Marks & specks

I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language. (Jacques Derrida, 1976)

Abstract typography from Cecil Touchon

It is easy to jumble up the words, but we must also touch the order of letters. and even the strokes that constitute a letter: the vertical, the horizontal, the diagonal, and the curved lines. now we go between the verbal and the visual, the words and letters become unstable forms. we don't bother with meaning to say it is unstable. we all know that already for a long time. we can only play with the material form, like what has been happening since the orthographic experiments of the Futurists, or the floating space of Un coup de dès.

The well-known abstract typography of Cecil Touchon is a recent example, where Roman letters undergo fragmentations and mutations. in contemporary writing, we can recall many works in visual poetry and the continuing experiments in typographic manipulation of an artist like Billy Bob Beamer.

In all cases, what is most intriguing are the moments when the work or text stop trying to make a puzzle, or quit hinting at any struggle to shake off the doppelgänger or allegory of semantic content, and just lay out a nonsymbolic process of production and variation of purely material marks. in other works by Touchon, the verbal asceticism can even drive marks toward becoming mere geometric specks,

Abstract typography from Cecil Touchon

making us wonder what else would have been left had we gone further and further.