Materia Prima, Text-as-Image

It is with the materiality of language, or Materia Prima, that this article concerns itself, reflecting upon the ‘surface’ of text, as an image in its own right. The oral or spoken/auditory/acoustic qualities of language have long been held to be aesthetically central to literature and poetry, not material words. The philosopher Richard Shusterman describes this phenomenon as a lack of attention to those instances when the ‘visible is visible’, this phrase relying upon a distinction between two meanings of the word ‘visible’. The first suggests being ‘able to be seen’, while the second suggests the ‘conspicuous’ or ‘strikingly manifest’ aspect(s) of the seen (or passive and active modes of the visible). The printed surface of language, where the ‘visible is visible’, has traditionally been viewed as irrelevant in philosophical accounts of language, from Plato to Wittgenstein, where, frequently, language is broken down only into ‘the sound aspect’ and ‘the meaning aspect’. However, this article will argue that the knowledge that artists, designers, typographers and illustrators bring is that the material word is a crucial partner in the production of meaning. This article engages with those practitioners whose work interfaces with these concerns, both directly and indirectly.

Article examining the potential of material explorations of language in the form of typographic/artistic practice, as a method of philosophical reflection about language. This involves a synthesis of methodologies drawn from both theory and practice.

This research is concerned with articulating a new theory about the materiality of language (entitled ‘Materia Prima’). This new methodology involves exploring/making examples of self-reflexive ‘visible’ language, which in turn offer insight into philosophies of language from an aesthetic/experiential perspective: constituting an immanent critique of language, rather than a descriptive one. The argument made is that philosophical theories about language cannot be separated from their enactment at the level of the sensory attributes and experience of language. To this end, alongside historical examples, the article contains images of textual experiments, made by the author, which are intended to complement and extend philosophical discourses by using accompanying those theoretical analyses, with ‘enacted’ examples (in the form of text-as-image, or Materia Prima).