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)