A Universal Language

I was very tempted to write my response in Wingdings font, but I figured that it would only be funny for a little bit and then it would be a pain for everyone to figure out exactly what I was saying—which seems to be the point of Ngai’s article on one level. Gimmick and comedy go hand-in-hand, as do gimmicks and labor. She notes that a gimmick is “both a wonder and a trick…a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain, whose affective intensity for us increases precisely because of this ambivalence” (469). Page 493 of Ngai’s article has a great list of the paradoxes that gimmicks possess (saves labor but intensifies labor, works too hard yet works too little, seems outdated though futuristic, etc.). Based upon this argument, is Book from the Ground a gimmick? Possibly. I think Russ’s post makes a strong point regarding this idea based upon the amount of cultural, digital, and technical knowledge required to make sense of certain icons found in the book. We get the initial impression that labor will be saved because we don’t actually have to read anything. However, if you were to consider all of the time spent accruing knowledge of “contemporary life” to get to the point where one is proficient enough to understand all of the icons in the book, there is no way that it is less labor intensive. Additionally, for me, it took much longer than I anticipated to read the book. Icons didn’t save me any labor on my weekly reading assignment.

Regarding the whole concept of a universal language that Russ points out, I’m really interested in the text’s relationship to music. After all, what is a piece of sheet music aside from an arranged collection of icons on a page that communicates an aural idea from one person to another in a universally applicable format? Just like writing or the iconography used in Book from the Ground, musical notation is a matter of translation, especially for those individuals trained in the discipline of sight singing who do not require an instrument to help formulate the correct notes. I know that there is a fundamental difference between words and music in what they can convey (though that is something we can discuss). Still, if we are talking about a universal icon system, we have one, and Xu Bing points to it by giving us several musical passages on the very first page (see the end of this post for links to each of these songs). By seeing this connection at the very outset, I got the impression that this text is not very different from something that we are used to (i.e. music); the alien aspect is that the iconographic representation is used to replace a different style of signification system.

Translating music from the written to the audible is a simpler process than translating icons or pictographs into their meanings because it requires less cultural knowledge. On page one, Xu Bing gives us the time signature, the key, the rhythm, and the notes of the bird’s song. The only thing he doesn’t give us is the tempo, so that is up to interpretation based upon real-life knowledge of bird songs. The only other point of confusion in translating the bird’s song is that there are little breaks at irregular points, sometimes at the end of a measure and sometimes right in the middle of one. In my “performance,” I interpreted them to be slight breaks in the song, though it is impossible to tell how long those breaks may be.

The most interesting part of this whole enterprise is the alarm clock’s jingle. Bing eliminates the grounding elements of musical notation—the staff, the key, the time signature—and only includes several eighth notes, a few sixteenth notes, and a quarter note.

Using the fact that the bird seems to duet with the alarm clock (which is corroborated in the translation at the end of Book about Book from the Ground), I made the inference that both tunes must be in the same key and took a guess at what pitches the notes might represent based upon the downward facing stems, their relative positions to each other, and the fact that I had definite notes for the harmony, meaning that the alarm clock’s melody shouldn’t clash with the bird’s accompaniment. The result of this little experiment produced something pretty cool. The alarm tone is not just a throwaway line of random notes, but a classical-sounding tune reminiscent, for me at least, of Vivaldi’s “Spring” (though it’s not that exact piece).

The elimination of more familiar, grounding elements along with a motion towards using contextual clues in this duet between bird and alarm clock provides readers a type of guide for the rest of the book’s project: some of the more traditional elements of reading/writing will be absent, leading to a less precise understanding of every aspect of the story, leaving room for interpretation and experimentation.

Yes, digital iconography replacing words is a foreign system to us, but Bing provides us a with the methodology for reading on the very first page using a more familiar universal translation system. Maybe, then, the book isn’t so much of a gimmick after all.

 

The Songs:

Note that for whatever reason, the songs don’t play for me when I open them on my phone. Everything works correctly when I use my laptop. Also, I’m pretty sure I transcribed everything accurately, but I may have made an error or two somewhere. My apologies to the bird if I did.

Initial bird (according to the translation at the end of Book about Book from the Ground): https://onlinesequencer.net/652824

 

Long bird passage: https://onlinesequencer.net/652823

 

Alarm: https://onlinesequencer.net/652334

 

Alarm/bird duet: https://onlinesequencer.net/652807

 

Bonus song I made up because I was having way too much fun with this instead of doing actual work: https://onlinesequencer.net/652400

Sign, Icon, Emoji

I’d like to consider for a moment Ch’ien’s description of how icons function:

Icons communicate meaning to an individual without his or her fluency in a specific or local linguistic culture. They have the capacity to moderate behaviors in global spaces as they have nonlocal specificity. (38)

“For anyone who imagines a global world,” Ch’ien continues, “icons might represent a possibility for a universal language” (38). I’m interested in how this translates into Xu Bing’s desire for “pursuing the possibility of a universally intelligible system” (Ch’ien 63): what are the assumptions that drive this project? Is a universally intelligible system of communication desirable?

It doesn’t seem to me possible to detach signs completely (whether words or emoji) from the contextual (i.e., local) associations they accrue over time. We need only think of how the eggplant emoji has taken on phallic associations, so that for some discourse communities and in some contexts it can signify an eggplant or the category of “vegetables” more generally, whereas other interpretative communities and contexts turn on its phallic signification. These multiple usages overlap temporally: one “meaning” does not supplant another. A sign’s signification in this sense would appear contingent upon the discourse community in which it is used and the prior associations it has accumulated. Signs are understood through an interpretative grid developed prior to an agent’s encounter with the sign or the system of signification.

Xu Bing seems to know this, based on his statements about comprehension (see the extract in Ch’ien on p.43). “You will be able to read [Book from the Ground] as long as you have experience of contemporary life”, Xu Bing posits (qtd in. Ch’ien 43), but what exactly does “contemporary life” entail here? As Ch’ien notes, a “language” such as Xu Bing’s “does not represent a shared sense of one culture – ideologically or aesthetically” (44). To be sure, Marcel Danesi has pointed out in his recent book, The Semiotics of Emoji, that the “thumbs-up” emoji takes on very different meanings (or “signifieds”) in different cultural contexts; while for many this symbol might take on positive valences, it is “hideously offensive in parts of the Middle East, West Africa, Russia and South America” (31). Of course, this is not to mention the limitations of a “digital divide” or the prerequisite of the sort of “technical capital” described by Brock et al. in our reading from a couple of weeks back – both of which might play a role in restricting who is able and who is unable to access this information or read it “properly”. This is to say that emoji, and other icons, do not completely transcend local fields of interpretation.

But Book from the Ground also requires another kind of cultural proficiency: think of all the references to “high” art – for example: Duchamp’s Fountain (25, 56), Andy Warhol’s Munroe (42), Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (43); and works of theatre such as The Phantom of the Opera, Lion King, Cats (43) – although these could arguably have become “middle brow” today as a result of their increased circulation or, as a result of the processes whereby an artwork accrues cultural capital, such as by being awarded an Oscar (an event referenced on pages 72-73). Likewise, there’s an assumed knowledge of works of pop culture, from movies like Silence of the Lambs (21) to Batman (72), to games like Mario and a game contributing to the Marvel universe (110-11). But think also of the references to economic fields, which requires that readers recognize brand logos (say, of postal services [45] or commercial products [[43]) or entire mythologies built around the stock market: i.e., the signifying system of Wall Street, which associates a bull (both verbally and as an image) with price increases and a bear with stocks that are heading down (this same signification system is used in Book from the Ground on p. 21). If Xu Bing develops a signification system that doesn’t require a prior knowledge of localized languages, it does require a “cultured” subject that is aware of and participates in a field of consumer capitalism.

This is not to say that Book from the Ground is entirely complicit in representing (and potentially reproducing) this capitalist subject, but that it might be a problem on our end to limit our understanding of what this text does to prior systems of signification. In other words, by interpreting Xu Bing’s project in terms of the development of a universal system of signification (even though Xu Bing’s statements encourage this reading), we might be missing the potential of a text like this to transform the associations we already bring to signification systems like icons and emoji. I’m going on, so I won’t delve into it too much here, but this is where I find Ngai’s argument to be very useful and convincing: if one dimension of a gimmick is to save us labor (e.g., as a “speedy transmission of meaning” [Ch’ien 45]), then Book from the Ground prevents this function by asking readers to sit down and spend some time with these funny little pictures. I think it’s possible to bring to this text all of the antinomies of the gimmick Ngai identifies, and I think in so doing it’s possible to read in Book from the Ground a use of signifying systems and their corresponding interpretative expectations that is more complex, and potentially more transformative, than a project of developing a universal system of communication could be.*

*If only because I can’t seem to imagine a world in which a global system of communication is possible unless some sort of regime is developed that requires all the participants of this signifying system (which raises its own sets of questions about inclusivity) to learn a common skillset and set of indexical associations. Perhaps it’s possible to argue that the English language, and the people and institutions that require people to become increasingly proficient in this language as a sort of lingua franca, is already performing such a regimentation. This process of instituting a lingua franca enacts a specific kind of violence: one that inevitably changes the interpretative frameworks that a person uses to interpret their world, and which, regardless of whether it intends to or not, begins a process of systematically annihilating difference (which I take to be undesirable and aggressive).