Heisenberg’s Principle and the Illegible Text
Why Illegibility Does Not Abolish Meaning
I[c]onic Log, Nils Röller (foreword), Michael Betancourt (afterword), Calamari Archive, Ink., New York, 2025, ISBN 978-1940853413 (Paperback), 978-1940853482 (Hardcover) [Eng-Ger-It-Fr] / buy: amazon • asterism • read: archive • listen: podcast • download: [ 1 ] \ [ 2 ] [pp. 77-78]
in ordinary texts, words are clearly discernible and are related to a syntax that regulates their connections • they objectively exist, and this does not impinge on their readability • in asemic texts, on the contrary, the lack of «words» necessitates abandoning the claim that we can detect them in some dictionary • the signifier and the signified of a sign thus resemble the momentum («speed», in a way) and the position of a particle in the quantum world; we cannot precisely detect both at once, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle • this actually deprives textuality of the sense of reality with which we are familiar • the asemic text challenges the reader to derive its own meaning, rather than merely serving as an aesthetic artefact that renounces signification • an extensive conceptual breach subverts the entrenched dogma of experience, whose uniqueness is suspended through the mimicry of language • although this shift often traces back to earlier ideas of writing, text falsification has become institutionalised • such a phenomenon occurs in the «no language’s land» between pure literature and visual art, where the spontaneous traits of handwriting are preferred over more rigid textual forms • every dot, stain, and even every single bit in a digital array becomes part of the same loose alphabet • like smugglers on the guarded frontier of meaning, asemic writers exchange secret scripts or drafts of confidential notes • when no code remains or is accepted for drawing signs, language reinvents itself in the common forge of form and meaning • since the writer relinquishes the role of deus ex machina, the reader or onlooker loses a traditional point of reference • this is even more the case when all conventions are absorbed into networks of obscure, though densely organised, signs; different and more suitable paradigms must then be developed • according to Marcel Broodthaers, even a paper on jurisprudence proves to be inspiring in this respect: «La place que le mot y occupe est une place nette. L’ambiguïté du Droit tient sans doute à l’interprétation du texte; à l’esprit et non à la lettre.»1 • on this basis, the question arises whether to equate the asemic level with a sort of language zero-point, a ground state of writing, or, most likely, the very state of the word before it encounters an alphabet • by rephrasing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, while the classical text may be worked out to near-meaninglessness, the asemic text persistently exhibits a residual meaning • as structures collapse, dust particles attempt to relentlessly reorganise themselves, gravitating through the void of deconstruction • when language lays down the laws, it is difficult to modify them; «[...] for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience [...] for visualisation, however, we must content ourselves with [...] incomplete analogies.»2 • in asemic texts, signs and meanings are superseded by the pure notion of asemicism: writing attests to its inexhaustible delay in meaning, according to the seemingly paradoxical, yet strict, formalism of what remains illegible • thus, two systems coexist: one language embedded in a sediment of «things» and another embedded in a sediment of signs that have not been exposed to any «thing» yet, nor are they likely to be
«The place that the word occupies in it is a clear place. The ambiguity of the Law undoubtedly lies in the interpretation of the text; in its spirit, not literally.» Marcel Broodthaers, Art poétique in Broodthaers, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 16
MIT Press, 1987), 16 41 Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, trans. Carl Eckhart and Frank C. Hoyt (New York: Dover Publications, 1930), 10