A zero-point writing?

A zero-point writing? 1 Excerpt from In the swarm (LN 2021), scheduled for winter 2021. Federico Federici federico@federicofederici.net • home: http://federicofederici.net last update September 2, 2021 to an aesthetic artefact of the renunciation of meaning. An extensive conceptual breach is set against the entrenched dogma of experience, whose uniqueness of content is suspended through the mimicry of language. Although the trigger may often be traced back to some previous idea of writing, text falsification is institutionalized. Such phenomenon occurs in that stretch of “no language’s land” between pure literature and visual art, where the spontaneous traits of handwriting are preferred to quite textual blocks. Every dot or stain and even every single bit in a digital array become part of the same loose alphabet. Like smugglers on the guarded frontier of meaning, asemic writers trade somewhat secret scripts or drafts of confidential notes. When no code is left or accepted to draw signs from, language reinvents itself in the common forge of form and meaning. Since the writer gives up his status of deus ex machina, the reader/onlooker loses a traditional steady point of comparison. Even more so when all conventions get absorbed into nets of obscure though densely organized signs, different and more suitable paradigms must be developed. According to Marcel Broodthaers, even a paper of jurisprudence proves to be inspiring in this respect: «La place que le mot y occupe est une place nette. L’ambiguïté du Droit tient sans doute à l’interprétation du texte; à l’esprit et non à la n ordinary texts, words are exactly discernible and in relation to a syntax that regulates their connections. They objectively exist and that does not impinge on their readability. In asemic texts, on the contrary, the lack of “words” imposes to drop the claim that we can detect them in some dictionary. The signifier and the signified of a sign thus resemble the momentum (“speed”, in a way) and the position of a particle in the quantum world: we cannot exactly detect both at once, according to what the Heisenberg principle inherently states. That actually deprives textuality too of the sense of the real we got acquainted with. The asemic text seems to challenge the reader’s clairvoyance to discharge a signification of its own, rather than reduce itself I 1 A zero-point writing? · · · Federico Federici lettre.»2 On this basis, the question is put of whether to equate the asemic level and a sort of language zero-point, a ground state of writing or, most likely, the very state of the word before it meets an alphabet. Upon conveniently rephrasing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, while the classical text may get worked out to almost full meaninglessness, the asemic one persistently exhibits a residual meaning. As structures collapse, dust particles attempt to relentlessly self-organise again, gravitating across the void of deconstruction. When language lays down the law, it is difficult to modify it, «[...] for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience [...] for visualisation, however, we must content ourselves with [...] incomplete analogies.»3 In asemic texts, on the contrary, signs and meanings have been superseded by the pure notion of asemicism: writing attests its inexhaustible delay in meaning, according to the seemingly paradoxical, yet strict, formalism of what remains illegible. Two systems thus coexist: a language embedded in a sediment of “things” and one embedded in a sediment of signs which have not been exposed to any “thing” yet, nor will they ever likely be. 2 Notes 1 First appeared in «Utsanga», Francesco Aprile curator, n.15, 2018. 2 «The place that the word occupies in it is a clear place. The ambiguity of the Law undoubtedly lies in the interpretation of the text; in its spirit, not literally.» Broodthaers, Marcel: Art poétique in Broodthaers, (ed. B. H. D. Buchloh), Cambridge 1987, p. 16 3 Heisenberg, Werner: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, transl. Eng. C. Eckhart, F. C. Hoyt, Chicago 1930, p. 10