12-19o

12-19n

12-19m

12-19l

12-19k

What is Absurdity ?

    It is worthwhile to ask this question again, since Forgetting is an insatiable beast:

    What is Absurdity?

     It is easy to oppose it to Law and think that, like following the Law, nothing is easier to do. Yet, to be absurd is both the hardest and the easiest to do. Hardest because we always see our actions as following some universal principle, and easiest because Absurdity, like the Law we feel we do without effort, is also what we cannot but do with the smallest effort. The difference is tiny, and it lies in our belief in whether what we do or not do is founded on our ability to know the nature and meaning of the action that we choose to do.

     Hence, if we say to ourselves, ''I'm going to commit an absurd act'' and think it is equal to saying ''I'm going to do a lawful act,'' or an act that we assume, under the banner of the rational, follows a rule like grammar or an ethic or a positive system: then that intention cannot be absurd. In short, you don't wake up one day and say I will be absurd. It's not something you intend, the same way that you cannot say, ''Today I will make time flow.'' But equally you can't say I will follow this or that Law, not because you can't follow a rule or law, but because, like time, law is what the universe follows whether we like it or not.

     That's why absurdity is hard: we follow a rule inevitably, whether we are aware or not, whether we intend it or not. To be absurd is hard because you need to be outside the universe to do it intentionally, and yet at the same time the easiest exactly when you want to do it intentionally. Everything we do, therefore, is the instantiation of Law. And this is the very basis of Absurdity, not its opposite, that law is inescapable, so that to try to enact it is what absurdity really is. It is not the opposite of Law or Meaning. What is absurd is to affirm that this act or that sentence follows this law or has this meaning. It is not the affirmation of the Meaningless, but the assertion that the act we do or words we say follow a rule or meaning we say they do. In short, absurdity is actually affirming this or that rule or meaning, because we never know which rule or meaning we act out, and eventually we act out one or the other, without the need to follow, like the lack of need to follow Time.

     This affirmation is what is absurd because there is no need to say or think it, and yet, we inevitably say or think it. What is absurd is that exactly and to say ''that exactly.'' And this is the reason that, like in Beckett or Ionesco, reason is itself what is absurd. The very fact of the inevitability of thinking this or that, sensing this or that, the very fact that I can't avoid a meaning or a rule in thought and action, makes my presence in the universe redundant because my thought or meaning is a superfluity, especially when I think that what I think is a mirror of the universe or reality. Why does the universe or reality need a mirror? And yet we are bound to make or be one, simply by being here and having thoughts or using language.

    This superfluity, this excess, this unavoidable doubling, and the awareness of it, is the beginning of the notion of the Absurd. Or you may also equally say: the beginning of Thought. Thus, if we get into the habit of thinking, and feel that this mirroring is smooth and without paradoxical status, is to avoid or evade vainly what must be, and absurdly be, a problematic ethic of our attempt at rationality, especially when that rationality does not see its limits or limitation, an absolute reason that we feel or we presume we exercise every day with every word or action, as a matter of course. To be absurd, then, is not to be irrational, but to be aware both of the superfluity and of the inevitability of rationality.     

(January 2018)        

12-19i, 12-19j

12-19h, 1-7

12-19e, 12-19f, 12-19g

There is no ideal speaker

"There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community."
                                                                                                      - Deleuze & Guattari, 1980.

-There is no ideal speaker, which is to say that there are only real ones, so that a pronunciation is compared with others, without leading to a big Other as a final referent.

-This means: no ideal speaker equals all are ideal speakers. Another way to say this is that there are just differences, no superintending identity for comparison for pronunciation and articulation. Second, variation in speech still preserves a statistical fuzzy domain for specific sounds which allow us to distinguish one from another. For example, /t/ and /x/ in Texas. No matter how it is said, these two letters are kept distinct, even if the vowels are pronounced in various subtle ways. Individual sounds are averages in relation to their surrounding sounds, which are also averages of other sounds in memory.

-When we listen or speak, there must be a process where we eliminate “noise” and abstract the “ideal” sound image or representation, so that every moment is like a test, a re-evaluation of the rapport in the mapping between phonic and graphic morphemic representation. The notion of high fidelity in sound recording would require a method of reducing noise and distortion in the recording, and what is defined as hi-fi would depend on what frequencies are defined to be within it. The aim is a neutral or flat unbiased recording of the targeted frequencies.

-However, registration does not end with the data, but must be played in various conditions and heard subjectively, so that remediation always results in tiny variations, similar to DNA from one person to another, or like fingerprints. There are many aspects of the voice which cannot be transcribed, such as the difference between masculine and feminine, infantine or gerontological voices. This is how we know the concept of individual discrete sounds is an abstraction.

-For we only happen to cross paths with the infinitely slow. Nothing of its ever unfolding but a tiny fraction registers itself through us.

12-19c, 12-19d

12-19a, 12-19b

#3

#2

#1

From speech- to script-oriented prosody

In a flat space, position organizes relations.

              – Johanna Drucker, Diagrammatic Writing

Its use as an axis between what we hear and
what we see is in my opinion the most fruitful and
innovative consequence of the free-verse revolution

   – Richard Bradford, Graphic Poetics : Poetry as Visual Art

In the twentieth century there has been a
steadily increasing interest in visual prosodies.

                               – Richard Cureton, 1986

    Visual prosody minimizes the phonetico-mimetic orientation of notational transcription by the subversion of morphotactics normally indexed to the temporal shadow of speech. The "deformation" of canonic orthographic formats like in E. E. Cummings sculpts the "silent" reading motions more indexed to the Eye than to the Ear. In so doing, the categorical domain of the "written" mode of language opposite speech emerges as a contrastive target of perceptual experience, as a separate "channel" allied with specific symbolic and discursive codifications of the two major physiological senses.

    (But whose eye, whose ear? Is there a disembodied ideal eye or ear that can serve as the referential frame for a universal measure in the performance of language or script acts? This would be like the big or generic Other. As if the appeal to such disembodied ideal Eye or Ear were a matter of course, that we know fully how hearing and seeing works cognitively and physiologically. The poetic space should be seen as a field of emergence like Mallarmé’s notion of the “espacement de la lecture,” the spacing of reading motions. The Eye and the Ear are exactly the mysteries which the metalingual performance must approximate, approach, and posit as grounds of its possibility. Like Taste, the Eye and the Ear are discursive objects.)

    This detachment from phonetic prosody can mean either the foregrounding of the shadow of speech as a foil against which visual prosody aligns itself; or as the symptom of the recognition of a dualistic system, Speech vs. Writing, where the privileged mode (because it is seen as the naturalistic ground of language) is made to confront that other mode which perpetually questions its essentialist and privileged status. Or, to see both as two types of performance, in constant cross-reference where one always recites the other as its mimetic counterpart, in either a consonant or dissonant mode of hauntology and parasitology.

    This is to say that the mediatic encounter between the Ear and the Eye is the nexus of  the local emergence of “speech” and “writing” as referentiable perceptual semiotic targets. The problem, however, with “writing,” in contrast to the plenitude and evidence of speech in traditional thinking, is that it is harder to define or locate, owing to its lack of any essential identity (which in principle is shared by all signs, for there are no positive terms). If we follow Derrida’s discussion of writing to the letter, then we will have to say that writing is that which has no place in (a metaphysically-conceived image of) "language." I cannot serve it in evidence, point to it, or speak of it. Yet, in a discursive act where speech presents itself as the natural ground of reference for language, a target called ''writing'' as the other of speech gets manufactured so that speech can be speech and writing can be writing. (And here, the Saussurean doctrine of speech and writing as separate systems echoes as a dialectic in the discourse of modern linguistics.) To play the field where these two shadows emerge as the fulcrum by which discourse activates its operative binaristic possibility falls under the domain of a metaprosodic metalanguage. Here, metalanguage is not a superior point above language: it is the reflexive motion by which languageness is manufactured as a referentiable object.

    When we describe metalinguistically, we are in fact trying to describe two incomplete systems at once. Both poles of speech and writing are dialectically necessary in imagining the concept of a single, unified, whole “language.” Yet, although dialectically necessary, it doesn’t need any dialectical resolution. It is ever only in this “broken up” state that it becomes possible to imagine such a phantasmic unity, and to allow the workspace of discourse to continue operating. Against the simple opposition of markedness-unmarkedness where the naturalness of speech and the artificiality of writing could be identified or arranged, we should set the notion of overmarking to designate the metaprosodic process that distributes these very same values in the field of the performative script act. Hence, ''speech,'' ''writing,'' ''ear,'' ''eye,'' and all the associated cluster of terms which revolve around them are metadiscursive levers. They arrive on the semiotic scene via the irresolvable dialectic of metaprosodic overmarking.

Kinetic writing

   The sign-form as multiplanar, multi-dimensional, or multimodal and engages not one but a plural set of differences. This can be seen in the two basic planes: graphic and sonic. Depending on specific embodiment, it can also engage the planes of movement, weight, color, dimension, substance, musicality, volume, etc. The re-inclusion of these other “planes” in modern orthography is a testament to a plural investment in the technology of the sign moving beyond print standardization. Advertising, visual design, craft, and the avant-garde up to vispo and post-lettrism are some of the domains where typography has addressed the intuition of signifying functions above standard lemmatization. That is, the standard typefaces and fonts are merely themselves modalities of the various embodiments of the gramma, in the same way that accents, musicality, intonations, volume, rate, pitch etc. are modalities of the phoné. The kinetic fusion of these dimensions or the translation of one plane to another can be seen in Futurist typography. The use of boldface or caps today is just a common example. The sound effects in printed comics using colourfully drawn distended and enlarged words or interjections are another. Dance, protest march, kinetics, proxemics, so-called nonverbal cues or language, are cross-over translations or reiterations of more complex meanings that one or a few words in standard font cannot fully convey.

From Christian Dotremont, Logogrammes

   The idea of a paradigm figura that predates any iteration or articulation returns us to the problem of ideal/material, abstract/concrete. However, it should be asked: is not the concrete instance also an abstract ideal? That is, the specific embodiment of a sign, in whatever shape, standard or nonstandard, is as abstract as any other. There is no form that is not abstract or ideal, that even the disfigured performance in itself evokes an ideal concept of an abstract (disfigured) sign-paradigm. The idealized ideal and the idealized non-ideal share the same abstract status. “What is a Letter” is getting trapped in the binaries it is setting up to get the discussion going. The questions remain unresolved because the issue is aporetic. Abstract typography to Asemic typography can be seen along the lines of this problematic, exploring the question of the ontological status or nature of sign-identity. It just remains for us to see how this engagement also inevitably falls into the unavoidable trap of hypostasis, demonstration, evidence, or of the example. By keeping the attempts interminable through a series of performances, abstract typography paradoxically embodies the indemonstrable.

   This exhibition of the indemonstrable is not in principle the opposite of the performance of a paradigmatic figura: they perform the same deviation and disfiguration of a paradigm, or of paradigmaticity itself. That is, the impossibility of the very notion of paradigmatic figura, or idealized sign, in perfect or imperfect form. Both the perfect and imperfect are ideal and abstract concepts. Hence, abstract typography is both impossible and the only possible, what we can’t escape from performing. If I draw a line that seems to begin a letter, and I don’t finish it, I still draw an ideal object, a point, a line, a curve, etc. You can call it a scrawl, a doodle, a scratch, glyph, mark, smudge, blur, stain, blot, etc., but all these are ideal and abstract notions of disfigured, nonstandard forms from the point of view of a normalizing typography or orthography. Hence, the non-word or non-letter is as abstract as the idea of the letter. They are not in any way more or less concrete nor abstract. And following difference, the imperfect form is constitutive of the perfect form, in the sense that there is no perfect form, nor imperfect: all forms are perfect the moment they arise, since they have come about as physical events in the quantum universe. 

   The question is: does recognition of a letter require an ideal form or paradigm figura of the letter? Is it not enough that one form or shape reminds me of similar shapes? I have never seen nor encountered an ideal letter. Standard is not the same as ideal, because standard is system specific or native to the economy of a specific style, like Times Roman, or Trebuchet. In fact, if I attempt to design a new letter face, no matter how ideal I make it, it will just be one font among the thousands. Even the non-ideal forms we encounter are non-ideal only in comparison to another non-ideal that was just made standard. This doesn’t mean that what we have in the concrete is the non-ideal, that it is what we are making or demonstrating. This merely reinstalls the issue because of our stubborn need for closure and ground. The non-ideal also cannot be demonstrated. That is, the embodiment of the non-ideal is also non-ideal. It cannot be demonstrated as is, as ideal, in all its plenitude or fullness. Is the ideal, which is both the ideal of the ideal and the ideal of the non-ideal, then an effect of memory, an aide-memoire, to assist in future recognition of a resemblance, and minimize the effort at interpretation or reading? In pareidola where facial images are “seen” where they don’t really exist (the Virgin Mary on rose petals, the face on Mars), we see how the mind’s predilection for resemblances can go overboard. There are only resemblances in an endless chain, in a movement of deferral that Warhol demonstrated, implied in the proliferation of finite set of copies that we perpetuate in the endless chain of reproductions in logical, virtual, and material spaces. 

   Again, it has to be emphasized that even the series of copies are not idealized realizations of the copy qua copy. That is, a hypostatic realization of “copyness” itself. There is no such thing as a copy in itself because the copy is also a copy of itself. This is the recursive logic “inherent” in the notion of the sign, the pure non-ideality that allows it to function as such, as the generator of resemblances and differences. The sign is not a resemblance of anything but the point of bifurcation by which resemblances and differences are perceived. This bifurcation is structured by regressive recursivity wherein the non-self-identical is endlessly reiterated.

Letras y figuras

   I would think the interesting aspect falls mainly in the way it seems to give letters concrete bodies (living and nonliving), but at a price. The bodies ''bend'' to the shapes of the letter, as if the letter were the master template that made them pliable to follow its shape. That is, the bodies are subordinate to the form of the letter, for which they ''sacrifice'' their own distinct morphology.

   Maybe its a good contrast to the notion of the abstract letter, whose ideal form and ideal non-form prevent it from becoming an object or a finished product. Letterforms are not static objects, but instead are vectors of a dynamic process (the metaplasmic history of alphabetical forms shows this). The ideal perfect letter and the ideal non-perfect letter are open-time convergence magnets, like the ''strange attractor'' concept in state space or phase space in dynamics. They are unrealizeable, and serve merely as the direction toward which the trajectory is moving, without this direction existing as a transcendent order (like Dante's God pulling all souls in).

   From a neo-materialist pov, the letter is merely an infinite set of virtualities or potentialities where each actualization is a sort of ''coordinate'' marking the intersection of forces, and where its path or timeline is not subordinate to an energetics beyond its own set of possible states. (The notion of non-essentialistic emergence of form, rough version). Hence, bodies don't bend to the letter but have their own processes, and, like the letter, are in constant stages of individuation. It is only in a symbolic regime that moments of letters and moments of bodies become locked up in a memory loop of redundancies and references, like the way they do perhaps in the letras y figuras. This ''feedback'' resonance is still part of the whole dynamic: the negentropic and homeostatic world of information and communication.

   But the visual punning can also be said to deconstruct the idealism of the letter by making us see how it was simply an illusion of perspective. When we look closer, the letterform vanishes into a myriad of other things, it is true, but things that have their own discrete ''concrete'' forms, the letter becoming nothing but a transparent holder or container of the real. It is a good illustration, though of how the ideal and the material gradients change hands by changing scales or frames. The letter seemed concrete from afar, then vanishes as an ideal upon closer look, giving way to ''real'' bodies. These "bodies," upon closer scrutiny, turn out to be only forms made from arranged paint or watercolor pigments following the idealized notions of ''color'' and “lines." The image of the body and the body of the image become indiscernible from one another. (You then say, how so like Magritte!)