Pursch's language blabatories

wa ys t o m a ke n o [n] se ns e  an d th en t he re ar e w a ys

not to make nonsen sema ybe w[ hy n ot]

. If one ask s 1’ll never know.

                                                --POME, Billy Bob Beamer

The subject of sense and nonsense is always expansive in any given direction. In addition, the very opposition between these terms becomes more interesting only when their simple antinomy is made complicated to the point where their regions collide and interchange depending on your point of view. The tenuousness of their borders is emphasized further by compositions that stylistically employ neologisms or unknown lexis, reframing a familiar language or alphabet into something unreadable, perhaps simulating the experience of illiteracy in our initial encounter with a new or foreign language; or, at its most extreme, implying that language, when detached from arbitrary meanings, is at its core really illegible, making us all foreigners even within the languages we inhabit.

Some of the recent output of a writer like John Pursch could at first be seen to be nonsense writing similar to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." Here is an excerpt from "Blabatorie" written in 2012:

Knowuce gwan ovahau wiekemta beloifin raunda wholata sauntar uvan edmottley vibrand spoddy cellt lustonulas; a sprole widahoel endamottle, whar doomdownie yousdabie. Onklar haueet umploted, darty blump ernacticle uke, erbayme afen akolliper eccidon etasucret blabatori, prapsan augspearamen gwanaribly wrayie. Murour hezeedat dagubermint ocarse nosall dadoitals undet’s phlarubav soptoicrate, oonlietaboy deglossed einehandheartears. Petwonken spaucalet undewa leedleseardge uvwhen’s awn, eenda chlopious fleamite deauvergie denizer hosawailtuem deezdaze.

True, we can recognize some phantom strings from different languages. In fact, as an experiment, if you paste samples of his texts on Google translate, the software would identify the writing to be in one of the known languages. It could be French, German, or Spanish, even Latin or Greek. In the case of our excerpt, it is supposedly English. What at first glance may just be nonsense literature could actually fall under a writing done using a constructed language (conlang, for short). If it is some sort of conlang, if it is one, it would have the support of an official group or would be part of an on-going development by a community much like Esperanto or Lojban. If it is not, maybe it could be a fictional language somewhere that Pursch picked up and retooled. If it falls under neither, we can safely assume it is some kind of "private" invention awaiting clarification. Pursch would just need a minimum set of grammar to push this private language towards becoming a conlang.

However, if there is some kind of Oulipian or permutational play here and we are simply tasked to decipher the code so that we can extract the "real" natural language behind it, or if it is an alteration of a previous source text, then these factors would just lay out for us a path of discovery from nonsense to sense, where we are simply reversing the writer's trajectory. The reader's position as puzzle-solver is once again established, albeit on a new level. Instead of representing meanings, nonsense texts like these could be seen as second-order signs representing a hidden language. Before knowing what it says, we are tasked to recognize if it is at all any one of known languages in the world, natural or constructed, or a mixture of both.

Whatever approach we take, one thing remains invariable: we are dealing with writing in unknown words and language. The presence of unknown words doesn't automatically classify the text as purely nonsensical. We can say, at the limit, that this kind of text suspends the arrival of sense because the resources that we apply with known writing, our interpretative or reading tools, just won't apply anymore. We can, of course, "feel" the musical and sonic or textural dimensions of the text, and re-establish the equivalences we learned between sound and sense. Nevertheless, we are not assured that this won't have a cultural bias or re-inject the caricature of a chart of parallel sonic, rhythmic, and semic values.

Grammar and syntax are equally indescribable. Unlike a nonsense line like "The gostak distims the doshes" or "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe" where accepted word-order and core phonotactics or morphotactics echo that of just one (historically-hybrid) language like English, Pursch's text above isn't so conforming, even multiplying the terrain of flexibilities natural languages are allowed to be capable of to include compounds that we often ally with meaningless blabbery or glossolalia. The minimum order we get is a beginning and an end where at least the arrow of reading is observed. This is the minimal motion that we can follow. Beyond being drawn, being tempted, into this direction, the textual artifact leaves us with very little else, as if we were before an ancient or future set of unreadable symbols recalling ghostly memories of bits and pieces of languages. If it could be argued that "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," then who can say that a set of "new sentences" is not part of any language?

After all, the "language" we have come to know may just represent the tip of a much larger universe of unofficial forms that will remain meaningless by convention. Isn't this (immeasurably larger) illegible realm a required part of the whole economy of the sign, without which sense could not happen? Isn't this the very spring from which sensible language draws its resources, and against which it has no real antinomial property? This would make the "language" we know as necessarily fragmentary, like the metapoetic style used by Billy Bob Beamer in numerous pieces like fragm epresiPOME[s, where choppy lines of text recreate this experience "artificially" within an art form supposedly representing the height of linguistic form and performance.

In this babble-like textual mélange of familiar alphabets, vaguely familiar echoes of lexical fragments, and abundantly unfamiliar neologisms, any recognizable language, structure, grammar, or meaning becomes a very limited, relative, and unstable realm in the world of fictional ideas. In their place we have Pursch's language laboratory, where linguisticity is always inaugural, and centerless morphemic and phonemic jouissance still reigns supreme, above and beyond intractable questions of sense or nonsense.

The face of Mars

When I read about the "Face of Mars" a long time ago, I was really amused by the popular interest that it created, especially among E.T. hunters and fans. There is an excellent summary explaining our solitude in the Universe written by Stephen Webb (If the Universe is Teeming With Aliens, Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox... where, incidentally, you have a section on language and communication) that you might want to check out. My goal is not really to take sides in this debate, but to discuss some associations in my mind that the whole interest created in the realm of recognition, reading, and interpretation.

In general, phenomena like the Face of Mars are diagnosed as a species of pareidolia *. From the Greek original (para + eidolon) we can probably freely translate it as a kind of "pseudo-image." People see or hear something familiar where it doesn't really exist. In this case, it's a big face-like landscape on the Cydonia region of the planet Mars, which has been the hotbed of E.T. speculation for ages.

In itself, there is nothing wrong with this mental tendency to see resemblances between one thing and another. It is part of our habits of recognition to see patterns and associate them for interpretation. Like in the famous ink-blot tests, out of an amorphous field of black and white, familiar images are visualized. There is nothing surprising here anymore. What could be more interesting is to do the reverse, if this can be done. What if, among the familiar things we see or read everyday, we suddenly stop recognizing, or become illiterate, dyslexic, or be struck with prosopagnosia (unable to recognize faces anymore)? Or become aphasiacs and display symptoms like inability to comprehend language, excessive neologism, paraphasia, agrammatism, inability to form words and name objects, and so on?

Now, to relate these symptoms to some current writing may not be flattering, but that is what I want to propose just so that the mechanism of interpretation via resemblance could be retooled on another literary level. Of course, with them, it is not a medical case at all, but the employment of a willful stylistic and para-linguistic radicality. By loosening the reign of historically-determined congealment of semiotic patterns and forms, post-literate writing has emphasized the obsessive tendency of the mind to see patterns and meanings where they no longer exist or where their existence can no longer be absolutely valid.

We can start with the works of Billy Bob Beamer, whose typographical experiments echo a long line of artists since the Futurists and visual poetry. The stylistic range of his massive output, mostly called Pomes, can't be covered in a brief mention like this, where I could only focus on a few aspects. The primary thing that strikes you when looking at one of his works is that most of the time you won't find a normally-spelled word. Like with many writers using the same method, in Beamer the lexical borders vibrate and expand, the dependencies loosen, and the arrow of reading becomes a polymorphic web of associated features. Formalization is redistributed and textuality is barely hanging together (counter-syntax). Beamer raises inscription towards the liberty of signatures with playful fonts, and the combinatory logic is disturbed through dissections and disjunctions of lexical matter, with spellings jumbled or intersected, and words and letters colliding in the axes of combination and selection to form half-words and half-sentences.

P[o[]m]em[e

[t]e[me]m[easa]unit[pro]vide[s a co]ne[nie]t[me]ns o[f ds]cusi[ng] a [pie]e o[f h]oug[t c]op[id ]fr[o pe]top[[eso]n  ",  [r]ega[rdle]s[soof whe]po[the[r th]a[t [t]ho]ugh[t co]n]t]ain[s ot[her]s in[sid]e i[t,] or flo[rm]s p[ar]t of a [la[rg]em[e]m]e[.]m]em[e c]ou[l]d con[sis]t of [a sin]gle w[ord], [o]r a [m[[e]]me[ co]ul]d co]n[s[is]t o[f[nie]t[ th]e] e[n]tir[e[ spe]ech] i[nwh]ch[ that word] fr[st oc[c]r[red.] h]s f[o]ms[ an an]al[gy t]o thidea o[f a e[ne s] asin[le u]it[ o[f ]s][le]plic]a]t]in[g i[n[fo]m[ato[]n fond o]n [t]h s[elf-]re[pl]catin]g[cho]so[mo]on[e s[elf-]re[pl]catin]g[cho]so[mo]on[e

Copy-pasting the para-textual output of Beamer requires care since in many of his works he plays with font types and sizes, even with letter colors as well. From the sample above, you may be able to assemble some syntactic thread if you squint close enough for a normalizing read. One of the major "words" we may recover is "meme," a key term in theories of cultural evolution, referring to a cluster of ideas or behavior similar to trends, fashion, and styles. After reconstructing some syntax and googling, it appears that Beamer was quoting from an entry that could also be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme):

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

Altering a copied text almost beyond recognition is of course a standard method since the Dadaists and Fluxus. The parasitic relationship could be analyzed in different directions, but I just want to look at the way the brackets confuse the flow of the textual original, disrupting its thought and syntax. There are also letters or words missing. In general, it appears that the sentence sequence remained the same. If this is a major writing method that involves some kind of over- or re-writing of copied textual matter, it could be used as a main avenue in making sense of Beamer's output and writing technique. This deformative repetition makes us ask what relationship this altered text has not only with the copied text but also with other themes like reading, information transfer, language, digital type formats, the internet, and knowledge in general. By disturbing the format of the copied text, it becomes harder to read the "message" and undermines the very concept of memes: the copying of thought and idea involves a real effort at reconstruction. The resemblances between texts, words, and language, like the resemblances or identities of memes in their course of evolution is made to look much closer to reconstructive surgery than to a genetic DNA transfer.

The profusion of brackets also reminded me of syntax diagrams in the theory of Dependency Grammar. However, since "how the presence and the direction of syntactic dependencies are determined is of course often open to debate” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar), word order and semantic order stop becoming absolutely homomorphic. In addition, lexical integrity is also ruptured, so that we won't easily recognize one word without seeing other words before, after, or inside other words. Signs, after all, have no positive or absolute values. The alphabetical forms fall into their brackets like figures in a chance-driven slot machine, or carved or drawn out (abstracted) from their niches. It is a radical procedure of syllabication and diagram-making, creating or destroying signs within signs, or messages within messages, allowing noise to burst in and alter not only meanings but also fixed and illusory resemblances to a lexicality, a syntacticity (syntaxis, put together), and a textuality (textus, woven together) that we had known before.  In the end, it seems that words and texts, even the face of language itself, are not operating under the logic of simple transfers, but must be reconstructed in toto via imaginary resemblances like on a barren, alien landscape.
____________________

* Pareidolia (pron.: /pærɨˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-doh-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek words para (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead") in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον "image, form, shape") the diminutive of eidos. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia).

The abstrcated text

Unable to fully rid ourselves of the need for signifieds and signifiers, we could at least try living with their extremely abstract existence or concrete inexistence (from 08 November 2012 entry).

Abstracted signs or denaturalized symbols. These demand a new regime of "reading" beyond traditional or classical hermeneutical dynamics. From non-sense words and sentences in the family of Lewis Carroll and to Oulipian-like exercises where there is still lexical integrity but with an unknown meaning (John Pursch), up to several degrees of disintegration and towards purely typographic, non-alphabetic compositions recalling logical or mathematical symbolization, the abstracted work of writers like Bob Beamer and Matt Margo challenges us to rethink what we have known to be the frontiers of what has been imagined as language.

How do we "read" today "abstrcated" works (misspelling intended) like Billy Bob Beamer's Pomes or Matt Margo's “of grammar otherwiS’e”? Is there a phonetic, grammatical, or any semantic dimension, can these be spoken, read aloud? Or can they even be read "mentally"? What degrees or elements of linguisticity are deactivated or reactivated to manage such composition, creatively and perceptibly? Can anyone fully tune-out all vestiges of linguisticity?

Are these works pure marks grazing the linguistic plane, tangential entities now just echoing the undersides of full symbolic personas, pre-conscious strokes that defy grammaticalization and structuration, non-referential graphisms that set themselves apart as counter-semiotic measures, self-invented simulation of languageness whose meaning is no longer necessary beyond its pure execution as post-lexical and post-syntactic marking?

Works like these are demanding a nominal abandonment. There is also since the Futurist a thread of anti-typographic formalization. What is the form or sound of language? (Like the Zen question What is the sound of one hand clapping? that leads to: Which hand? If all true language is indeed incomprehensible (Artaud), then probably, in a non-mystical way, it is just simply too abstract to know.

Non-communal language, non-communicative language defies what should have been the raison-d'être of the very core concept of having a language. Why do we need to defy this essentially defining condition? Is not this the very reason why language exists in the first place? Asemic textuality has no definite meaning after all. This is now our generic relationship with linguisticity, where language is merely a minimalistic phantasm, stripped bare of meaning, structure, function, and form.

Maybe take the abstract typography in Touchon and use that to "make sense" of Beamer etc. Reaching out to the beginning of recognition of language, the dark incipits of formal assembly or disassembly. Both are possible. The beginning and the end of signs look similar.

So we don't look for imagery or metaphors or nice phrases and emotional meanings. We look at it as a kind of dynamics of assembly and disassembly, where the shadow of a language comes and goes in a perpetual nascent or evanescent stage of formation, and see how or where it doesn't form a language, and only tangentially relates to languages we know, which they only echo or shadow in a very allusive way. Here allusion no longer directs us towards intertextual wholes; instead, allusion works only to evoke the old memory of textuality.

Textuality, this very valued entity of communication and  preservation of human memory, has passed away, and human memory is now being archived by other media. In John Pursch's android fiction ("Hip-deep"), lobots fill in the function of speech carriers (which we can say may well stand for "Lobotomized Language Bots").

Momo, post-language cybernetician, inputs idiotic speech in Marty only as data sets of shredded history (like paper shredded texts). Here, speech is lobotic, the whole novelistic narrative is a mirage of a partial amnesiac where language has become strange, not yet asemic, but shredded, in a new state of combinatory idiom no one currently really speaks, a mish-mash of sub-languages, in a futuristic fantasy scenario where language and textuality are distant conceptual memories encoded in lobotic "circustry."

Invisible art

Once, a search engine's page featured a chameleon that made me think of the art of Liu Bolin and mimicry.

Liu Bolin in front of a magazine shelf

Mimicry must be the oldest form of art in nature. In contrast to the 20th century tendency to create art which points to its presence as art, mimicry succeeds only if it achieves its goal of blending completely with its surroundings. In short, mimicry is essentially an art of invisibility. Although some sort of transparency or opacity accompanies its execution, its goal has always been exhaustively neither. As an integrative procedure, it also does not have representation as its objective. Mimicry neither represents itself nor another object. Instead, it blends by blurring the boundaries between itself and its opposites, or between imitation and imitated without falling either into some kind of hyperrealism or objectivism. The sign does not replace the real, nor the real the sign.

As an art of invisibility, Bolin's mimicry also enacts the disappearance of the traces of art by reducing its elements visually to become indistinguishable from the elements around it. All the signs of art become inseparable from non-art and non-signs. There is just something magical in his act, the summit of camouflage and survival skills, a "ghost" mode reminding us of the old Baroque art of the Trompe-l'œil. Of course, the optical illusion he performs is "detectable," or else we won't be talking about it this long. It is like a magician's trick that we all pay to see: a subject or an object appearing or disappearing.

Anything that appears in the universe that has some kind of pattern and complex organization has been called an "emergent" structure. Language has also been seen to develop this way. It would only take one step to think of writing and art along the same genre. Maybe as a type of "fourth-order" emergent structure*, art and other forms of representation could also be "seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances." 

In Bolin, however, this level of participation in the realm of signs has taken a different path. As a form of self-portrait that was supposed to incarnate the essential qualities of a persona, Bolin's trompe-l'œil instead transmutes itself and its medium of existence into the optical substance of its environment. In Bolin's case, it can be anything: rocks, groceries, monuments, cinema seats, toys and magazine racks, walls, trees and logs, symbols, famous tourist spots, drapes, streets, buildings, graffiti, postcard wall, etc. As an omnipresent kind of living statue, Bolin the invisible man is there only to make his presence remarkably unremarkable, an indefinable image among other self-similar images, signs, objects, symbols, and things. Won't this zero-degree mimicry be the most eloquent embodiment of asemia (Greek asémos, "without mark," "signless")?

By becoming almost imperceptible, he probably makes us see what we always miss seeing: the whole and its parts are really invisible.**

_____________

* It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A first-order emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A second-order emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). 

**  I recall a passage from Henri Michaux: "On ne voit rien, que ce qu'il importe si peu de voir. Rien, et cependant on tremble. Pourquoi?" (Je vous écrit d'un pays lointain)

Bird song

Some linguists from MIT took Darwin's observation of an analogy between bird song and human language further along to propose that language could have developed from the "grafting" of  two aspects of communication modeled from birds and other animals. From birds, language got its "expressive" side, and from the rest of the animal kingdom, its "informative" side.

Through a maligned form of association, this hypothesis suddenly reminded me of Zaum, which more or less divided the world of literature into the poetry of known and unknown words, or between known and unknown languages. Or, more precisely still, between recognizable and unrecognizable signs, or between signs that have and do not have "definite" meanings (i.e., semic and asemic texts).

I don't mean to say that Zaum was simply an evolution in the other direction. Whatever its legacy is today would begin within the possibility it opened up stylistically, as a generalized parole in libertà that decenters the dominance of "lemmatized" signs. Any grammatological project we may venture into hence would no longer involve a search for a more authentic, trans-rational, between-men-and-gods kind of language, ornithological or otherwise.

Definitely, conlangs like Esperanto or Lojban and other formal or fictional languages are continuously created because of different technical, technological, social, or literary reasons, but not all without the need for the illusion that any of them has some Edenic or Rousseau-like import. Lojban, for example, was invented to circumvent the ambiguities in meaning that we find in natural languages. This is not a new ambition since analytical philosophy and the development of formal logic. Whether any similar ambition succeeds or fails is an issue now only second to the fact that inherited "natural" languages are somehow always seen to be missing the mark somewhere, and that some kind of supplementary code needs to be created.

These issues make me ask many questions that won't be answered swiftly. Does ambiguity exist among animals and birds when they communicate? Another question: what is the relationship of asemic and aleatory versions of cross-evolutionary machine-style writing like Kervinen's with the world dominance of cybernetic languages (a kind of cyber-Zaum)? Given that languages limit human thought so much, why do we still write or compose as if we can find some semiotic architecture exceeding the combinatory semantics (or logic) of all languages (and thought)? Is there a perfect configuration of signs, known or unknown, that will supersede the limits of all human thought? An angelic or alien language, glossolalia, post-Babel or post-babble? Through here, indeed, we now enter the realm of fiction and fantasy.

Ancient pcoet (2009)

DIONYSUS : 

Brekekekex koax koax— 

from you I’m catching your disease!

               -Aristophanes, The Frogs

In the realm of ancient comedy, where the essential vision remains to be reversibility, or the absence of absolute order in the universe, a god like Dionysius and a slave like Xanthias can exchange identities, even if for a moment, and divine speech can intersect with, or become one with animal language. Nonsensical noise, yet still maintaining a simulacrum of order, even over the level of art and music, the amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and cannot be less than, an embodiment of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and its kingdom of inhuman sound, in surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art form that represents in patterns of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but cannot comprehend .

Today, beyond the confines of art, and within a newer realm of writing, even this last envelop of order is abandoned, for a simulation of chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable. However, we no longer have nature nor the sacred as its indecipherable secret component; we already discarded the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What we are left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical and political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic weight. To remimic the indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized cultural forms, and to return it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the patterns of hardened meanings, beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and imagery, and into the matter of language itself, is to renew a link with ancient comedy, and remember the reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.

Mtttr

MOCC IBEZ MHUX QNEA TUOI CICC IMEC

ZOFY SOGZ AUFB EVIC TEBL QWIF BUWU

OHFI IMYM KZYQR TEPH WRIO EGKK QSIY

SCYI RETY CMEX PSAS JUDT MOLF ZIRB 

WEWJ FHOH BWIH FOYP UYQR PYSE JIIM

GYJE IZFT MXUH AVPY CIZD ZQEW QEIFB

UQEM NOLN GHQG ANPY PIPY BIKY CTAF

VHER COAK TYNC SQYQ EWLH XIWV JADF

YMRT OHJV IMSR JUNV MOER OXIO SEIP 

JAHU FTOR SGIF AFAJ YUNE XUMO AURW

YQAK TKAF VOLY DHED HVAM ZJHB RUQN

UJEB EOGY CPAK HGIG RUUB DOZV ZEPL

NESN GIFA OALX SMYQ RILM JUQL VUHZ

FUHW ETTC GNAZ WYKL FAEM DEKI RIEK

CEFZ ZEAH TYIM RHUH IRRA EZEP TETO

GUSW ULLE XEUU MISK OADU SEZR GIXI

UFIJ NUHL MUVS RIAF MUPZ SSAR PESM 

ZLIW TEQC UYQC CIGX ZOSH WRET QIYA

PIJY OSRD GIHQ SROT URTI UOCU SYSM

OUSW KLON HOML KNAA XAXH OBMV EZIL

ETQU DUOJ ATSA GEWI KHIO NELZ BKOA

ZAOP GEEF FAEX CNOK KWIG CETE VUAJ

LADD IYAE EZTE UNFH FIRU SPZE LUOO 

APNK GYVM DYNT GHEO EZZT IUZO XETL

VIUS BWOE VEMI KWEP ZWIZ DERI QYEH 

CAUX AGUY DNIO JUCU OGKO HEAY RHWI

EBEA IWSY GYUH QIKR IAHD JONF HEWK

HYTS DIXB KZYT MIGH FTHE NAUN WREH

QEIR SPUG BEDN PYSE KMEC ONVU BREB

CUFU XUWZ POAK GNOW SGLI OEAX ZOUJ

AWHF  JUFS RANV PRYP FWEH IGRY VIUU

LYGR VENX EJEY JARP YKEN GULA VUCC

GAHZ KUBY ZNHO GLAF KOSQ VUZR FIWK 

CECU CZRO VICJ KOEQ UKOE NIQP PUAW 

TAQT POBM KIVR YIZD URZT UMUB ACOA 

FOSN OLWT XYWP GOBR DELG XUBE LACL

NYHC PTOV EVWA WUJR DEBE PYGM GWIN

IWKY USDZ MTTA KBHE GERF RJAP ZJAC

AONN SEMW UYGE AEIR BEEB ARWE PILM 

MYZE AGGO DAHS UAWN OZUM GCTD XIPA 

VUGV CUDE ALQL MAZO ENDN PAYG PREL

CLNO BACR IMIF PTAK ELKY JXEO JUSQ

UKDA XUHX TYLU EEXP IXMO SDAK YXGU 

ZUWY PEWQ POJIT EVWI KBUC DEXA EBET

ZJBG CIKR MIZF TBUK PIFS VUWD HURG

VISR AFWA PAQO OTME LASR KVIW BUUZ

ZHUN AZDL ZOCA FEFW MAWT IEOR OSBI

STUA DQZT CUXM LOID PWYY CEAL BEXN 

GVHA OASZ GRCX AKLA FEVZ  QYBI NAWX 

DUYR DOMN ZFEE KLYA KASN VIMC CRUH 

PHUL PEFO POEX NUIB CRHO ZEHY LYAG

DWUO UNRT SNUC UUBL VALO IMKI WHYN 

CEUY UQLT ENXY DAOW KEPX GULZ SAQG 

GLAE OWSS BAXD NAYL FOEK OCBY HYDN 

PRAP UHPI MYRC KUHM LJBO RULV PYNT

SLEB POHN LAVB ABME SOHB YERV AZEV

MYDG SQUY ZHYU GOXL NYGZ NRAE RIVM

KUHX DEVN TECP SUFE DOSZ DUZM ZMUS 

QOBS QIDY LELN SACN GNAA CAWZ VYLT

...

A feather likeness

Another peculiar phrase that I encountered recently was from a "poem" by Jackson Mac Low generated through a permutation of a part of Gertrude Stein's text from Tender Buttons. The title alone would probably make you pause: "A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair" (1999). As if the many lines in Stein's work don't sound strange enough for the ''common reader,'' Mac Low now decides to ''process" the "fifty-third paragraph of the book (exclusive of titles, etc), which begins, 'A fact is that when any direction is just like that, . . .' I selected the paragraph by random-digit chance operations using the RAND Corporation's table A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates." Mac Low continues to expound on his "method":

My source and seed texts came from the first edition of Tender Buttons, issued by Donald Evan's publishing house Claire Marie (1914), as posted online in The Bartleby Archive (1995) and The New Bartleby Library (1999), both edited by Steven van Leeuwen, with editorial contributions by Gordon Dahlquist. However, I incorporated in my file of Tender Buttons fourteen corrections written in ink in Stein's hand, which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition, now owned by the Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I "mined" the program's output for words which I included in 117 sentences (several elliptical and each one a verse line) by changes and/or additions of suffixes, pronouns, structure words, forms of "to be," etc. and changes of word order. Initially, in making these sentences, I placed lexical words' root morphemes near others that were near them in the raw output--in fact I included many phrases, and even whole verse lines, of unedited, though punctuated, output, mostly in early strophes--but I was able to do this less and less in the course of writing the poem. While composing the 117 verse-line sentences, I divided them into eight strophes that successively comprise numbers of sentences corresponding to the prime-number sequence 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19. 

-http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15566

We can easily note the care by which Mac Low chose the textual edition that he wanted to use, even including the "fourteen corrections written in ink in Steins's hand which Ulla E. Dydo found in Donald Sutherland's copy of this edition," etc. I am really tempted to imagine a Borgesian tale with a Calvino-esque twist in this effort to make the anchoring of Mac Low's permutation of Stein's text as solid as possible through the recovery of the most precise and updated rendition of her writing. The permutation exercise must have its grounding in the most accurate version of the text, even to the extent of getting the copy that had the most authorial flavor of origin through a correction in ink by hand, which is the closest we can get to an autographed (and, therefore, official) copy of the book. We don't want anything less than the original set of words in the most original order so that we can be sure our permutation will indeed be that: a permutation, a new order of words undreamed of by Stein, a real version of it, and not a copy of its text. If we find a copy of her text that even had the slightest deviation, then we would already have a permutational text dated ahead of Mac Low's transformation. The care he took here is, indeed, justified.

From this ''definitive'' edition of the text, Mac Low then takes a section from it through a specified chance operation, then subjects this excerpt to a transformation using a diastic technique. This is followed by some editing whose grammatical rigor complements the mathematical impulse to pattern the results in strophes after the prime number sequence. As anyone would have remarked by now, this whole process of ''composition'' employed an antithetical pair of principles. On one end, we have the determination of the texte de départ as the most definitive textual origin from where a section was taken at random; on the other end, we have this part subjected to a rule-based word transformation aided by Hartman's chance program: "Eight strophes initially drawing upon the whole text of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. I sent the entire text through [Hartman’s] DIASTEX5..., his automation of one of my diastic text-selection procedures." The meeting point in the texte d'arrivée of the extremes of randomized or arbitrary and structured procedures in writing illustrates a very paradoxical situation in the practice of aleatory poetics. 

This is probably not entirely surprising as a component of this ''method.'' In one way or another, we can see the same mixing of flavors from the very beginning of the use of "chance" procedures in pre-computational literary ''composition'' in Dadaism's Tristan Tzara himself:

POUR FAIRE UN POÈME DADAÏSTE

Prenez un journal

Prenez des ciseaux

Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.

Découpez l'article

Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-le dans un sac.

Agitez doucement

Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.

Copiez consciencieusement.

Le poème vous ressemblera.

Et vous voilà "un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise du vulgaire."

The title could as well be rendered "How to make a poem or any text Dadaist." Interestingly, the paradigmatic source material suggested for this process comes from the definitive genre of factual writing governed by journalistic rules. The ''aesthetic procedure'' is then delivered in a number of mock-serious, step-by-step instructions worthy of the kitchen, simulating the rigors of orthodox composition. By reducing artistic creativity to a handful of repeatable steps or formulae, this user-manual a.k.a. recipe of success exploiting a ready-made language demolishes all the cherished myths that the age had of romantic agency, metaphysical order, and structured artistic composition. The pretended exhortations sprinkled in to mitigate the total arbitrariness of the process (to "shake gently," to ''take out the cuttings in the order they come out," and then to ''copy conscientiously") only succeeded to impress as a cosmic dose of superficial discipline and judiciousness. In addition, the jocular nature of these directives keeps us in an ambiguous state of reception; it is difficult to say how far they can be applied or practised.

True, the price to pay in the ''application'' of these Dadaist directives may involve the "end of intelligent writing," not only because this method tends to produce textual artifacts that go beyond poetic, epistemic and communicative paradigms of language, but also because it raises the suspicion that the final, solid or stable texts that have become more or less the point of reference in language and writing are themselves informed by an originary randomness and permutation (through reading). The rigorous steps that Mac Low followed in the finalization of the output text were nevertheless founded on an arbitrary take off point. Furthermore, the diastic approach he applied pulled out any word that just happened to have been written down in this or that line of the text by Stein herself, doubly illustrating through this variation whatever was meant by his selected starting point: "A fact is that when any direction is just like that." Hence, it would be more accurate to say that the Dadaist directive is actually less an aesthetic method to adopt or to apply than a characterization of the global absence of telos in language.

In the end, the rules that Mac Low applied rigorously, even the grammatical ones, are undermined by the arbitrary nature of his point of entry into the text. The very choice of what OULIPO-like literary permutational process to use is in itself as baseless as his employment of a set of random-digit chance operations through computational technology. The scientific tools that once were tightly tied to a deterministic view now become the very arena for the elaboration of complex transformations, and are being recruited to blur the distance in nature between meaningfully structured writing and meaninglessly aleatory linguistic variations. Much of what we also have currently in the realm of computer-generated texts or machine-aided asemia are replicating in this paradoxical space of an infinitely original (Latin, origo) language where chance and order have become very difficult to separate from one another.

Colorless green ideas

When Chomsky made the sentence ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," he was illustrating through a sample how a string of language that we have not heard before can be produced by a speaker following the application of some governing rules or universal grammar. Whether a deep structure like this exists or not has been the subject of intense debate for decades, a complex controversy that I have neither the time nor the expertise to be involved with in a brief blog entry. What interests me here, other than the fact that a string like that can even be produced, is the way it reminds me of similar weird-sounding sentences or lines in literature.

In general, a sentence like ‘’Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’’ belongs to what we can dismiss as a member of the class of "nonsense" utterances, about which an anthology such as the one by Carolyn Wells exists. Again, broadly speaking, this type of nonsense also belongs to that sub-set which uses an "orthodox'' syntax and known lexis, distinguished from the second sub-set which no longer does. Among the known lines in Literature we can range under these two sets would be Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" which uses a familiar syntax with known and unknown words. We can argue that, despite the difficulty in determining the precise meaning of some new words and lines in the ''poem,'' anyone would still be able to recover some nonverbal meaning conveyed by the rhythms and sound effects of the piece, the same way that music does even in the absence of words. This allows the possibility to organize contests to ''semanticize'' the famous Chomskian sample. No matter how senseless it may be, some meanings can still be read into it, even if it may count as ''over reading'' (since the sentence is not of common usage).

However, what counts as weird or unfamiliar in language may just be a function of its currency in a given community or historical situation. I bet many people will also find English sentences as used in the 16th century weird or difficult to read, even nonsensical. We could also say the same thing to the varieties of English spoken around the world. There are expressions and vocabulary that an Englishman may use that an Australian may not understand, or vice versa. In short, we don't even need to go into Literature to look for weird sounding expressions because weirdness is a relative quality that is independent of any grammar, universal or not.

If we want to count all the weird expressions in a language, we may well be forced to include the majority of metaphors in everyday and literary domains. And in so far as all of language is metaphorical in nature whose weirdness had been forgotten (conceptual metaphors in Lakoff, etc.), we can even say that language itself by its very catachretic constitution, at the very bottom (or root, or any other figure that we may want to use), is informed by weirdness. It is no wonder that ostranenie or ''defamiliarization,'' by foregrounding once more this forgotten dimension of language, became a central defining technique of the ''poetic'' in the 20th century for literary criticism. The production of weird, unfamiliar language became the chief signature by which we could sense the presence of the poetic or the literary.

Of course, this is not a fool proof criterion. ''Context,'' this abstract term which we use to name all the known and unknown variables that inform the meaning of events, may not really serve as a default court of appeal since it is also unfortunately as unstable as any other scaffolding for semantic closure. However, for contrasts, it does help us understand why one expression in one time or place may sound weird or common in another. Defamiliarization is context-sensitive, so to speak. It is indeed conceivable for a writer or speaker to target a domain of expression that has the widest demographic denominator to maximize the impact of ostranenie. Some ''coinage'' have become common usage, and many others remained unable to attain this linguistic pleasure. (Just look at Shakespeare.) ''Transparent language'' is just a more epistemically-loaded way of labeling familiar and commonly used expressions. That is why we find it disturbing yet amusing when Ionesco or Beckett progressively deprives these common everyday expressions of sense in their Absurdist works.

Going back a little further, I recall Breton and the surrealists using a similar procedure of juxtaposition of incongruous terms. Look at some of the lines from ''Union libre ou Ma femme.'' 

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur

A la taille de sablier

Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre

Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de

dernière grandeur

Aux dents d'empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche

A la langue d'ambre et de verre frottés

Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée

A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux

A la langue de pierre incroyable...

If you jumble up all the things the wife is being likened to, it would be a monstrous thing. The wife here becomes a field of intersection in language, following the surrealist aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. This free union simply enacts the same process by which linguistic elements are conjoined to produce speech, only symbolically exaggerated to foreground and to contrast it with the constrained set of union we have come to know as transparent and literalized language. Capable of being described by any metaphorical set, the object ''wife'' suddenly becomes indescribable. André Breton writes:

[T]hese elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final analysis, than the others...

We don't need to subscribe to the underpinning ideas of surrealist psychology to visibly appreciate the effects of defamiliarization in these ''poetic abuses'' of (an already catachretic) language. Quoting Reverdy, Breton explains for us the mechanics behind this linguistic weirdness: ''The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.''

Whatever radicalized form or method writing may take on today (well over the eroded notions of powerful ''images'', ''emotions'', or ''poetic reality''), it would still remind us of this primary combinatory process, even if it pushes us beyond the very substance of language itself in all its orthodox formations and conceptualizations. What may be closest could have taken us so far, and what is so familiar could in the end be a stranger we have met by chance.

Towards conceptual languages

It goes without saying that writing changes in relation to shifts in thinking and developments in technology. Look at Kervinen's "machine language" inspired style. Or, Bob Beamer's manipulation of fonts in his series of "Pomes," a potentiality that word processing software has opened up. Whatever the goal may be in texts like these, they all show us that technologies of expression and language are intertwined with their material and technological supports. Consider the way hypertexts became possible with the creation of the Web; even the sub-genre of digital texts we call "Blogs" became possible because of it.

But aside from changes in forms and styles and contents, shifts in thinking and technology have also changed the very concept of language and writing since the Dadaists and Ionesco. Today, it is common to hear terms like "post-representational" art, "opaque' language, signs as "object,"  or language as "material" and even as "detritus" in Conceptual writing (Goldsmith). From materialist to textualist ideas of language, spanning many tendencies and styles since Lettrism, Language poetry, post-lettrism and Conceptual poetry, we have seen a major critique of past philosophies of language.

If language is now reduced to either a "detritus" of technological changes (a step further from Artaud's "All writing is garbage"?), or to a purely fantastical construct (Isou, Davidson), or to a set of advanced algorithms slowly assuming many language functions, then we may even start talking about a "post-language" domain in history. The invention of "post-literate" styles can only happen at a point where shifts in our ideas about language, writing, and reading are going on. Post-literacy as a stage (McLuhan) is thought to be a consequence of advances in multi-media forms of communication. Bruce Powe:

What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless? (Solitary Outlaw)

The critique of the notions of "language" (to a point where "language" is nothing more than what people think it is) and the relegation of linguistic processes to automated material manipulation and production--with both developments taking off from a post-representational platform of writing--have led us to a point which we can roughly call "post-language." Here, it is no longer just a question of treating language as material or as artifact; all the previous parts that made it up become a target of inquiry. Syntax and lexis have become arbitrary. What is a "word," a "sentence," a "meaning," a "complete thought," an "argument"? What in the world is a "sign"?

Without a "language," a writer is like a painter without paint. That's just the "material" aspect. Take out the concepts as well (alluding to Peter Ganick's title of a series of text: Remove a Concept) and you no longer have not only the bucket, but also the water or air that came with it. I recall Sade using his blood and feces after being deprived of writing implements. Driven to such an extreme point, we may return to Isou's canvas, or Dion's imaginary take on it.

Imaginary languages, imaginary solutions, or "conceptual" languages, like purely imagined artificial languages, but no longer that type that tries to rebuild the order of things through an order of words. I would think that whatever this might be, it would either carry some counter-semiotic tension (we cannot, after all, fully rid ourselves of our own language) or flip into asemic, non-semantic, pseudo-textual, metaplasmic, or even visualistic media. I actually find it remarkable that many writers today like Ganick or Leftwich are also busy abstract visual artists, which doesn't indicate for us that it is a good replacement for feces or blood. Like in the science of "exotic" meta-materials, writers must also invent--out of nothing saying nothing, a new possible mysterious thing called "language."