“The
essence of language is to be articulated. Such articulations can be as smooth
as one wishes; they are no less divisive for all that. In order to language to
function, signs must be isolable one from the other (otherwise they would not
be repeatable), At every level (phonetic, semantic, syntactic, and so on)
language has its own laws of combination and continuity, but its primary
material is constructed of irreducible atoms (phonemes for spoken language, and
for written, signs whose nature varies according to the system in question: in
alphabetic writing, for example, the distinctive unit is the letter). Whoever
says ‘articulation’ always says, in the final instance, ‘divisible into minimal
units’: the articulus is the
particle. Language is the hierarchical combination of bits. Liquid, on the
contrary … is indivisible” Yve Alain Bois, 'Liquid Words', in Formless: A Users
Guide, p124.
Tests from a series of new ‘Live Writings’ generated from my experience as ‘Seer-in-Residence’ (see posts below). Live Writing (working title) is a new method of producing writing that I am currently playing with, provoked specifically through my experience as a Seer-in-Residence. Still very much a working approach at present, my intent is to explore the possibility of a form of live writing operating at the nascent point of words coming into being before collapsing, where language appears somehow reluctant to become solidified into coherent sentences or legible meaning.
As with the Close
Readings, I am considering how strategies of skimming and the visual
encounter with words 'close up' produces other kinds of meaning, where words
are not always distinguishable as discrete signifying units, but instead appear
liquid, their sense blurred. I am thinking about the possibility of a language
for reflecting the not-quite-seen or captured, for reflecting the sense of the
glimpsed. Visually, the live writings perhaps point to these moments of
blindness within perception, to ellipses and eclipses within witnessing,
rendered as a not-yet of language punctured through with gaps and
holes.
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Emma Cocker, Live Writing (Feeling it for You)
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Presented as a poem or even score of sorts, the live writings perhaps
also intimate towards the possibility of reading or vocalisation.
Blindness becomes breathlessness; the not being-able-to-fully-grasp of language articulated through syncopated speech-acts, assemblages of plosive
phonemes and vowel sounds, of hyperventilations and gasps.
My experience of the Seers-in-Residence project has also provoked me to think a little more about the relation between eclipses and ellipsis, which I now hope to develop further through new visual/textual work (for example see test below) and new writing. Both eclipses and ellipsis indicate towards an obscuring, something hidden from view. Ékleipsis — an ancient Greek word referring to a state of abandonment or downfall, the ceasing of something to exist. Élleipsis — an omission. Falling short … the dot dot dot that marks the space of awkward silence or of momentary pausing, the removal of extraneous detail, the dissipation of unfinished thought.
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Emma Cocker, Eclipsing Ellipsis, 2013
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Emma Cocker, Eclipsing Ellipsis, 2013
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