–Todd Burst
With works by Todd Burst and collaborations with Michael Orr and Laura Ortiz
Michael Jacobson, in an interview with asymptote journal, recently described asemic writing as “a wordless, open semantic form of writing that is international in its mission.” indeterminacy What is wordless writing? Asemic (non-semantic) writing has components of visual literature (text), without meaning — so-to-speak. He goes on to describe it as a “shadow, impression, and abstraction of conventional writing.” The term ‘shadow’ best describes asemic writing. The content of many asemic pieces have the appearance of words; in some works, the words are portrayed as if they have syntax. They are the ‘shadows’ of language when the ‘stuff’ called meaning has dropped away. Seen in the historical context of philosophy, theory and globalizations, asemic writing is a deeply provocative art movement that deserves more attention from philosophy, literary theory, and global studies.
In 1997, poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich started describing their poetry as asemic. Since the 1990s, asemic writing has grown into a global art form. Today, asemic writing can be found in museums and online blogs, magazines, and other venues. Although Gaze and Leftwich were the first to apply the term asemic to their poetry, ‘asemic’ texts have a long history preceding the 1990s.
Asemic writing is an aesthetic object, which invites the “reader” (viewer) to decipher or translate the work in any way she sees fit. “Without words, asemic writing is able to relate to all words, colors, and even music irrespective of the author or the reader’s original language,” Jacobson claims asemic writing bridges inexplicable emotions from an opaque and inaccessible subjectivity to the visual sphere without imposing meaning. The writer and reader shall a visual experience that lies beyond a shared meaning. It is writing that expresses itself as such and goes no farther.
(Non)Sens (translated as non-meaning): Philosophical Background
Asemic writing reflects the radical outcome of twentieth-century philosophy. This is a bold, but an ambiguous statement. Twentieth-century philosophy was not led by one ultimate aim, project, or grand narrative. It would be a sin to lump philosophers from early logical atomism to Daniel Dennet (in Anglo-American analytic philosophy) and Jacques Derrida (Continental philosophy), despite the variety of philosophers and philosophies of the twentieth century, many scholars addressed language — generally — and meaning — specifically. By twentiethcentury philosophy, here, I refer to American Pragmatists, such as John Dewey; analytic philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Q.V. Quine; and Continental scholars, Ferdinand Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. These writers, in one way or another, contended that meaning was indeterminate and that meaning often relied on non-linguistic behaviors (or ‘forms of life), largely part of cultural practices and/ or cross-cultural overlaps.
Taken together, these philosophers undermined the representationalism or word/ world relations between language and objects and behaviors. Language is contingent upon circumstances, context, and behaviors, which cannot be determined absolutely. Any presuppositions we have about the determinacy of language is vanquished. The words, once signifiers of the world, are in themselves devoid of meaning. They become shadows, floating free, unhinged from the world and the intentions of language users. After radical deconstruction, all we have are symbols — the textual residue left behind after radical deconstruction.
In Experience and Nature, philosopher John Dewey, states “Meaning is not a psychic existence, it is primarily a property of behavior.” Quine used Dewey’s work to explicate his ideas on the indeterminacy of translation. In an article in the Journal of Philosophy, Quine explains the influence Dewey’s “Art as Experience” had on him. Dewey commented that “meaning… is a property of behavior,” not words. Wittgenstein would later adopt a similar view of meaning, but he referred to it as ‘forms of life’ instead of behavior. In “Ontological Relativity,” Quine goes on to state, “uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels.” He goes on to argue that in following Dewey, “what we give up is not just the museum figure of speech [representationalism or word/ world relations]. We give up an assurance of determinacy.” This means that if we accept that meaning lies partially in the behavior of a community. Faced with a question on the meaning of two terms, the question is largely answered by a groups’ language disposition.
Quine uses his famous ‘gavagi’ argument to explicate that meaning borrows from behavior. In “the indeterminacy of translation,” Quine sets up a scenario, where an anthropologist visits an indigenous people who anthropologists have no experience with. And the anthropologist wants to understand their language. One day they go hunting and one of the indigenous people points to a rabbit and says ‘gavagi,’ but what does this mean — rabbit, food, etc. The shared behavior of the indigenous people with the anthropologists helps the anthropologists come to grips with their language, but there are no means of getting a word for word translation of what they are saying because meaning leans on a perceived cultural overlap. Even if the translator creates definitions for all the words in the language, there is nothing external to test the anthropologists’ correctness of the definitions, except by shared behavior. This means that translations cannot be determinate because it relies on more than a word for word translation of words, etc.
Structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s owed a debt to Ferdinand Saussure, a linguist in the early twentieth century. Saussure, similar to the Pragmatists and Wittgenstein, argued that words do not derive meaning from a word/ world relationship, but instead rely on a relationship between words. According to Saussure, meaning is derived from what the word is not or the difference between the word and other words. This indicates that meaning is beyond the immediate use of language and awaits discovery in the overall structure of relationships between words — hence structuralism.
In Death of the Author (1968), Roland Barthes, once a staunch structuralist broke from structuralism. For Barthes, the intentions of the author of a text cannot account for the text’s meaning. The meaning of a text is removed from the author, because things like ‘intentions’ are philosophically ambiguous and inaccessible from the text alone. Barthes writing negotiates the text as an independent entity, whose meaning cannot be fixed by structures — with culture or any other kind of structures. But for Barthes, the death of the author is the birth of the reader, meaning that interpretations remain open and cannot be fixed by intentions, contexts, structures or any other system. The text is therefore indeterminate.
Jacques Derrida’s “differance” provides an example of the post-structuralist view of meaning. Derrida, here, plays with the definitions of words to explicate his point, which in itself expresses what he conveys. The term “differance” is derived from two meaning connected with the French verb differer, which come from the Latin word differre. Differre means both “putting off until later” and difference “to be not identical, to be other.” Accepting the structuralist argument from Saussure, differance indicates for Derrida, indicates that meaning is derived from differences between words, but meaning is never present. According to Derrida, meaning is temporally deferred, but never present with the utterance or text.
If meaning is removed from the text, whether by its relation to ‘forms of life,’ culture, linguistic structures, or differance, then text is meaningless (asemic) or at least meaning is indeterminate. The shadow words, common to asemic writing, are the inevitable outcome of twentieth-century philosophers’ analysis of meaning. The texts are like empty shells.
One of the keys to asemic writing is its openness. This openness derives from the indeterminacy of translation and meaning. Roland Barthes commented that the death “death of the author leads to the birth of the reader.” An authors’ intention cannot determine the meaning of the text, the readers’ interpretation (never static) provides the text with meaning. Asemic writing, however, indicates the death of both the reader and writer — an inevitable outcome of the indeterminacy of meaning.
Jacobson’s writing appears in: Kanon, Sample, “On Asemic Writing — Asymptote,” interview with Michael Jacobson, accessed April 1, 2016, http://www.asymptotejournal.com/visual/michael-jacobson-on-asemic-writing/.. NOTE: the Indeterminacy of Meaning is a reference to W. V. Quine’s indeterminacy of translation. Sens, French very for meaning. (Non) sens reads — without meaning. Asemic, by definition means non-semantic or without meaning. The meaning of asemic texts are derived from various open interpretations and therefore are not arbitrary ‘gibberish.’
