On the recognitions of asemic poetry as language

1 Authorial hands

The processes and procedures of textuality are distanced from the act of writing by the printing press – a change that marks the beginning of technological determinism. Both visual poetry and asemic writing stand on territory defined, either explicitly or implicitly, by the operations and techniques of machinery, the efficiencies of assembly line fabrication, and the ongoing heritage of the industrial revolution impacting the arts. This relationship is a surprise: the distinction of poetry from the operations and technical processes of industrial production and mechanical reproducibility are superficially stark. Machinery first impacted the production of books via the printing press – an automated process of reproduction and systemic reproducibility for writing that utterly eliminated the illuminated manuscript and the handiwork of the scribe. Hand production was supplanted by the operations of machinery and the typographer, as Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan noted about Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of his printing press in ∼1439:

Typography as the first mechanization of handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge … For it cannot be sufficiently explained that the mechanization of the ancient handicraft of the scribe was itself “applied” knowledge. And the application consisted in the visual arresting and splitting up of the scribal action. That is why, once this solution [the printing press] to the problem of mechanization was worked out, it could be extended to the mechanizing of many other actions. (McLuhan 1962: 184)

This first automation lies at the origin of the later transformations of handicraft and manual labor by automation. All the varieties of visual poetry challenge the traditional bias of poetics for meter, rhetoric, and the primacy of language that have emerged in the shadow of the printing press (and become dominant since the invention of graphic design in the twentieth century), asemic writing especially, by engaging machinery via their insistence on being hand-made, manually written, uniquely produced works – a specific valence that evokes the Romantic rejection of industrialization and the automation of human labor which becomes the assemply line factory and anticipates contemporary machine learning. However, the “intentional function” is apparently in conflict with this increased concern with poetic composition and arrangement on the page because it suppresses the visuality of writing. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press has a tangential relationship with the parabola of poetics whose concerns for human action and interpretation dominate the apprehension of the work: standardized letterforms eliminate those subjecting and personal idiosyncrasies of script, composition, and illumination that are emphasized in visual and asemic poetry. This transition from the medieval scribe to the printing press informs the role of handwriting and manual composition in visual and asemic poetry (no matter how the work is actually distributed to readers). Because this first example of European industrial automation happened in the fifteenth century, at a time of general illiteracy long before the industrial revolution that began in the Enlightenment (Eisenstein 1980), it is less a model for the transformations created by nineteenth century industrialization than an early portent for the machine’s impacts on traditional forms of craft labor.

Mechanical systems have been conceived as antagonistic to issues of poetics since at least the Romantic poet William Blake’s revival of the illuminated book at the conclusion of the eighteenth century; this long history continues into the present. The contemporary decline of handwriting and non-mechanical text (Schwenger 2019: 2–4) is the culmination of this centuries-old process of transition from the manual to the mechanical. The standardization that the printing press and typography necessarily entails acts to minimize or even eliminate the idiosyncratic expressions of the personal from the composition of the page, leaving only the material trappings offered by vocabulary and the specifics of phrasing. Authorial “voice” replaces the literal authorial “hand” in the identification of texts, enabling its return as collage where printed materials can provide material for reassembly, placing the hand-drawn in counterpoint to the mechanically reproduced.

The assumed opposition between poetry and machinery that is characteristic of works produced since the start of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century finds an analog in the systematic medievalism reanimated by William Morris (MacCarthy 2014) and the various Arts and Crafts movements (Kaplan 1987: 59) inspired by John Ruskin’s objections to industrialization (Pevsner 2011: 36–57). This is the same Romantic rejection of the industrial factory apparent in Blake’s work that leads to an emphasis on traditional craft as a moral fixative for the impacts of industrialization. The refusal of distinctions between high art and low craft, and the use of structural forms as decoration brings the consequences of this rejection of machinery into focus aesthetically, as design historian Wendy Kaplan noted about the Arts and Crafts movements: “manual training was both a reaction against industrialization and a response to it” (Kaplan 1987: 301). The empirical features (drawing, collage, handwriting) that cue the signification of “handmade” in asemic poetry operate in the same ways that visible hammer marks do in Arts and Crafts productions. The “intentional function” that is justified by these signs of a “human touch” enables a recognition of this lineage and the ideology it suggests are symptoms of art produced in the aftermath of the machine’s dominance. It reveals a lineage of responses to automated labor by human art that continues into the present. That the naming of “asemic poetry” by poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich in 1997 (Touchon 2022) happened at the conclusion of the twentieth century when the Internet emerged as a popular, ubiquitous medium is not a coincidence, but is instead an example of the continuing tension between ideologies of traditional expressive aesthetics, and the automated systems and autonomous potentials of digital technology. Asemic poetry demonstrates how human interpretation remains central to esthetic production despite mechanical or digital automation potentially challenging the role of human action in producing art.

Neither visual nor asemic poetry are a direct reflection of an inherent antipathy to technology; instead, they are a resentiment from the “torn rags of lines with gaping holes in between” (Flusser 2011: 136) that philosopher Vilém Flusser identifies with the death knell of handwritten language as a reflection of the technical aesthetics imposed by machines that process language and images becoming culturally dominant. His analysis evokes the fragmentation and collaging of type-elements by Mayer (2014: 47–142), or Norman Ives (Hill 2020), or Touchon (2019) as much as it does the fragmentation and illegibility common to asemic writing by Giovenale (2019), Helmes (2019), or Gaze (2021). Each very different, these poets all nevertheless deploy common strategies that transform language into visuality, drawing attention to the instability of its articulation. The range of expressions they create describe not only the asemic, but the legible as well (Figure 1). Formal morphologies in asemic poetry reproduce the “intentional function” of legible writings by breaking the singular letter into pieces that remain recognizable as lettering or arranging marks in formal compositions evoking the graphic composition of the printed page. Collectively, their asemic poetry demonstrates both written language and typography as belonging to those visual interpretations grouped together by an “intentional function” which identifies them as instances of lexicality, thus giving this work a immanent relevance for considerations of the “intentional function” for traditional semiosis. The transition from being-image to being-language, (even if the “language” employed remains unknown, allusive, or alien), is a process of isolating and re/assembling formal, empirically present visual cues whose response is apparent as the “intentional function.” There are three distinct categories within this pre-semic morphology apparent in the collective works of these asemic poets:

1. partial lettering that inhibits legibility by preventing their immediate recognition (division, fragmentation);

2. manipulations of perceptual cues (gestalt shapes, positive/negative reversals, simulation);

3. combinations of letters that isolate lettering and inhibit word formation (repetition, scaling, composition, decoration, transparency, overlapping)

Figure 1:

The categorical range of expressions between identifications of text and image creates not only the asemic, but the legible as well.

Familiar and traditional assumptions about the integrity of lettering and legibility are maintained in both asemic and visual poetry. The ways these compositions assert the integrity of their letterforms allows the “gaping holes” Flusser describes to become literal ruptures in asemic compositions. Recognizing these shapes as letters restores them to a familiar and stable configuration. It is a clandestine return to a semblance of legibility: asemic poetry maintains the familiar expressive framework of lexicality, but emphasizes the action of human production rather than the mechanical arrangement of lettering – the gestural mark, irregular line, and torn, cracked, or broken letter – elements that are also allusions to the physicality of writing, as Figure 2 by Marco Giovenale demonstrates. Interpreting this collection of lines as a series of statements depends on the “intentional function,” which intervenes at the foundation of semiosis via the audience’s recognition/identification of these marks as being-language; without this intentional designation, they are simply abstract patterns without a lexical referent. Asemic poetry manipulates the intentional function through the attenuation of familiar lexical cues that separate the visual from the textual; however, the morphological level of formal techniques and procedural concerns with composition-organization in visual and asemic poetry make its relevance obvious in the ways that mechanical systems are essential to the contemporary publication and distribution of these works.

Figure 2:

Asemic poem Untitled, by Marco Giovenale, ink on paper, 2017; used with permission.

The contemporary ascendance of asemic poetry is a symptom of anti-industrial, or even Luddistic tendencies resurfacing as the digital computer and autonomous production become commonplace and threaten to further displace human handicraft. The observations in Art for the Millions by Holger Cahill (director of the Works Progress Administration [WPA] in the 1930s and curator of several exhibitions of American Folk Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), identifies the changes imposed by industrialization on the arts:

I do not think that we have weighed sufficiently the meaning of the change from a handicraft to a machine method of production, probably the most revolutionary change in the history of human society. Its effect upon the arts has been catastrophic. It has divorced the artist from the usual vocations of the community and has practically shut off the average man from the arts. (Cahill 1932: 37)

His explicit statement that the use of machinery acts to sever art and artists from both their traditions and community is an expression of the same disdain expressed by Ruskin almost a century earlier. They reveal the continuing influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on the development of art in the United States generally, a heritage that informs the emphasis on handcraft and manual assemblage in asemic poetry. By acknowledging asemic poetry is part of an historical dialogue whose responses to automation created by digital technology includes other forms that exploit errors and human interventions, such as Glitch Art, this cultural paradigm emerges as a continuing response to the impacts of technical advances on the arts.

The “intentional function” is an assumption of human agency (the belief in a productive consciousness that is intentionally responsible for any text as a vehicle of communication) emphasized by his analysis becomes a literal assault on the physicality and coherence of written and printed text in visual and asemic poetry. Refusals of visuality inform Flusser’s negative assessment of mechanical systems of typography and language, but ironically, his assumption of human agency employed in writing also effaces and problematizes the identification of any intent by drawing attention to the cues the audience employs to identify intentions. Peter Schwenger describes these “hand-made aesthetics” without identifying them explicitly in his study, Asemic, The Art of Writing:

Asemic writing may look “miseffectual” because illegible; but it has effects that are different from those of conventional communicative writing … The timing of this liberatory movement is significant, for it comes at a point of crisis for writing, understood as material and handwritten. Writing today is almost invariably done by keyboarding rather than by an instrument moving across a blank paper surface. (Schwenger 2019: 3)

Although the typewriter is an invention of the nineteenth century, it is not this mechanism that “keyboarding” describes, but the use of word processing on a digital computer, a technology that appeared during the 1980s. Putting these developments in a historical context and situating them within an ongoing response to mechanical systems is not a criticism of asemia and contemporary varieties of visual poetry, but rather an acknowledgment of their relationship to earlier debates over technical apparatuses: this description of a “decline countered by artistic endeavor” precisely matches the purposes and activities of William Morris and his followers since the nineteenth century – the evidence of hand working became signifiers of authenticity for the Arts and Crafts Movement. The initial appearance of asemic work in particular – the term was coined in 1990s along with the internet’s ability to connect various and otherwise isolated practitioners internationally – coincides with the general transition from mechanical typewriters to digital computers and the shift from physical to electronic documents. The haptic embrace Schwenger identifies can be understood as resentiment of the repressed materiality, or as a reactive assertion of poetics as a physicality, yet it cannot be put out of view that these works are all uniformly reproduced, shared and commonly experienced not as physical objects but as digital ones via a screen or print out.

2 A perceptual as-if

What and How the audience sees are two different things. They are autonomous, a precondition to the refractive sorting of perception that defines sign formation, an ambivalence of designation and comprehension which asemic poetry exploits, and the transparency of graphic design attempts to minimize. Recognizing markings as part of the categorial class /writing/ effectuates an autonomous decision to understand what is being seen as a product of some intentional decision (Jakobson 1981: 22) that dominates the visual encounter. Language is a specific type of engagement where the audience/reader parses their apperception into units which are then subject to interpretive actions – interpreting encoding always depends on the premise that what has been encountered is a product of intentional construction, i.e., that is expressive of a specific meaning encoded using protocols shared by the audience: recognizing writing, (even when it can’t be read), involves a category assignment justified by the “intentional function” that validates considering visual experience as if encoded – identifying the marks as /writing/. Any identification of any kind of /writing/ – whether handwriting or typography – depends on an established familiarity with textual expressions generally. This act changes the apperception itself, eliding its visuality – thus the designation /language/ stands apart from other categories of apperception, a process that asemic poetry brings into consciousness by making the “intentional function” become apparent in this interpretive process. The viewer’s mnemonic recognition of words and writing are constants denoting a familiar order (Kant 1996: 172–176) establishing the markings as intentional, thus expressive rather than incidental: this change in apperception from visuality to lexicality is the “intentional function” in action.

The “intentional function” establishes /writing/ as a distinct and parallel mode of engagement with what an asemic work modulates to avoid becoming lexically familiar while maintaining the identification as language. This precarious balance between unknown and familiar illuminates the distinction between typical semic engagements and those common to all poetic encounters: the necessary agreement to look at expressive dimensions independent of the communicative (denoted) meaning of the “signs” themselves. Asemic poetry accentuates those elements deployed in more traditional visual poetry where the graphic composition, placement, or arrangement of letters/words can become an expression about the text, as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram Il Pluit (‘It’s Raining’) where the lines of text are presented as slanting lines running diagonally across the page in a visual suggestion of the rain described by the poem itself (Apollinaire 1925: 64). As the graphic dimension dominates apperception, the work begins to exclude its linguistic statement – to become asemic – inviting the dominance of the expressive visuality normally excluded from the consideration of language, a reversal of typical expectations for the dynamic of text:image in visual poetry where the imagistic aspects remain subservient to the lexical expression.

The proposal by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels of an impossible yet simultaneously apparently written text – produced by an autonomous pattern on a beach that nevertheless resembles cursive writing – demonstrates the central role of the “intentional function” in the (proximate) recognition of language. The lexical interpretation depends on the assumption that the words recognized are /intended/ productions of an intelligent actor. The hypothetical they propose exemplifies the “intentional function” as an essential but unintentional decision to constitute markings as “signs” to begin the chain of semiosis:

Suppose that you’re walking along a beach and you come upon a curious sequence of squiggles in the sand. You step back a few paces and notice that they spell out the following words:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

This would seem to be a good case of intentionless meaning: you recognize the writing as writing, you understand what the words mean, you may even identify them as constituting a rhymed poetic stanza – and all this without knowing anything about the author [William Wordsworth] and indeed without needing to connect the words to any notion of an author at all. You can do all these things without thinking of anyone’s intention. But now suppose that, as you stand gazing at this pattern in the sand, a wave washes up and recedes, leaving in its wake (written below what you now realize was only the first stanza) the following words:

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

One might ask whether the question of intention still seems as irrelevant as it did seconds before. You will now, we suspect, feel compelled to explain what you have just seen. Are these marks mere accidents, produced by the mechanical operation of the waves on the sand (through some subtle and unprecedented process of erosion, percolation, etc.)? Or is the sea alive and striving to express its pantheistic faith? Or has Wordsworth, since his death, become a sort of genius of the shore who inhabits the waves and periodically inscribes on the sand his elegiac sentiments? (Knapp and Michaels 1982: 717–728)

This recognition of words written in the sand becomes uncanny – but even this uncanny aspect depends on the expectations for the action of waves on the sand by the viewer. The problem of the “intentional function” is apparent in the sense that these words should not be, at least not as they’re being presented. The random debris of waves are not expected to produce coherent writing since natural processes lack the capacity of human agency (thus /intention/). The recognition of lettering is an illusion. Yet none of the potentials offered to account for this appearance of writing comfortably resolve their lexical recognition, even if such an event may be possible in the same way that monkeys randomly banging away at typewriters forever would eventually write everything that will ever be written (Borel 1913: 189–196). And that happens precisely because of the “intentional function” that converts the random marks and arrangements of sand and water to achieve this lexicality. To read the world as a text is only a problematic engagement if the reader believes such an approach is fallacious. To declare them accidental marks means that the ascription of intention to their appearance as lettering was a category error; but to do that also conflicts with the cultural recognition that the two stanzas of words are the entirety of the poem “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” from the book Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth (published in 1800). This encounter is precisely an instance of the uncanny since it challenges the application of the “intentional function” – via the identification of lexicality – that decides the marks are language at all. To render these hypothetical marks as words is to deny their visuality and random production, to ascribe to them some function of being-language. This choice by the imaginary reader involves the enframing of a section of the beach as distinct from the rest, and within that scope identifying these markings left by waves as lexical, rather than merely a visual pattern. It reveals sign formation as a capricious imposition by the reader, even if it is also a mundane projection of order.

This concern with the poetics of metalanguage makes the insistence on the human dimensions of asemic enunciations cohere around questions of agency and the capacity of human intelligence to invent new forms – the approaches to judgment proposed by Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:

The first alternative is rational and mathematical cognition through construction of the concept; the second is mere empirical (mechanical) cognition, which can never yield necessary and apodictic propositions. Thus I could indeed dissect my empirical concept of gold, and would gain from this nothing more than the ability to enumerate everything that I actually think in connection with this word; but although a logical improvement would thus occur in my cognition, no increase or addition would be gained in it. (Kant 1996: 675)

In withholding the determinative recognition that identifies a sign and matches its contextual use with past experience and established lexical expertise, the asemic specifically challenges the reader to acknowledge the invention inherent to the presentation. What is typically an accessory to the expression and presentation of the utterance becomes the sole focus, and the poetic function developed by these works becomes an exercise in rule creation rather than application – a creation that proceeds by unmasking the role of these established rules in the production of familiar lexicality. This distinction between familiar and recognized signs and the unfamiliar and defamiliarized presentations of asemic compositions is obvious from how the recognition of familiar letterforms dominates the appraisal of visual poetry. The totemic aspects of lettering are abundantly on display without the commonplace association with linguistic expression – the same experience of alterity that accompanies any unknown writing. The identification of semantic units without accompanying fluency results in ambiguity and ambivalence around their significance.

The ideological basis of these developments informs the interpretation, development and prospects for future evolution in both visual and asemic poetry. Recognizing the demand for hand-work in their production is a revelation about the esthetic limitations these forms have developed and implicitly offers a realm for expansion and further development: the embrace of the digital tools (machine production) in ways that do not emphasize human handiwork. In this regard it is a progression that mirrors that of the transition from the revenant medievalism of Art and Crafts studios to the avant-garde embrace of the machine in the 1910s and 1920s. The elements of this transition are already apparent, if not systematically developed, in asemic publications such as the “collaborative graphic novel” A Kick in The Eye (Appel et al. 2013), which is filled with digital images of various types. However, those pages that are clearly made by converting handwriting into digital vectors (Appel 2013: 114) make the digital basis of the work more than merely incidental to the process of publication. By transposing the irregularities of the hand drawn into the sharply defined linearity of digital design, these pages suggest a fusion of mechanical typography with the instabilities of handwriting.

The challenge to the reader that asemic works innately present matches that posed by any unknown language: the recognition of cues suggesting signification, but without a corresponding mnemonic link to past experiences that render those cues as symptoms of a specific encoding. In posing this recognition-without-signification, asemic poetry acts to isolate the non-signifying features of written language as distinct expressions, collapsing distinctions in a way that Michel Foucault implied would destroy the encultured protocols essential for meaning:

The statement is neither a syntagma, nor a rule of construction, nor a canonic form of succession and permutation; it is that which enables such groups of signs to exist, and enables these rules or forms to become manifest. But although it enables them to exist, it does so in a special way – a way that must not be confused with the existence of signs as elements of a language (langue), or with the material existence of those marks that occupy a fragment of space or last for a variable length of time. (Foucault 1972: 88)

Foucault’s proposal is not difficult to grasp – it is an analysis where the destabilization of meaning created by asemic violence to signification results in a collapse, an abyssal of signification. Yet this is not what happens with these works. Instead of a failure to convey meaning, these works are instances of a poetic metalanguage where the structures and mechanisms of significance themselves become subject to poetical articulation, deflection, recombination. This difference separates visual and concrete poetry. It lies with the capacity to identify familiar lettering in visual poetry (and even words) a factor that is absent in asemic works – this suspension/repression of identifications of encoding that distinguishes these genres.

The interpretive ambivalence and potential for immanent collapse into non-signification by asemic poetry derives from an indistinct “intentional function” where the lexical and grammatical aspects of language trade places, confounding their semiosis: the material arrangement of terms becomes the relational construction of meaning. This inversion is categorical. The foundational recognition of being-language does not result in further recognitions that enable significance, a stoppage of interpretation that recalls Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observations about the conversion of ambivalent visual interpretations into a recognizable order:

The very expression which is also a report of what is seen, is here a cry of recognition.

What is the criterion of the visual experience? – The criterion? What do you suppose?

The representation of “what is seen.”

The concept of a representation of what is seen, like that of a copy, is very elastic, and so together with it is the concept of what is seen. The two are intimately connected. (Which is not to say that they are alike.) (Wittgenstein 2000: 198)

The recognition of “what is seen” can always include the category of language, but this is where semiosis normally begins: with the decision that a series of marks or sounds are a linguistic utterance whose decoding relies on mnemonic recognitions of how its components have been arrayed in the past to communicate some meaning. His criticism suggests that language is incapable of describing thought, but merely suggests its operations through inference and empathic identifications mediated by past experience: these grammatic foundations disappear into the expressive statement, implicitly forming it and informing its contents, but otherwise hidden by the significance thus communicated. Shifting into metalanguage by withholding the material trappings of communication causes the grammatical aspects to assume the signifying role they would otherwise serve as vehicles for: the utterance becomes reflexive, and in doing so changes the subject of address to the nature of the code used to communicate through a mismatch between symbol and interpretation (Hofstadter 1999: 102). It is a changed state of consciousness about the status and organization of language that nevertheless falls within the scope of poetics precisely because it hesitates between being nothing more than a collection of visual markings and expressing an idea (which in this case falls within the lexical).

3 Conclusions

The referential function of language is held in suspension by asemic poetry, undermining the ascription of coding to the statement presented. As in typical poetic statements, the message offered by asemic poetry is ambiguous, but in a radically different way: the “speech within speech” common to the quotational and allusive construction of poetry – a multiplication of referents – collapses this multiplicity to the moment of sign formation itself, into an immanent specificity of unknown but ambiguously familiar semantic cues for signs that may or may not be present in an inversion of how poetics typically operate. A maximal ambiguity imposes an equally powerful mobility on articulation, unfixing the relationships of signifying and non-signifying, unifying the encoded/non-coded/pre-coded into a singular asemic unit. As metalinguistics dominate poetic enunciation, their expressive capacity comes untethered from the stability assured by linguistic fluency, in the process unmasking the formative elements that cue the entrance to semic order. The text thus becomes a mirror reflecting role of the reader as an imposer of significance on empirically present semantic cues (those elements that become the text) by employing both fluency and past experience as guides: the reader finds what they already know and understand in asemic texts, a presentation that exploits their capacities for fabulation and imagination rather than the more familiar mnemonic identifications of cues that produce familiar signs. By truncating, interrupting, or disrupting these matches between encounter and past experience the asemic brings the innate ambivalence of all visual phenomena into consciousness as an eidolon – a projected gestalt that imposes coherent order on perception in a process that identifies and organizes linguistic recognition.

Asemic poetry makes the solipsism of Kantian “invention” apparent: in identifying each composition as-language, but without an identification of significance, the reader is forced to understand the poem as a unique creation that renders their established knowledge of existing lexical “rules” moot. The meaning of these poetics depends entirely on the impositions of the reader precisely because there is not an a priori set of rules that enable their decoding. This uniqueness and independence are how the asemic disrupts established order; they are also what give these works their solipsistic dimension. In being freed from familiar lexicality, they are inventions whose understanding and apprehension reveals that lexical constructions are limited in the sense that Kant describes and Wittgenstein notes: determinative judgments are the essential vehicle for engaging in any communication. Reflective judgments of meaning do not proceed via decoding. Communication is a determinative act.

Although there is no necessity for asemic poems to correspond to the formal devices cuing a handmade expression, they almost exclusively do. This contemporary usage of drawn, written, and gestural marks revitalizes familiar, Romantic ideologies that prioritize evidence of human action as a demonstration of authenticity: even the ways that asemic poets such as Appel create digital-but-handmade renditions of graphic compositions or frameworks, (and pixelate their gestural marks), does not counter this esthetic tendency – it brings the human dimensions more clearly into consciousness by making the mismatch between the digitized and analog gesture into a part of the work’s apprehension and poetical construction. It invokes the “intentional function” to mediate these nonlexical compositions into being-language, an assertion that reiterates their claim to human fabrication; what might appear to be a redundancy (only humans actually produce linguistic signs) serves as an essential marker that justifies their invocation of an as-if encoded apprehension while simultaneously with holding the capacity for a definitive decoding of their meaning.

Communication requires both the encoder and decoder to share a rubric of known forms and meanings in common, applying a flexible set of rules to achieve a consensus on what the text might state; the use of automated translation software or even generative texts produced by AIs highlights how this foundation in past experience depends on the identification and ordering of semantic cues that provide the materials for sign formation. Asemic poetry manipulates these foundational mements of encounter. But these recognitions are also determinative role processes that AI systems can readily automate – an aspect of communication that demonstrates how comprehension of significance is separate from the identification of familiar constructions – which gives the emergence of asemic writing (and its common basis in the hand-made gesture) an additional valence within the tradition of human actions opposing mechanical and automated systems. The commonplace dominance of the hand-written in asemic poetry orients their expressive construction in two linked ways: first aesthetically, to those Romantic challenges to the autonomous processing of machinery (expanded to include digital computers), while simultaneously maintaining their expressive link to the traditional aesthetics of the illuminated manuscript.