From Shadow, to Silhouette, to Decentered Metrics

            In examining the earliest examples of such image production that I have found, there is one particular aspect that I would like to examine here in more detail. Although the primary characteristic notable from this stage in the history of image production is the ‘sculpted’ nature of the images, there is another feature that I find a little more intriguing. In shaping the surface of such stones into distinctive volumes, sometimes such produced surface features were designed so as to throw distinctive shadows onto the surfaces on which they occur:

            When examining the second set of examples (associated with techniques of material production derived from the working of wood), such shadow detail is again apparent but, in a less discrete and more pervasive way. An earlier example of this technique displays shadow production along all of the edges where layers of stone have been differentiated through ‘sculpting’:  

            A later example of this sort of technique shows a completely different use of shadows: here, the shadow cast by edge of the stone is used to selectively highlight specific collections of images. Since which specific glyphs are highlighted is determined and differentiated by the height of the sun at midday , this stone was used to indicate season-specific events occurring in the territory where it was created. It is in fact a stone astrolabe; and various angles indicative of the height of the sun at different times of the year - and at different latitudes - are readily apparent.

As amazing as this is, there is one other development noticeable here which is of even more importance: images upon this stone are no longer simple volumes shaped into characteristic patterns but now include small, discrete, and singularly distinctive images which can be considered to be ‘silhouette glyphs”:

Not only has the use of shadow in image production shifted into a completely new technology which demonstrates a functionality quite separate from simple image production, but, the precursor techniques through which distinctive shadows were produced along the sculpted edges of layers within the stone being used has produced a completely new type of image. By unifying the shadow detail characteristic of sculpted stone with the differentiation inherent within variant layers of stone, a new ‘family of signs’ has been produced. This is, in effect, an occurrence of that which was identified in “Proust and Signs” as (linguistic) ‘essence’: a co-joining of “the quality common to two different objects, kneaded in this luminous substance, plunged into this refracting medium…” (“Proust and Signs”, page 47). This new type of image is in itself a conceptual sphere through which image production is localized upon the surfaces to which it can be applied: such silhouette glyphs share the commonality of an endoconsistency which defines the virtuality of the surfaces upon which they occur (“Components, or what defines the consistency of the concept, its endoconsistency, are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable.” "What Is Philosophy?", page 19). As a conceptual formation, this type of image is capable of supporting event horizons upon the visual surface of their occurrence: when we encounter such silhouette glyphs, we are already seeing conditions which support interrelationships between images that are capable of producing grammatological structures (“…the concept also has exoconsistency with other concepts, when their respective creation implies the construction of a bridge on the same plane. Zones and bridges are the joints of the concept.”  "What Is Philosophy?" page 20).

            What is particularly exceptional here is that specific, identifiable patterns of interrelationship can also be found in the way that such silhouette glyphs are grouped together. For instance, the occurrence of faciality (noted throughout the material production of images we are examining) is itself modified by the introduction of silhouette glyphs into the production of images, becoming less the presentation of a (sculpted facial) volume and than it is the assemblage of diagrammatic features:

            This use of faciality as a paradigmatic template for the assemblage of diagrammatic features - which are in themselves distinct image elements (as silhouette glyphs) - establishes yet another conceptual family of image types. The territoriality which is inherent in occurrences of faciality (as the creation of landscapes) is decentered away from faciality as such and into the production of assemblages which are composed of diagrammatic features: 

            “We have seen that the abstract machine has two very different states: sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about deterritorializations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that are absolute but remain negative; sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency giving it a “diagrammatic” function, a positive value of deterritorialization, the ability to form new abstract machines… There is no more face to be in redundancy with a landscape, painting, or little phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of landscapity, picturity, or musicality. This is not a collection of part-objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits of a face enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an unknown landscape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively produced, created, according to quanta of absolute, positive deterritorialization – not evoked or recalled according to systems of reterritorialization. ”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, pages 189-190.

As non-metrical image writing became progressively more conceptual in the nature of its composite elements, the assemblages produced within it became less a matter of images produced in deference to the material substrate supporting them and more of a concern directed toward the interconnectivity of image components. In this, a shift occurs away from a resonance holding between productive techniques defined by material substrates and the image elements produced upon them, and toward a conceptual resonance between the compositional assemblage of images and the event structures of a surrounding world. Here, a relative deterritorialization in productive technique (which moves away from an emphasis upon the structure of the material substrate being used, and toward the use of display patterns that are consistent in themselves) has produced an absolute deterriorialization in linguistic form that moves from a use of simple signs to the use of complex concepts; and this in turn marks a much more important shift: from the use of sign production in linguistically individualistic reterritorializations, to a more expansive and generalized socio-cultural reterritorialization that encompasses shared and complex conceptualizations about the world. In this, we can begin to see the formation of what might best be termed (using the term developed by Deleuze and Guattari in “What Is Philosophy”) ‘geophilosophy’: the shared conceptual definition of those contingent events which prompt thought’s very occurrence,  through specific localizations of experience.

            Within such assemblages of diagrammatic features, the individual image elements are more than simple silhouette glyphs; they are also parts of the larger composites that they provide defining features for: and as such, they support an entirely new form of grammatological relationship, a productive linguistic structure that is characteristic of what are called “partial objects”:

"Partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious... If it is true that every partial object emits a flow, it is also the case that this flow is associated with another partial object and defines the other's potential field of presence, which is itself multiple. The synthesis of connection of the partial objects is indirect, since one of the partial objects, in each point of its presence within the field, always breaks the flow that another object emits or produces relatively, itself ready to emit a flow that other partial objects will break."

“Anti-Oedipus”, pages 324-325.

Once again, we find that multiplicity is associated with a differential production which exceeds that conventional linguistic pairing of the concepts ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. Here, we see the establishment of ‘narrative flows’ that have their own dynamics of interrelationship, and which have shifted the composite assemblage of images away from a simple faciality. We would be missing a much more important dynamic if we were to simply state that faciality resonates with landscapes and so generates territoriality: for, as emotively resonant beings, we are in fact ourselves conceptually productive of a very mechanical type of resonant linkage between the endoconsistency and exoconsistency of (and thus, also the interrelationships holding between) concepts. As a species, we are productive of a seemingly infinite variety of linguistic formations. Because of this, it is possible to identify here yet more stabilities forming within that accelerated flow of image-associated assemblage which non-metrical image writing developed into. Indeed, these new forms of image composites are not just stabilities; composed as they are of nonnumerical multiplicities, they are in fact meta-stable: such image composites group together variations and differentiations, rather than simply presenting discrete and singularly identifiable composites of diagrammatic features. As meta-stabilities, such assemblages support grammatical composites which must be seen to be meta-narratives: that is, they occur as multiplicities composed of event horizons which are essentially variant in essence, rather than simply differential in a serial manner.

Indeed, such examples of non-metrical image writing are paradigmatic of grammatological structure; and as such, they establish beyond question the inherently linguistic essence of this form of writing. For, at this point, the composite image elements which characterize this form of writing need no longer be directly dependent in their functionality upon the material substrate of their occurrence: a decentering of the random metrical properties inherent in such stone substrates can be demonstrated, and in turn be shown to supply distinct forms of grammatological structure that provide consistency to the images through which they are displayed. Meta-stable composites no longer occur simply as differentiations in the stone grain patterns of the substrates supporting their production: they also occur as elements within exclusively structural patternings. For instance, image composites can be shown to occur as variations of basic geometric forms: as components of distinctly ringed assemblages, the narrative structure of which is defined by such circularity; and as discrete image areas, which at once separate and co-relativize image composites as distinct localizations of productive assemblage… as ‘compressed’ examples of the same concept of narrative differentiation established in the use of the decentered metrics found in ringed assemblages.

Once the use of such discrete image areas becomes established, such distinct image composites are no longer dependent upon any particular substrate for their productive occurrence. They become ‘iterable’ in themselves: they can ‘signify’ in a distinct and distinguishably repeatable fashion… and in a manner that is in no way a direct product of such determinations as those through which the Eurocentric emphasis upon a phonological expressivism defines modern linguistics (bearing in mind, of course, that the repeatability of the iterable is always differential when taken in relation to the linguistic texture in which it necessarily occurs).

Transferred to a different medium (such as paper), this meta-stability of essentially iterable image composites provides the basic linguistic characteristics which define the glyphic forms of writing used throughout Asia . This, when coupled with the common occurrence of animal and tool glyphs, presents a strong affinity which can be easily seen with the glyphic writing forms of the Middle East; and similarly, many shared elements can be noted in the glyphic writing forms of Central America (particularly, those traits related to faciality).

In the course of my research, I have had no other option but to reach this inevitable conclusion: although the standard model of modern linguistics assumes that ‘writing’ is a simple representation of phonetic speech patterns and that, as such, writing is a product of human intention which is directly derived from speech and thus wholly circumscribed in its occurrence by phonetic patterns of speech; and, although modern anthropological and archaeological has decided - based upon the linguistic determinations provided by such preconceptions - that the First Nations of North American had no form of written language before their contact with European civilization; contrary to these accepted truisms of modern academic discourse and of ‘common knowledge’, I must in fact conclude:

During pre-Columbian times, the First Nations of North America did indeed use a distinct form of writing which is demonstrably of their own creation; and, the historical evolution of this form of writing can be established to such an extent that the Indigenous Peoples of North America may well have been responsible for the very invention of writing itself.

(If the example of non-metrical image writing has taught us anything, it is that 'writing' as such can have many possible points of origin; many independent starts and courses of evolution; many contributing lines of development; many separate 'plateaus' of accomplishment. The form of image writing examined here is certainly a major line of development in the history of written languages, and one that has so far been completely ignored by modern academic discourse. And when I ask myself, "Why has the very possibility of the existence of this form of writing been ignored?", I do not like the answers that I find. I do not like those answers at all).