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