Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Entropy, arrow of time, irreversibility? At any rate, whole and parts.

Conceptual limits, example would be the notions of "whole" and "parts." Humpty Dumpty story.
We don't actually grasp what these concepts really mean, but they help us talk about something. Say, this "air" blowing through the window now. Do we mean air as a whole, all air in the universe, or a part of air? In fact, neither. We can never really speak of wholes and parts, but that they allow us to say something in between. "Time" is also treated in whole and part, as when we speak of it in philosophical terms, or say "Last two minutes."

These conceptual limits are abstractions whose real meaning eludes us, but they allow language to happen and become useful in everyday life. This reminds me of Plato's levels of reality. It is the notion of ideal entities that gives everyday things their meaning. Although reduced to being shadowy copies of their ideals, material and everyday realities are able to participate in language because of this relationship. In this case, the ideal and the real are both conceptual limits, each one essentially indescribable without the other. The real reminds us of the ideal, and the ideal reminds us of the real. Yet, neither pole has any real autonomous value, as if we can isolate the "ideal" from the "real."

________________

Story idea: a man condemned to die, survives. say electrocution. he wakes up after the first cut of the mortician. however, he barely remembers who he was. This has divided his country. The religious claims him as a miracle of God, like Lazarus. Others say he should be put to death again for his heinous crimes. Others say he is evil, possessed by a new spirit. Law makers don't know what to do with him, if it is lawful to place him back under arrest. Is he a free man now? He becomes famous, everyone wants an interview. There is an order to arrest him. He is kept in a special cell. Some want him freed, since putting a man to death for his crime is same as a man fulfilling his sentence. He gets a default state lawyer. Whether alive or dead, a convict who already died once after execution has already paid for his deeds.

He is studied. The damages to his brain and organs are healing. His brain has reformed. Like a new birth. He barely recalls his relatives. He has almost absolute amnesia. Doctors say they are not sure if he will be able to recall anything.

If he is freed, he might be killed by those related to his past victims. What is his past? Maybe he was a killer, a terrorist, a rapist, a drug lord, or all of the above. What else has he forgotten? He has a language. Or some of it? Maybe he starts off with little, then gains language skills along the way. But his language is different, unknown... Some say a seraphim language, others say of fallen angels, or aliens, or other supernatural, uncategorizable thing.

The whole situation is the opposite of fairy tales where animals are given the gift of understandable speech.

__________________


Speed is an event beyond sense, but affects as most directly, altering our destinies before we even register the shifts. In this kind of uneven frames of acceleration where our organs are tortoises versus Achilles, the arrow of perception can only target the heel of death.

significantly significant

significantly significant
significantly insignificant
insignificantly significant
insignificantly insignificant

why compose when you can decompose?
why compose when it can be done with an algorithmic machinery?
when will we fully abdicate the role of signifying agents?

signifying what with what?

something with something?
something with nothing?
nothing with something?
nothing with nothing?

what is that only insignificant thing that we can see (Michaux)?
will it stay insignificant once we mention it?

we mass produce meaning because we are in the center.
what if there is another meaning where there is none, which is truer?
can we make something that is insignificantly insignificant?
when both can only be simulated: significance and insignificance.

all writing is garbage: every sign is insignificant, a waste of time.
can we say the reverse? all garbage is writing? or: all writing is not garbage
that is, anything and everything is significant, even what is not.

ALL arguments.

Why still words...

Neither meaning nor non-meaning means anything solid. We live in the tension of reversible and non-reifiable opposites.

Signs and non-signs don't just play mirror for one another where one is always the passive object of representation. There is instead an interrelation, and also a mutually-exclusive evolution, as well as cross-over influences. They are two animals in motion, or two ink strands dropped and evolving in a glass of water.

(I liked one artist's idea of letting leaves in the wind make writing-like impressions on paper. Can it still be "writing" without "human" direction? There is a border here between human and natural marking: whose footprint is it? WHO writes seems to remain an important factor. can it still be writing of any kind, semic or asemic, if absolutely no human being was involved in any way?)

Why is it that there are still words, melody and form? What is rhythm, a flex in the dark, a reincarnation of concepts? Without a center, a conductor or agent of meaning: a mere gesture of a trace textualism, a nostalgia for narratives and narrativity, for a meaningful clustering, a negentropic fantasy...

Vestiges of the "textual"

Unlike in drawing where any squiggle can be admitted as part of a world of artistic procedures, the closed set of forms that have been lemmatized as letters or words or punctuation or symbols are more difficult to employ willy-nilly. The impact is more destructive of sense. I can draw anything, drip paint all over, or simply slash the canvas, and this can still be appropriated because a semiotic system remains to decode it. In other words, we can still "talk" about it.

However, when such a master Decoder in itself becomes the object of decomposition, what interpretative system is there left to decode it? We are suddenly left with nothing to go on, the burden of meaning is not carried over onto another reading medium. You are simply faced with "textual artifacts" that don't add up lexically, syntactically or semantically.

Even in a piece like 2_   +, some vestiges of textuality remain: title, some spacing, borders, etc. The writing space itself can only be navigated with these constraints in real dimensions. lemmatized forms can only be rendered in so many font types barring "hand-written" swirls and slashes. In short, the departure from the standardized formats can only go so far in their renderings. This is where alphabetical or lexical departures like Bob Beamer's come in, with all the formats and colors that he uses. Beyond this, abstract typographies like Touchon's would already fall outside the perceptually readable formats of actual languages, even if this is the direction we want to pursue with "textual" forms.

We can employ this plastic freedom to conjure precisely the abstracted nature of signs. the impact is an immediate perception of senselessness because here, it is the Decoder itself that is affected. Another way to do it would be by delaying the appearance of the sign by a metasign, a purely conceptual formation that conjures a sign. Everything I do is a metasign, an improbable signage, or new ways to spell, or new dimensions for an abstract wordage.

Conceptual signage or wordage: who knows how a "sign" looks like? Has anyone seen any of Plato's "ideas"?

Some vestiges of the decoder are deployed, but these are now just haunted forms. Some measure of clarity, indeed, would be needed in the development of techniques along these lines, especially if one of the premises is the absence or weakened presence of agents of meaning. "Chance" is a weak alibi to relay a hard-to-realize non-teleological condition because Chance is too abstract to do in any case. At any rate: everything is too abstract anyway to be done in any way. How can I make "signs," "words," "sense," or "texts" when even the terms "concrete" and "material" are abstract? This is where the improbable comes in, which is also improbable to do. Any idea that tries to establish its own solidity becomes a ritual, an obsession, or a suspicion. It becomes highly symptomatic, and leaves a trail of repetitive signatures or rhythms.

2_ +

"A fusion of cryptozoology and orthography comes to mind here."

--Matt Margo

2_      +    

G                 F     >                                          I                                K    s    ‘             

                                         B                                              __                                      L                    

          W                                                                                                                                                 R

                                C                     S                   ;                                                           E                  

  3 @                                  Y _____t       ;; v                V     b

p_L_       o

….                        ….                                   …     h                   L          “        Q

          X                     *           

                                        L                                          N                   ,                  

                B                          a                    _     

                                                                                    O

Reading nothing

Saisir : traduire. Et tout est traduction à tout niveau, en toute direction. -Henri Michaux

"Everything is translation at every level, in all directions." It seems a well-known quote like this doesn't need more commentary. It belongs currently to what we already assume in practice. It is the same as saying that everything is reading. An organism that orients itself in space already makes use of all its faculty to successfully recognize and navigate. That is obvious enough an idea. Another that is no longer probably worth mentioning is the notion that writing is already reading. These assumptions lead us to another given, that all reading takes place within pre-established frames: all reading is interpretation and perspective. We live in one universe, but we have many competing views about it. Simple enough, nothing new here.

What is more interesting are the elements that a system of reading cannot read or translate, and are indicated by place-holder terms that we can indeed read, but indicate the place where translation or reading fails. The illegible exists as a readable sign in the translating medium, but not as a term with a positive semantic content, but as a "blind spot" within language translated as that point where language cannot say anything about. And we have many words like that, words that tell us nothing even by saying it. "Zero" is probably the archetypal example. Other candidates are: gibberish, indecipherable, glossolalia, babble, cryptic, unreadable, untranslatable, inexplicable, enigma, opaque, unknown, nothing, and unnameable. The term "illegible" itself belongs to this category: it marks the point where translation fails or is absent; but not completely, of course.

The situation is more ambiguous. There is something we can read, the signifier is legible. We cannot say that its semantic content is zero. In fact, this is what it is precisely saying: it is that signifier pointing us to what it cannot really provide. It signifies the category of anything that has no semantic content, or whose semantic content cannot be ascertained. It performs the role of the legible surface of whatever it is that remains illegible. In short, the illegible is not an absolutely unreadable state; it is still within language (since what is outside language cannot be imagined), and translates for us whatever it is that has resisted translation. It is saying nothing beyond saying that nothing further can be said on whatever it was trying to signify. By saying less, by signifying nothing, it is capable of signifying successfully.

Where it succeeds, however, is where it fails absolutely. I cannot read this, but I mark what I cannot read by a sign that we can all read. Thus, we can read the sign, whenever reading or translation is confined to the level of the legible surface of language. It is on this very surface that language warns us where we can no longer go further, and where we can go on indefinitely. Between words that say something to say nothing and those that say something to say another thing, we ask: what is this other thing that language must be able to say something about to avoid saying nothing? If "illegible" is just the opposite of "legible," and has no more value than the legibility that it negates, then what does the legible give us? No doubt, to answer these questions is to relaunch ourselves into the world of so many competing interpretations.

                                                                                                           (09-2012)

The triangle of fictions

=We know well that the presence of any word is already something divine.

=We live with today’s current fictions, of the Sign, of the Text, the same way we lived with Poetry and Subjectivity before, among other past essences and metaphysics, whether ideal or material. As far as concepts go, they embody our best efforts to make sense of things. However, they are nothing but interpretative vehicles, contemporary concepts whose luminosity is as fictive as the rest before them.

=Like other words, the full divine presence of concepts like Chance, Sign, Text, etc. is still to come. Like the idea of Experience in Montaigne off setting medieval belief systems, these concepts are merely tools forged to wage a similar war against the tyranny of other concepts.

=When and where can a word really happen? The word (as an entity or category) is still looking for its dimensions. No word has yet fully existed. (This is not a return to the same formulaic binaries. Instead, we are concerned here with the sign of the meaning of the sign and/or the meaning of the sign of meaning. That is, with the possibility of their conceptuality.)  They are, after all, all concepts needing elaboration. When one fiction supports another fiction, we recall once more Borges’ series of dreamers and dreamers.

("The sign has no positive value." This "discrete" part requires the whole of language to exist, which, in turn, requires the idea of discrete parts to become a ''whole.'' In short, a word, ultimately, is the whole of language. And where does it end to begin?)

=Where is the boundary between sign and noise? The 3 concepts here (boundary, sign, noise) form the triangle where fictions are made from. 

Textualisms

1. the sign has no content or doesn't refer to any. instead, signs are deployed to speak of the im/possibility of signs, the same way @ refers to "at" or an emoticon indicating the indicators of emotional states or concepts in an abbreviated way.

2. using a "logographic" state, it doesn't produce a sign in the normal sense, but a metasign. this is what I would like to call "textualism" or the simulation of sign-hood in a realm where signs are also fictional entities. signs don't speak about fictional characters, but are themselves fictional.

3. a sign is the equal of any other sign, a=b=c=d etc. in a circuit of pure play, a play of fictional characters, arbitrary events, between the order of Time and the order of Language.

4. textualism is the production of an echo of sign-hood, a simulation or parody of writing. here, writing does not deploy ready-made semiotic forms in a network of habitual meanings. this is no different from the creation of a metalanguage like formal logic to speak of a process on the level of theorems. everything is a postulate.

5. visually, it can deploy glyphs, pre-letteral features representing an echo of signs, a molten, mobile state prior to lexical identities, like Michaux's inks. a sort of pre-writing.

6. i have mentioned Bolin's art of disappearance as an extreme method,
Dion's post-lettristic canvas, sign simulations,
hyper-signs, counter-signs, abstract typographies, pre-word, post-word, non-word
hypermedia or mixed media, where sign/nonsign distinctions have broken down,
caricature of scriptural forms,
post-language iterations like: machine writing or post-authorial scripting,
or automatic writing in a cybernetic sense,
metaplasms and ciphers

7. here, "textuality" is a concept that is postulated as a hypothetical entity like the "sign," and not deployed as a ready-made object in a presumed fully-functional semantic and semiotic network.

8. proliferation of non-standard signs or symbols: rarely used special symbols recalling logical or mathematical formalisms or cybernetic computer codes, or programming high-level languages. explodes the closed circuit of settled semiotic networks. same as deployment of illegible, asemic or metaplasmic variants.

9. the question then becomes: what would be its "syntax" or form of regularity if any? syntax without meaning has been a method employed like in di Palma's January Zero, or any rule-based permutation, this time no longer involving standard sign sets, but also nonstandard ones. this constraint may be the last frontier, since randomness/arbitrariness had been a part of artistic production since Dadaism. however, arbitrariness is a stronger version of randomness: it is a concept that falls outside of order/chance dichotomy. it implies a sectional choice, a change of perspective, a vectorial intervention that is nevertheless an echo in a vacuum.

10. in all cases, who would still see human agency as an organizing force or as an ordering principle? post-humanism means: we are not the center of the universe. sense/nonsense: to make nonsense is the most difficult, as difficult as making sense. we cannot do anything nonsensical, since we are the source of meaning. nothing we do is nonsense, but at the same time, the sense of anything we do escapes us. (in many sci-fi works, the usurpation of human agency as the dominant center of meaning by super intelligent machines has often been portrayed as evil. Logically, it would entail the eradication of the human species in history. the whole plot then revolves around the recuperation of human subjectivity as an essential requirement in the fulfilment of the narrative.) sense/nonsense are limit concepts, both impossible to incarnate as is, since they exist only in a relative field of tension, like Escher hands.

11. post-reading: the object/text is no longer amenable to either a metaphoric or a metonymic interpretation. It is neither a representation nor a symptom. What could its function be?

12. What is the "vehicle" of a ''meaningful" bit of information? Information here is not a pre-given object but must be decided beforehand by another meaning-making gesture. Hence, meaning decides what meaningful is. At any rate, my question is about what circumstance creates what is significant. The becoming-significant or -sign of anything. It is an event that requires a bifurcation. The sign itself is nowhere. Something turns, reading happens, and we hear voices. We then try to explain how it all works...

13. in a very paradoxical way, i am asking myself, skirting sign/nonsign, what can i incarnate? what is this stuff that can be generated without the Subject-Me-I as the agency of any meaning / nonmeaning without using the "machine" as a permuting excuse and without returning to aleatory textual production? i am not making.... i am just searching.... and one of the states is the pre- or post-word. in the beginning the word is a gurgle. i don't apply signs... i can only conjure signhood and the lost memory of textuality. there is no fixed alphabet set for that. i mean, in the place of a letter, why not a holographic nudge, or an electric shock, or spilled milk in zero-gravity? there is no more "writing...." that idea is a mummy.

14. when we set our own rules, it signals all is arbitrary, the rule of the arbitrary. what has any applicable meaning? Neither chance nor necessity has any real ontological significance. in the end, the real has a hidden title and an unknown syntax, where each event is its own rule.

Other contiguities

Reincarnation waves the dead body’s antennae above sentence structure’s serrated moaners.

-Matt Margo

In general, contiguity gives an excuse to speak of meanings. Even more interesting from the point of view of superstition and popular sentimental romance are "random" contiguities that are imagined to be emanating from a higher or transcendent source of special significance (like Fate). Unfortunately, we don't have the same mythic source for "language" wherever a certain brand of "scientific" rigor demands something beyond statistical consensus as an excuse for delineating a category of structurally and semantically "vibrant" contiguities. 

To dream of combinations that pretend to have more semantic weight or value (poetic or otherwise) has now been replaced by the simple execution of the motor of combination itself, where unrestrained coupling is the rule, like DNA mixing sent in a delirious fast forward drive. To what end? New matter, new meaning, new being? No, the goal is Combination itself, accelerated faster and faster, beyond the restricted barrier of vibrant syntactic or linguistic contiguities we were advised for so long to support or promote.

Matt Margo, from "Two Titles," 2011

This seems to be what is going on in a non-linear, post-grammatical work like that of Matt Margo's: mixing everything, words, figures, contexts, registers, expressions, idioms, narration, description, clauses, run-on phrases, fragments, imagery, the common and not-so-common and the orthodox and unorthodox all intersecting on any angle on the "discursive" plane. The odd mixture makes it difficult to determine their “complete” meaning (which is no longer the point). Sometimes, the parts, which could make sense if found in another context or out of context, are themselves in uncommon combinations that we even doubt if they are trying to make sense at all. Since "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," a combinatory textual practice like this also redefines the boundaries of syntactic possibilities and politics.

The result goes further than the articulation of accepted and unacceptable combinations reproducing the stock of  “common” and uncommon semiotic organization and sense. More importantly, the text returns us to the very dynamism where linguistic contiguities are happening before settling into semiotic refrains (like asteroids with a center or wandering stars forming imaginary constellations), thereby reinforcing the catachretic view of all linguistic combinatory processes. With this kind of text, writing becomes a sort of neural rewiring happening on the pure surface of free association. It is here that we enter once more towards the hazy boundaries between the order of Time and the order of Language: where semantics falls between the two would be anybody's guess.

The malleable page

-The new page is a field of events where anything can intersect another thing, an assemblage space. Syntax, any manner of concatenation of material or pro-symbolic elements, can have any multidimensional and multiple degrees of freedom. Nothing dictates that this or that should be what appears here or there.

-This field has no center: I don't control its elements or direction; I am only one of the players, and I myself am a plurality of forces. The page is a field of dreams without a center. (Or: the center can be simulated.)

-The sign is an imaginary object, its dimensions are unstable and immeasurable. When we speak in a language, or when we read a language, we are more than interpreting. We are activated in a field of intersecting events, where signs are reborn as symbols and new matter, magnetic transformations, a moment in a point of perceptual infinities, like in an aleph.

-Language is just one bark in a rich noise environment. Signs, when they appear, don't just appear in pairs; they appear with all sorts of things, a battalion, a fluid throng, with variable membership every time. Signs don't represent; they attach themselves like magnetic particles with other particles. These are gregarious types, with cliques and gangs or tribes, with their themes, hymns, emblems, and refrains.

-The multimedia intersection of elements is just the material consequence of a core operational nature, the eventual expression of assembly processes. A signifying event is a company that varies with each reactivation. Unfortunately, parts and wholes don't appear together because of at least two reasons. One, time constrains the experience of a whole set of evolutions. A novel, for example, can only be read one page at a time. Two, the forkings cannot be managed within the spatial limits of a circumscribed techno-media. The viewing space of say cable TV or URLs could represent the spatio-temporal field of an evolutive assembly space, where the intersection of concatenable things happen.

Just two ways the famous looking-glass of Alice is reinterpreted on the net. In the first, the humor arises out of the reassertion of the  duality of materiality and virtuality; in the second, the domain of virtual images and duplicates still awakens unknown terrors (in this case, the repossession of one's identity and body by others).

-Malleability of matter (and, by extension, of the "materialist" sign) is the end goal of techno-media. In digital space and in the dimension of simulations, signs and things are no longer opposites. (We see this made iconic by people entering films or virtual realities, or going out of them into the "real world" that still actually resides in both.) Within that new dimensionality where our perceptual literacy is now roaming, anything can become anything, where identities like signs and things are temporary blink-prints on electronic sand.

-In this domain, the palpable and the impalpable share the same addresses between Mind and Machine (themselves variable points on this floating dimension where everything is exterior, built up by sensory extensions that provide the whole content and mode of our world comprehension.)

Pursch's language blabatories

wa ys t o m a ke n o [n] se ns e  an d th en t he re ar e w a ys

not to make nonsen sema ybe w[ hy n ot]

. If one ask s 1’ll never know.

                                                --POME, Billy Bob Beamer

The subject of sense and nonsense is always expansive in any given direction. In addition, the very opposition between these terms becomes more interesting only when their simple antinomy is made complicated to the point where their regions collide and interchange depending on your point of view. The tenuousness of their borders is emphasized further by compositions that stylistically employ neologisms or unknown lexis, reframing a familiar language or alphabet into something unreadable, perhaps simulating the experience of illiteracy in our initial encounter with a new or foreign language; or, at its most extreme, implying that language, when detached from arbitrary meanings, is at its core really illegible, making us all foreigners even within the languages we inhabit.

Some of the recent output of a writer like John Pursch could at first be seen to be nonsense writing similar to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." Here is an excerpt from "Blabatorie" written in 2012:

Knowuce gwan ovahau wiekemta beloifin raunda wholata sauntar uvan edmottley vibrand spoddy cellt lustonulas; a sprole widahoel endamottle, whar doomdownie yousdabie. Onklar haueet umploted, darty blump ernacticle uke, erbayme afen akolliper eccidon etasucret blabatori, prapsan augspearamen gwanaribly wrayie. Murour hezeedat dagubermint ocarse nosall dadoitals undet’s phlarubav soptoicrate, oonlietaboy deglossed einehandheartears. Petwonken spaucalet undewa leedleseardge uvwhen’s awn, eenda chlopious fleamite deauvergie denizer hosawailtuem deezdaze.

True, we can recognize some phantom strings from different languages. In fact, as an experiment, if you paste samples of his texts on Google translate, the software would identify the writing to be in one of the known languages. It could be French, German, or Spanish, even Latin or Greek. In the case of our excerpt, it is supposedly English. What at first glance may just be nonsense literature could actually fall under a writing done using a constructed language (conlang, for short). If it is some sort of conlang, if it is one, it would have the support of an official group or would be part of an on-going development by a community much like Esperanto or Lojban. If it is not, maybe it could be a fictional language somewhere that Pursch picked up and retooled. If it falls under neither, we can safely assume it is some kind of "private" invention awaiting clarification. Pursch would just need a minimum set of grammar to push this private language towards becoming a conlang.

However, if there is some kind of Oulipian or permutational play here and we are simply tasked to decipher the code so that we can extract the "real" natural language behind it, or if it is an alteration of a previous source text, then these factors would just lay out for us a path of discovery from nonsense to sense, where we are simply reversing the writer's trajectory. The reader's position as puzzle-solver is once again established, albeit on a new level. Instead of representing meanings, nonsense texts like these could be seen as second-order signs representing a hidden language. Before knowing what it says, we are tasked to recognize if it is at all any one of known languages in the world, natural or constructed, or a mixture of both.

Whatever approach we take, one thing remains invariable: we are dealing with writing in unknown words and language. The presence of unknown words doesn't automatically classify the text as purely nonsensical. We can say, at the limit, that this kind of text suspends the arrival of sense because the resources that we apply with known writing, our interpretative or reading tools, just won't apply anymore. We can, of course, "feel" the musical and sonic or textural dimensions of the text, and re-establish the equivalences we learned between sound and sense. Nevertheless, we are not assured that this won't have a cultural bias or re-inject the caricature of a chart of parallel sonic, rhythmic, and semic values.

Grammar and syntax are equally indescribable. Unlike a nonsense line like "The gostak distims the doshes" or "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe" where accepted word-order and core phonotactics or morphotactics echo that of just one (historically-hybrid) language like English, Pursch's text above isn't so conforming, even multiplying the terrain of flexibilities natural languages are allowed to be capable of to include compounds that we often ally with meaningless blabbery or glossolalia. The minimum order we get is a beginning and an end where at least the arrow of reading is observed. This is the minimal motion that we can follow. Beyond being drawn, being tempted, into this direction, the textual artifact leaves us with very little else, as if we were before an ancient or future set of unreadable symbols recalling ghostly memories of bits and pieces of languages. If it could be argued that "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," then who can say that a set of "new sentences" is not part of any language?

After all, the "language" we have come to know may just represent the tip of a much larger universe of unofficial forms that will remain meaningless by convention. Isn't this (immeasurably larger) illegible realm a required part of the whole economy of the sign, without which sense could not happen? Isn't this the very spring from which sensible language draws its resources, and against which it has no real antinomial property? This would make the "language" we know as necessarily fragmentary, like the metapoetic style used by Billy Bob Beamer in numerous pieces like fragm epresiPOME[s, where choppy lines of text recreate this experience "artificially" within an art form supposedly representing the height of linguistic form and performance.

In this babble-like textual mélange of familiar alphabets, vaguely familiar echoes of lexical fragments, and abundantly unfamiliar neologisms, any recognizable language, structure, grammar, or meaning becomes a very limited, relative, and unstable realm in the world of fictional ideas. In their place we have Pursch's language laboratory, where linguisticity is always inaugural, and centerless morphemic and phonemic jouissance still reigns supreme, above and beyond intractable questions of sense or nonsense.

The face of Mars

When I read about the "Face of Mars" a long time ago, I was really amused by the popular interest that it created, especially among E.T. hunters and fans. There is an excellent summary explaining our solitude in the Universe written by Stephen Webb (If the Universe is Teeming With Aliens, Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox... where, incidentally, you have a section on language and communication) that you might want to check out. My goal is not really to take sides in this debate, but to discuss some associations in my mind that the whole interest created in the realm of recognition, reading, and interpretation.

In general, phenomena like the Face of Mars are diagnosed as a species of pareidolia *. From the Greek original (para + eidolon) we can probably freely translate it as a kind of "pseudo-image." People see or hear something familiar where it doesn't really exist. In this case, it's a big face-like landscape on the Cydonia region of the planet Mars, which has been the hotbed of E.T. speculation for ages.

In itself, there is nothing wrong with this mental tendency to see resemblances between one thing and another. It is part of our habits of recognition to see patterns and associate them for interpretation. Like in the famous ink-blot tests, out of an amorphous field of black and white, familiar images are visualized. There is nothing surprising here anymore. What could be more interesting is to do the reverse, if this can be done. What if, among the familiar things we see or read everyday, we suddenly stop recognizing, or become illiterate, dyslexic, or be struck with prosopagnosia (unable to recognize faces anymore)? Or become aphasiacs and display symptoms like inability to comprehend language, excessive neologism, paraphasia, agrammatism, inability to form words and name objects, and so on?

Now, to relate these symptoms to some current writing may not be flattering, but that is what I want to propose just so that the mechanism of interpretation via resemblance could be retooled on another literary level. Of course, with them, it is not a medical case at all, but the employment of a willful stylistic and para-linguistic radicality. By loosening the reign of historically-determined congealment of semiotic patterns and forms, post-literate writing has emphasized the obsessive tendency of the mind to see patterns and meanings where they no longer exist or where their existence can no longer be absolutely valid.

We can start with the works of Billy Bob Beamer, whose typographical experiments echo a long line of artists since the Futurists and visual poetry. The stylistic range of his massive output, mostly called Pomes, can't be covered in a brief mention like this, where I could only focus on a few aspects. The primary thing that strikes you when looking at one of his works is that most of the time you won't find a normally-spelled word. Like with many writers using the same method, in Beamer the lexical borders vibrate and expand, the dependencies loosen, and the arrow of reading becomes a polymorphic web of associated features. Formalization is redistributed and textuality is barely hanging together (counter-syntax). Beamer raises inscription towards the liberty of signatures with playful fonts, and the combinatory logic is disturbed through dissections and disjunctions of lexical matter, with spellings jumbled or intersected, and words and letters colliding in the axes of combination and selection to form half-words and half-sentences.

P[o[]m]em[e

[t]e[me]m[easa]unit[pro]vide[s a co]ne[nie]t[me]ns o[f ds]cusi[ng] a [pie]e o[f h]oug[t c]op[id ]fr[o pe]top[[eso]n  ",  [r]ega[rdle]s[soof whe]po[the[r th]a[t [t]ho]ugh[t co]n]t]ain[s ot[her]s in[sid]e i[t,] or flo[rm]s p[ar]t of a [la[rg]em[e]m]e[.]m]em[e c]ou[l]d con[sis]t of [a sin]gle w[ord], [o]r a [m[[e]]me[ co]ul]d co]n[s[is]t o[f[nie]t[ th]e] e[n]tir[e[ spe]ech] i[nwh]ch[ that word] fr[st oc[c]r[red.] h]s f[o]ms[ an an]al[gy t]o thidea o[f a e[ne s] asin[le u]it[ o[f ]s][le]plic]a]t]in[g i[n[fo]m[ato[]n fond o]n [t]h s[elf-]re[pl]catin]g[cho]so[mo]on[e s[elf-]re[pl]catin]g[cho]so[mo]on[e

Copy-pasting the para-textual output of Beamer requires care since in many of his works he plays with font types and sizes, even with letter colors as well. From the sample above, you may be able to assemble some syntactic thread if you squint close enough for a normalizing read. One of the major "words" we may recover is "meme," a key term in theories of cultural evolution, referring to a cluster of ideas or behavior similar to trends, fashion, and styles. After reconstructing some syntax and googling, it appears that Beamer was quoting from an entry that could also be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme):

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

Altering a copied text almost beyond recognition is of course a standard method since the Dadaists and Fluxus. The parasitic relationship could be analyzed in different directions, but I just want to look at the way the brackets confuse the flow of the textual original, disrupting its thought and syntax. There are also letters or words missing. In general, it appears that the sentence sequence remained the same. If this is a major writing method that involves some kind of over- or re-writing of copied textual matter, it could be used as a main avenue in making sense of Beamer's output and writing technique. This deformative repetition makes us ask what relationship this altered text has not only with the copied text but also with other themes like reading, information transfer, language, digital type formats, the internet, and knowledge in general. By disturbing the format of the copied text, it becomes harder to read the "message" and undermines the very concept of memes: the copying of thought and idea involves a real effort at reconstruction. The resemblances between texts, words, and language, like the resemblances or identities of memes in their course of evolution is made to look much closer to reconstructive surgery than to a genetic DNA transfer.

The profusion of brackets also reminded me of syntax diagrams in the theory of Dependency Grammar. However, since "how the presence and the direction of syntactic dependencies are determined is of course often open to debate” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar), word order and semantic order stop becoming absolutely homomorphic. In addition, lexical integrity is also ruptured, so that we won't easily recognize one word without seeing other words before, after, or inside other words. Signs, after all, have no positive or absolute values. The alphabetical forms fall into their brackets like figures in a chance-driven slot machine, or carved or drawn out (abstracted) from their niches. It is a radical procedure of syllabication and diagram-making, creating or destroying signs within signs, or messages within messages, allowing noise to burst in and alter not only meanings but also fixed and illusory resemblances to a lexicality, a syntacticity (syntaxis, put together), and a textuality (textus, woven together) that we had known before.  In the end, it seems that words and texts, even the face of language itself, are not operating under the logic of simple transfers, but must be reconstructed in toto via imaginary resemblances like on a barren, alien landscape.
____________________

* Pareidolia (pron.: /pærɨˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-doh-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek words para (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead") in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον "image, form, shape") the diminutive of eidos. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).

The abstrcated text

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 (from 08 November 2012 entry).

Abstracted signs or denaturalized symbols. These demand a new regime of "reading" beyond traditional or classical hermeneutical dynamics. From non-sense words and sentences in the family of Lewis Carroll and to Oulipian-like exercises where there is still lexical integrity but with an unknown meaning (John Pursch), up to several degrees of disintegration and towards purely typographic, non-alphabetic compositions recalling logical or mathematical symbolization, the abstracted work of writers like Bob Beamer and Matt Margo challenges us to rethink what we have known to be the frontiers of what has been imagined as language.

How do we "read" today "abstrcated" works (misspelling intended) like Billy Bob Beamer's Pomes or Matt Margo's “of grammar otherwiS’e”? Is there a phonetic, grammatical, or any semantic dimension, can these be spoken, read aloud? Or can they even be read "mentally"? What degrees or elements of linguisticity are deactivated or reactivated to manage such composition, creatively and perceptibly? Can anyone fully tune-out all vestiges of linguisticity?

Are these works pure marks grazing the linguistic plane, tangential entities now just echoing the undersides of full symbolic personas, pre-conscious strokes that defy grammaticalization and structuration, non-referential graphisms that set themselves apart as counter-semiotic measures, self-invented simulation of languageness whose meaning is no longer necessary beyond its pure execution as post-lexical and post-syntactic marking?

Works like these are demanding a nominal abandonment. There is also since the Futurist a thread of anti-typographic formalization. What is the form or sound of language? (Like the Zen question What is the sound of one hand clapping? that leads to: Which hand? If all true language is indeed incomprehensible (Artaud), then probably, in a non-mystical way, it is just simply too abstract to know.

Non-communal language, non-communicative language defies what should have been the raison-d'être of the very core concept of having a language. Why do we need to defy this essentially defining condition? Is not this the very reason why language exists in the first place? Asemic textuality has no definite meaning after all. This is now our generic relationship with linguisticity, where language is merely a minimalistic phantasm, stripped bare of meaning, structure, function, and form.

Maybe take the abstract typography in Touchon and use that to "make sense" of Beamer etc. Reaching out to the beginning of recognition of language, the dark incipits of formal assembly or disassembly. Both are possible. The beginning and the end of signs look similar.

So we don't look for imagery or metaphors or nice phrases and emotional meanings. We look at it as a kind of dynamics of assembly and disassembly, where the shadow of a language comes and goes in a perpetual nascent or evanescent stage of formation, and see how or where it doesn't form a language, and only tangentially relates to languages we know, which they only echo or shadow in a very allusive way. Here allusion no longer directs us towards intertextual wholes; instead, allusion works only to evoke the old memory of textuality.

Textuality, this very valued entity of communication and  preservation of human memory, has passed away, and human memory is now being archived by other media. In John Pursch's android fiction ("Hip-deep"), lobots fill in the function of speech carriers (which we can say may well stand for "Lobotomized Language Bots").

Momo, post-language cybernetician, inputs idiotic speech in Marty only as data sets of shredded history (like paper shredded texts). Here, speech is lobotic, the whole novelistic narrative is a mirage of a partial amnesiac where language has become strange, not yet asemic, but shredded, in a new state of combinatory idiom no one currently really speaks, a mish-mash of sub-languages, in a futuristic fantasy scenario where language and textuality are distant conceptual memories encoded in lobotic "circustry."

Invisible art

Once, a search engine's page featured a chameleon that made me think of the art of Liu Bolin and mimicry.

Liu Bolin in front of a magazine shelf

Mimicry must be the oldest form of art in nature. In contrast to the 20th century tendency to create art which points to its presence as art, mimicry succeeds only if it achieves its goal of blending completely with its surroundings. In short, mimicry is essentially an art of invisibility. Although some sort of transparency or opacity accompanies its execution, its goal has always been exhaustively neither. As an integrative procedure, it also does not have representation as its objective. Mimicry neither represents itself nor another object. Instead, it blends by blurring the boundaries between itself and its opposites, or between imitation and imitated without falling either into some kind of hyperrealism or objectivism. The sign does not replace the real, nor the real the sign.

As an art of invisibility, Bolin's mimicry also enacts the disappearance of the traces of art by reducing its elements visually to become indistinguishable from the elements around it. All the signs of art become inseparable from non-art and non-signs. There is just something magical in his act, the summit of camouflage and survival skills, a "ghost" mode reminding us of the old Baroque art of the Trompe-l'œil. Of course, the optical illusion he performs is "detectable," or else we won't be talking about it this long. It is like a magician's trick that we all pay to see: a subject or an object appearing or disappearing.

Anything that appears in the universe that has some kind of pattern and complex organization has been called an "emergent" structure. Language has also been seen to develop this way. It would only take one step to think of writing and art along the same genre. Maybe as a type of "fourth-order" emergent structure*, art and other forms of representation could also be "seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances." 

In Bolin, however, this level of participation in the realm of signs has taken a different path. As a form of self-portrait that was supposed to incarnate the essential qualities of a persona, Bolin's trompe-l'œil instead transmutes itself and its medium of existence into the optical substance of its environment. In Bolin's case, it can be anything: rocks, groceries, monuments, cinema seats, toys and magazine racks, walls, trees and logs, symbols, famous tourist spots, drapes, streets, buildings, graffiti, postcard wall, etc. As an omnipresent kind of living statue, Bolin the invisible man is there only to make his presence remarkably unremarkable, an indefinable image among other self-similar images, signs, objects, symbols, and things. Won't this zero-degree mimicry be the most eloquent embodiment of asemia (Greek asémos, "without mark," "signless")?

By becoming almost imperceptible, he probably makes us see what we always miss seeing: the whole and its parts are really invisible.**

_____________

* It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A first-order emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A second-order emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). 

**  I recall a passage from Henri Michaux: "On ne voit rien, que ce qu'il importe si peu de voir. Rien, et cependant on tremble. Pourquoi?" (Je vous écrit d'un pays lointain)

Bird song

Some linguists from MIT took Darwin's observation of an analogy between bird song and human language further along to propose that language could have developed from the "grafting" of  two aspects of communication modeled from birds and other animals. From birds, language got its "expressive" side, and from the rest of the animal kingdom, its "informative" side.

Through a maligned form of association, this hypothesis suddenly reminded me of Zaum, which more or less divided the world of literature into the poetry of known and unknown words, or between known and unknown languages. Or, more precisely still, between recognizable and unrecognizable signs, or between signs that have and do not have "definite" meanings (i.e., semic and asemic texts).

I don't mean to say that Zaum was simply an evolution in the other direction. Whatever its legacy is today would begin within the possibility it opened up stylistically, as a generalized parole in libertà that decenters the dominance of "lemmatized" signs. Any grammatological project we may venture into hence would no longer involve a search for a more authentic, trans-rational, between-men-and-gods kind of language, ornithological or otherwise.

Definitely, conlangs like Esperanto or Lojban and other formal or fictional languages are continuously created because of different technical, technological, social, or literary reasons, but not all without the need for the illusion that any of them has some Edenic or Rousseau-like import. Lojban, for example, was invented to circumvent the ambiguities in meaning that we find in natural languages. This is not a new ambition since analytical philosophy and the development of formal logic. Whether any similar ambition succeeds or fails is an issue now only second to the fact that inherited "natural" languages are somehow always seen to be missing the mark somewhere, and that some kind of supplementary code needs to be created.

These issues make me ask many questions that won't be answered swiftly. Does ambiguity exist among animals and birds when they communicate? Another question: what is the relationship of asemic and aleatory versions of cross-evolutionary machine-style writing like Kervinen's with the world dominance of cybernetic languages (a kind of cyber-Zaum)? Given that languages limit human thought so much, why do we still write or compose as if we can find some semiotic architecture exceeding the combinatory semantics (or logic) of all languages (and thought)? Is there a perfect configuration of signs, known or unknown, that will supersede the limits of all human thought? An angelic or alien language, glossolalia, post-Babel or post-babble? Through here, indeed, we now enter the realm of fiction and fantasy.

Ancient pcoet (2009)

DIONYSUS : 

Brekekekex koax koax— 

from you I’m catching your disease!

               -Aristophanes, The Frogs

In the realm of ancient comedy, where the essential vision remains to be reversibility, or the absence of absolute order in the universe, a god like Dionysius and a slave like Xanthias can exchange identities, even if for a moment, and divine speech can intersect with, or become one with animal language. Nonsensical noise, yet still maintaining a simulacrum of order, even over the level of art and music, the amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and cannot be less than, an embodiment of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and its kingdom of inhuman sound, in surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art form that represents in patterns of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but cannot comprehend .

Today, beyond the confines of art, and within a newer realm of writing, even this last envelop of order is abandoned, for a simulation of chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable. However, we no longer have nature nor the sacred as its indecipherable secret component; we already discarded the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What we are left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical and political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic weight. To remimic the indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized cultural forms, and to return it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the patterns of hardened meanings, beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and imagery, and into the matter of language itself, is to renew a link with ancient comedy, and remember the reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.

Mtttr

MOCC IBEZ MHUX QNEA TUOI CICC IMEC

ZOFY SOGZ AUFB EVIC TEBL QWIF BUWU

OHFI IMYM KZYQR TEPH WRIO EGKK QSIY

SCYI RETY CMEX PSAS JUDT MOLF ZIRB 

WEWJ FHOH BWIH FOYP UYQR PYSE JIIM

GYJE IZFT MXUH AVPY CIZD ZQEW QEIFB

UQEM NOLN GHQG ANPY PIPY BIKY CTAF

VHER COAK TYNC SQYQ EWLH XIWV JADF

YMRT OHJV IMSR JUNV MOER OXIO SEIP 

JAHU FTOR SGIF AFAJ YUNE XUMO AURW

YQAK TKAF VOLY DHED HVAM ZJHB RUQN

UJEB EOGY CPAK HGIG RUUB DOZV ZEPL

NESN GIFA OALX SMYQ RILM JUQL VUHZ

FUHW ETTC GNAZ WYKL FAEM DEKI RIEK

CEFZ ZEAH TYIM RHUH IRRA EZEP TETO

GUSW ULLE XEUU MISK OADU SEZR GIXI

UFIJ NUHL MUVS RIAF MUPZ SSAR PESM 

ZLIW TEQC UYQC CIGX ZOSH WRET QIYA

PIJY OSRD GIHQ SROT URTI UOCU SYSM

OUSW KLON HOML KNAA XAXH OBMV EZIL

ETQU DUOJ ATSA GEWI KHIO NELZ BKOA

ZAOP GEEF FAEX CNOK KWIG CETE VUAJ

LADD IYAE EZTE UNFH FIRU SPZE LUOO 

APNK GYVM DYNT GHEO EZZT IUZO XETL

VIUS BWOE VEMI KWEP ZWIZ DERI QYEH 

CAUX AGUY DNIO JUCU OGKO HEAY RHWI

EBEA IWSY GYUH QIKR IAHD JONF HEWK

HYTS DIXB KZYT MIGH FTHE NAUN WREH

QEIR SPUG BEDN PYSE KMEC ONVU BREB

CUFU XUWZ POAK GNOW SGLI OEAX ZOUJ

AWHF  JUFS RANV PRYP FWEH IGRY VIUU

LYGR VENX EJEY JARP YKEN GULA VUCC

GAHZ KUBY ZNHO GLAF KOSQ VUZR FIWK 

CECU CZRO VICJ KOEQ UKOE NIQP PUAW 

TAQT POBM KIVR YIZD URZT UMUB ACOA 

FOSN OLWT XYWP GOBR DELG XUBE LACL

NYHC PTOV EVWA WUJR DEBE PYGM GWIN

IWKY USDZ MTTA KBHE GERF RJAP ZJAC

AONN SEMW UYGE AEIR BEEB ARWE PILM 

MYZE AGGO DAHS UAWN OZUM GCTD XIPA 

VUGV CUDE ALQL MAZO ENDN PAYG PREL

CLNO BACR IMIF PTAK ELKY JXEO JUSQ

UKDA XUHX TYLU EEXP IXMO SDAK YXGU 

ZUWY PEWQ POJIT EVWI KBUC DEXA EBET

ZJBG CIKR MIZF TBUK PIFS VUWD HURG

VISR AFWA PAQO OTME LASR KVIW BUUZ

ZHUN AZDL ZOCA FEFW MAWT IEOR OSBI

STUA DQZT CUXM LOID PWYY CEAL BEXN 

GVHA OASZ GRCX AKLA FEVZ  QYBI NAWX 

DUYR DOMN ZFEE KLYA KASN VIMC CRUH 

PHUL PEFO POEX NUIB CRHO ZEHY LYAG

DWUO UNRT SNUC UUBL VALO IMKI WHYN 

CEUY UQLT ENXY DAOW KEPX GULZ SAQG 

GLAE OWSS BAXD NAYL FOEK OCBY HYDN 

PRAP UHPI MYRC KUHM LJBO RULV PYNT

SLEB POHN LAVB ABME SOHB YERV AZEV

MYDG SQUY ZHYU GOXL NYGZ NRAE RIVM

KUHX DEVN TECP SUFE DOSZ DUZM ZMUS 

QOBS QIDY LELN SACN GNAA CAWZ VYLT

...

A feather likeness

Another peculiar phrase that I encountered recently was from a "poem" by Jackson Mac Low generated through a permutation of a part of Gertrude Stein's text from Tender Buttons. The title alone would probably make you pause: "A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair" (1999). As if the many lines in Stein's work don't sound strange enough for the ''common reader,'' Mac Low now decides to ''process" the "fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, 'A fact is that when any direction is just like that, . . .' I selected the paragraph by random-digit chance operations using the RAND Corporation's table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates." Mac Low continues to expound on his "method":

My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan's publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written in ink in Stein's hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition, now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I "mined" the program's output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure words, forms of "to be," etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences, I placed lexical words' root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output--in fact I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, output, mostly in early strophes--but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem. While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19. 

-http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15566

We can easily note the care by which Mac Low chose the textual edition that he wanted to use, even including the "fourteen corrections written in ink in Steins's hand which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition," etc. I am really tempted to imagine a Borgesian tale with a Calvino-esque twist in this effort to make the anchoring of Mac Low's permutation of Stein's text as solid as possible through the recovery of the most precise and updated rendition of her writing. The permutation exercise must have its grounding in the most accurate version of the text, even to the extent of getting the copy that had the most authorial flavor of origin through a correction in ink by hand, which is the closest we can get to an autographed (and, therefore, official) copy of the book. We don't want anything less than the original set of words in the most original order so that we can be sure our permutation will indeed be that: a permutation, a new order of words undreamed of by Stein, a real version of it, and not a copy of its text. If we find a copy of her text that even had the slightest deviation, then we would already have a permutational text dated ahead of Mac Low's transformation. The care he took here is, indeed, justified.

From this ''definitive'' edition of the text, Mac Low then takes a section from it through a specified chance operation, then subjects this excerpt to a transformation using a diastic technique. This is followed by some editing whose grammatical rigor complements the mathematical impulse to pattern the results in strophes after the prime number sequence. As anyone would have remarked by now, this whole process of ''composition'' employed an antithetical pair of principles. On one end, we have the determination of the texte de départ as the most definitive textual origin from where a section was taken at random; on the other end, we have this part subjected to a rule-based word transformation aided by Hartman's chance program: "Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I sent the entire text through [Hartman’s] DIASTEX5..., his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures." The meeting point in the texte d'arrivée of the extremes of randomized or arbitrary and structured procedures in writing illustrates a very paradoxical situation in the practice of aleatory poetics. 

This is probably not entirely surprising as a component of this ''method.'' In one way or another, we can see the same mixing of flavors from the very beginning of the use of "chance" procedures in pre-computational literary ''composition'' in Dadaism's Tristan Tzara himself:

POUR FAIRE UN POÈME DADAÏSTE

Prenez un journal

Prenez des ciseaux

Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.

Découpez l'article

Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-le dans un sac.

Agitez doucement

Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.

Copiez consciencieusement.

Le poème vous ressemblera.

Et vous voilà "un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise du vulgaire."

The title could as well be rendered "How to make a poem or any text Dadaist." Interestingly, the paradigmatic source material suggested for this process comes from the definitive genre of factual writing governed by journalistic rules. The ''aesthetic procedure'' is then delivered in a number of mock-serious, step-by-step instructions worthy of the kitchen, simulating the rigors of orthodox composition. By reducing artistic creativity to a handful of repeatable steps or formulae, this user-manual a.k.a. recipe of success exploiting a ready-made language demolishes all the cherished myths that the age had of romantic agency, metaphysical order, and structured artistic composition. The pretended exhortations sprinkled in to mitigate the total arbitrariness of the process (to "shake gently," to ''take out the cuttings in the order they come out," and then to ''copy conscientiously") only succeeded to impress as a cosmic dose of superficial discipline and judiciousness. In addition, the jocular nature of these directives keeps us in an ambiguous state of reception; it is difficult to say how far they can be applied or practised.

True, the price to pay in the ''application'' of these Dadaist directives may involve the "end of intelligent writing," not only because this method tends to produce textual artifacts that go beyond poetic, epistemic and communicative paradigms of language, but also because it raises the suspicion that the final, solid or stable texts that have become more or less the point of reference in language and writing are themselves informed by an originary randomness and permutation (through reading). The rigorous steps that Mac Low followed in the finalization of the output text were nevertheless founded on an arbitrary take off point. Furthermore, the diastic approach he applied pulled out any word that just happened to have been written down in this or that line of the text by Stein herself, doubly illustrating through this variation whatever was meant by his selected starting point: "A fact is that when any direction is just like that." Hence, it would be more accurate to say that the Dadaist directive is actually less an aesthetic method to adopt or to apply than a characterization of the global absence of telos in language.

In the end, the rules that Mac Low applied rigorously, even the grammatical ones, are undermined by the arbitrary nature of his point of entry into the text. The very choice of what OULIPO-like literary permutational process to use is in itself as baseless as his employment of a set of random-digit chance operations through computational technology. The scientific tools that once were tightly tied to a deterministic view now become the very arena for the elaboration of complex transformations, and are being recruited to blur the distance in nature between meaningfully structured writing and meaninglessly aleatory linguistic variations. Much of what we also have currently in the realm of computer-generated texts or machine-aided asemia are replicating in this paradoxical space of an infinitely original (Latin, origo) language where chance and order have become very difficult to separate from one another.

Colorless green ideas

When Chomsky made the sentence ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," he was illustrating through a sample how a string of language that we have not heard before can be produced by a speaker following the application of some governing rules or universal grammar. Whether a deep structure like this exists or not has been the subject of intense debate for decades, a complex controversy that I have neither the time nor the expertise to be involved with in a brief blog entry. What interests me here, other than the fact that a string like that can even be produced, is the way it reminds me of similar weird-sounding sentences or lines in literature.

In general, a sentence like ‘’Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’’ belongs to what we can dismiss as a member of the class of "nonsense" utterances, about which an anthology such as the one by Carolyn Wells exists. Again, broadly speaking, this type of nonsense also belongs to that sub-set which uses an "orthodox'' syntax and known lexis, distinguished from the second sub-set which no longer does. Among the known lines in Literature we can range under these two sets would be Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" which uses a familiar syntax with known and unknown words. We can argue that, despite the difficulty in determining the precise meaning of some new words and lines in the ''poem,'' anyone would still be able to recover some nonverbal meaning conveyed by the rhythms and sound effects of the piece, the same way that music does even in the absence of words. This allows the possibility to organize contests to ''semanticize'' the famous Chomskian sample. No matter how senseless it may be, some meanings can still be read into it, even if it may count as ''over reading'' (since the sentence is not of common usage).

However, what counts as weird or unfamiliar in language may just be a function of its currency in a given community or historical situation. I bet many people will also find English sentences as used in the 16th century weird or difficult to read, even nonsensical. We could also say the same thing to the varieties of English spoken around the world. There are expressions and vocabulary that an Englishman may use that an Australian may not understand, or vice versa. In short, we don't even need to go into Literature to look for weird sounding expressions because weirdness is a relative quality that is independent of any grammar, universal or not.

If we want to count all the weird expressions in a language, we may well be forced to include the majority of metaphors in everyday and literary domains. And in so far as all of language is metaphorical in nature whose weirdness had been forgotten (conceptual metaphors in Lakoff, etc.), we can even say that language itself by its very catachretic constitution, at the very bottom (or root, or any other figure that we may want to use), is informed by weirdness. It is no wonder that ostranenie or ''defamiliarization,'' by foregrounding once more this forgotten dimension of language, became a central defining technique of the ''poetic'' in the 20th century for literary criticism. The production of weird, unfamiliar language became the chief signature by which we could sense the presence of the poetic or the literary.

Of course, this is not a fool proof criterion. ''Context,'' this abstract term which we use to name all the known and unknown variables that inform the meaning of events, may not really serve as a default court of appeal since it is also unfortunately as unstable as any other scaffolding for semantic closure. However, for contrasts, it does help us understand why one expression in one time or place may sound weird or common in another. Defamiliarization is context-sensitive, so to speak. It is indeed conceivable for a writer or speaker to target a domain of expression that has the widest demographic denominator to maximize the impact of ostranenie. Some ''coinage'' have become common usage, and many others remained unable to attain this linguistic pleasure. (Just look at Shakespeare.) ''Transparent language'' is just a more epistemically-loaded way of labeling familiar and commonly used expressions. That is why we find it disturbing yet amusing when Ionesco or Beckett progressively deprives these common everyday expressions of sense in their Absurdist works.

Going back a little further, I recall Breton and the surrealists using a similar procedure of juxtaposition of incongruous terms. Look at some of the lines from ''Union libre ou Ma femme.'' 

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur

A la taille de sablier

Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre

Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de

dernière grandeur

Aux dents d'empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche

A la langue d'ambre et de verre frottés

Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée

A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux

A la langue de pierre incroyable...

If you jumble up all the things the wife is being likened to, it would be a monstrous thing. The wife here becomes a field of intersection in language, following the surrealist aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. This free union simply enacts the same process by which linguistic elements are conjoined to produce speech, only symbolically exaggerated to foreground and to contrast it with the constrained set of union we have come to know as transparent and literalized language. Capable of being described by any metaphorical set, the object ''wife'' suddenly becomes indescribable. André Breton writes:

[T]hese elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final analysis, than the others...

We don't need to subscribe to the underpinning ideas of surrealist psychology to visibly appreciate the effects of defamiliarization in these ''poetic abuses'' of (an already catachretic) language. Quoting Reverdy, Breton explains for us the mechanics behind this linguistic weirdness: ''The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.''

Whatever radicalized form or method writing may take on today (well over the eroded notions of powerful ''images'', ''emotions'', or ''poetic reality''), it would still remind us of this primary combinatory process, even if it pushes us beyond the very substance of language itself in all its orthodox formations and conceptualizations. What may be closest could have taken us so far, and what is so familiar could in the end be a stranger we have met by chance.