WRITING SYSTEMS AFTERWORD The paradox is that for something like theatre to exist it is necessary that there is an event understood as an occurrence in a physical-temporal space in the presence of spectators. If theatre is language, and thought is representation, the event is an intentional act that occurs in the consciousness of the subject. This is by nature invisible, irreducible, incapable of being exhausted in any kind of form, and unsayable. Can we consider the event an intentional act? And if so, in what way then do we place the event in physicaltemporal space in relation to representation if it is already in itself an act of representation? Theatre does not exist as something external to be defined but as an experience. Is it enough to say that the theatre cannot be defined? A more complex question arises, to do not only with theatre s inability to be fixed in any object, but the impossibility of objectifying it even at the purely conceptual level, which is why if I state that the theatre cannot be defined I am saying nothing. The incapacity of the word to capture reality is not a matter of a lack of suitable tools for definition. We won t speak therefore of an object or a concept but of a process that needs to be brought into consciousness. In phenomenology this aspect of experience that cannot be separated from experience itself is known as quality. In order to approach the issue we need to start 150 151
AFTERWORD SOURCES & AUTHORITIES from the point that theatre in its connection with language can exist as quality, as an experience inseparable from experience itself. As soon as I confront the practice of writing or speaking I exit the quality and enter into duration, finitude, representation. The investigation extends towards a question of whether it is possible to countenance an act of writing beyond representation in which what is shown is language itself. I have been looking towards a particular shift between theatre as representation and theatre as recognition. This shift has to do with the difference between being and representing and concerns the unity of language and world and the possibility of elaborating language as a living form. The being of language that transcends the individual, but which expresses itself in the individual as a state of consciousness, doesn t represent itself but rather recognises itself as self-consciousness and is in a state of constant manifestation. This manifestation, however, does not exclude the invisible as interior vision. If world and language do indeed coincide and this coincidence is expressed in thought, and if thought transcends the word in a movement that is not representation but an act of recognition, the question that opens up then is one of how we can share the invisible that opens in the mind of every human. page 3 116 Particolari visibili e misurabili di INFINITO by Giovanni Anselmo Theatre of Thought opens with the first page of 116 Particolari visibili e misurabili di INFIN- ITO by Giovanni Anselmo who introduced his book as follows: 116 pages are 116 visible and measurable parts of INFINITO, conceived as an enlarged written word. The sequence order of the pages is, from top left, and in a clockwise direction for each of the first seven letters, a corner, a part of a side, a corner, a part of a side, etc., finishing with a centre. Where the inner corners of the letters are concave, their corresponding convex corners are considered. page 4 Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec The Hunting of the Snark is a poem written by Lewis Carroll in 1874. It narrates a voyage to find an inconceivable creature: We have sailed many weeks/ But a Snark, on the which we might lovingly gaze/ We have never beheld till now!. The space in which the hunting takes place is an empty square. This figure later appears in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. The page is traced by pure potentiality, closing and disclosing infinity. It is the border of a stage from which the thinkable takes shape by a certain intensity of the double (or the other side) that shows itself as the unknown. The always manifest experience of Being is uncovered. page 5 8 On Nature by Parmenides of Elea The first definition of Being can be found in this poem. The title is probably not authentic. That the poem survived is due entirely to the fact that later ancient authors, beginning with Plato, for one reason or another felt the need to quote some portion of it in the course of their own writings. Sextus Empiricus quotes thirty of the thirty-two verses of fragment 1. Simplicius appears to have possessed a good copy from which he quoted extensively in his commentaries on Aristotle s Physics and De Caelo. Thanks to Simplicius lengthy transcription, we ap- 152 153
SOURCES & AUTHORITIES SOURCES & AUTHORITIES pear to have the whole of Parmenides major metaphysical argument demonstrating the attributes of true reality. The poem opens with an introduction inspired by the Mysteries. There are the gates of the paths of Night and Day, and lintel and a threshold of stone surround them, and the aetherial gates themselves are filled with great doors. And the goddess received me kindly, and took my right hand with her hand, and uttered speech and thus addressed me: welcome. Come, I shall tell you, and do you listen and convey the story, what routes of inquiry alone there are for thinking: the one - that is and that cannot not be. The passage should not be treated as an allegory, but rather as a truthful account of a religious experience which had taken the traditional form of initiation. The poem is divided into two parts: The Way of Truth (Aletheia) and The Way of Appearance or Opinion of the Mortals (Doxa). In The Way of Truth Parmenides writes: To be, and to be thought about, are one and the same. Because the same thing is there for thinking and for being. And it is all one to me. Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again. But since all things have been named light and night, and these have been applied according to their powers to these things and to those, all is full of light and obscure night together, of both equally, since for neither is it the case that nothing shares in them. And you shall know both the nature of aether and all. The signs in the aether, the destructive works of the splendid sun s pure torch, and whence they cameto-be, and you should learn the wandering works of the roundeyed moon, and its nature, and you shall also know the surrounding sky, whence it grew and how Necessity did guide and shackle it, to hold the limits of the stars. The definition of Being is the basis of later definitions such as that of the atom in Democritus or of the Idea in Plato, and the definition of the Cogito in Descartes. page 41, 43 Tractatus logico-philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein Parmenides concept of Being is assumed in Wittgenstein s idea of language. Tractatus logicophilosophicus has an emblematic beginning: Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already considered the thoughts that are expressed in it or at least similar thoughts. page 9 40, 44 Egyptian Grammar by Alan H. Gardiner A straightforward way of understanding Tractatus logicophilosophicus would be to leaf through Gardiner s list, contained in his Egyptian Grammar, which as well as indicating what Wittgenstein was looking to define in his theory of refiguration leads to one of the extraordinary discoveries of the nineteenth century, the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. page 42 The Rosetta Stone And The Rebirth Of Ancient Egypt by John Ray The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 when French soldiers working on the foundation of a fortress in the city of Rosetta came across a black granite stone bearing a trilingual inscription in Greek, demotic (older Coptic), and hieroglyphic. The stone was proved from its Greek portion to be a decree in honour of the young king Ptolemy. The part bearing the hieroglyphs was badly preserved. This and the fact that for a long period hieroglyphs were considered to be writing with an exclusively symbolic function are reasons why the attention of scholars was directed to the demotic section. The stone was transported to England but a copy remained with the celebrated French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy who handed it on to the Swedish diplomat Åkerblad. Within two months Åkerblad succeeded, by a comparison of the Greek and the demotic texts, in identifying in the latter all the proper names occurring in the former, beside recognizing, alphabetically written in the correct Coptic, the words for temples and for Greeks. The next great advance was made by Thomas Young, when he understood that the demotic and the hieroglyphic system of writing are intimately connected and while approving of Åkerblad s results so far as they went, he quickly realized that demotic teemed with signs that could not possibly be explained as alphabetic. He was also cer- 154 155
SOURCES & AUTHORITIES SOURCES & AUTHORITIES tain that both demotic and hieroglyphic consisted largely of phonetic elements. Meanwhile Champollion, who was destined to win immortal fame as the decipherer of the hieroglyphs, had as yet but few positive results to record. Close study had brought him the conviction that the three kinds of Egyptian writing (hieratic, known as cursive writing, demotic or rapid script, and the hieroglyphs) were mere modifications of one another and when, in 1821 he printed his brochure of the hieratic script, he had no difficulty in converting the demotic groups known to him into hieratic, and thence into hieroglyphic. The name of Ptolemy was transcribed into both hieroglyphic and demotic and from his further researches he transcribed into hieroglyphic a name which he rightly conjectured to be that of Cleopatra. Åkerblad had read the demotic name of Ptolemy alphabetically and comparing the demotic signs with that of the cartouche of Ptolemy he concluded that the hieroglyphs could also, at least on occasion, be alphabetical. The value attached by him to the individual hieroglyphs were now confirmed by the cartouche of Cleopatra, for in both cartouches the sign for P, for O1 and for L were found standing in exactly the position where they were to be expected. page 45, 46 On Language as Such and on the Language of Man and The Task of the Translator by Walter Benjamin In On Language as Such and on the Language of Man we find a distinction between a particular language and language in general. Particular language is any sort of language, notation, or code that is in some way reversible. Language in general, on the other hand, would be a condition, something shared across all languages, but which is not reducible to any. The Egytian hieroglyphs, during the adventure of their decoding, were obviously considered a particular language. As such their reversibility was presumed. There are a few particular factors that should be mentioned when we talk about hieroglyphs. The first is that we are confronting a language used by 1% of the population, the Pharaoh (considered at that time a divinity), and his scribes. The second is that even if some signs are phonograms, hieroglyphic is not a spoken language, in the way this is understood nowadays, as confirmed by the fact that the vowels are not written. There is not a particular language in our knowledge with such characteristics. If we take into consideration the proposition, 4.002 Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is, by Wittgenstein. we can say that the condition in which we find ourselves facing the Rosetta Stone is not so different from the manner in which we find ourselves confronting the question as to how it is that any word, including those words whose meaning I already know, signifies. The mystery of the hieroglyphs, understood here as language in general, is the secret of the language that we put to work in this moment, and in order to decipher it we have to ask ourselves firstly how it is that a word relates to its meaning. No reference point exists that permits us to interrogate language from outside of language. In this sense every theory of language should be accompanied by a theory of translation. page 158 116 Particolari visibili e misurabili di INFINITO by Giovanni Anselmo The book ends with the last page of 116 Particolari visibili e misurabili di INFINITO. The last nine pages are respectively the four extreme parts (top, bottom, right, left) of the outer circumstances, the same four parts of the inner circumstances and the centre of the letter O. 156 157
COLOPHON Theatre of Thought ISBN: 978 954 587 155 9 Concept: Snejanka Mihaylova Editing: Céline Wouters and Snejanka Mihaylova Text: Snejanka Mihaylova Design: Céline Wouters Publisher: Critique & Humanism Publishing House Translation: Lindy Baker edited by Joe Kelleher Printed and bound at Snel Graphics, Liège (BE) Edition of 1000 The publication is developed with the logic and visualisation of the Egg and the Butterfly writing systems by Ayumi Higuchi, and the Crystal writing system by Phil Baber. Made in dialogue with Gertjan van Gennip and Jan van der Stappen. Thanks to, Giovanni Anselmo for staging the infinity, Lewis Carroll for the discovery of the Snark and for the Map of the Ocean, Parmenides of Elea for the definition of Being, Ludwig Wittgenstein for the intuition of unity of language and the world, Walter Benjamin for the idea of pure language, Alan H. Gardiner for the homonymous list in which the world and life are one, and George Perec for the last words in this book. Made possible with the financial support of Collina and Son (BG), and hetveem theater (NL). All efforts have been made to contact the rightful owners with regard to copyrights and permissions. Please contact kx@bsph.org, with any requests and queries. All other content Snejanka Mihaylova and Critique&Humanism Publishing House, 2011. Critique&Humanism Publishing House 11 Slaveykov Square, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria 158
One day I shall certainly have to start using words to uncover what is real, to uncover my reality.