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.
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* 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.**

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* 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)