The Inattentive Reader*

Henri Matisse, "The Inattentive Reader," 1919 (image from tate.org.uk).

    The silent reader motif in painting (sometimes depicted either as a female imbued with faint corporeal sensuality, or as an individual in serene isolation whose whole attention is absorbed by the text) appears to function as a cognitive or semiotic means to divide the visual field between what is seen and what is read. More importantly, though, is the rhetorical fusion it hides while demarcating the boundaries between the body of the text from the body of the reader via its detour into the erotic or the sensuous. Reading becomes for the beholder the enjoyment of rediscovering the body of the reader as distinct from the body of the text and the world. It is as if it were in the gesture or posture of holding the textual body that the sensuous energy of the reader's body is generated and invested with desire. Reading or the pleasure of the text arises in that scene where the desire for a body becomes its paramount object of focus. 

    To maintain this achievement at its highest notes, however, the reader's body must keep contact with the textual body. That tactile bridge represents the material hypostasis required in the generation of the physical in the world of the image. The loss of this tactile bond (the reader letting go of the text) dissolves the spell that maintains the eroticized lectural bond: the text being read becomes an inert object, and desire finds nothing to feed on but drab elements of the medium (here given to us by Matisse through the color choices, the posture and eye direction, and the sexless clothing). The shimmering light that held up the rapt attention on the readerly face or body dissolves simultaneously with the disappearance of the tactile connection with the textual body. The eye wanders away from the page and the text is left idle on the table, disrupting the symbiotic bond that conferred the simulacrum of lifelike energy to the readerly body as the ontological extension of the textual body. 

    The painterly contact between the model and the text--existing in principle as signs on the canvas and on the page--feeds both ends of their conceptual possibility, pushing us to vacillate between the two poles of the simulacrum, that is, between "essence" and "appearance," so that the semiotic discourse of perception that splices the sign between the physical and nonphysical can function in language as identifiable categories. They are, hence, not so much irreconcilable opposites as the medium in which reading and desire become functional metaphors of one another.

* The self-generation of textuality can be seen in the binary separation it enacts between itself and its referent. To exist as an object apart, it must name its other, thereby maintaining its status as a perceptible referentiable object. This primary ergonomic dichotomy can be seen via the deictic functions which orient the imaginary space of reading. Various reality effects depend on such markers which name the outsides of the text, while at the same time index the text "itself" as the site where such citation happens. More obvious self-references are locutions such as ''at the time of this writing.'' In general, the spaces and temporal dimensions it creates, its proleptic-analeptic axes, extend for the reader a plane of existence between what is read and what is mentioned. We can even look at narrative codes similar to what R Barthes listed in S/Z less as linguistic or literary "devices" than as ergonomic resting points or "landmarks" where both text and reader become locatable coordinates in the groundless space of representation.

    There is much work to be done in the elucidation of this self-generative logic where textual and non-textual coordinates are set up by reading motions as projections of its own prosodic traces. This ergonomic notion dilutes the over-emphasis on structurality or literary form and answers the question what audience it would be a structurality for. Encoded in the design feature of textuality are the means by which the dichotomy text-nontext is made and kept perceptible. It is a border that can become thematized whenever a metafictive or metalingual tactic is set in motion. Like the mirror stage, a reader is drawn into the deictic network of the interminable play of coordinative reference where binary values exchange places in an irresolvable dialectic. This could be seen as the chiasmic spiral where desire and semiosis animate each other in an exchange logic without closure.

Notes for "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r"

   --In piece no. 13 of No Thanks, as it is often elsewhere with Cummings' penchant for tmesis, simultaneity and seriality are placed in tandem, as if language was forced to confront the very irresolvable dialectic informing its temporary movement in phonographic solution space. Why do we need a solution space? It’s less a question of need than what is simply an encounter, a disjunctive encounter, the arrival of the gap and the metaphoric dimension of the sign as a stopgap measure, the solution which simply puts the gap in sharper focus or perpetuates it, prolongs it, by plotting one (re)solution after another.

   --Paradigmatic vs syntagmatic crowding, as if slots for letters had more space for just one, so that a polyphonic stream is filtered to derive the normal word morphology and syntax. Thus simultaneity demands a compromise in serial space where several signals can coexist and must be parsed into their common morphological grouping. Syllables, affixes, phonetic groups, syntax groups, or a unilinear sentence or IPs, no longer command primary aesthetic lodging in syntagmatic chain, but must compete for priority with the virtual crowd in the paradigmatic background. As if Cummings was illustrating an algorithm of linguistic online processing, the pre-utterance cognitive neural mass going through the neat grid of the Symbolic order. Everything is free grapheme, only ASGrs set the conditions to bind them. This is why the iconic is the grammatical and vice versa for Cummings (cf grammatical metaphors). In solution space, all graphemes are free until a regime of signs grids them.

    --The in/famous grasshopper poem can be seen less as a mimesis of the kinetic or a visual onomatopoeia or isomorphism between graphic prosody and motion, than the provision of the space of reading motions where the recombinatory logic of semiotic notation is foregrounded and reactivated. In short, a diagram of lexicogenesis in reading motions. We are returned to a metaprosodic stance where verbal and graphic equivalences are being invoked for reconstitution in their pragmatic and informational equivalences or parallelisms. It is moving closer to the simulation of interactivity as the spacing of reading motion, returning us to the productive moment where segments and supersegments are reconstructed out of nonsegmentarity, where linearity and nonlinearity become metaprosodic options for the reconstruction of the writing system in graphematic solution space. A writerly grammatogeny, instead of a readerly one. Tinkering with the writing system’s solution spaces in a more explicit manner, above the implicit infrathin differences we introduce with each deformance, by reconfiguring its forms, order, disposition, direction, appearance, relations, values, operations, functions, organization, categories, combinations, tactics, and so on.

    --Running against the monocular unilinear voice. Polyphony. One line at a time is too limiting. Multi tasking. An utterance is a crowd, parsed through an algorithm of priorities. Parentheticals as the compromise in syntagmatic chain or line, emphasis on orthogonal paradigmatic field, the simultaneous vs the serial. Metrical grid is dominantly serial syntagm. Cummings grid overlays it with the paradigmatic mass coexisting pt by pt in synchrony with the overmarked line. Line within a line, multiple syntactic processes running side by side, criss crossing, interacting, commenting on and in dialogue with each other. Such multiple articulation interlacing and implicating each other pushes the limit of the glottographic resources of the graphematic solution space. Cacophony is managed by recourse to nonglottographic prosody, letting the eye pick out the multiple interlacing syntax via scriptly signatures.

   --The graphemic morphotactic arrangement of < grasshopper > would seem to be a commentary on the eventuality of the arrival of standard orthography and lexeme, representing the direction which looks like the telos of becoming in which linguistic elements and beings coincide in an isomorphic mapping format. Three timelines intersect in the space of reading, the event being divisible among the syntactic grammar of Subject, Verb, and Object (spectator, process, spectacle). The directionality of writing as a linear narrative frame against which the process of arrangement happens, a sort of slow motion frame of literacy. The grasshopper poem is diagrammatic mapping where the aesthetic entities we call word, line, sentence, syllable, CV, directionality, page, stanza, paragraph, letters, punctuation, syntax, morpheme, phoneme, and so on emerge as perceptible objects in the dynamic space of reading.

Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring (2017)

Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date.
And one perhaps nearing its end…..If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, 
if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – 
without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, 
as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly 
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

—M. Foucault, The Order of Things

     If it were not for the narrative alibi in Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” of a scientific laboratory experiment in a technology of “transtemporalized consciousness,” Jim McCulloch’s migration into a sentient lobster millions or billions of years into the future would have sounded pretty much like the schizophrenic voyages and becomings that R.D. Laing wrote about that became celebrated in Anti-Oedipus and in which he defined

the schizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes a subject to remark: "I had existed since the very beginning ... from the lowest form of life [the body without organs] to the present time...."

This whole spectrum represents real material intensities through which a nomadic subject passes.

[E]verything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items..... We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. ¹

     In these migrational becomings where there is only a mobile field of intensity, it is only by convention of language that we still speak of a “self.” ² The nomadic subject that drifts and migrates can become anything, completely disaggregated from the molar forms or transcendental images like the ego in a process that Deleuze and Guattari call “desubjectification.” In the becoming-animal of Jim, this schizophrenic migration is framed as a scientific temporal voyage, but it performs the same shattering movement of dehumanization. There is nothing degrading in this dehumanization; instead, in Jim’s migration into a futuristic sentient lobster, the anthropocentric view of the world and history is paradoxically decentralized via humanese, the same human language in which the process is communicated to us. Hence, the question of whether or not it is really possible for the inhuman other to speak through us (in lobsterese, let’s say) will accompany this brief discussion all throughout.

     We can see this problematic of a real dialogue between the human and the inhuman put forward in a passage tinged with the same soft ironic humour that suffuses the entire novella. Asked about the existence of lobsters in the anthropocene era, Jim was forced to be circumspect with his reply:

   McCulloch hesitated. "Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one."

   "You have no discourse with them, then?" one of the lobsters asked.

   "Very little," he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile. McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, "We eat them!" and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts—and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.

    It is through this migratory fusion where borders of identities become blurry—even hypothetically effaced in a humanese that requires borders to conduct its discourse—that Jim (if we can still call him that without quotes ³) saw the bigotry of the anthropocentric view of the universe. Here, billions of years into the future, the very notion of humanity seems like an incredible improbability, a very faint dream.

He had become, it seemed, a lobster, or, at any rate, something lobster-like. Implied in that was transition: he had become. He had once been something else. Blurred, tantalizing memories of the something else that he once had been danced in his consciousness. He remembered hair, fingers, fingernails, flesh. Clothing: a kind of removable exoskeleton. Eyelids, ears, lips: shadowy concepts all, names without substance, but there was a certain elusive reality to them, a volatile, tricky plausibility. Each time he tried to apply one of those concepts to himself—"fingers," "hair," "man," "McCulloch"—it slid away, it would not stick. Yet all the same those terms had some sort of relevance to him.

In another conversation held earlier in the text, we can fully note the semantic, even ontological, incommensurability that holds between humanese and lobsterese:

—Are you awake?

—I am now, McCulloch answered irritably.

—I need definitions. You are a mystery to me. What is a McCulloch?

—A man.

—That does not help.

—A male human being.

—That also has no meaning.

—Look, I'm tired. Can we discuss these things some other time?

—This is a good time. While we rest, while we replenish ourself.

—Ourselves, McCulloch corrected.

—Ourself is more accurate.

—But there are two of us.

—Are there? Where is the other?

McCulloch faltered. He had no perspective on his situation, none that made any sense.

—One inside the other, I think. Two of us in the same body. But definitely two of us. McCulloch and not-McCulloch.

—I concede the point. There are two of us. You are within me. Who are you?

—McCulloch.

—So you have said. But what does that mean?

—I don't know.

     The border between Human and Inhuman is held up paradoxically by the necessity of the human-directed tale at the very moment of its declared impossibility. The impossibility of the tale is bound up with the impossibility of the other speaking as the other, and the impossibility of the other inhabiting its own alterity. Here the other can really speak only if all notions of self and identity are suspended. But these are not just the main humanese concepts that we begin to suspend. The notions of “species,” “body,” “mind,” “individual,” “memory,” “language”, “society,” “history,” “habitat” or “territory,” “differences,” “culture,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “time,” and “space,” and even “Earth” no longer have their validity. ⁴ For our self-declared mastery or dominion over the world is facilitated and enthroned by these humanese terms, the language by which we claim hegemonic colonization of all species we consider inferior.

     This anthropocentrism, however, does not want to be silenced so easily. Before encountering the new god of this future era, a telepathic cephalopod measuring about 15 to 20 meters in diameter, “Jim” had the mistaken belief that he at least migrated into a creature of the same superior intelligence that a human being had, and is therefore also the dominant species of that future world. This is, no doubt, a compensatory concession for the recognition of the possibility that humans are not the only intelligent species on Earth. Lobsters, McCulloch reflected,

are low-phylum creatures with simple nervous systems, limited intelligence. Plainly the mind he had entered was a complex one. It asked thoughtful questions. It carried on civilized conversations with its friends, who came calling like ceremonious Japanese gentlemen, offering expressions of solicitude and good will. New hypothesis: that lobsters and other low-phylum animals are actually quite intelligent, with minds roomy enough to accept the sudden insertion of a human being's entire neural structure, but we in our foolish anthropocentric way have up till now been too blind to perceive.

His exhausted metaphors, indeed, contribute to this persistent blindness. However, “Jim/lobster” is/are not the epitome of superior sentience on the new Earth.

—What is it?

—We are approaching a god, the lobster replied.

—A god, did you say?

—A divine presence, yes. Did you think we were the rulers of this world?

   In fact McCulloch had, assuming automatically that his time-jaunt had deposited him within the consciousness of some member of this world's highest species, just as he would have expected to have landed, had he reached the twenty-second century as intended, in the consciousness of a human rather than in a frog or a horse. But obviously the division between humanity and all sub-sentient species in his own world did not have an exact parallel here; many races, perhaps all of them, had some sort of intelligence, and it was becoming clear that the lobsters, though a high life-form, were not the highest. He found that dismaying and even humbling; for the lobsters seemed quite adequately intelligent to him, quite the equals—for all his early condescension to them—of mankind itself. And now he was to meet one of their gods? How great a mind was a god likely to have?

     Secondly, and most importantly in terms of history, Jim had the mistaken messianic belief that his singular presence and arrival in the lobster’s world constituted the “omen” of an epoch-changing critical and transitional moment. Even in a decentralized historical continuum, the anthropocentrism of world events persists to anchor the semantics of an all-too-human philosophy of cosmic time. This absurdly privileged point of view is now about to be equally debunked:   

   "I'm—not ready to go home yet," he said. "There's so much I haven't seen yet, and that I want to see. I want to see everything. I'll never have an opportunity like this again. Perhaps no one ever will. Besides, I have services to perform here. I'm the herald; I bring the Omen; I'm part of this pilgrimage. I think I ought to stay until the rites have been performed. I want to stay until then."

   "Those rites will not be performed," said the octopus quietly.

   "Not performed?"

   "You are not the herald. You carry no Omen. The Time is not at hand."

McCulloch did not know what to reply. Confusion swirled within him. No Omen? Not the Time?

—It is so, said the host. We were in error. The god has shown us that we came to our conclusion too quickly. The time of the Molting may be near, but it is not yet upon us. You have many of the outer signs of a herald, but there is no Omen upon you. You are merely a visitor. An accident.

   McCulloch was assailed by a startlingly keen pang of disappointment. It was absurd; but for a time he had been the central figure in some apocalyptic ritual of immense significance, or at least had been thought to be, and all that suddenly was gone from him, and he felt strangely diminished, irrelevant, bereft of his bewildering grandeur. A visitor. An accident.

     Or, in lobsterese, Jim is only a “revenant”:

   "When will you show it to us?"

   "Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth."

   "What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?"

   "A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being."

   "And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?"

   "I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being."

   "Which is a revenant."

   "Yes, I think so."

     A specter, a shadow that keeps returning, that haunts the text and language, a hold-over from an ineffaceable humanese. As Foucault had said, man’s disappearance is a “wager” since he himself understood how, in speaking of this impossible presence of a face drawn on the sand, that the erasure, by having taken place, retains paradoxically what was effaced, in both memory and metaphor. As a presence in metaphor, or as metaphor, above all, with all the paradox this entails. For a literal non-presence cannot logically disappear, and a dramatics of disappearance only re-enshrines the presence it explicitly denies. It is in this way that both the human and the inhuman are the two sides of the same language.

  

     Can the other of this language really speak? Can the lobster really speak lobsterese? Can the inhuman speak, or can the human speak as human through the inhuman, even when the human can no longer speak except as inhuman? And when the inhuman speaks, can we still believe the human can speak through? In the end, what we are hearing are neither but language, the habitat and intersection of both, and is neither human nor inhuman. For language, which we thought to be human, is neither one nor the other. It is simply the place of an imaginary dialogue, the conjuring space of both humanity and inhumanity as such. The dissolution of the image of the human cannot happen fully without the correlative effacement of the image of the inhuman.

     Similar to the “characters” that traverse texts like magical wholes which summon souls and organize the plausibility of events, the “self,” human or inhuman, is nothing but a heuristic unity. It is more aptly the invocation of the unlocatability of the essence of the “human” in language and reaffirms the irreducible enigma of our presence as pure migratory passage in a becoming more inhuman than human, something that the myths, before the advent of reason, had known all along.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 84-85.

2. In one passage in his book Consciousness Explained (1991, p. 413-14) we would think that Daniel Dennett had read Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” when he spoke of the transitional moment of the invention of the “self”:

People have selves. Do dogs? Do lobsters? If selves are anything at all, then they exist. Now there are selves. There was a time, thousands (or millions, or billions) of years ago, when there were none — at least none on this planet. So there has to be — as a matter of logic — a true story to be told about how there came to be creatures with selves. This story will have to tell — as a matter of logic — about a process (or a series of processes) involving the activities or behaviors of things that do not yet have selves — or are not yet selves — but which eventually yield, as a new product, beings that are, or have, selves.

     The transitional event is theorized as located at the critical moment of the birth of reason:

[T]he birth of reasons was also the birth of boundaries, the boundary between "me" and "the rest of the world," a distinction that even the lowliest amoeba must make, in its blind, unknowing way. This minimal proclivity to distinguish self from other in order to protect oneself is the biological self, and even such a simple self is not a concrete thing but just an abstraction, a principle of organization. Moreover the boundaries of a biological self are porous and indefinite. Border crossings are thus either moments of anxiety… or something to be especially enjoyed.

     Coupling and mating are such types of border-crossings and are actually conceptually within the limits or “normal” human practice (marriage, nationhood, groups, corporations, etc.). The “porousness” of boundaries is not just the property of a socio-erotic dynamic but also of physical systems in general. Extending this logic to the ontology of the self, Dennett asks: The normal arrangement is one self per body, but if a body can have one, why not more than one under abnormal conditions? Aren’t we only the fleeting guests of our own minds, the same way we are the mere transient travellers in the body or bodies that we share as the host of a multitude of other organisms? As strangers to ourselves, our horizon is always elsewhere.

3. Deleuze and Guattari (op. cit., p. 86), on this notion of proper names, write:

The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of "effects": effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics, where proper names designate such effects within fields of potentials: the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the names of history, and not the name of the father.

4. Echoing the difficulty of finalizing the boundaries of the natural from the human, Hans Bertens (2008) asks and affirms:

Where do we draw the line between nature and ourselves, that is to say, between nature and culture? Perhaps the conclusion must be that the attempt to define nature, or the wilderness, in any objective way, leads us to back to the constructedness of our concepts, to their discursive character. Nothing in the real world announces itself as ‘wilderness’. We must accept that we do not know where our discursive construction of nature, or ‘wilderness’, ends and nature itself begins.

The delimitation of the natural, of course, carries the ambiguous poles of valuation and devaluation not only in terms of human exploitation and transformation but also in terms of conservation or preservation. The deep Hegelian resonances of this dialectic in terms of history and human identity where Nature is negated to be posited and sublimated finds its revisionary rephrasing in Slavoj Žižek’s idea of “desublimation” in Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires (1998), another posthumanist novel.

This notion that we are entering a new era in which humanity will leave behind the inertia of the material bodies, was nicely rendered by Konrad Lorenz's somewhat ambiguous remark that we ourselves (the "actually existing" humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man. Of course, the first association that imposes itself here is the notion that the "actually existing" humanity still dwells in what Marx designated as "pre-history," and that the true human history will begin with the advent of the Communist society; or, in Nietzsche's terms, that man is just a bridge, a passage between animal and overman. What Lorenz "meant" was undoubtedly situated along these lines, although with a more humanistic twist: humanity is still immature and barbarian, it did not yet reach the full wisdom. However, an opposite reading also imposes itself: the human being IS in its very essence a "passage," the finite opens into an abyss.

The reader's gymnasium

Redundancy as key concept in cognitive information design. The script act is ramified in several levels of iconic and diagrammatic cross-mapping, so that rhythms are repeated from the phonemic, prosodic, bibliographic, graphetic, acoustic, mimetic, rhetorical, kinetic, physiognomic, gestural, proxemics, etc. dimensions. In a concert, the whole act is massively reproduced not just by the dancing clapping singing crowd but by the media technology which multiplies its replication a millionfold. Here, salience becomes the basis of real experience, that of an aesthetic waveform getting reproduced and translated by various modalities. Thus, a script act is always a concert where analogues are replicated on various media so that it can become saliently readable.

***

Where is the Reader, how is it inscribed? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, thematized. Like the fourth wall. In the visual arts, the perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angle, ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as a mode of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium. The focus is on the body, texture, surface, material of the frontal object of attention. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the reader's space expands (expressionism) to become the whole record of its nonlinear motions.

Artefacts of looking may or may not accommodate the space for the reader/observer; they may, partly or fully, demand or deny the observer's space. Not often is this aspect thematized, or this tendency follows historical modulations. Or, the ontology of the object is actually that of the readerly ''gymnasium,'' displaced to satisfy the age's rhetoric of discursive authority (positivism). In literature as early as the epics, the narrator function being given to the figure who takes over the narrative is a reader in disguise, where performance intersects and becomes part of the ontological space of fiction (metalepsis).

Radical community

We often presume that we seamlessly share the same cognitive or semantic context with others. The context, most of the time, is variegated among people. There are some road intersections (a mystery!), but the view of the whole may be radically different across individuals. I'm reminded of a poem by W. Stevens which practically says the world is as many or as varied as the number of individuals looking. This is a radical way of defining individualism or individuality, something more or less built into the composition of ''individual'' as a word itself. There is obviously a form of overlap and encounter, or else we won't even imagine the notion of ''context'' or the shared horizon of understanding called sensus communis. Yet, this is probably better seen less as a constant or stable frame than as something that must be built up concurrently with the ongoing speech or script act.

Perhaps a good way to negotiate these extremes is to look at them as assigned points in a kind of discourse or language game, necessary for taking stock of positions and tracing out the meanderings of communication or conversation. I recall here D. Davidson's idea of radical interpretation where the context is basically an emergent aspect of the speech or script act. That is, whatever the object text is, as utterance or as printed material or multimedia, part of the identity, content, message, information, or meaning of that object text is the emergent context which allows that meaning to become perceptible. Put another way, ''text'' and ''context,'' in the manner or extent that they are said to be ''connected'' in understanding, are emergent poles of the communication event as a radically creative or inaugural semio-poetic process, with all the attendant technological, socio-psychological, and political dimensions of perceptual formation and/or deformation.

Realism, redundancy, reading

--On the recalcitrant binary of mimetic and anti-mimetic: we need to step back and ask ourselves if a non-mimetic mode in linguistic practice is ever possible de facto even when it is claimed de jure. It would be more precise to say that the favoured mimetic object simply moves out from one type to another, from the realia of history to that of, say, semiotic forms. In the final analysis, the object of all mimesis would be other species of mimesis. It is this mimesis of mimesis which allows the language of realism to become possible, and it is a question that brings us all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Hence, in point of fact, the anti-mimetic writing being alluded to, identified with the avant-garde, carries more mimesis than the plainly mimetic kind of writing. The disfavour this avant-garde species receives is due to something else than an issue of mimesis or realism. By attributing exclusively a thicker coefficient of the real to mimetic writing, wouldn’t we be reiterating the discursive authority, legitimacy, and rationality of the individuals who claim to have a better access to the referent? And this referent is being reproduced in writing untainted with fantasy and the resources of language and memory? (Maybe the more important or useful notion is redundancy, not mimesis or representation.)

***

--We always produce diagrams to facilitate the deployment of salience, informationality, or significance. This is the sign as an aesthetic object, a cognitive material or procedural support which presents itself in the communicational field as a marked or overmarked object or target of perception. It is an act proposing for the recognition of a scriptural or semiotic move as a communal substance of meaning to be shared and passed along as a significant artefact or text: that is, as the locus of everyday or critical discourse. Ethnologically speaking, the rites and rituals which are repeated, the painstaking manner and formality or theatricality in their performance or presentation, could be seen as the prime distillation or modelling of the reproduction of the koinē aisthēsis as a cultural feature or substance. Cf. the material turn, the material repertoire of the culture. There is, of course, a politics here at work, since it is a discourse which delineates outsiders as nonparticipant discourses. There are those included and excluded in the “conversation.” It would be interesting to see where the lines are drawn, the signs of resistance, and the moment of transition or passage toward the exterior other.

***

--The self-generation of textuality can be seen in the binary separation it enacts between itself and its referent. To exist as an object apart, it must name its other, thereby maintaining its status as a perceptible referentiable object. This primary ergonomic dichotomy can be seen via the deictic functions which orient the imaginary space of reading. Various reality effects depend on such markers which name the outsides of the text, while at the same time indexes itself as the site where such citation happens. More obvious self-references are locutions such as ''at the time of this writing.'' In general, the spaces and temporal dimensions it creates, its proleptic-analeptic axes, extend for the reader a plane of existence between what is read and what is mentioned. We can even look at narrative codes similar to what R Barthes listed in S/Z less as linguistic or literary "devices" than as ergonomic resting points or "landmarks" where both text and reader become locatable coordinates in the groundless space of representation.

   There is much work to be done in the elucidation of this self-generative logic where textual and non-textual coordinates are set up by reading motions as projections of its own prosodic traces. This ergonomic notion dilutes the over-emphasis on structurality or literary form and answers the question what audience it would be a structurality for. Encoded in the design feature of textuality are the means by which the dichotomy text-nontext is made and kept perceptible. It is a border that can become thematized whenever a metafictive or metalingual tactic is set in motion. Like the mirror stage, a reader is drawn into the deictic network of the interminable play of coordinative reference where binary values exchange places in an irresolvable dialectic. This could be seen as the chiasmic spiral where desire and semiosis animate each other in an exchange logic without closure.

02-20

Sign/crisis/pleasure/reading

--We think of reading as something we do, on something, or as something done with us or on us. We never see it as simply what is done or what happens. Everything must be a syntax of causes and effects. We think of it as our cognitive property, an act or event attributed to our status as perceiving agents or beings. We would never see it as an ''external'' process which produces its ''elements'' such as ''readers'' and ''readerly objects.'' Or as a field where all these elements are emergent quasi-objects. I'm looking at it as a recursive reproduction of the mirror-stage where it is its own objective to keep emerging as its own emergence.

--La liseuse, reading a reader reading a text which is also a reading of a reading, and so on. Like in Foucault’s problematization of the location of the stage of representation in his superb commentary on Velasquez’s Las Meninas, we should view reading less as a psychological event centered in a putative subject or cogito than a play of various frames of substitutions dynamically extending in time and space. That is, as a scene of the emergence of reading / writing where temporality and spatiality themselves arise, together with the Subject of reading. That is to say, the emergence of the scene itself as the scene of emergence.

--We can regard it as a materialist cognitive design environment and not a pure phenomenology of reading. We are dynamically wedded into the design, but it is not the permanent arrival of the aesthetic sign that is paramount but its variational relay toward an other. The material information design holds the marked differences between aesthetic objects, not as a fixed binary but as a dynamic radical mode of exchange. This mode involves the spiralling and nonfinal meeting between the image of the body and the body of the image, a spiralling non-terminal chiasmus where desire chases its own tail. In contrast, an essentialist planar regime of signs simplifies exchange into a closed, unilinear, and hierarchical binary circuit.

--The pleasure of speaking emanates from the radical exchange where desire is chasing its own tail, where the logic of the signifier is founded not on its terminal arrival in a final signified but in the oscillating value of its own identity or possibility. The pleasure is then in the risk taken in the leap from the unknown toward a momentary recognition of the familiar, or in the ''salvation'' felt in the moment of the crisis of reading, like in narrative situations where the lady is rescued at the last moment. Speaking or script acts save the signified for retrieval, in the reproduction of the familiar.

Asemic writing: reading initiations (2018)

     From the blurb for An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting (2013) edited by Tim Gaze and Michael Jacobson we read:

An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is the first book-length publication to collect the work of a community of writers on the edges of illegibility. Asemic writing is a galaxy-sized style of writing, which is everywhere yet remains largely unknown. For human observers, asemic writing may appear as lightning from a storm, a crack in the sidewalk, or the tail of a comet. But despite these observations, asemic writing is not everything: it is just an essential component, a newborn supernova dropped from a calligrapher's hand. Asemic writing is simultaneously communicating with the past and the future of writing, from the earliest undeciphered writing systems to the xenolinguistics of the stars; it follows a peregrination from the preliterate, beyond the verbal, finally ending in a postliterate condition in which visual language has superseded words.

     In the simplest of terms, Asemic writing is writing in any media made of undecipherable invented symbols or glyphs, or illegible, unreadable, or incomprehensible calligraphic-like or cursive-like writing or griffonage. It consists of works resembling some kind of writing system or handwriting located “on the edges of illegibility,” doubly referring to the writers or artists themselves practising it and the product of that practice. 

     The first question that arises in this case is why do these poets and artists producing such work? And how should we read them if the grammatological or calligraphic marks or forms they come in are unreadable? How do we read something made of deliberately unreadable or unknown words, language, symbols, or markings? What is the implication of this artistic statement in general to our concepts of language and writing?

     As Asemic art works are visual and material representations of writing, they are often associated to Visual Poetry in general. However, Asemic writing has a restricted thematic: “unreadable” writing. Only the absence of accessible meaning on the level of the glyphs or griffonage or longhand forces us to look instead at how they look and how they are made or what they are made of (as picture, process, and material).  It would be a different kind of reading process, something we are not in the habit of making in formal literary terms, but an activity we often in fact engage in when we read visual and material cues, like in the expression “reading clues” or “reading people” or reading nonverbal or body language. Thus, we do perform other modes of reading outside of language in the strict linguistic sense. Everyday, we are playing the role of the detective. Approaching Asemic writing will just need some skill in art criticism and history, some knowledge of writing or grammatological systems, a practical background in graphic design, an intuitive grasp of cultural proxemics and bibliographical or literacy codes, some basic acquaintance with the history of the Human Sciences and 20^th century critical theory, and a familiarity with the human body. There is, perhaps, only one thing you won’t need: the dictionary and the grammar of the real living or dead languages you have and haven’t learned. We would need to take out something else, too, something which we could call the “transcendental” or ahistorical Code or Ground of reading.

     To commence a preliminary demonstration of how our detective might go about “reading” an unknown script or an indecipherable scribbling, I would deploy two terms: “altersign” and “intersign.” The first is my coinage to refer to clearly drawn but fully invented “meaningless” glyphs; the second comes from Michael Rinaldo, in his unpublished doctoral work, Breaking the Letter: Illegibility as Intersign in Cy Tombly, Steve McCaffery, and Susan Howe (2013), referring to markings which are neither writing nor drawing, hovering between scriptural and pictorial status. Two more terms to complement the first pair: positive and negative composition. These are not opposites but are simply “tendencies” of composition: the first emphasizes the forming of legible but unknown glyphs, the second the deforming of legible scripts to produce illegible marks which hover between a likeness to writing and to drawing. The “entities” we will often encounter in Asemic writing come as either invented forms never meant to be “read” on their own terms, or appearing as neither scriptural nor pictorial elements.

      Like Visual Poetry to which it is marginally associated, Asemic writing comprises a wide spectrum of practices in terms of the media and procedures employed. It can be born “analog” or “digital” or can use material coming from these two media technologies. For example, a digitally-born design could be printed on paper, which in turn becomes material for an abstract asemic collage using magazine cut outs and found objects, then overlaid with calligraphic paint or ink tracings. In principle, there is no limit to the material density or complexity of the work like in any form of plastic or verbal art. It all depends on the evolution of the work, the preferences of the artist, and the various logistical and economic aspects of production. Nevertheless, while “formal” and visual poetries are flexible with their themes or subjects, Asemic is not. The subject of Asemic writing is writing itself in its “proto-semantic” (McCaffery) embodiments in various grammatological, material, and even gestural dimensions. This doesn’t mean that Asemic works cannot include non-grammatological items or even regular elements of known languages. The main distinction is that the focus of the piece is the “xenography” which can be either the sole element of the work or placed beside non-xenographic items for whatever purpose the work may want to accomplish in both aesthetic and philosophical terms.

     As introduction to the “positive” process of producing the Asemic, let’s start with the Chinese artist Xu Bing’s famous asemic text, Tiānshū (translated as A Book from the Sky but which is better rendered Nonsense Writing according to Wu Hung). In this work in four-volume book format of 604 pages (see Plate 1), Xu Bing invented 4,000 meaningless Chinese characters. The unreadable “Chinese” characters were printed following traditional wood types hand-carved by the artist himself who said that he “spent four years of his life making something that says nothing.”

     Grammatologically, Tiānshū follows the “metalogics” (see Johanna Drucker) of the Chinese writing system (reading direction, letterform style and sizes, page layout) and for a non-Chinese, would appear like legitimate Chinese calligraphic scripts. For Rinaldo, however, this will not count as an example of the illegible, even though it is asemic, because of the sharp and well-drawn nature of the notations or letterforms. Since I am not a trained Sinologist, I am confining myself to simply pointing out both the inventive nature of Xu Bing’s 4,000 “Chinese” characters and their legible, even traditional, embodiment as instances of altersigns.

     As another instance of grammatological inventiveness, Michael Jacobson’s glyphs in his “visual novella” called The Giant’s Fence (see Plate 2) follows the same procedure as Xu Bing’s. Jacobson, who begins his work using “pen-and-paper sketches” using “automatic writing or [snatching] a shape from the surrounding environment” and then moves on to “[developing] complexity,” says his works represent the

Attempts to push written, symbolic communication to the breaking point and create a sort of "trans-symbolism," that is, signs transcending symbolic communication.... Usually the signs begin as recognizable symbols that, through subsequent generations, become abstract designs whose origin eventually becomes obscure even to myself, the creator of the piece (2013).

     Like Xu Bing, Jacobson draws inspiration from known writing systems of the world. Jacobson, however, takes his inspiration from a system that is not his own. Apart from deriving The Giant’s Fence’s influences from Easter Island’s Rongorongo scripts, Jacobson also gets his ideas from illegible graffiti and sigils. (The choice of grammatological allusions can also be seen as a significant conscious or subconscious stylistic ideology of the other, the foreign, or the unknown.) Jacobson does not have a fixed normative or prescriptive method for “reading” Asemic works:

One must have an explorer's spirit to interpret asemic texts. They aren't bound by anything except the limits of one's imagination. I also think asemic texts offer readers access to the author's raw life experience. Because the text is undecipherable, an asemic author is likely to put down thoughts and emotions that don't exist in standard written communication. What the reader does with this nexus of communication is entirely up to him or her. I recommend "reading" an asemic text in various places, in various orders, and in various contexts so the glyphs can interact with the environment and always seem fresh (2013).

The modulation toward authorial affects or experience as reading components can be seen as a skeuomorph of older poetic paradigms. These older models can be deployed in the reading or making of the work if one wishes, but Jacobson cautiously tempers this with suggestions of conducting nonlinear readings. 

     A possible approach for such “positive” types of Asemic creation/production is to see how other aspects of communication or media technology in both their material and ergonomic aspects remain in force. The four basic elements of communication media technology (Hand, Tool, Pigment, and Surface) are all combined in various ways but always in a tension with the scaffolding afforded by our understanding of how to navigate the directionality of scripts or glyphs both as part of known writing systems and as elements of the page or the book (their “metalogics”). Even though the linguistic and poetic codes we are used to expecting are not available (or suggested to be not available), other extraneous codes or background knowledge are retained (on the legible “side” of the edge). For example, the Giant’s Fence still respects alignments and baselines even though we are not given which reading directionality to follow. The tightly-bound almost vine-like ramification of the manuscript precluded any free placement and followed a disciplined page printing grid like Xu Bing’s text. The ligatures that create the flow of “units” (since a bias makes us look for discrete parts) evoke the abstract mode of handwritten hieroglyphics. The widespread absence of kerning makes it difficult to ascertain the boundaries of letterforms in the way we are used to in the current Roman alphabet typographical system. Jacobson’s asemic glyphs, however, do remind me of the old classical Greek and Latin style of continuous script without spacing, up or down casing, and punctuations called the Scriptio continua. 

     In an age of standardized machine-cut typefaces and fonts, Jacobson’s abstract semi-pictorial continuous script carries the “aura” of a pre-modern, non-Western society. To assume or impose such an aura on the Jacobsonian manuscript may imply a nuance of Romantic primitivism or a critique of standardized, streamlined typography and its corollary myth of communicative transparency or modernist efficiency, and this we achieve just by inferring from our basic or background knowledge of writing systems (or grammatological typology) around the world. There appears to be some consistency in the scriptural notational style but it will take a rigorous image analysis to determine if there are even discrete letterforms or cursive cycles that repeat in a regular pattern or rhythm in the whole book. That is, we are not certain if there are even alphabetical units at all. We can add more grammatological or graphetical technicalities in this “extrinsic reading,” but I wanted only to sketch a demonstration of how an approach to Asemic xenography can be pursued. 

      These readings, then, would like to deploy a “grammatologist” approach (in the pre-Derridean and, later on, Derridean strands) conjointly with others such as bibliography or graphic design which emphasize the pragmatic materiality of the work. Certainly, relevant concepts can be marshalled whenever helpful in the elucidation of the dynamics invoked by the Asemic piece at hand. As Jacobson has said, in the end it is up to readers to decide what to make of it, yet with the proviso of the avoidance of the closure of meaning since the very choice of inventing unknown glyphs already prompts us that the focus is not on whatever the scripts may mean lexically or hermeneutically, an approach which has become impractical given the presumed absence or non-availability of the scriptural system’s inherent code. Instead, the bracketing off of the code deflects our attention toward the literally “extrinsic” aspects of the asemic artefact and toward our assumptions about navigating a writing system as a historically and culturally bound pragmatic convention modulated by the affordances of media technology embodiment. I will reserve the discussion of the details of these “extrinsic” approaches in another section.

     Unfortunately, I will need to discuss three more Asemic pieces because showing only one or two works cannot possibly represent the whole range of artistic possibilities of Asemic writing and the general and case-specific approaches to various oeuvres. Let me give an example this time of a work that uses the “negative” processes of producing the illegible following the restrictions made by Rinaldo in his work. Using the poet/artist bpNichol’s distinction between “dirty” and “clean” in Visual and Concrete Poetry, we can say that Xu Bing and Jacobson’s legible yet asemic glyphs printed sharply and neatly in black and white are examples of the latter type. Adding more elements via collage and palimpsest multiplies the layers of the page or frame and raises the graphic and material density of the work. When an element that we cannot classify unambiguously as either scriptural, pictorial, or even sculptural is present on the display surface, then we have what Rinaldo calls an “intersign.” For him, this is the signature of the illegible:

Illegibility… functions intersemiotically in a way that is harder to define: it mediates between textuality and pictoriality without being unambiguously determinable as either icon or text through notational decipherment. And it is this suggestiveness in textual illegibility of both icon and text that eludes precise formulation. While not textually legible, an illegible mark could still evoke writing qua fragmented or effaced sign. In turn, textual illegibility could additionally suggest pictoriality when inferable as partially abstracted image of a text. (This is the case sometimes when textual objects are incorporated within the three-dimensional world of a perspective painting.) If a mark is unambiguous and legible in at least one sign system, then it ceases to be an intersign in the same way a textually illegible mark would.

     There are many ways to accomplish this. An example would be in the often used palimpsestic illegibility similar to what we can see in Charles Bernstein’s "Veil" (see Plate 3). Situated between concrete poetry and asemic art, this production from Charles Bernstein conveys the material thickness of writing where scriptural forms attain depth and weight, shade and texture through the stratification of textual sediments. As one machine-cut Roman letter gets piled on top of another, the white spacing that allowed them to function as discrete typographical units give way to shadow as the differences among glyphs get dissolved by the sheer weight of the marks it supported. The text as textus has literally become opaque, creating a grainy textscape wall which hangs between sign and image, meaning and matter. The sheer verbosity of machine-cut signifiers does not lead to more meaning but to the occultation of their own form as sharply legible standardized glyphs. Dirty, concrete, illegible, and asemic, the “Veil” retains the vestiges of typewriterly alignment and even retains anglo-lexical “survivors” in a Courier-like typeface at the ragged-right end or edge of the page/frame/surface. Still legible, they have nevertheless become marginal forms beside the vast illegible static screen of the ink wall. By not opting for an asemic graphism that simulates xenography, the “Veil” hits much closer to home by morphing the standardized forms of the writing system we know very well so illegibly that we can no longer read or even recognize them via the modes of verbal and visual literacy we have practiced for a long time as our intimate cultural capital and habitus.

     Another example that should fall under Rinaldo’s intersign is Peter Ganick’s “Notes toward infinity - theory of the scribble - theory of the scrawl” (see Plate 4). Ganick is a prolific writer and poet, producing volumes of work running into thousands of pages. I wanted to discuss this type of Asemic work to provide an idea of the radical range of Asemic writing. We won’t think of the term “calligraphy” or “graffiti” as applicable even in the most abstract mode or manifestation, not even of longhand scripts like signatures. It is not called “scrawl” for no reason. But setting that beside “infinity” makes us think (paradoxically) of the absence of fixed frames of reference and how that takes away basically all notions, all thoughts, all measures, all directions. Since thought-less, it is also sign-less. There seems to be a halted attempt at some illegible words scribbled on the lower left hand corner, and helps to give the page some sort of initial alignment. Yet, the chaotic mass of long, heavy, light, jagged, curved, wavy, thin, thick, crooked, zigzag, winding, and generally errant lines don’t seem to converge or diverge anywhere. Over all, no writing system we know of is definitely alluded to. No image in the iconic or pictorial sense of the word can be made out. We can’t even pretend that it is an artist’s preliminary sketch. 

     Yet in spite of the seeming chaos, we can see a hint of a subtly placed center, even if we can’t find where the scrawling motion begins or ends. The margins are respected, as if there was still a center of gravity keeping the wandering scribbler from leaving the page entirely. We cannot even compare it to atomic collision marks which never hesitate in their ineluctable paths despite being governed by chance. We can’t compare it to automatic writing whose strokes are too unconsciously decisive, too feverish, and frenetic. We sense a trembling, shaky, tracing movement, the hand barely holding the tool well enough to execute decisive or bold strokes. The scrabbly marks don’t coordinate sufficiently to gather themselves into a definite form or loop, or huddle into a glyph beyond the erratic tangle of lines. The hand writing seems to be refusing to hold the pen upright, reminding me of Maurice Blanchot’s (1969) notion of “weariness” in The Infinite Conversation, communicating the fact and act of writing/language as “the truth of weariness, a weary truth.”  

     In general, the weary, directionless lines of Ganick’s piece can be contrasted to the longhand in Vincenzo Accame’s “Récit” (see Plate 5) where the strokes are determined, purposeful, single-minded, and looks much more “normal” than Plate 4’s aimless scribbles. As another species of the intersign, Accame’s closely-huddled handwriting is illegible and from a good distance can seem like a forest. The white triangular gaps that cut through abruptly are so geometrically sharp, like roads dividing the landscape, that they fragment the intended continuity of the handwriting field (organic vs. inorganic motif). The scissor-like gaps disable the cohesion of the “récit” (story), divide language from itself, and reinforce the separation of signifiers from signifieds that feeds back into the illegible form of the handwriting as handwriting and not as systemic, or cursive, or grammatological signs. Furthermore, the diagonal orientation of the triangular slices runs against the usual x and y axes of print page layout or gridding, as if it were a new axis z, a third dimension cutting through the gray matter of the text as a disruptive dynamic. We can also make the observation that the opposition between the slopes and strokes of the cursive style and the rectilinearity of the diagonal gaps could be regarded as the difference between human and artificial or machinic technological footprint in media technology. It is possible, then to employ such binaristic rhetoric following the graphics layout of the work itself. A grammatological notion can therefore be complemented by graphic design “grammars” as well as bibliographic conventions in this multimodal “extrinsic” and literal approach toward Asemic writing.

     Even if there are radically undecipherable glyphs, illegible cursives, and dysgraphic markings, the five Asemic plates still depended on the bibliographic orientation of the Page as compositional field. Apart from Ganick’s landscape mode, the other four are in the portrait mode. The ergonomic function of the “standard” implied observer is conserved in all cases except Jacobson’s which can be rotated 90 or 180 degrees without seemingly violating page-viewing orientation. The only purely horizontal baseline in Accame’s “Récit” is strategically located at the bottom of the frame, serving as the ergonomic clue for viewing orientation. The cursive in his piece also would not look “correct” if rotated by 90 or 180 degrees, given the undulating baseline of the slopes and strokes dictating the position of the loops on the ascender portion above the typographic “mean” line. Even Ganick’s piece, with its multidirectional and weary non-cursive lines, leaves something for ergonomic orientation: the fragmentary cursive on the lower left corner and the nascent but obscured or abandoned Cartesian grid are “forensic” clues to the orientation of the page. Thus, even if the linguistic or poetic codes are bracketed off in a way analogous to Husserl’s epoché, other extraneous codes are invoked, including principally, inevitably, or inviolably the implied presence of the viewer as a phenomenological constant without whom the pragmatic process of a global semiosis will not even begin. 

     The “improvisational” (in Michael Borkent’s sense) demonstration I made here are sketches of a possible multimodal approach using “extraneous” grammatological, graphetical, bibliographic, phenomenological, ergonomic, pragmatic, or cultural codes logically called for by being in front of an unknown graphic (ambiguously pictorial and scriptural) artefact and in the absence of the (transcendental, intrinsic, or metaphysical) formalist poetic or linguistic codes which Asemic writing precludes by definition. We may not have words we can recognize, but reading does not just center on words but also on other types of relationships. A “paralingual poetics” (or “postlinguistic,” following Borkent’s terminology) such as Asemic writing partakes of our shared era of reading without the benefit of timeless codes formerly imagined to “inhabit” an artistic artefact or the chambers of the human mind (cf. Michael Reddy on the “conduit” metaphor of communication). The exploration of these paralinguistic codes would lead to a different type of “extrinsic” approach in a more literally literal direction. The “scanning” technique would also need to take into account the unique assembly aspects that each Asemic piece represents and must be open to experiment with the specific direction the detailed interpretation will take, adopting new tools or modifying them as the particular case requires. This is simply extending into the reading practice the operational logic of any Art which demands a constant re-vision of our ways of seeing.

List of Plates