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."
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