A failure: “▯What is possible in the best of all impossible words▯”
The “Failure Glyph,” “▯,” colloquially known as “Tofu” due to its resemblance to a block of tofu, is a white rectangle used to signify to the user a Glyph Failure, that is, when a glyph cannot be represented by the font or software being used.
Later, I will discuss this phenomenon more thoroughly, because it offers another kind of caesura, a caesura in the technological sublime. Some have called this rectangle a signifier for glyphlessness.
This failure glyph begins showing up in Brathwaite’s work in the late 90s. In the semantic sense it is a fundamentally deictic symbol meant to orient us to the failure of our system’s inability to present / represent a coded sequence, usually a letter or symbol that one font has that another does not. In ASCII, this glyph is coded as .nondef. Non-definitional. Without definition. That for which there is no glyph, no adequate symbol, or, put more strongly, no existent symbol, at least, in the system being used. For the system using ASCII translation it is the impossibility of representing something its code. It refers to the untranslatable. In other words, if in a rather banal way, it represents a disaster to the system, or what Brathwaite might call a “cosmological disruption.” The failure glyph signifies the possibility that any reading might succumb to the absent presence of what is excluded by the system, that upon discovery may or may not re-color the entire text, our understanding of it, its identity, the entire world. Until the “▯” is deciphered any text might really mean anything. Thus, the presence of the “▯” disorients the possibility of reading for complete meaning, and leaves the reader in utter partiality. It is a caesura, albeit a contingent one (but what caesura is not contingent?), that hovers over the text, making any critical scrutiny fundamentally anacrusitical. But it is also contingent contingency, because there is always the possibility that the “tofu” is intentional, i.e. that the “glyph failure” signified by the “tofu” is not a failure at all, but a deliberate inclusion by the author, in this case, Brathwaite. So, finally, any such determination is a decision to believe what I have no final access to. Brathwaite’s failure glyphs do not fail to signify, but, rather, hypostatize the signifying process, abandoning it to paradox and contradiction, in other words, abandoning it for the invisible and opaque. Here we see what we cannot: “the floating materiality of matter that “does not fit.” (Myung Mi Kim) The Sycorax Video-Style is a relentless glyph failure, and failure of glyphs, and celebration of opacity as fundamental to the palimpsestic cosmology Brathwaite advocates for in MR, a cosmology that leaves the critic unmoored. In the post to come, I will demonstrate one way that the use of glyphs disintegrates certain normative critical methods, methods that, finally, should be abandoned, in favor of an anacrusitical, caesural reading praxis, or, more simply put, poetics.
That Brathwaite brackets “CLOSURE” with failure glyphs will likely pique the ears of readers interested avant-garde poetics.
I will “close” with the “close” of Lyn Hejinian’s “continuation” of her own famous essay “The Rejection of Closure.” In, “Continuing Against Closure,” published in Jacket #14, Hejinian points us in the direction of borders. The caesura might be said to be the space within and without a border, where borders are written, what they border. At the same time, they are not, because the caesura is neither the phrase to the left of the hemistitch or the phrase to the right of the hemistitch. It is not the space after the comma or before the beginning of the next phrase. It is not space at all, but time, that is, a form of rhythm. The literal caesura of Howe’s presented above, too, is also a caesura in time, insofar as the caesura is, finally, never a gap, hole, or emptiness, but an interval. The caesura is not Howe’s cut out of the Xeroxed page from Tsur’s essay, but what is opened by the cut. The failure glyph signifies the indeterminate border of the poem where it cannot assimilate into the ASCII code. It is the limit of caesura, where information (even no information) no longer pertains to the poem. It is where its infrastructure ends.
“It is in this context that, though still arguing my case against closure, I can speak in favor of the border, which I would characterize not as a circumscribing margin but as the middle — the intermediary, even interstitial zone that lies between any one country or culture and another, and between any one thing and another.
It’s a zone of alteration, transmutation, a zone of forced forgetting, of confusion, where laws and languages clash, where currency changes value and value changes currency, and where, bumbling along, everyone is a foreigner, Jane to Sam, wolf to donkey, rhapsodist to infant, pigeon to goose.”
“Continuing Against Closure,” Lyn Hejinian
Another end:
Not wishing to limit itself to a “study of sources”— which was Julia Kristeva’s term for what she saw happening to her idea of “intertextuality”— this book concludes by returning to that sharper and more troubled notion of the intertext as the problematic activity of a sign when it interacts with another sign system, perhaps even as its users bring about that interaction unwittingly or blindly (59–60): a conception of the sign that we see in the Quechua concepts of quilca and ayllu—but also more generally in the emergent natures of unnatural signs.
[…]
While a critique of colonial power can never relent (especially when contemporary political life remains so contaminated by colonial legacies
of racial and sexual subjugation), the endurance of these signs reveals
the imperfection of that power; its contradictions are canalized into the
affirmation of worlds other than that singular modernity of the commodity
form.