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.