Call for Submissions :: p e r f o r a t i o n s 17

An assumption of this century, Foucault's analysis of "divinatio" not- withstanding, is that the world is becoming increasingly legible -that there are one or more "readings" of the world - either through the foreclosing of textuality (what is, can be said), or through an increased understanding aligned with progress and progressivity. If the world is an encoding, then decipherment continues to reduce the unknown, and this might even be measured in terms of bandwidth, tolerances, and so forth.

On the other hand, one might argue towards an essential and irreducible illegibility, that not everything is decipherable - that there may, perhaps, be unknown or unknowable signs - as well as phenomena masquerading as signs - as well as phenomena having no relation to the symbolic at all.

This is not an argument for a "horizon" of the illegible, but a seepage that occurs perhaps within as well as without the legible. (For example, it may not be the case that every culture can be traced or translated - even in part - into every other.) Perhaps every domain is inherently illegible; perhaps foundations are not always interpretable across the board (and there for are not foundations sub specie aeternis). Consider the illegibility and illiteracy of the world, and consider the following, somewhat practical, concerns. (Any other related concerns, of course, would do as well.)

0. Issues of identity, recognition, self-reflexivity / asservation: Towhat extent does identity depend on legibility? Can one "read" anotherculture (without or without literacy in that culture) in such a manner that anomie or the sensation of exile do not occur? Can one "read" one's own culture in this manner? What is the phenmenology of anomie? Of exile?

1. Illiteracy - the inability to read and write. Every text is illegible. (But if one is literate in the language of a text, and the text is visually "clear," does that necessarily mean it is legible?) What is the post-Ivan Illich "take" on language, reading and writing?

2. Computer illiteracy - the inability to use computer technology. (Are computers legible "all the way down"? What constitutes legibility in this case?) What is the political economy of computer technology? Of computer-mediated-communication (CMC) in relation to this? (Think of the division between haves and have-nots for example. What - today - constitutes "having"? Is bandwidth a consideration?)

3. Dead Media (Bruce Sterling) - illegible remnants, archeologies.(What constitutes "media" in the first place?)

4. Infinite 'kanji"- wandering across a Borgesian world in which universals do not exist, in which each signified (in the sense of reference in the world) possesses its own sign. Nothing and everything are simultaneously interpretable in writing. All signs are illegible and legible; all are strictly indexical, ikonic, blurring the distinction.

5. Illegibility of or on or off the Net: What constitutes Internet illegibility; what constitutes Net illiteracy? Do TCP/IP and other protocols play a role here? Since virtual subjectivity is largely textual (or entirely textual, if bit-mapping is considered as such), what would be an "illegible subject"? What sorts of reception theory apply here?

6. Are cultures translatable? Is habitus a discourse or discursive formation? What is the political economy of legibility, of illegibility?

7. What constitutes misrecognition? How does misrecognition play into the above? (Misrecognition: an alternative or alternative reading, a non-intended reading, a reading-degree-zero, an absent or absent-minded reading.)

8. Reading and writing "foreign" cultures or the cultures of one's own. Reading and writing on the Net.

9. And finally, to what extent is illegibility inherent in the world at large? And what constitutes this inherency?

Alan Sondheim

contact: sondheim@panix.com or zeug@pd.org