writing partakes of our shared era of reading without the benefit of timeless codes formerly imagined to “inhabit” an artistic artefact or the chambers of the human mind (cf. Michael Reddy on the “conduit” metaphor of communication). The exploration of these paralinguistic codes would lead to a different type of “extrinsic” approach in a more literally literal direction. The “scanning” technique would also need to take into account the unique assembly aspects that each Asemic piece represents and must be open to experiment with the specific direction the detailed interpretation will take, adopting new tools or modifying them as the particular case requires. This is simply extending into the reading practice the operational logic of any Art which demands a constant re-vision of our ways of seeing.

List of Plates

 

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 Old entry:

1. The asemic is a dynamic, unstable category. Something can be asemic to a lot of people, but how can we tell that it will still be to someone else in the future or in a different situation? What can be "absolutely" asemic is an open question. What is asemic may end up becoming meaningful to someone later on. However, we should qualify this by saying that asemic writing primarily refers to two conditions: first, a suspicion holds that a given specimen belongs to or instantiates a sign or writing system; second, that this "system" is inaccessible or unknown in an absolute way. Specimens of asemic writing are indeed given "second-order" meaning (as a style in art, for example), and "asemic" has its own definition, but this is all happening in a sign system (English) that is external to the sign system suspected to be used in a specimen of asemic writing. Even the intentional production of asemic art or writing does not "betray" its asemic nature. The question then becomes: How is it possible for anyone already possessing a language to produce something in another "projected" or "imagined" sign system where the producer pretends to have no access? Isn't asemic writing a species of fantasy? And, therefore, not so dissimilar from other fantasies of language?

2. The term is basically limited to any marking that has the semblance of writing. It is not normally applied to objects. For example, what would an "asemic table" be, or an "asemic pillow?" Thus, the qualifier "asemic" is something used in conjunction with nouns such as art, painting, writing, etching, drawing, text, postcard, poem, etc. In short, it is mainly an artifact that contains or carries a semblance to some kind of writing or language.

3. Any object or sets of objects could be treated as writing if there is enough number of them set in some kind of pattern that could have a semblance to some kind of language, writing, or sign system. Again, this is dependent on who reads. For schizophrenia, anything at all can have a pattern. But it would be another step to see a pattern as some form of writing, and more to say which one is asemic (unknown system) and which one is readable. (Here, as elsewhere, I use the term "system" irresponsibly and loosely as a kind of network of relationships whose boundaries are not easy to fix or define. Any system must necessarily be open or has "interface" capabilities. If not, it would be super-insulated and isolated, fully autonomous and self-enclosed, like a "monad" that has no doors or windows. Enclosed this way, a system will become fully unreadable or untranslatable, an enigma.)

4. The key to labelling something as asemic or not depends on an assumption of the presence of a "system" to which something asemic supposedly belongs. This system must also be deemed "artificial" enough. Rain erosion marks on a wall, for instance, is hard to categorize as asemic writing or art. They can be considered "found" art or "natural" art. Yet, since no obvious and deliberate attempt was made to continually control the flow and development of the markings, they don't fall under "writing." What we call "natural" languages have enough artificiality in them that we don't see them as similar to rain marks or geological flow marks on rocks or landscapes. (The "water" flow marks on Mars, for example.) Languages are only called "natural" to distinguish them from systems that are known to have been deliberately created. Examples are constructed, formal, and computer languages. This distinction does not imply superiority for any category: "(T)he limited size and short-lived nature of artificial languages are probably the only things that sets them apart from natural languages, since all languages are artificial insofar as they are conventional" (Wikipedia). Like other sign systems, "natural" languages become extinct, too.

5. Asemic art or writing cannot be absolutely accidental, or else it won't be "writing." Asemic writing is a marking that is assumed to be a part of an unknown sign system, not a foreign language or an ancient language that just needs deciphering. Secondly, it is also assumed to have some "intelligence" in it that remains undiscovered or irrecoverable. This is what sets it apart from natural processes or accidental marks. A gash on the paint of a car may be interpreted as an evidence of a minor collision, but is not considered to be a specimen of writing. It is simply "forensic" evidence.

6. The borderline that delimits the moment when any marking whatsoever can become asemic writing is not easy to draw. First, any mark must become writing or resemble some instance of a sign system at work. The annular rings in trees are natural markings but are not considered writings. They represent the "forensic" evidence of the age of trees, each ring being translated into one year in the human time system. It cannot be "asemic" as long as it is given a scientific meaning.

7. Asemic writing may not contain a recoverable meaning, but it does carry a "forensic" meaning. The fact that anything can be given the term "asemic writing" tells us that whatever artifact it is, we can recognize it, categorize it, talk about it, point to it. These are all acts of meaning. Even if asemic writing as a specimen can be categorized in a system that has meaning, it is itself not a part of that system but of another presumed system of signs. It is asemic because the system that can help us read it is missing, unknown, or irrecoverable. Hence, no translation work is possible. It is in this respect that the tactical value of asemic writing comes to the forefront: it mutes the Semantic and emphasizes the inscrutable form or material or process of the writing gesture. Executed consciously, the asemic is produced, a contrario, in itself bearer of unknown meaning, but tagged and moving within a horizon supposedly active with meaning.

8. Hence, when we say "asemic writing," we actually presume the presence of two systems of signs that have no natural or accidental origins: what we use to categorize a specimen as "asemic writing," and another in which the specimen is written or coded. Apart from these two systems, we must also assume the presence of others that are not considered to be writing systems: natural processes and accidents. These two realms are not asemic because of science and "forensic" methods of reading. They are not "writing" since they are not sign systems themselves. Instead, sign systems "read" them and give them their own kind of systematicity expressed in formulae or some other jargon. The natural world and the universe are not sign systems, despite the fact that a formal language or jargon like mathematics has been made and is used to describe them. A table doesn't become linguistic just because I call it a "table," but it does become part of a whole context in which we move and live. Maybe a way to phrase it is to say that a table is part of a system of objects and it intersects with another system (that of signs) when we call it "table."

Automatic writing by Bruno Leyval

9. Only in divination can accidents and natural events act as "messages" from the gods, or as forms of writing. Forced to consider nature and accidents as "messages," I can only admire the diviner's access to the system of writing that I don't have, which transforms nature into an asemic language whose words and meaning completely escape me. "Automatic writing" can also produce scribblings whose illegibility can be considered asemic, unless assigned a meaning via supernatural or psychological interpretations. These are only two examples where asemic instances get transformed into signifying artifacts. A third example would be superstitions. Just look at the following quotes and the amazing way insignificant coincidences or accidents in nature are given meaning:

Three butterflies on a leaf are unlucky.

Two crows flying together from left is bad luck.

Birds at a window bring bad news.  

A robin tapping on window brings bad news.

When a lizard crosses your path, the day will not be a happy one.

(http://naturemeanings.blogspot.com/2012/01/divination-in-nature-luck-proverbs.html)

The logic behind superstitions can sometimes be traced back to old beliefs and narratives; sometimes, the logic or the system behind them can just be completely unknown.

10. Between natural and accidental events and asemic writing, we can place the work of Otto Zitko, described as calligraphic expressions of non-literal writing (Herbert Lachmayr). Everything looks like wounding, spiralling, entangling lines traced or scrawled all over walls and canvasses, moving across all borders between spaces traditionally aligned with objects of the "real" world, and spaces we restrict to representational media like the canvas. The key concept here is the term "non-literal writing." This is both writing and not writing, or neither any of the two, and yet "calligraphic" in execution. In this case, we can say that we are no longer in the same situation where we are confronted with the assumption of the presence of two sign systems in which one is "asemic" because it is approached with the suspicion of possessing qualities we associate with the sign system we routinely use, but whose elements we cannot recognize or translate, or whose logic and meaning we cannot access. In asemic writing, these suspicions and assumptions just hover around the specimen, and questions indeed arise as to how we should be "appreciating" or "critiquing" artistic attempts involving the "asemic," which seems to be located between the extreme poles of enigma and meaning. Can we treat asemic writing then as a kind of parody of writing and language?

In an Otto Zitko exhibit, Helsinki, 2005
Photo by Petri Virtanen

11. In Zitko's "labyrinthine and whirling" non-literal writing, we are not dealing with the meeting of two writing or sign systems, one assumed to be known and one assumed to be unknown. To say we are is probably like saying Pollock's paint dribblings and drippings are specimens of some form of writing. Some can remind you of particle collisions, or chaotic, infantile, erratic scrawlings where recursive patterns can sometimes occur. But these lines don't trace "natural" chaotic fluctuations. The directionality is so uneven, so erratic, that only a feverish and intentional multi-directionality could be at work. The chaotic lines don't really impress us as fully chaotic, despite the fact that we are given this impression at first glance. The deliberate manipulation of the line's directionality and the changes in size, length, or color appear so many times that we can only conclude that what we have is artificially made. The work is just so much more chaotic than nature to be natural or to be even called "chaotic." Probably, it will be better just to call it "super-chaos." It exceeds the chaotic, and applies multi-directionality or non-directionality to push the inscribing gesture beyond nature, writing, signs, or meaning, and into the energy of the open line. Here, the open line is free to become its own full event, outside of order and chaos.