What is the Matter? A Meditation on Illegible Writing

Abstract

What is the Matter?A Meditation on Illegible Writing Wayne Stables (bio) Polonius What do you read, my lord?Hamlet Words, words, words.Polonius What is the matter, my lord?Hamlet Between who?Polonius I mean the matter that you read,my lord. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet1 If language speaks for a meaning, it must also be able to speak in the absence of meaning. If it speaks for an addressee, then it must also be able to speak in the absence of an addressee. If it speaks for something, it must also be a "for" without a "something" and without the particular "for" that would be pre-determined for it. Only one half of language is an ontological process; philology must, therefore, also concern itself with the other half. —Werner Hamacher, "95 Theses on Philology"2 Imagine writing that means nothing. Not writing that is yet to mean, a script still to be deciphered, but writing that literally means nothing. What would such writing look like? Rather than answering the question with a description, it may be better to produce an inscription—to write a line of your own. Suppose you were to produce a series of squiggles in the white space below. You would know that behind them an intention lies, an intention that could compromise the innocence of your lines. In such circumstances it may be wise to turn to the writing of another, to a text whose temper remains unknown, say one of the "asemic" inscriptions of the Argentine writer Mirtha Dermisache (1940–2012).3 Here is the first page from one of her books (Figure 1): [End Page 285] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Mirtha Dermisache, page from Sin título (Libro), 1971. Unique artist's book, ink on paper, bound in black hardcover, 48 pages with 36 images, 30 x 27 cm.4 Images of Dermisache's work are reproduced courtesy of the Mirtha Dermisache Archive, Buenos Aires, and Siglio & Ugly Duckling Presse. These lines could be a secret code, a message too complex to be deciphered, perhaps, but a message nevertheless. If this is what it seems to be—writing—then surely it comes in company. For writing shadows language. "Though unrelated to its inner system, [writing] is used continually to represent language," declares Ferdinand de Saussure. "We cannot simply disregard it. We must be acquainted with its usefulness, shortcomings, and dangers."5 Looking at the page reproduced above, we may be able to identify the hallmarks of language, even if the language this writing represents is unknown to us. We could, for example, try to identify individual signifiers by virtue of their repetition, by the play of [End Page 286] difference and the patterning of identity between them. Then there is the seductive suggestion of sense unfolding along successive moments of time, across the gaps between the marks on the page. Lest we are led astray by the semblance of syntax, we might then recall that language is more than what appears to the ear or to the eye. Saussure's key claim—"in language there are only differences"—becomes explicit with a remarkable metaphor (C 120). Language, itself constituted by difference, resembles the surface upon which these words appear: "Language can … be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure phonology" (C 113). According to Saussure, when one is thinking about language one is thinking about an inextricable couple: sound and thought. And yet no matter how resolutely the reader attends to the shapes drawn on Dermisache's page, they elicit neither the sounds (signifiers) nor the concepts (signifieds) to which they correspond. These marks appear to have relinquished their function as signs, refusing to substitute for the referents they signify. If this writing, following Saussure's metaphor, is traced on the back page, there is no way from the...