Discourse, Figure

The Line and the Letter

205 The Line and the Letter Between opposition and difference lies the difference of the space of the text to that of the figure. This difference is not of degree; it constitutes an ontological rift. The two spaces are two orders of meaning that communicate but which, by the same token, are divided. Rather than space of the text one should speak of textual space; instead of space of the figure, figural space.This terminological distinction is meant to underscore the fact that the text and the figure each engender, respectively, an organization specific to the space they inhabit. This space is not the container of an extrinsic content; even when it presents itself as such,as in the case of textual space,it is not a universal feature, but one specified by a property characterizing it. I define textual space, then, as the space in which the graphic signifier inscribes itself. As for the space of figure,“figural”qualifies it better than “figurative.”Indeed the last term, in the vocabulary of painting and contemporary criticism, opposes the space of the figure to “non-figurative” or “abstract.”The relevant feature of this opposition resides in the analogy of the representative and the represented, and in the spectator’s ability to recognize the latter in the former.This feature is secondary to the problem at hand.The figurative is merely a particular instance of the figural,as we saw in the window that Renaissance painting opened for us.The term “figurative” implies the possibility of deriving the pictorial object from its “real”model through an uninterrupted translative process.The trace on the figurative painting is non-arbitrary. Figurativity is thus a property that applies to the plastic object’s relation to what it represents; it becomes irrelevant if the picture no longer fulfills a representational function, i.e., if it is the object itself .The object in this case is determined by the signifier’s organization alone, which oscillates between two poles. It can be either letter or line.The letter is the support of a conventional, immaterial signification, identical in every respect to the presence of the 206 the line and the letter phoneme. Moreover, the support disappears behind what it upholds, since the letter occasions only instantaneous recognition, in the service of signification .The graphic (as well as phonic) signifier owes this evanescent quality to its arbitrary nature. However, the sense in which I employ arbitrary here no longer applies to the relationship between the purported linguistic sign and the thing it is meant to indicate; rather, it applies to the relationship between scriptural space and the reader’s own body. This relationship is arbitrary, for no connection could possibly be established between the distinctive graphic value of the lines or clusters of lines that form a T or an O, and the plastic value of the figures formed by these letters—the crossing of a vertical and a horizontal line, a circumference. The body is led to adopt certain dispositions depending on whether it encounters an angle or a circle, a vertical or an oblique. When a trace owes its value to this ability to induce bodily resonance, it inscribes itself in a plastic space. But when the trace’s function consists exclusively in distinguishing,and hence in rendering recognizable, units that obtain their signification from their relationships in a system entirely independent from bodily synergy, I would claim that the space in which this trace inscribes itself is graphic. Disentangling the two expanses is not an easy matter.We are constantly tempted to have the one encroach upon the other. Take the letter N, a figure formed by the articulation of three straightline segments, or take A—same definition. The two letters can be distinguished only by their particular composition of segments, since the nature and number of their basic elements are identical. Yet does this mode of composition not call for relationships of textual displacement in the reader’s optical field, and therefore for figural properties? The horizontality of the bar in the letter A and the obliquity of the bar in the letter N exist relative to a point of view. Now oppose N to Z.The discrepancy no longer proceeds from the composition of segments between them, since it is the same in both cases, but from the composite’s position relative to a biaxial system, vertical and horizontal. From N one obtains Z by a 90-degree planar rotation around the N’s...