Unlike in drawing where any squiggle can be admitted as part of a world of artistic procedures, the closed set of forms that have been lemmatized as letters or words or punctuation or symbols are more difficult to employ willy-nilly. The impact is more destructive of sense. I can draw anything, drip paint all over, or simply slash the canvas, and this can still be appropriated because a semiotic system remains to decode it. In other words, we can still "talk" about it.
However, when such a master Decoder in itself becomes the object of decomposition, what interpretative system is there left to decode it? We are suddenly left with nothing to go on, the burden of meaning is not carried over onto another reading medium. You are simply faced with "textual artifacts" that don't add up lexically, syntactically or semantically.
Even in a piece like 2_ +, some vestiges of textuality remain: title, some spacing, borders, etc. The writing space itself can only be navigated with these constraints in real dimensions. lemmatized forms can only be rendered in so many font types barring "hand-written" swirls and slashes. In short, the departure from the standardized formats can only go so far in their renderings. This is where alphabetical or lexical departures like Bob Beamer's come in, with all the formats and colors that he uses. Beyond this, abstract typographies like Touchon's would already fall outside the perceptually readable formats of actual languages, even if this is the direction we want to pursue with "textual" forms.
We can employ this plastic freedom to conjure precisely the abstracted nature of signs. the impact is an immediate perception of senselessness because here, it is the Decoder itself that is affected. Another way to do it would be by delaying the appearance of the sign by a metasign, a purely conceptual formation that conjures a sign. Everything I do is a metasign, an improbable signage, or new
ways to spell, or new dimensions for an abstract wordage.
Conceptual signage or wordage: who knows how a "sign" looks like? Has anyone seen any of Plato's "ideas"?
Some vestiges of the decoder are deployed, but these are now just haunted forms. Some measure of clarity, indeed, would be needed in the development of techniques along these lines, especially if one of the premises is the absence or weakened presence of agents of meaning. "Chance" is a weak alibi to relay a hard-to-realize non-teleological condition because Chance is too abstract to do in any case. At any rate: everything is too abstract anyway to be done in any way. How can I make "signs," "words," "sense," or "texts" when even the terms "concrete" and "material" are abstract? This is where the improbable comes in, which is also improbable to do. Any idea that tries to establish its own solidity becomes a ritual, an obsession, or a suspicion. It becomes highly symptomatic, and leaves a trail of repetitive signatures or rhythms.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
2_ +
"A fusion of cryptozoology and orthography comes to mind here."
--Matt Margo
2_ +
G
F >
I K s ‘
B __ L
W R
C S ; E
3 @ Y _____t
;; v V b
p_L_ o
….
….
… h L “ Q
X *
L N ,
B a _
O
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Reading nothing
Saisir :
traduire. Et tout est traduction à tout niveau, en toute direction. -Henri
Michaux
"Everything is translation at every level, in all
directions." It seems a well-known quote like this doesn't need more
commentary. It belongs currently to what we already assume in practice. It is
the same as saying that everything is reading. An organism that orients itself
in space already makes use of all its faculty to successfully recognize and
navigate. That is obvious enough an idea. Another that is no longer probably
worth mentioning is the notion that writing is already reading. These
assumptions lead us to another given, that all reading takes place within
pre-established frames: all reading is interpretation and perspective. We live
in one universe, but we have many competing views about it. Simple enough,
nothing new here.
What is more interesting are the elements that a system of
reading cannot read or translate, and are indicated by place-holder terms that
we can indeed read, but indicate the place where translation or reading fails.
The illegible exists as a readable sign in the translating medium, but not as a
term with a positive semantic content, but as a "blind spot" within
language translated as that point where language cannot say anything about. And
we have many words like that, words that tell us nothing even by saying it.
"Zero" is probably the archetypal example. Other candidates are:
gibberish, indecipherable, glossolalia, babble, cryptic, unreadable,
untranslatable, inexplicable, enigma, opaque, unknown, nothing, and unnameable.
The term "illegible" itself belongs to this category: it marks the
point where translation fails or is absent; but not completely, of course.
The situation is more ambiguous. There is something we can
read, the signifier is legible. We cannot say that its semantic content is
zero. In fact, this is what it is precisely saying: it is that signifier
pointing us to what it cannot really provide. It signifies the category of
anything that has no semantic content, or whose semantic content cannot be
ascertained. It performs the role of the legible surface of whatever it is that
remains illegible. In short, the illegible is not an absolutely unreadable
state; it is still within language (since what is outside language cannot be
imagined), and translates for us whatever it is that has resisted translation.
It is saying nothing beyond saying that nothing further can be said on whatever
it was trying to signify. By saying less, by signifying nothing, it is capable
of signifying successfully.
Where it succeeds, however, is where it fails absolutely. I
cannot read this, but I mark what I cannot read by a sign that we can all read.
Thus, we can read the sign, whenever reading or translation is confined to the
level of the legible surface of language. It is on this very surface that
language warns us where we can no longer go further, and where we can go on
indefinitely. Between words that say something to say nothing and those that
say something to say another thing, we ask: what is this other thing that
language must be able to say something about to avoid saying nothing? If
"illegible" is just the opposite of "legible," and has no
more value than the legibility that it negates, then what does the legible give
us? No doubt, to answer these questions is to relaunch ourselves into the world
of so many competing interpretations.
(09-2012)
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
The triangle of fictions
=We know well that the presence of any word is already something
divine.
=We live with today’s current fictions, of the Sign, of the Text,
the same way we lived with Poetry and Subjectivity before, among other past
essences and metaphysics, whether ideal or material. As far as concepts go,
they embody our best efforts to make sense of things. However, they are nothing
but interpretative vehicles, contemporary concepts whose luminosity is as
fictive as the rest before them.
=Like other words, the full divine presence of concepts like
Chance, Sign, Text, etc. is still to come. Like the idea of Experience in Montaigne
off setting medieval belief systems, these concepts are merely tools forged to
wage a similar war against the tyranny of other concepts.
=When and where can a word really happen? The word (as an entity or category) is still
looking for its dimensions. No word has yet fully existed. (This is not a return to the same formulaic binaries. Instead, we are concerned here with the sign of the meaning of the sign and/or the meaning of the sign of meaning. That is, with the possibility of their conceptuality.) They are, after all, all concepts needing elaboration. When one fiction supports another fiction, we recall once more Borges’ series of dreamers and dreamers.
("The sign has no positive value." This "discrete" part requires the whole of language to exist, which, in turn, requires the idea of discrete parts to become a ''whole.'' In short, a word, ultimately, is the whole of language. And where does it end to begin?)
("The sign has no positive value." This "discrete" part requires the whole of language to exist, which, in turn, requires the idea of discrete parts to become a ''whole.'' In short, a word, ultimately, is the whole of language. And where does it end to begin?)
=Where is the boundary between sign and noise? The 3 concepts
here (boundary, sign, noise) form the triangle where fictions are made from.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Textualisms
1. the sign has no content or doesn't refer to any. instead, signs are deployed to speak of the im/possibility of signs, the same way @ refers to "at" or an emoticon indicating the indicators of emotional states or concepts in an abbreviated way.
2. using a "logographic" state, it doesn't produce a sign in the normal sense, but a metasign. this is what I would like to call "textualism" or the simulation of sign-hood in a realm where signs are also fictional entities. signs don't speak about fictional characters, but are themselves fictional.
3. a sign is the equal of any other sign, a=b=c=d etc. in a circuit of pure play, a play of fictional characters, arbitrary events, between the order of Time and the order of Language.
4. textualism is the production of an echo of sign-hood, a simulation or parody of writing. here, writing does not deploy ready-made semiotic forms in a network of habitual meanings. this is no different from the creation of a metalanguage like formal logic to speak of a process on the level of theorems. everything is a postulate.
5. visually, it can deploy glyphs, pre-letteral features representing an echo of signs, a molten, mobile state prior to lexical identities, like Michaux's inks. a sort of pre-writing.
6. i have mentioned Bolin's art of disappearance as an extreme method,
Dion's post-lettristic canvas, sign simulations,
hyper-signs, counter-signs, abstract typographies, pre-word, post-word, non-word
hypermedia or mixed media, where sign/nonsign distinctions have broken down,
caricature of scriptural forms,
post-language iterations like: machine writing or post-authorial scripting,
or automatic writing in a cybernetic sense,
metaplasms and ciphers
7. here, "textuality" is a concept that is postulated as a hypothetical entity like the "sign," and not deployed as a ready-made object in a presumed fully-functional semantic and semiotic network.
8. proliferation of non-standard signs or symbols: rarely used special symbols recalling logical or mathematical formalisms or cybernetic computer codes, or programming high-level languages. explodes the closed circuit of settled semiotic networks. same as deployment of illegible, asemic or metaplasmic variants.
9. the question then becomes: what would be its "syntax" or form of regularity if any? syntax without meaning has been a method employed like in di Palma's January Zero, or any rule-based permutation, this time no longer involving standard sign sets, but also nonstandard ones. this constraint may be the last frontier, since randomness/arbitrariness had been a part of artistic production since Dadaism. however, arbitrariness is a stronger version of randomness: it is a concept that falls outside of order/chance dichotomy. it implies a sectional choice, a change of perspective, a vectorial intervention that is nevertheless an echo in a vacuum.
10. in all cases, who would still see human agency as an organizing force or as an ordering principle? post-humanism means: we are not the center of the universe. sense/nonsense: to make nonsense is the most difficult, as difficult as making sense. we cannot do anything nonsensical, since we are the source of meaning. nothing we do is nonsense, but at the same time, the sense of anything we do escapes us. (in many sci-fi works, the usurpation of human agency as the dominant center of meaning by super intelligent machines has often been portrayed as evil. Logically, it would entail the eradication of the human species in history. the whole plot then revolves around the recuperation of human subjectivity as an essential requirement in the fulfilment of the narrative.) sense/nonsense are limit concepts, both impossible to incarnate as is, since they exist only in a relative field of tension, like Escher hands.
11. post-reading: the object/text is no longer amenable to either a metaphoric or a metonymic interpretation. It is neither a representation nor a symptom. What could its function be?
12. What is the "vehicle" of a ''meaningful" bit of information? Information here is not a pre-given object but must be decided beforehand by another meaning-making gesture. Hence, meaning decides what meaningful is. At any rate, my question is about what circumstance creates what is significant. The becoming-significant or -sign of anything. It is an event that requires a bifurcation. The sign itself is nowhere. Something turns, reading happens, and we hear voices. We then try to explain how it all works...
13. in a very paradoxical way, i am asking myself, skirting sign/nonsign, what can i incarnate? what is this stuff that can be generated without the Subject-Me-I as the agency of any meaning / nonmeaning without using the "machine" as a permuting excuse and without returning to aleatory textual production? i am not making.... i am just searching.... and one of the states is the pre- or post-word. in the beginning the word is a gurgle. i don't apply signs... i can only conjure signhood and the lost memory of textuality. there is no fixed alphabet set for that. i mean, in the place of a letter, why not a holographic nudge, or an electric shock, or spilled milk in zero-gravity? there is no more "writing...." that idea is a mummy.
14. when we set our own rules, it signals all is arbitrary, the rule of the arbitrary. what has any applicable meaning? Neither chance nor necessity has any real ontological significance. in the end, the real has a hidden title and an unknown syntax, where each event is its own rule.
2. using a "logographic" state, it doesn't produce a sign in the normal sense, but a metasign. this is what I would like to call "textualism" or the simulation of sign-hood in a realm where signs are also fictional entities. signs don't speak about fictional characters, but are themselves fictional.
3. a sign is the equal of any other sign, a=b=c=d etc. in a circuit of pure play, a play of fictional characters, arbitrary events, between the order of Time and the order of Language.
4. textualism is the production of an echo of sign-hood, a simulation or parody of writing. here, writing does not deploy ready-made semiotic forms in a network of habitual meanings. this is no different from the creation of a metalanguage like formal logic to speak of a process on the level of theorems. everything is a postulate.
5. visually, it can deploy glyphs, pre-letteral features representing an echo of signs, a molten, mobile state prior to lexical identities, like Michaux's inks. a sort of pre-writing.
6. i have mentioned Bolin's art of disappearance as an extreme method,
Dion's post-lettristic canvas, sign simulations,
hyper-signs, counter-signs, abstract typographies, pre-word, post-word, non-word
hypermedia or mixed media, where sign/nonsign distinctions have broken down,
caricature of scriptural forms,
post-language iterations like: machine writing or post-authorial scripting,
or automatic writing in a cybernetic sense,
metaplasms and ciphers
7. here, "textuality" is a concept that is postulated as a hypothetical entity like the "sign," and not deployed as a ready-made object in a presumed fully-functional semantic and semiotic network.
8. proliferation of non-standard signs or symbols: rarely used special symbols recalling logical or mathematical formalisms or cybernetic computer codes, or programming high-level languages. explodes the closed circuit of settled semiotic networks. same as deployment of illegible, asemic or metaplasmic variants.
9. the question then becomes: what would be its "syntax" or form of regularity if any? syntax without meaning has been a method employed like in di Palma's January Zero, or any rule-based permutation, this time no longer involving standard sign sets, but also nonstandard ones. this constraint may be the last frontier, since randomness/arbitrariness had been a part of artistic production since Dadaism. however, arbitrariness is a stronger version of randomness: it is a concept that falls outside of order/chance dichotomy. it implies a sectional choice, a change of perspective, a vectorial intervention that is nevertheless an echo in a vacuum.
10. in all cases, who would still see human agency as an organizing force or as an ordering principle? post-humanism means: we are not the center of the universe. sense/nonsense: to make nonsense is the most difficult, as difficult as making sense. we cannot do anything nonsensical, since we are the source of meaning. nothing we do is nonsense, but at the same time, the sense of anything we do escapes us. (in many sci-fi works, the usurpation of human agency as the dominant center of meaning by super intelligent machines has often been portrayed as evil. Logically, it would entail the eradication of the human species in history. the whole plot then revolves around the recuperation of human subjectivity as an essential requirement in the fulfilment of the narrative.) sense/nonsense are limit concepts, both impossible to incarnate as is, since they exist only in a relative field of tension, like Escher hands.
11. post-reading: the object/text is no longer amenable to either a metaphoric or a metonymic interpretation. It is neither a representation nor a symptom. What could its function be?
12. What is the "vehicle" of a ''meaningful" bit of information? Information here is not a pre-given object but must be decided beforehand by another meaning-making gesture. Hence, meaning decides what meaningful is. At any rate, my question is about what circumstance creates what is significant. The becoming-significant or -sign of anything. It is an event that requires a bifurcation. The sign itself is nowhere. Something turns, reading happens, and we hear voices. We then try to explain how it all works...
13. in a very paradoxical way, i am asking myself, skirting sign/nonsign, what can i incarnate? what is this stuff that can be generated without the Subject-Me-I as the agency of any meaning / nonmeaning without using the "machine" as a permuting excuse and without returning to aleatory textual production? i am not making.... i am just searching.... and one of the states is the pre- or post-word. in the beginning the word is a gurgle. i don't apply signs... i can only conjure signhood and the lost memory of textuality. there is no fixed alphabet set for that. i mean, in the place of a letter, why not a holographic nudge, or an electric shock, or spilled milk in zero-gravity? there is no more "writing...." that idea is a mummy.
14. when we set our own rules, it signals all is arbitrary, the rule of the arbitrary. what has any applicable meaning? Neither chance nor necessity has any real ontological significance. in the end, the real has a hidden title and an unknown syntax, where each event is its own rule.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Other contiguities
Reincarnation waves the dead body’s antennae above sentence structure’s serrated moaners.
-Matt Margo
In general, contiguity gives an excuse to speak of meanings. Even more interesting from the point of view of superstition and popular sentimental romance are "random" contiguities that are imagined to be emanating from a higher or transcendent source of special significance (like Fate). Unfortunately, we don't have the same mythic source for "language" wherever a certain brand of "scientific" rigor demands something beyond statistical consensus as an excuse for delineating a category of structurally and semantically "vibrant" contiguities.
To dream of combinations that pretend to have more semantic weight or value (poetic or otherwise) has now been replaced by the simple execution of the motor of combination itself, where unrestrained coupling is the rule, like DNA mixing sent in a delirious fast forward drive. To what end? New matter, new meaning, new being? No, the goal is Combination itself, accelerated faster and faster, beyond the restricted barrier of vibrant syntactic or linguistic contiguities we were advised for so long to support or promote.
 |
| Matt Margo, from "Two Titles," 2011 |
This seems to be what is going on in a non-linear, post-grammatical work like that of Matt Margo's: mixing everything, words, figures, contexts, registers, expressions, idioms, narration, description, clauses, run-on phrases, fragments, imagery, the common and not-so-common and the orthodox and unorthodox all intersecting on any angle on the "discursive" plane. The odd mixture makes it difficult to determine their “complete” meaning (which is no longer the point). Sometimes, the parts, which could make sense if found in another context or out of context, are themselves in uncommon combinations that we even doubt if they are trying to make sense at all. Since "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," a combinatory textual practice like this also redefines the boundaries of syntactic possibilities and politics.
The result goes further than the articulation of accepted and unacceptable combinations reproducing the stock of “common” and uncommon semiotic organization and sense. More importantly, the text returns us to the very dynamism where linguistic contiguities are happening before settling into semiotic refrains (like asteroids with a center or wandering stars forming imaginary constellations), thereby reinforcing the catachretic view of all linguistic combinatory processes. With this kind of text, writing becomes a sort of neural rewiring happening on the pure surface of free association. It is here that we enter once more towards the hazy boundaries between the order of Time and the order of Language: where semantics falls between the two would be anybody's guess.
The result goes further than the articulation of accepted and unacceptable combinations reproducing the stock of “common” and uncommon semiotic organization and sense. More importantly, the text returns us to the very dynamism where linguistic contiguities are happening before settling into semiotic refrains (like asteroids with a center or wandering stars forming imaginary constellations), thereby reinforcing the catachretic view of all linguistic combinatory processes. With this kind of text, writing becomes a sort of neural rewiring happening on the pure surface of free association. It is here that we enter once more towards the hazy boundaries between the order of Time and the order of Language: where semantics falls between the two would be anybody's guess.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
The malleable page
-The new page is a field of events where anything can intersect another thing, an assemblage space. Syntax, any manner of concatenation of material or pro-symbolic elements, can have any multidimensional and multiple degrees of freedom. Nothing dictates that this or that should be what appears here or there.
-This field has no center: I don't control its elements or direction; I am only one of the players, and I myself am a plurality of forces. The page is a field of dreams without a center. (Or: the center can be simulated.)
-The sign is an imaginary object, its dimensions are unstable and immeasurable. When we speak in a language, or when we read a language, we are more than interpreting. We are activated in a field of intersecting events, where signs are reborn as symbols and new matter, magnetic transformations, a moment in a point of perceptual infinities, like in an aleph.
-Language is just one bark in a rich noise environment. Signs, when they appear, don't just appear in pairs; they appear with all sorts of things, a battalion, a fluid throng, with variable membership every time. Signs don't represent; they attach themselves like magnetic particles with other particles. These are gregarious types, with cliques and gangs or tribes, with their themes, hymns, emblems, and refrains.
-The multimedia intersection of elements is just the material consequence of a core operational nature, the eventual expression of assembly processes. A signifying event is a company that varies with each reactivation. Unfortunately, parts and wholes don't appear together because of at least two reasons. One, time constrains the experience of a whole set of evolutions. A novel, for example, can only be read one page at a time. Two, the forkings cannot be managed within the spatial limits of a circumscribed techno-media. The viewing space of say cable TV or URLs could represent the spatio-temporal field of an evolutive assembly space, where the intersection of concatenable things happen.
-Malleability of matter (and, by extension, of the "materialist" sign) is the end goal of techno-media. In digital space and in the dimension of simulations, signs and things are no longer opposites. (We see this made iconic by people entering films or virtual realities, or going out of them into the "real world" that still actually resides in both.) Within that new dimensionality where our perceptual literacy is now roaming, anything can become anything, where identities like signs and things are temporary blink-prints on electronic sand.
-In this domain, the palpable and the impalpable share the same addresses between Mind and Machine (themselves variable points on this floating dimension where everything is exterior, built up by sensory extensions that provide the whole content and mode of our world comprehension.)
-This field has no center: I don't control its elements or direction; I am only one of the players, and I myself am a plurality of forces. The page is a field of dreams without a center. (Or: the center can be simulated.)
-The sign is an imaginary object, its dimensions are unstable and immeasurable. When we speak in a language, or when we read a language, we are more than interpreting. We are activated in a field of intersecting events, where signs are reborn as symbols and new matter, magnetic transformations, a moment in a point of perceptual infinities, like in an aleph.
-Language is just one bark in a rich noise environment. Signs, when they appear, don't just appear in pairs; they appear with all sorts of things, a battalion, a fluid throng, with variable membership every time. Signs don't represent; they attach themselves like magnetic particles with other particles. These are gregarious types, with cliques and gangs or tribes, with their themes, hymns, emblems, and refrains.
-The multimedia intersection of elements is just the material consequence of a core operational nature, the eventual expression of assembly processes. A signifying event is a company that varies with each reactivation. Unfortunately, parts and wholes don't appear together because of at least two reasons. One, time constrains the experience of a whole set of evolutions. A novel, for example, can only be read one page at a time. Two, the forkings cannot be managed within the spatial limits of a circumscribed techno-media. The viewing space of say cable TV or URLs could represent the spatio-temporal field of an evolutive assembly space, where the intersection of concatenable things happen.
 |
| Just two ways the famous looking-glass of Alice is reinterpreted on the net. In the first, the humor arises out of the reassertion of the duality of materiality and virtuality; in the second, the domain of virtual images and duplicates still awakens unknown terrors (in this case, the repossession of one's identity and body by others). |
-Malleability of matter (and, by extension, of the "materialist" sign) is the end goal of techno-media. In digital space and in the dimension of simulations, signs and things are no longer opposites. (We see this made iconic by people entering films or virtual realities, or going out of them into the "real world" that still actually resides in both.) Within that new dimensionality where our perceptual literacy is now roaming, anything can become anything, where identities like signs and things are temporary blink-prints on electronic sand.
-In this domain, the palpable and the impalpable share the same addresses between Mind and Machine (themselves variable points on this floating dimension where everything is exterior, built up by sensory extensions that provide the whole content and mode of our world comprehension.)
Friday, March 29, 2013
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
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.
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).
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).
Sunday, March 24, 2013
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?
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."
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