An Asemic Aesthetic

Abstract

An Asemic Aesthetic Tom Conley (bio) ASEMIC: THE ART OF WRITING BY PETER SCHWENGER Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019 What is it to draw, write, paint, even sculpt indecipherable figures—the force of which is conveyed not in meaning but in form? How do readers make "sense" of what they see? When an unsettling beauty of graphic signs overtakes what they signify, we find ourselves squarely in Peter Schwenger's world. It is one for which childhood memories have us recall that before we learned to read, we made sense of signs through sight and touch. We noted the texture, grain, and mass of printed books. Sniffing paper, sticking our fingers into the gutters, flipping pages: we looked for pictures to guide us. Before we learned their names, title pages, historiated initials, runner heads, tailpieces, and colophons were a sheer delight to behold. It was "writing" unencumbered by language, writing so attractive that we hold dear to ourselves those times when what script was "saying" mattered little. The authors and artists taken up in this monograph recapture those pleasures but with the added dimension that they bring with them an implicit political aesthetic. Blurb writers at the University of Minnesota Press call this elegantly written monograph "the first critical study of writing without language." They inform us that Asemic fills a gap in a field that has "exploded in popularity, with anthologies, large-scale anthologies, a large-scale art exhibition, and flourishing interest on sites like Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram." Yet it almost goes without saying that any study of writing aimed not to mean is doubly bound. Peter Schwenger faces the conundrum of communicating clearly and distinctly about "writing that does not to communicate any message [End Page 210] other than its own nature as writing" (1). By "its own nature" is meant texture, design, aspect, and "feel" of script as drawing or disegno—in sum, a force of form and creative possibility. Much as Joyce wished to be free from the nightmare of history, Schwenger asks us to liberate ourselves from the task of "communicating." Conveying effects words cannot describe, instead of transcribing meaning or sending "messages" to improbable or unknown receivers, asemic writing calls attention to its shape, tactility, spatiality, and physical disposition. Patterned on legible (often alphabetical) forms, with beguiling resemblance to familiar sign systems, it stresses occlusion, difference, and enigma at the core of communication. Chapter 1 outlines what Schwenger means by asemic and, by implication, the force of asemia giving rise to its expression. He reminds us, first, that in going from kindergarten to college, millennials rarely know how write with pen and paper, much less master cursive script enough to copy a sentence from beginning to end. Educators in secondary schools often confirm the point, adding that, as if attesting to the French proverb about those who are misguided or witless when they cherchent midi à deux heures (look for noon at two p.m.), high school students encounter difficulty in reading analogue clocks and watches. The etiology of ignorance, Schwenger implies, might be rooted in the Classical Age and the Enlightenment, when readers were trained to look through writing and discern "meaning" beyond its physical form. This is contrary to the era of the incunabulum and the early printed book, a transitional moment when manuscript and book were coequal, when the shape of letters and words went with their meaning. In the later seventeenth century and beyond, "a mere secretary to an executive meaning" (5), writing was assumed to "represent" something other than itself. Ideation replaced materiality. Nominally holding to the enduring analogy of the furrows of a planted field resembling the lines of script in the frame of rubricated vellum, distribution and the spacing of letters, words, and punctuation marks was assumed to be linear. Schwenger subscribes to Vilem Flusser (in Does Writing Have a Future? [University of Minnesota Press, 2011]), who believes that in the age of cinema, television, and the computer screen, scansion of lines gives way to that of surfaces. Moving in every direction, as if gazing upon all-over paintings, our eyes note figural shapes that appear other, [End Page 211] alien, outside of what they...