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!)

The translation of matter

- As if the identity of writing in its ""physical form" was a given. The very material format of glyphs is an ideal vision of language, inasmuch as speech is, both prey to becoming. Both are in a futurity, a virtuality not opposed to reality. Against the hyperforms of desire, the full phallic presence, the fugacity of form is not a distant object, but the very mode of the lived moment of language. Writing, as the defining mode of language, has no precise ontology.

- The fixity of form is more the function of desire than the feature of the physical. It is not the feature of the physical to endure. The quasi-permanent inscription of forms is the prosthetic extension of memory and desire. What is material marries what is psychical, anthropic, ideal. The ideal must find its extension in the material, like a sculpture embodying the imago. But like any cultural form, in marriage the opposites are maintained: the union is abstract, even if the social transformation is real. The material is hence also already the extension of the ideal. Or there are two notions of the ideal. The first defines it as an essential self-identity; the second, as what D & G calls “more abstract than the abstract,” that which is between the material and the ideal conceived traditionally. If objects are the extension of the anthropic, they are nevertheless traversed by an “evil genius” (J. Baudrillard).

- (Can't we say then that the essence of the world as a mystery does not imply some inadequacy on the design of our faculties. In a sense there is a limit, yes, but it less about what we lack than how our relationship to the world is not a matter of reflection but of transformation, that is, translation.)

Salvador Dali, “Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,” 1938.

- The surrealists have given us so much of that aspect of objects, how they are possessed by an irreducible alterity, visually captured only in terms of the malleability of pictorial punning. We have always thought of painting as the abode of the familiar, mistaking our recognition of what they “depict” as a reaffirmation of our perceptions. (Perhaps this is true for religious paintings. Nevertheless, religious works are like mythic representations: their subject matter is already the surnatural.) The evil genius of matter is what is more natural than our notions of the natural. It is that which lies at the limit of the represented, or the exterior which is intimated, that surrounds the readable, the metaphorical, which is its subject matter, which is the other of both its subject and its matter. And even when we reduce the aesthetic to the objectivity of the material, after the pursuit of the formal is exhausted in Modernism, won’t we have as a logical conclusion the "buchi" in Lucio Fontana’s art? As he says: “I make holes, the infinite goes through them, light passes through them, there is no need to paint… ”

"Concetto Spaziale", Attese (1967), and "Concetto Spaziale, Attesa" (1961) by Lucio Fontana.
From https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/lucio-fontana-art/

- The inscription (a carving out, like abstraction, like cuneiform) which is language's mode of being pays the price of alterity, of non-identity. This tension is, however, integral to the perception of sense. It is the irresolvable requisite of meaning: contradiction, paradox, difference, oxymoron, chiasmus, reversibility, non-identity. To speak is to alter, but incompletely. For alterity itself carries its own non-identity. There is no essential other, since by definition the other is that which has no essence. Or, that which is imagined to have an absolute one, as the negation of becoming.

The castrated signifier

- Writing was always linked in history to a type of sacred object: from myth, philosophy, to science, to intention to form to structure to a UG. The dialectics of the logic of the Signifier vs the logic of the Signified. The recession and resurrection of the various signifieds in history, from the sacred to eide to social reality to intention to form and so on. Autotelic as a signifier without signified, leading to materiality of signifier in 20th century art, writing. To take away the logic of the signified does not mean leading to meaninglessness, which is meaningless by itself. Instead it reduces its cultural logic to material production, even if traces of the old aesthetic remain as skeuomorph, working as an indirect commentary on the surplus cultural cues for reception. Cf. the recession of the Signified in materialist poetics, in Cecil Touchon, in asemic writing. When all forms of the signified had been detached from the signifier.

- The logic of the signified is both repressed and recovered, like in the psychoanalytic dynamic of the signifier. This logic hides the absence of the signified. (In Zizek, the pure Master Signifier governs politics, culture.) 20th century criticism has always linked the signifier to a signified, but must posit the signified as beyond the play of signifiers. The absent phallus is posited as the sublime objet petit a. To accept castration, then relegate the nostalgia for the signified as a muted exteriority, being reduced to a harmless symptom of production. The dream logic of unreadable scripts: because the readable is elsewhere displaced, as already consumed or consummated libidinal production, already enjoyed, but not foregrounded.  Because to signify my jouissance is obscene, that is, pornographic, as when an actress announces ''I'm coming.'' The consumption of the signified today is perhaps like that: in the mode of the obscene (J. Baudrillard). The hyper-hilarity and giddiness of advertising, the over-demonstration of the cause and effect chain, mediatization of the real, and so on.