The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 32

To express oneself in forms involving an artistic element is part of self- const.i.tution as a human being, distinct from the rest of the natural realm. Moreover, to have access to the richness of other expressive forms-rhythms, colors, shapes, movements, metaphors, sounds, textures-is to reascertain a sense of belonging. In this vein, the right to affluence implicit in the civilization of illiteracy extends well into the domain of the aesthetic. New artistic structures and means are continuously submitted and consumed. Some end up in oblivion; others suggest dynamic patterns. Freed from the constraints of a dominant literacy, artistic practice is becoming more and more like any other form of human experience, emanc.i.p.ated from the obsession of universality and eternity (embodied in museums and art collections), from centralism (expressed in such elements as the vanishing point, the tonal center of music, the architectural keystone). True, a great deal of narcissism has come to the forefront. And there is a tendency to break rules for the sake of breaking them, and to make the act of breaking the rule the object of artistic interest. In transcending old media boundaries, production and appropriation come closer together.

The person making the artwork already integrates the appropriation in the making. Thus a complicity beyond and above language is established in defiance of time, s.p.a.ce, and the universal. Nevertheless, artists still want to be eternal!

Art establishes itself on a plurality of levels of interaction.

This is its main characteristic, since the cultural level supported by literacy is breaking the bonds of a generic, pervasive literacy. Several specialized languages mediate at various levels. The language of art history addresses professionals at one level, and laymen at another, through an array of journals and magazines. Art theory speaks to experts and, in a different tone, to neophytes who themselves will judge or produce artworks. The language of materials and techniques delves into particulars beyond oil, canvas, melody, beat, and rhythm that a generally literate onlooker or listener would not readily comprehend.

The art of the civilization of illiteracy partly reprocesses previous artistic experience. By no accident, the entire modern movement looked back at ancient art forms and exotic art and appropriated their themes and structural components. In this experience, cultural conventions expressed through literacy (such as the recurrent linear perspective, illusory s.p.a.ce, or color symbolism) are of secondary import. The goal is to account for the tension between motives (the magical, the sacred, or the mythic), the realistic image, and abstract extensions. The experience, which language inadequately reported, but could not subst.i.tute, is the subject of artistic investigation. African and Chinese masks, Russian icons, Mayan artifacts, Arabic decorative motifs, and j.a.panese syllabaries are invoked with the intention of arousing awareness of their specific pragmatic context, which in turn will influence new artistic practical experiences. This is art after art. Evidently, Russian avant-garde, French cubism, American conceptualism, and all the other isms cannot be seen as ordinary extensions to experiences alien to tradition, or as attempts to loosen the ties between art and literacy in conscious preparation for relative emanc.i.p.ation from language. This phase has its own, new, recurring interactions. The post-modern is probably the closest we have come to the expression of awareness and values about art in art, a generic hall of mirrors.

Artistic practice led to a change in the structure of the domain: art a.s.sumes a self-referential function and submits the results to the public at large (literate or not). To look at post-modern art and architecture as only ill.u.s.trative of cultural quotes, and possible self-irony, would mean to miss the nature of the experience projected in making the new artifacts. It is an undoing of the past in order to achieve a new freedom (from norm, ideal, value, morality, even aesthetics). The concept of art, resulting from the theoretic practice focused on acc.u.mulated artistic experience in its broadest sense, is subjected to change. Artifacts resulting from the practical experience of artists const.i.tute a domain congruent to the aesthetic dimension of human interaction in the social environment. This art is illiterate in the sense that it refuses previous norms and values, comments upon them from within, and projects a very individual language, with many ad hoc rules, and a vocabulary in continuous change. Think about how, in the post-modern, the condition and function of drawing change.

Drawing no longer serves as an underlying element of painting, architecture, or sculpture. Rather, drawing ascertains its own aesthetic condition. In a broader sense, it is as though art continuously generates its definition and redefinition, and allows those involved in artistic practice to const.i.tute themselves as ent.i.ties of change more than as manufacturers of aesthetically relevant objects. In a similar way, harmony is re- evaluated in the experience of music.

The specializations within artistic practice (e.g., drawing, harmony, composition) correspond to an incredible diversification of skills and techniques, to the creation and adoption of new tools (digital devices included), and awareness of the market. Those who know the language of an artifact, or of a series of relatively similar artifacts, are not necessarily those who will appropriate and interpret the artifact. In this age, aesthetic expression becomes an issue of information processing resulting from the systematic deconstruction of the aesthetic practice of the age dominated by literacy. Images and sounds are derived from various experiences (photographic, mechanical, electronic). Spontaneity is complemented by elaboration. Previous stylistic characteristics- spontaneity is only the most evident-are reified and framed in new settings together with the interpretation. They are also reified in artistic expression as the gesture of making the work and the act of submitting it to the public with the aim of pleasing, provoking, criticizing, ridiculing, confounding, challenging, uplifting, or degrading (intentionally or not).

Post-modern artistic practice results from the display of broken conventions and rules, or of disparate and sometimes antagonistic characteristics. Suffice it to point out how the private (the personal side of art, layout strategies, art of proportions, drawing, symbolism, harmony, and musical or architectural composition) becomes public. Real Life, an MTV series, is the personal drama of five young people trying to make it in New York City. The script was their day-to-day existence, the attempt to harmonize their conflicting lifestyles in the elegant loft that MTV provided. When the director fell in love with one of the characters, he was brought in front of the camera's merciless eye. Likewise, the artist-painter, composer, sculptor, dancer, or film director-submits the secrets of his experience to the viewer, the listener, and the spectator. The artifact comes to the market delivered with its self-criticism, even with a time bomb set for the hour after which the work has become valueless. The making of art made public is at the same time its unmaking.

Appropriation, one of the preferred methods of the art experience, is based on a notion of aesthetic or cultural complicity. The illiterate public accepts a game of allusions.

The alluded must be present in the work, because in the absence of a unifying literacy, there is no shared background one can count on. Insinuations, innuendo, and provocation are practiced parallel to the quote around which the work establishes its own ident.i.ty.

Art is infinitely fragmented today. No direction dominates, or at least no longer than the 15 minutes of fame that Warhol prophesied. There is a real sense of artistic glut and a feeling of ethical confusion: Is anything authentic? The public is lured into the work, sometimes in ridiculous forms (a painting with live characters touching the viewers, pinching them, reaching for pocketbooks, or spitting chewing gum); other times in naive ways (through mirrors, interactive dialogue on computer screens, live installations in a zoo, live keyboards in a music hall).

Art is delivered unfinished, as a point of entry, and as an open challenge to change. To copyright openness and sign it is as absurd, or sublime, as delivering beautiful empty bars of music to serve as a score for symphonic interpretation or a multimedia event.

The copy is better than the original

Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practical form of human projection, we notice the transition from a centralized system of reference and values to a system of parallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in the market as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is a noticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: what belongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. And there is a need for disparity and distinction: How do we distinguish among the plenty acc.u.mulated in a never-ending series of shows when all that changes is the name on the canvas?

The same applies to photography, video art, theater, dance, minimalist music, and the architecture of deconstruction. An evident tension results, not different from the one we perceive in the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious: where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insider information (What is hot?). This is not an expression of an ideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but of alternatives delivered together with the uncertainty that characterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsession with recognition in an environment of compet.i.tion that often becomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used to attack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century are children's toys in comparison to the means of aesthetic annihilation used in our time.)

Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition and history, this kind of art affects the appropriation of its products in the sense of increasing artificiality-the shared phylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly, interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions (often hair- splitting), more and more within the artistic domain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations, and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographic reproduction is always better than the original. This is the music that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is the art whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert on television are even better than the production. Meaning comes about in an individual experience of relating distinctions, not common experiences.

The specialization of art, no less than the specialization of sciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerous networks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples of this are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding the strategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixing the elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video, even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by the scanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail over meaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling and synthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of ma.s.sive decentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalized integration through networks of interaction, within which museums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. It is not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the support for a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if not earlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper, forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do not know how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledge integrated in their digital instruments.

With the advent of technological means for the production and dissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an age of a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy to adapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preference changes. The new artistic practice results in the demythification of artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the same time. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility and infinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images with memory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Sound samples are the library of the composer active in the civilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter of practicability, people could display, in places of living or work, images from any collection, or listen to music from any ongoing concert around the globe. They could also change the selection without touching the display. They could redo each artwork as they please, painting over its digital double in the act of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of the past would ever accept, or any artist of the present would care for. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As a matter of fact, televised images are already manipulated and r-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data- yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting our involvement with new media, will probably replace the majority of televised images. With the advent of digital video delivered via the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as any TV production facility will support artistic innovation that we still a.s.sociate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywood events.

Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in the civilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchange and contact at each of its levels: meaning const.i.tution, symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity and transcendence of art, notions and expectations a.s.sociated with the literate experience, become nostalgic references of a past pragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at which they consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting a model even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In its new manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, but many in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes in an abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal of uniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradicts the ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing, over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied with frenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for very fluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity of Chinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, West European ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body is integrated into the more comprehensive body of the show, practice these strategies for different purposes and with different aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, and fervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomes painting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends its volume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual or real events that integrate the natural and the artificial.

In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarely secured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would be impossible without the industry it created; nor would painting, sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart, another name for virtual reality) without the industries they stimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimate market of originals meet in the illiterate obsession with celebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. The extension of art as practice to art as object, resulting from the aesthetic experience in the s.p.a.ce of reproductions better than originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act (process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence of the artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in a reproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of a concert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or of images on CD-ROM and DVD disks.

When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, a tree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thought by donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a s.p.a.ce of personal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, including creativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It can be in someone's private theater, s.e.x parlor, or drug experience.

As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into an instrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity in the virtual s.p.a.ce shared. As opposed to art in its conventional form, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. The artist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist can decide to become the work and experience the perception of others. No Rembrandt or Czanne, not even the illiterate graffiti artists in the New York subway system could experience such things.

Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-language based experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading.

Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute their images or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites on the World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy, literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or is this another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmatic framework of literacy-defined self-const.i.tution? The borderline, if any, between art and writing is becoming fuzzier by the hour.

A nose by any other name

The art of the word, of language, as exemplified in poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and movie scripts, takes place in a very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? The languages of poetry and of our routine conversations differ drastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Many a writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short or long) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A rose by any other name...") is not exactly the same as "A nose is a nose is a nose..." (or "A nose by any other name..."). Although the similarities between the two are so evident that, without a certain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualify both as identically silly or identically strange, there is a literary quality that distinguishes them.

The art of written words, usually called literature, involves using language for practical purposes other than projecting our common experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokov once told his students that literature was not born on the day someone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolf ran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chased that person. "Between the wolf in the tall gra.s.s and the wolf in the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] is the art of literature." This is not the place to discuss the definition of literature, or to set one forth. It is clear, nevertheless, that literature is not the mere use of language.

By a definition still to be challenged, there is no literature outside written language. (The term oral literature is regarded as a sad oxymoron by linguists who specialize in oral cultures.) Furthermore, there is no appropriation of the art of language, of its aesthetic expressiveness, without understanding language, a necessary but still insufficient condition. (It is insufficient because to understand language is not equal to using language creatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is no literature without literacy. However, language use in literature is not the same as language use in daily life, in the self-const.i.tutive experience of living and surviving.

When human experience is projected in language and language becomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction in the experience. The syncretic character of language as it is formed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to the syncretic character of human activity in its very early stages.

Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience of self-const.i.tution is segmented and various forms of labor division are brought about by expectations of efficiency. The scale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, is reflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, in turn, determines distinctions in human expression and communication through language. Survival becomes a form of human practice, losing its primeval condition when it implies the experience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited, of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfy hunger does not require awareness of needs and the means to fulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such as instinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of an animal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh of slaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The first reports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; the second, about the ability to infer from one practical domain to another. So does the perceived need to share and expand experience.

In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, the immediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magical addressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the same language. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them as examples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmatics pertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale of humanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action were conveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much later in time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and the expanding scale, do different forms of practical experience separate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it is running after someone, or it is only a product of someone's imagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it is in the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of these situations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basis symbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric, astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use of language symbols is structurally identical to the use of astronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that it uses the conventional nature of the representation in sign processes (generation of new symbols, a.s.sociations among symbols, symbolic inferences, etc.).

Crying wolf started early

Literature results from the perceived need to transcend the immediate and to make possible an experience in a time and s.p.a.ce of choice, or in the s.p.a.ce and time of language itself.

Naming a place Florence, Brugges, Xanadu, Bombay, Paris, Damascus, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing in a story derives from a motivation different from how names were given to real cities, to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usually identifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They become part of our environment, const.i.tuting the markers for the context, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of the experiences from which they result. In each name of a person, place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as in fiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience of human self-const.i.tution creeps in.

When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at a poetry recitation say that they learn something about the place, characters, or subject, they mean that they learn something (however limited) about the practical experience involved in const.i.tuting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether they really know about something, or whether they care to know it, is a different question. Usually, they do not know or care to know because, being born in a language, moreover being subjected to literacy, they believe that things are real because they are in language. They take the world for granted because words describe it. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real when they are written about. Some people are educated to accept some things as more real than others: historical accounts, geographic accounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. More often than not, people walk through Verona in order to see where Shakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers swore undying love to each other. They wind up in front of some ridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incident has gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. A picture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo and Juliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle and the fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places in Jerusalem, reputed cafs in Paris, or sites a.s.sociated with the name of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinction between fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of the fiction of fiction, and reality.

There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction or not) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historians of literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. In the experience of writing, authors const.i.tute themselves by projecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to map between the world they live in and the world of language. In the experience of reading, one projects the ability to understand language and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the same world in which writers const.i.tute their ident.i.ty. The process comprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words, ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to the uniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to an infinity of understandings of the many components of a printed book or performed play. In this process, new reductions are made possible. The history of literature and language is well known for the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literary critics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; book marketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What we learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode, and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and reading.

The history of literature is connected to the diversification of language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be better understood if we consider the practice of literature in relation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is not to endorse the convention of realism, one of the weak explanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art and literature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain and doc.u.ment that various relations between spoken and written language and the language of literature lead to various writing conventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, the relation was based on ident.i.ty. In other words, the two forms of language were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctions in practical experiences resulted in distinctions in the self-const.i.tution of the human being through a language that captured similarities and differences, and became a medium for conventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism was acknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions.

The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to refer here to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only as remote from normal language as normalcy was from observing stars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold, conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading today whatever survived or was reconst.i.tuted from these writings is an experience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has a specific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist, philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longer recall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They are considered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrong ideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experience is in a pragmatic context to which we have difficulty connecting-but because their language testifies to an experience of transcending the borders between human practice and establishing a systematic, encompa.s.sing domain which now seems grounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the Old Testament, Tao) are also examples.

The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did not really see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), started crying wolf, and when finally adults show up, there is no wolf.

"Oh, he likes to tell stories," or "She has a wild imagination.

She will probably become a writer." In some cases, elves, ghosts, or witches are blamed for a sudden wind, changes in weather, or trees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and this is reported as private fiction. Artistic writing and appropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much as painting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematical equations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves a convention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us not confuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we may decide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people do not accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up crying with the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or at somebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive some lesson from it, or identify with characters, in effect, rewriting them in the ink or blood of their own lives.

Meta-literature

The recurring interaction between a writer (indirectly present) and a reader takes place through writing and reading. It is proof of the practicality of the literary experience and an expression of its degree of necessity. The extent of the interaction is thus the expression of the part of the practical experience that is shared, and for what purpose. This is ill.u.s.trated by the uses we give to literature: education, indoctrination, moral edification, ill.u.s.tration, or entertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and reader project themselves in the reading through a process of dual reciprocal const.i.tution, changing when circ.u.mstances change, objectified in the forms through which literature is acknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast to the arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the natural component (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible.

Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristic and exercises virtual coordination of the experience of a.s.signing meaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begs a.s.sociation to music. To someone watching how the process unfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggered less by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisively by what comprises the act of instilling meaning of the objectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or short story. The fact is that language, more than natural systems of signs, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, as humans progress from one scale to another, within which meaning is conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions of existence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. It const.i.tutes as many domains of interaction as there are experiences requiring language, a subset of language, or artifacts similar to language.

The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and still goes strong, that the universality of language is reflected in the universality of literature, and thus the universality of conveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means to un-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of the reference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of a different projection of the human being. It means understanding the process through which meaning is conjured as human self-const.i.tution takes place. While it is true that when someone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is one that refers to the language of that particular reader's experience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); once the convention is uncovered, personal experience takes second place, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction, begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but it might as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfolding as a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artistic wording establishes a self-contained universe of self-reference and becomes not only the message, but also the context. The practical experience of writing is discovery of universes with such qualities. The practical experience of reading is populating such a universe through personal projection that will test its human validity. Both writer and reader create themselves and ascertain their ident.i.ties in the interaction established through the text.

It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy (mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally const.i.tute something in opposition to it. In a larger framework, literature is but one among many means of practical human experiences resulting, like any other form of objectification, in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing, interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life to ent.i.ties that, once expressed, start their own existence, no longer under the control of the writer or reader. For as long as language dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions of literacy, we could not understand how writing could be an experience in something other than language, or how it could be performed independent of language-based a.s.sumptions. Since the turn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, there was a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was used to select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the action and its successive interpretations, many layers of practical experiences with language acc.u.mulated. The literature of the absurd went further and suggested situations only vaguely defined with the aid of language, actually defined in defiance of language conventions. There is more silence in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco than there are words.

Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only the expression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience of concrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, or even tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation, with the implicit a.s.sumption that our domains of interactions are not defined only through language. The modern renewal of dance, emanc.i.p.ated from the condition of ill.u.s.tration and narration, and from the stifling conventions of cla.s.sic ballet; the new conventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicit characteristics of the medium; and the expressive means of electronic performances only add to the list of examples characteristic of a literature trying to free itself from language and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid the animistic connotation (literature as a living ent.i.ty trying to do something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned as examples of new human experiences: const.i.tution of the literary work as its own language, with the a.s.sumption that the process of appropriation would result in the realization of that particular language.

A realization, in literature as much as in science, is a description of a system which would behave as though it had this description. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses (Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but a mosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken and new rules introduced. There is no character by the name of Ulysses in the book. The t.i.tle and the chapter subt.i.tles were meant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey.

("A beautiful t.i.tle," wrote Furetire almost 300 years ago, "is the real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance of language-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writing turned out to be a practical experience in segmenting s.p.a.ce and time in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculous tragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for which the common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to the Odyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with the critics, a para-text, following the text as a context for interpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following a tradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemed no less challenged by the experience of designing their own language, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict put in words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Pa.s.sos, Laurence Sterne, and Hermann Hesse are examples from the same tradition.

Gertrude Stein was a milestone in this development. In poetry, designing a language of one's own is strikingly evident, although more difficult to discuss in pa.s.sing (as I know I am doing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comes easily to mind-invented their own language, with new words and new rules for using them. Others-and for some reason Vladimir Brodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (political articles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framed their poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not so evident.

The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum.

It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understand that there is a connection between the cubist perspective, Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theory will probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change the perspective of interpretation, though. The connection between genetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture, fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to our current concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions come in varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individual at a precise juncture of the human practical experience of self-const.i.tution as a writer or reader. Language split, and continues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rap frequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas to slang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested the need for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an admirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote some of his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by the poor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument was aesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, language loses its edge, and people living in such a deprived language environment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particular literature, can become a form of resistance. A new language, reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument for new literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; Anthony Burgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy, Malay, c.o.c.kney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian, French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fiction and poetry written in Klingon.

In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order to effectively create literary domains, people need instruments and media for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience.

It unites special types of ill.u.s.trated novels, photographic fiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East), and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers a doc.u.mented journey in order to recapture the spirit of the sixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg's collection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Using similar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes the convention of the text as a distinct human construct made up of words, but which behave differently from informative, descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhuman communication. The strategy is to place the domain of the referent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that the potential reader will have no reason to look for references in empirical reality. This act of preempting the practice of reading, based on reflex a.s.sociations in a different systematic domain, is not necessarily a warranty that such a.s.sociations will not be made.

There are many people who, either due to their cognitive condition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphors literally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish new kinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relations that signal the convention pursued. When the act of writing becomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writing experience, writers, and possible readers with them, move from the object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that in the s.p.a.ce of fiction, as much as in the s.p.a.ce of the empirical world, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on, flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing is not so much reporting about the state of the world as it is const.i.tuting a different world, along with a context for interactions in this world. The validity and coherence of such worlds stems from qualities different from those that result from applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments, syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to the practice of language within the convention of literacy.

Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing as co-composing...)

The post-modern practice of creative writing involves the intention of interaction in ways not experienced in the civilization of literacy. The written is no longer the monument that must not be altered or questioned, continued, or summarized.

Reading, seen in part as the effort to extract the truth from the text, takes on the function of projecting truth in the context of text interpretation. Actually, the a.s.sumption of this practical experience of co-creation (literary, musical, or artistic) has to do with different languages in the practice of writing and reading (painting and viewing, composing and listening, etc.), and even of co-writing (co-painting, co-composing, etc.).