The Limit of Writing and the Art of Noise

Asemic writing: what we have here is not a failure to communicate, but a transposition. The destruction of literature is the inception of an art, an art from another culture’s tradition, an art that now resides alongside (between) literature and art in a Western tradition that is coming into being.

What is the form of this being? In a discussion of poetry in his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound offers the following:

The maximum of phanopoeia [throwing a visual image on the mind] is probably reached by the Chinese, due in part to their particular kind of written language. (42)

This approach allows us think of written poetry (poeia) as primarily graphic rather than as primarily aural and gives us, though our poetic tradition is largely different from that of the Chinese, terms to define visual poetry without reference to the aural by severing its ties to a “textual element”. Indeed, it also moves us toward asemic writing.

But what is writing without a “textual element”, is it visual poetry, is asemic writing, is it both, or is it something else?

Taking the definition of asemic writing to be writing “without semantic content”, to quote Tim Gaze, the ability of phanopoeia to throw “a visual image on the mind” would tend to make something more akin to visual poetry than to asemic writing simply because this “visual image on the mind” tends to be a form of semantic content (for example, consider how images relate to Lockean ideas).

What happens, though, when we pass beyond this content into abstraction or, its practical equivalent, the converse of abstraction, the raw?

Jean-Francois Lyotard, in Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics, offers interesting commentary on the movement in the 20th Century toward the destruction of literature and, following Nietzche on Geräusch (Geräusch is here more than simply noise; it is much more like an hypnotic effect or a hallucinogen) in Wagner (19th Century), the movement of music to noise. Lyotard, on Malraux as a writer fighting a war against writing in a technically brilliant way, says,

Colors, forms, sounds, and voices become organized into stories—long and short—that deploy their meaning. The poetics of the ellipsis forces the real world to confess that it is an illusion: the screen of the familiar had obsessed the nil. (Soundproof Room (62), Trans. Robert Harvey)

This statement gives us a useful converse, a transposition, a way of moving the technique of the writer battling writing as such (not a writer trying to express something, self or otherwise, in writing, but a writer engaged with the techniques of writing) onto the ground of the artist, moving “[c]olors, forms, and sounds” into semantic meaninglessness, into an art called asemic writing.

The picture is no longer worth a thousand words. The nil is its own screen.