Exploding Tongues: Language, Art, and the Russian Avant-garde

BookENDS: A Working Theory of Textuality as Cultural Dominant, 1912-

Textuality and the Nullification of Dimension


This page marks both a beginning and an end. It is an introduction to the assignments, projects and resources contained in the project, as well as a summary of ideas that resulted from a semester's process of inquiry.

We began our course by considering two artifacts: Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square" (1915) and Aleksei Kruchenykh's first zaum ("transrational") poem "Dyr bul shchyl" (1913) Each is a well-recognized cultural monument in the history of modernism. The "Black Square," an unruly gesture in crudely simplified geometric form, redacts any referentiality with an overlay of thick, black, oil paint; "Dyr bul shchyl" (1913) upends language as such by substituting primordial sounds for poetry in lines scribbled hastily above a tangled thicket of an illustration. Malevich and Kruchenykh were friends and collaborators. The question was whether these two phenomena were parallel, loosely inspired by each other, or whether there was some more fundamental relationship between them, causal or otherwise. 

Abstraction has been described as an idea. In a landmark 2012-13 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, "Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925," Curator Leah Dickerman assembled works representing a trans-Atlantic network of artists and theorists, whose collective efforts and social connections, more than any individual discoveries of feats of genius, were responsible for the emergent realization of abstraction as a defining feature of 20th Century visual arts. If one accepts Dickerman's reasonable presupposition, that abstraction was an idea, a shared thought that could transcend any material or formal instance, then making the connection between zaum poetry and Suprematist painting becomes quite easy: each cultural practitioner in his/her/their own way grasped the notion as it spread through their social networks, and sought in the materials, forms and processes of their own media to achieve its realization.

This course in its investigations seeks a different route between artists of different disciplines, bypassing the transmission of ideas. It is inspired by a metaphor less compelling than Dickerman's social network diagram, but one that is, perhaps, more germane to the period under investigation. The goal here is to understand how a few, focused efforts by a very small number of cultural practitioners could effect a wholesale collapse and regeneration of socio-cultural communication by strategically (though perhaps not consciously) targeting the nerve center, the most central nexus point through which the most diverse modalities of expression and communication could travel.

The scenario that emerges from inquiry is one of highly specific, almost accidental, contingencies of personal biography, idiosyncratic processes, and random found material that leverage, nevertheless, immense cultural processes to follow, because the changes occurred simultaneously on the orders of parole (speech) and langue (language). The efforts by the Russian Avant-garde to “emancipate” (words, sounds, meanings, objects, etc.) amounted to an explosion in meaning that reverberated indefinitely in emanating spherical waves in historical time and place, and impacted all things, however minutely, in its wake. 

The metaphor of cultural explosion presents a much different set of tasks for researchers. Unlike a social network, which suggests a diffuse series of phenomena over time and space, the prospect of a singular moment or "big bang" event requires a reduction in time, scale, and scope, as well as material specificity as one approaches that occurrence. A period, such as 1910-1925, becomes less important than the compressed moments of late 1912 and early 1913. The global scale of cultural transmission, enabled by travel, publications, and new forms of communication, reduce to the effects of late-evening collaboration between a few people at a worktable creating irregular, limited-edition objects with their hands. 

This approach to the general topic of modernity and abstraction has been greatly facilitated by another collection of artifacts, Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art (2017) a book publication by Curator Nancy Perloff of the Getty Research Institute, and accompanying interactive website and tagged materials in an online collection of Russian Futurist Books. 

Thesis

The conclusion of our collaborative work is that a strong case for significant causal connection between the verbal and visual languages of "Dyr bul shchyl" and "Black Square" is to be found in the particular materiality of the "artist books" of the 1910s, especially in the collaborative products issued by Kruchenykh himself, working with many prominent artists and writers who went on, like Malevich, to gain fame and notoriety for their respective investigations in "abstraction." The impact of this work upon the visual arts was to displace mimetic representation and the predominant understanding of a picture frame since the Renaissance as a "window on the world" with a different operative metaphor of a canvas as a page, with characters instead of images, unmarked paper instead of implied space, and margins to distinguish between significant and insignificant areas for meaning. 

To grasp the significance of this narrower interpretation of the Russian branch of modernism, one must take into account a number of important scholarly contributions over the past several decades on the specificities of written and printed language, as well as the material form of the codex itself as a kind of language, since its widespread distribution and acceptance after Gutenberg.   
 

Facing Type: Johanna Drucker and the Resurrection of the Printed Word

As a linguistic phenomenon, the book presents new and different challenges to its interpreters. In The Visible Word (1994) Joahanna Drucker argues forcefully for a reconsideration of the Saussurean/Formalist/Prague Structuralist theoretical framework, properly identifying this line of inquiry as most directly relevant, while impeaching its findings on the grounds of an exclusive attention to sound and speech over visual and physical qualities of books. Those in the best position to know, in other words, were blind to the theoretical and methodological implications of their observations. The approach, following Drucker, is, perhaps paradoxically, to reapply the same theoretical discoveries of the moment, but to do so without the original methodological prejudice toward oral speech over written (inscribed and printed) language. 

The rhetorical device of animacy, applying terms of humanistic discourse, with moving political connotations, to elicit sympathy for the fate of writing within a biased discourse. 

The paradox was that it was the inscription, the written text, which was ultimately subjected to analysis and not the elusive, ephemeral sound. The relationship of dependence went largely unnoted, until the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. But throughout the nineteenth century, writing aided linguistics with the modesty and unassuming propriety of a well-trained servant. 
     Writing, then, through the very basis of linguistic study, was considered insignificant and invisible, as beneath mention or notice. The indispensable adjunct to linguistic scholarship, without which there would have been no object of study, writing went unnamed and unrecognized. Not only were the forms and material properties of writing, or even of written texts, not a distinct object of inquiry, but its very existence, the fact that it served as language, went unacknowledged.


Like a language, with which it is contiguous, a book is both an entity and the fulfillment of an expectation. From Ferdinand de Saussure we accept the methodological distinction between langue and parole (language and speech), as a means to consider the book in its phenomenological tensions. The book as system (langue) is transparent, a means to an end. It operates as any signifier, subordinate to a presumed reality toward which it points by means of a complex network of conventions and shared practices. The book as entity or artifact, unique in instance, on the other hand, resists the enslavement to social practices of its functional role. It becomes a singular instance of speech (parole). 

By analogy, and as a member of the series of linguistic phenomena, the book can be interpreted as a word. The conceptual modeling as it was left by Saussure and his students too simply focused on the autonomic status of the sign as such. The network of correspondences was readily illustrated by condensing elements to simplified forms as entities, but it would take further work by other theorists thereafter to elaborate the necessary complexity of signification. Jakobson and Trubetskoy resolved words as bundles of sounds with distinctive features, and elaborated the minute differences between otherwise identical signifiers that speakers of a language would use to indicate wholly unrelated phenomena in the world. The foundation and premises of linguistic investigation were placed on new ground by Saussure. The premises had to be elaborated, however, to keep its insights from relapsing into commonplace, intuitive misunderstandings. 

Kruchenykh and the practice of book arts. Dyr bul shchyl. 


Velemir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. "The Letter as Such" (Bukva kak takovaia). 1913. 

The word is still not a value, it is still merely tolerated.
Otherwise, why would they clothe it in a gray prisoner's uniform? You have seen the letters in their words - lined up in a row, humiliated, with cropped hair, and all equally colorless, gray - these are not letters, these are brands! But ask any wordwright and he will tell you that a word written in individual longhand or composed with a particular typeface bears no resemblance at all to the same word in a different inscription. 

 

There are two propositions:

  1. That mood changes one's longhand during the process of writing.
  2. That the longhand peculiarly modified by one's mood conveys that mood to the reader, independently of the words. Also, one has to pose the question of graphic signs, visual signs, or simply tactile signs as if felt by the hand of a blind man. Of course, it is not mandatory that the wordwright be also the copyist of a handwritten book: indeed it would be better if the wordwright entrusted this job to an artist.

 


Poetics becomes a way for cultural practitioners to expand the range of expression. 
The experience making books was formative for the members of the AG, even while bookmaking is not considered an endeavor in and of itself. 
Bookmaking is a language
1. To separate, methodologically, consideration of book production and consumption as a regularized system of meaning and individual instances of book creation. 
So first: what IS the grammar of bookmaking? Following Saussure, this should be the sole focus of inquiry. Things are only meaningful to the extent they play a functional role in the system, and not otherwise.
Second: what is the system of reified made meanings in codicy as parole? In poetry, symmetries actuate non communicative aspects of language. Symmetries and other regularities are the particular instance of how languages are reified, but not all reification has to be symmetrical or regular. 
The disturbance and transfer from langue to parole is dependent upon the medium. In poetry other means that tend toward entropy achieve the same outcome, while remaining recognizably poetic: metaphor, strikingly unexpected, illogical juxtapositions of words and concepts. (Cf Malevich's illogical paintings)
In book-making, which is already formalized and regular, accentuation of materiality can be achieved through very high value deluxe editions AND the demonstrative opposite: the aggressive nullification of anticipated (normal) order. 
For bookmaking to become an expressive system in and of itself, the various components have to allow for marked oppositions to manifest, and to establish what those distinctions might represent as an object of signification. Does this happen?
The convention of book as an utterance channels the linguistic message through the semantics of the text only. The artist book redirects artistic message through the entire book. 
The poetic function activates extra-linguistic media for primary or secondary expression. As a by-product, it expands for others that domain. 

From Langue and Parole to Literacy and Textuality: The Contra-Bution of Gerald Janecek

Gerald Janecek published "Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg" in the catalogue The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934 (2002) by the Museum of Modern Art, which accompanied an exhibit by the same name (a complete pdf file of the catalogue can be accessed here).

Saussure's establishment of language as a system rested upon the supposition that the matter of language is conceptual; that it resides in the minds of its speakers; and that it is shared within a speech community--the speakers of the language. That supposition is available as well to underpin a theory of written language, though the more immediate assignment of text to an opposing "material" category has precluded extension of Saussure's method. The tangible, immediate material qualities of written text, and the alluring, engaging  processes of its production and dissemination serve as a theoretical red herring in this case.

Refocused attention from one form of realized language (speech) to another (text), distracts from their shared duality. Both are subject to the same methodological distinction between instance and system, where instance is defined as the individual and infinite sum total of all actual historical utterances, and system is understood to be the rules and patterns of occurrence as conceived by all speakers of the language. Text, for all its inherent materiality, carries with it a relatively brief history and minute pool of literates, as compared with verbal speech. It nevertheless has acquired its own regularities of practice (production, distribution and consumption of written words), that accompany each instance, and render significant that which would otherwise remain incomprehensible. These regularities include aspects and dimensions well outside the immediate scope of reading: how does one hold a book? What is the process of leafing through pages? What is the relationship, if any, between characters in lines and illustrations? 

 

If Kruchenykh had consciously set out to dismantle (nowadays we might say "deconstruct") the legacy of Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1397-1468), it is unlikely that he could have done it more completely. Gutenberg's legacy of linear movable type and mass-produced books is such an innate part of modern Western culture that we are almost blind to its effects on our thought patterns and cultural assumptions. Yet these effects are arguably profound. As Marshall McCluhan has speculated, "A child in any Western milieu is surrounded by an abstract explicit visual technology of uniform time and uniform continuous space in which 'cause' is efficient and sequential, and things move and happen on single planes and in successive order."


 

In a series of remarkable book works of 1912 to 1920, Kruchenykh and his collaborators challenged this legacy in an unprecedentedly complete way, step-by-step departing from our European expectations about what a twentieth-century book should be. 


Drucker, p13. 
Drucker's attention is upon the blank category of materiality, and it is triggered by practitioners and theorists whose intentions were to flout conventions of text. Put differently, an examination of textuality might acknowledge an important historical and theoretical break in the moment of the early 1910's, influenced by the recent insights of Saussure, that wrenched apart the coherent domain of material textuality, and exposed the otherwise imperceptible dual nature of text as literacy and textuality. (Codicy)
Drucker's critique returns writing as such to a central position of consideration 

This page references: