Visible Writings

VISIBLE WRITINGS

Edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw

VISIBLE WRITINGS Cultures, Forms, Readings

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visible writings : cultures, forms, readings / edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–4882–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–4883–8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Visual communication. 2. Signs and symbols. I. Dalbello, Marija. II. Shaw, Mary Lewis. P93.5. V545 2010 302.23—dc22 2010004651 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2011 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2011 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Text design and composition by Jenny Dossin Manufactured in the United States of America

—Richard Lockwood (1952–2005)

CONTENTS

ix

Acknowledgments

2

Introduction

3

Introduction

13 15

Mary Shaw

Marija Dalbello

Buzz Spector, Encyclopaedia

Contours of Meaning in the Scripts of Ancient Mesoamerica: Western Epistemology and the Phonetic Issue Gordon Brotherston

37

Arts in Letters: The Aesthetics of Ancient Greek Writing Alexandra Pappas

55

Letter and Spirit: e Power of the Letter, the Enlivenment of the Word in Medieval Art Cynthia Hahn

77

Visible and Invisible Letters: Text versus Image in Renaissance England and Europe Peter Stallybrass

99

Illegibility and Grammaphobia in Paul et Virginie Lorraine Piroux

113

Written on the Page

131

Buzz Spector

Jacques Neefs

Kafka Face to Face As If Sur-face Text-ure 135

Un coup de dés and La Prose du Transsibérien: A Study in Contraries

Mary Shaw

151

Mathematics for “Just Plain Folks”: Allegories of Quantitative and Qualitative Information in the Habsburg Sphere Marija Dalbello

Contents

vii

175

Beneath the Words: Visual Messages in French Fin-de-Siècle Posters Phillip Dennis Cate

193

How Do You Pronounce a Pictogram? On “Visible Writing” in Comics François Cornilliat

209

Inviting Words into the Image: Multiple Meanings in Modern and Contemporary Art Marilyn Symmes, with Christine Giviskos and Julia Tulovsky

235

Color Writings: On ree Polychrome Texts

253

Buzz Spector Joyc-aean

Tiphaine Samoyault

A Rose Is . . . Kafka-esque Actual Words of Art 257

e Figurative and the Gestural: Chinese Writing According to Marcel Granet

Li Jinjia

271

Michaux: To Be Read? To Be Seen?

291

Reading the Alhambra

303

Catastrophe Writings: In the Wake of September 11

319

. . . visible, legible, illegible : around a limit . . .

341

Sttmnt

342

Buzz Spector

Claude Mouchard Richard Serrano

Béatrice Fraenkel Roxane Jubert Buzz Spector

Colloquium #1 (Picture Puzzles) Colloquium #2 Colloquium #3 Colloquium #4

viii

Contents

347

Notes on Contributors

351

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have come into being without the vision and guidance of Leslie Mitchner and Marilyn Campbell, our editors at Rutgers University Press. We cannot thank them enough for their unfailing support, and for their patience. The present collection originated in a 2006 interdisciplinary conference co-organized by the French Department and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University and Université Paris 8–Saint-Denis; the enterprise was thus a supremely collective effort from its inception. Those who contributed to this endeavor are too numerous to name; many are represented or acknowledged in the pages that follow. We do nonetheless want to make special mention here of past and present directors of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum—Phillip Dennis Cate, Gregory Perry, Marti Mayo, and Suzanne Delehanty— who supported our project through its many stages. Its development has been repeatedly and generously supported by the Zimmerli Art Museum’s endowment fund established by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for which we are most grateful. Our gratitude goes as well to Stacy Smith, who encouraged our research in the museum; to Kiki Michael, who organized the photography of Zimmerli-held works; to Diana Schiau-Botea, Alfredo Franco, Florence Quideau, and Alla Rosenfeld, who variously enhanced our understanding of the Zimmerli’s collections; and to Marilyn Symmes, who in addition to contributing an essay immensely facilitated our work in the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and the Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Rare Book Library. Within the Rutgers community, we wish to thank students in our advanced graduate seminars focused on modern French poetry and theater, visual epistemologies, and cultures of the book for their various forms of contribution to this volume. We also wish to thank Isabel Nazario, associate vice-president for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities, for her sponsorship of our project, as well as James Swenson, chair of the French Department, Uri Eisenzweig, director of the Transliteratures Project, Sarolta A. Takács, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences’ Honors Program, and Hartmut Mokros, dean of the School of Communication Information, for their generous encouragement and support. We are very grateful to Rutgers librarians

Acknowledgments

ix

Jeanne Boyle and Sara Harrington, who helped us locate obscure sources and resolve complicated issues of image reproduction rights. The technical and administrative resources of our respective home units were vital to the completion of this volume. Our thanks go in particular to Elizabeth Folk, administrative assistant of the French Department, and to Elizabeth Ciccone, business specialist at the School of Communication Information, who provided crucial assistance with several aspects of the book’s realization. Dawn Potter’s thorough and patient copyediting for Rutgers University Press saved us from many errors and infelicities. We cannot sufficiently express our appreciation for the wise counsel and multifaceted assistance of François Cornilliat and Anselm Spoerri, who have steadfastly accompanied us through every step of this project. Finally, we remember and acknowledge the contribution of the late Richard Lockwood, former chair of the French Department; his own visible writing is featured on the dedication page.

x

Acknowledgments

VISIBLE WRITINGS

Mary Shaw

INTRODUCTION

All writing is visible, but we don’t always see it. By contrast, the writings treated here become highly visible insofar as they draw the reader’s attention to their visual dimensions. Thus, as we enter into this collection, we ask you first to doubly focus your gaze, to look right and left, to mark that we, the editors, like our contributing authors, come to this complex topic from different perspectives. Cultures, forms, readings: the plural, open-ended subtitle suggests that we strive to embrace many points of view without pretending that a complete picture of visible writings can be somehow here achieved. For me, a scholar of modern poetry with a strong interest in literature’s relationship to other arts, our liminary image, book artist Buzz Spector’s Encyclopaedia, is emblematic of how simultaneously comprehensive and inconclusive the coverage of our topic seeks to be. We aim to expose a wide range of visible writings and to highlight connections among multiple fragmentary perspectives. And Spector’s Sttmnt, which acts here in lieu of a conclusion, with its closing emphasis on how his artistic “evocation of emptying out” secures our visual fascination, offers a kind of twin, inverted image of what I hope our collective readings can achieve. May the gaps in our scholarly representations function, as absences tend to do in all visible writings, to sharpen our awareness of all that is missing and draw us ever closer into what is present here. Several of the essays in this volume treat materials and concepts that are on the cutting edge of contemporary art and literature. Thus, Roxane Jubert presents the legibility (or illegibility) of avant-garde graphic experiments undertaken all over the world in domains ranging from the plastic arts and poetry to everyday life and Tiphaine Samoyault compares the diverse uses and functions of color printing in twentieth-century poetry and fiction. Though her essay includes texts from Germany and Italy, Samoyault primarily treats French examples. This strong “French connection,” apparent in one way or another in roughly half of the essays, stems from our book’s origins in an interdisciplinary conference conceived and co-organized by scholars from Rutgers University and Université Paris 8–Saint-Denis, most of whom hold some kind of literary orientation. Thus, exemplifying the

2

Introduction/Mary Shaw

Marija Dalbello

INTRODUCTION

I asked him what he meant by a mirror? “An instru-

ment,” answered he, “which sets things in relief at

a distance from themselves, when properly placed with regard to it. It is like my hand, which I must not put beside an object to feel it.”1

—Denis Diderot, “An Essay on Blindness”

The immediacy of vision so pointedly evoked in this quotation suggests the irreducibility of vision to the sense of touch, or to the word. Seeing is an existential relation establishing what we know, but we cannot explain the world without the word, just as “words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by the [world].”2 This collection explores the irreducible nature of the senses by focusing on the visibility of language and the legibility of image. The contributors present arguments about the reflexivity of language and writing and the aesthetics of visibility and invisibility. Their essays do not adhere to a single theory or common assumption. Instead, they reflect the cross-disciplinary perspectives of art and design, visual and literary studies, art history, history of writing and the book, the social history of knowledge, and the epistemology of vision. This book adds to an already substantive literature about the perceptual and linguistic dimensions of visible language, the mutual reflection of word and image that constitutes it, and the verbal and visual mediation of cultural meanings. Reaching beyond such approaches, these essays explore writing in relation to the phonetic nature of language as well as to drawing, painting, typography, and gesture; they evaluate the fixity and fluidity of texts, their inscription on the writing surface and in material objects and spaces situated in cultural practices and interactions. A view of writing as mediated through perception and the senses leads us to consider the limit of the meaningful and conjures the absence of meaning and legibility. Visible writing is considered within historical contexts and visual cultures and in multiple instances of the visible and the graphic. Visible writing is a genre of image-text; its forms and readings are symbolic, perceptual, and cultural.

Introduction/Marija Dalbello

3

geneticist’s probing, telescopic view, in some ways antithetical to the comparatist’s (typically synchronic) wide angle, Jacques Neefs’s essay guides us through a reading of scratched-out and inserted writings on the surface of the manuscript page, which literally opens our eyes to the coming into being of three canonical masterworks of French literature—by Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, and Gustave Flaubert. Though they remain focused on texts written in French, the essays by Neefs and Samoyault, as well as those, no less pointedly literary, by Lorraine Piroux and Claude Mouchard, deepen our perspective on what is implied by reading and easily connect with examples and ideas coming from other cultural horizons. For instance, the picture essay by Marilyn Symmes, Christine Giviskos, and Julia Tulovsky offers a curatorial view focused more on images than on words in its sampling of works drawn from the Zimmerli Art Museum’s rich American, Russian, Soviet dissident, and French collections. This sensitizing of our eyes, this broadening of our view to include many aesthetic modalities of combinations of words and images, helps the reader in turn to absorb genres of visible writings that demand equal attention to image and text: forms such as poster art, discussed by Phillip Dennis Cate, or comics, examined by François Cornilliat, which have become central to contemporary culture, though they still tend to fall between the domains of literature and art. We simply juxtapose these predominantly “modern,” western perspectives with others pertaining to different times and places: the Renaissance, in Peter Stallybrass’s analysis of woodcuts in sacred texts; the Middle Ages, in Cynthia Hahn’s reading of initials in illuminated manuscripts; ancient Greece, in Alexandra Pappas’s examination of several forms of inscription and pattern poems; and Mesoamerica, in Gordon Brotherston’s study of “writing without letters” in tlacuilolli screenfold books and scrolls. We revel in the differences among our authors’ approaches and do not force common ground, though we point here and there (through editorial notes) to interesting links between arguments (and each reader will find others) to encourage and allow space for future dialogues to emerge. Our choice not to overclassify or digest our material, not to underscore or efface the similarities and differences among these essays but to simply let them stand, may well be determined by the inherently multifaceted, hybrid character of our subject. For, as Claude Mouchard shows in his essay on the poet-painter Henri Michaux—in a manner complementary to Li Jinjia’s analysis of Marcel Granet’s theory of Chinese writing—visible writings, however we approach them, tend by their nature to transgress, to undermine and overspill not only the conventional limits of art and literature but also the outer and inner boundaries of all sorts of symbolic systems, including language(s), with their moving borders

4

Introduction/Mary Shaw

The visual sense is the most fundamental; it precedes words and language. Yet the emphasis on the conceptual/verbal character of language is dominant in the attitudes that shape thinking about knowledge and literacy.3 By contrast, what can only be shown but not represented by language is opaque, though inhabited with a presence. The expressions of language that aim at clarity of words maintain a dichotomy within which the visual is not capable of such instrumentality and finds itself relegated to the sphere of the aesthetic and the numinous. This collection probes arguments about the optic dimensions of writing and their relations to visual culture by examining intersections of the visible and the legible as essential to communicative acts. Visual epistemology grounds an understanding of visible writing as carrying such meanings via textimage systems—considered in their materiality and their contexts of circulation. Peter Stallybrass examines the circulation of print artifacts. He traces crossings of illustration woodcuts and initials in Renaissance books through distinct realms of print culture. Reuse of illustrated initials creates paradoxical effects: thus the classical and the scriptural are confounded when Ovidian initials are used in the transmission of biblical texts. The invisibility of these images to contemporary readers reveals the paradox of materiality in a medium that makes the visible insignificant, utilitarian. The nature of media and the problematic nature of print, this time in eighteenth-century French culture, are explored by Lorraine Piroux, who studies the visual dimension of an exemplary post-Enlightenment novel. She contrasts the view of the text as it is mediated in print and epitomizes the instrumentality of viewing to an inner meaning that is irreducible to the material creation through which it becomes visible and knowable. The pictorial and visual aspects of the work enable it to stay hidden within a visual system, counterbalancing the legibility of instrumental and common print that threatens the integrity of literature. In this controversy around print and codex form, the literary and the aesthetic are contrasted with an analytical, reductive materiality of the book. Mary Shaw compares two canonical works of visual modernist poetry to emphasize their different, indeed inverse, strategies of producing the visible writing effect. She argues that there were multiple rather than monolithic aesthetic traditions within modernist poetic movements, discussing the 1897 and 1914 versions of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice) and the first “simultaneous” book, the 1913 Prose du Transsibérien (The Prose of the Transsiberian), a collaboration between Blaise Cendrars and the artist Sonia Delaunay, as examples of different connections between text and image.

Introduction/Marija Dalbello

5

between graphic signs, gesture, and speech. They also call into question entrenched geopolitical cultural categories such as French, European, or American and dichotomies such as east and west— without entirely dissolving them. Everywhere we turn, visible writings shape and have long shaped our aesthetic sensibility and our modes of literacy, that which appeals to our eyes (and ears) and the ways in which we read. And as the essays here collected demonstrate, the prominence of this phenomenon hardly restricts itself to our individual experiences of reading texts or viewing art. Visible writings help to define, orient, and express our identities as diverse peoples who create and respond to these writings collectively in ever-changing, historically determined ways. We learn this from Marija Dalbello’s essay, which shows how mathematical concepts were both visually and verbally transposed so as to be efficiently disseminated (in several languages) through the Habsburg Empire’s illustrated almanacs, thus making centralized information accessible to “just plain folk.” We learn this from Richard Serrano’s reflections on the varying ways in which today’s tourists, as well as Moorish or Catholic monarchs and their subjects, would “read” inscriptions from the Holy Koran and from secular Arabic poetry on the palace walls of the Alhambra. We learn, finally, how crucial a role visible writings can play within political events and in our public spaces: thus, Béatrice Fraenkel examines how the quintessentially American democratic values of “we the people” were writ large and small, expressed as much intimately as communally, in the street writings that arose in New York in the days following September 11. In her careful parsing and contextualization of the function of visible writings in this major twenty-first-century crisis, Fraenkel addresses head-on social and political dimensions of our topic that surface elsewhere only as motifs in discussions of different cultures and forms. Though certain manifestations of visible writings are so obvious we can hardly escape them (like the large, looming presence of billboards), and we tend not to notice others (like the typography of a book, which escapes us as we begin to read), once these diverse phenomena begin to coalesce in our minds, we begin to see them everywhere, and often at the center of the most unexpected places. Thus, in the early stages of preparing this collection, in the summer of 2008, I had the feeling that the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics were designed just for us. But how many people, from how many far-flung places and walks of life, actually ooh-ed and ah-ed together as the 2008 Fou drummers summoned their ancestors by beating/lighting up pixels for the countdown, in both Arabic and Chinese numerals? How many collectively admired the graceful display of calligraphy and the fifteen dancers’

6

Introduction/Mary Shaw

The material dimensions of objects that circulate visible writing— in which the gestural, inscriptional, oral, and material worlds of objects converge—and reinforce its sense and meanings are captured by Alexandra Pappas, who considers the privileged nature of writing and the democratic nature of speech. She selects instances of writing that highlight the entire range of semantic, aesthetic, and parodic uses of writing in ancient Greece, including those demonstrating a communicative purpose, those devoid of meaning (as in nonsense, mock inscriptions), those in which inscriptions are accidental and arbitrary, as well as examples of gestural writing (in Euripides’ Theseus). Phillip Dennis Cate shows how an image absorbs the world of oral culture by examining an ambient dimension in fin-de-siècle French posters, where visual in-jokes, now readable through historical interpretation, were connotatively visible to their contemporaries, to the “period eye.”4 This dimension of visible writing is not merely metaphorical; it presents a strong case for a visible language’s dependence on an oral context of circulation. By contrast, Gordon Brotherston shows not only that the insistence on the phonetic aspect limits an understanding of the visual but that, in fact, the visual can encompass the phonetic. An archetype of all the complications and complexities of visible writing, the tlacuilolli “holistically . . . fuse into single statements what for us are the separate categories of literature, arithmetic and picture.” What is more, literacy and reading are constructed as activities not derivative in any way from speaking: indeed, it is in the nature of the visual to be autonomous. Multidirectional reading perceptually creates resistance points within which visibility and legibility are in tension, as when vernacular vocalizations are converted to illegible visual lettering in the examples of early French comics analyzed by François Cornilliat. Such instability is central to the art of comics, whose “essence . . . , if one must exist, is neither image nor text, but a combination of the two which possesses the virtual power to erase its own components.” There is a tension between drawing and writing; it persists even when conventional figurative and phonetic elements integrated in the visible language of comics seem to erase distinction of text and image. Li Jinjia revisits Marcel Granet’s interpretation of Chinese figurative writing and his theory of its sociocultural origin, requiring an integrated study of writing, language, literature, and society. Li, after Granet, argues that the pictorial sign, while it maintains the neutrality of language, manages to “conserve the primitive expressiveness of words, consolidates and enriches this expressiveness and transform it into an historical aspect of the Chinese language.” Graphic memory converts words into mnemonic images; writing is conceptual and

Introduction/Marija Dalbello

7

ink painting that emerged on an eleven-by-twenty-meter sheet of paper, which then magically detached itself from the ancient scroll/LED screen?1 Were there 100,000 in the stands and 4 billion worldwide on television, as reported by China Today?2 Whatever the number, there can be no doubt that this electronic scroll, with its multiple, stunning performances of visible writings (which anyone can now re-witness on YouTube in a flash), provided a highly effective frame to show how the “lost” arts at the center of Chinese culture can seem to be instantly recaptured by the global digital culture of today. The ceremony’s most astonishing moment for me was the one most dramatically spotlighting a conjoining of opposites that visible writings often embody, a moment that simultaneously revealed extremes of modernity and archaism, ancient rites and traditions as well as marketing and technology. After graphically articulating (among other things) the rise and (symbolic) fall of the great wall of China and the Chinese character for harmony, 897 dancers hidden in telescopic modules commemorating the Chinese invention of print suddenly exposed their human selves. Under the cold, identical shells of silver print modules, we saw a sea of individual smiling faces and, for once, of unchoreographed waving hands. How, then, do we try to grasp and understand the nature and effects of visible writings, which seem at once so elusive and so pervasive? This collection does not try to wrap up the field but to further open it. Nonetheless, as essayists, we began by sharing a common focus. Our starting point was the simple paradox set out in the opening of this introduction, which each of us addresses from our own particular frame of reference: though all writings are (by definition) visible, their visual dimensions play themselves out in many different ways, and can often be erased or forgotten.3 The visible writings treated in this volume are cases in which the material aspect of the graphic is (or becomes), in one way or another, visually compelling and imposing so that what we read is aesthetically and conceptually enhanced by its inextricable attachment to a figure or an image. Together, and from multiple angles, the essays consider the following kinds of relations: the visible as one with the legible (in hieroglyphs, ideograms, and traditions of calligraphy); the visible alongside the legible (in ornaments, illuminations, illustrations, comics); the legible within the visible (in posters, graffiti, painting, comics again, almanacs, and other kinds of texts); historical erasures or transformations of the visible in favor of the legible (for example, from oral performance to writing and from manuscript to print); and the return or persistence of the visible in the legible (in various kinds of spatial relations, iconographic writings, typescripts, manuscripts). For me, one of the more unexpected and interesting results of our

8

Introduction/Mary Shaw

eidetic. Verbal memory is a recessive dimension of pictorial writing. Li thus critiques not only the limited western (alphabet-centric) notion of literacy and writing, which subordinates the visible aspect of writing to its phonetic dimension, but also the dichotomy that opposes ideographic writing to alphabetic writing. The living words of Chinese writing have a western typological counterpart in the visual epistemology of medieval texts. Cynthia Hahn’s essay on illuminated initials explores the presence of the letter as a visual sign. The aura of living letters transcends the concreteness of the writing surface. This kind of visible writing takes on a particular rhetorical form to reinscribe writing within two interpretive frameworks; the realm of letter forms becomes invisible as the initial letter sidesteps the tradition of hearing and remembering altogether and becomes pure image without traces of language, ensuring access to the numinous: the letter of God, as in the tetragrammaton.5 The other essays address visible writing in aesthetic and literary contexts, as equivalent to poetic language in a visual sense.6 In the manuscripts studied by Jacques Neefs, the geometry of thought organizes the surface of the text, whereas the surface and texture of the page are emptied out in Buzz Spector’s altered book specimens: the surface texture and instability of the “literary” work of art reveal the appearance-disappearance ontology of any written and fixed text. The emptying gesture (of tearing) makes the symbolic container (the lignified book itself ) visible. Polychrome poetry, and the luminosity of color, contrast, and sound, are analyzed by Tiphaine Samoyault not only as expressive but also as set against the technical constraints of black ink (and print) on white paper. In the esoteric writings of poet and painter Henri Michaux, Claude Mouchard recognizes that presence and tangibility of letters have a gestural origin in painting. The corporeality and emotion of writing emerge in corresponding organic shapes, “rudimentary organisms.” Roxane Jubert considers writing at the critical point of legibility, in boundary games and other forms of experimental writing, which are enigmatic, mysterious, and validated in optical illusion. In the resistance of writing, she uncovers the elemental meanings of “docile letters and signs.” Words can travel across time, and time makes writing permanent—but not the message, in the Arabic inscriptions of the Alhambra studied by Richard Serrano. Conversely, Béatrice Fraenkel focuses on writing in action, as opposed to writing as evidence of tradition, in the epigraphic expressions of New York’s collective mourning in the aftermath of September 11. Marilyn Symmes, Christine Giviskos, and Julia Tulovsky explore a range of artistic expressions combining text and image in twentieth-century American, Russian nonconformist, and fin-desiècle French art. My own essay on diagrams and mathematical

Introduction/Marija Dalbello

9

investigation was the discovery of the extent to which visible writings test our preconceptions regarding the transparency and translatability of language in general, whatever the direction of these preconceptions might be. For example, we discover that, while the loose and flexible insertion of writing-related images can allow for and even provoke multiple translations of certain kinds of texts (as happens with the Habsburg almanacs discussed by Dalbello and the Renaissance texts presented by Stallybrass), the interpenetration and entrenchment of writing into the domain of the visual image often leads, on the contrary, to a great resistance to or even the impossibility of translation (as shown by essays as different as my own study of two famous modern visual poems and Gordon Brotherston’s treatment of a broad spectrum of Mesoamerican scripts). Visible writings’ singularities and differences, as much as their interrelations and common ground: this is what you may expect to find in the following array of readings, cultures, and forms. Notes 1. For a brief but detailed description of how these ceremonies unfolded, see the Total Production International website, http://www.tpimagazine.com/production-profiles/126702/beijing_olympics_opening_ceremony. 2. These figures appear at http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/aoyun/en/c5/5.html. 3. In our original call for papers, conference co-organizer Derek Schilling historically contextualized this conundrum: “From the Enlightenment perspective of instrumental reason embodied by the printed book, moveable type, and the dream of universal literacy, the forms and means of inscription employed have been assumed to be accidental and arbitrary, rather than essential to the communicative act; the ideal of transparent communication has thus worked to downplay the visibility of written language, though this mode of expression by definition offers itself up to the eye in the form of a mark or trace.”

10

Introduction/Mary Shaw

verbalizations deals with the culture mediated by typologies that depend on associations of text-image systems traveling independently of language: this leads back to questions about the structure of thought and the epistemology of visible writing. The immediacy of vision is unproblematic and natural—as if in a mirror. And yet the material presence of a mirror points to an intervening gesture as a metaphor for writing. Writing as the language of thought is mediated through multiple senses that emphasize a geometric rather than a logical nature of thought and knowledge. The nature of writing is visual, aural, haptic. The essays in this volume explore how the sense of sight that underlies visible writing interacts with traces of gestures, of hearing and touch, thus associating it with drawing or painting. In the mutual reflection of word and image that constitutes visible language, it becomes relevant to study these overlaps in the broader contexts in which text-image systems are circulated and consumed. These essays identify practices situated on the limit and explore some radical ideas about writing and literacy beyond the metaphorical and aesthetic dimension of writing, as both within and outside language. Notes 1. Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See,” in Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature and Other Philosophical Works (Manchester: Clinament, 1999), 151. The last phrase of this translation by Margaret Jourdain (“[ . . . ] which, to feel an object, I must not reach to one side of it”) has been altered here (by Mary Shaw) for clarity. For the original French, see “Lettre sur les aveugles” (An Essay on Blindness) (1749), in Denis Diderot, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 813: “Je lui demandai ce qu’il entendait par un miroir: ‘Une machine,’ me répondit-il, ‘qui met les choses en relief loin d’elles-mêmes, si elles se trouvent placées convenablement par rapport à elle. C’est comme ma main, qu’il ne faut pas que je pose à côté d’un objet pour le sentir.’” 2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1973), 7. 3. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 4. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 5. Ibid., 41. 6. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 116.

Introduction/Marija Dalbello

11