The Language Signifier: Visual Writing and Ecologies of Dimensionality

"... we must remember that “visual writing,” the basic subject of discussion in this collection of reviews, does not per se contain or represent specific writings or specific texts. Visual writing and visual poetry demonstrate the way language works, the characteristic attributes of its generative substantiveness—its unblemished patterns, its many structures—its dominion, its universality. The politics and antiquated modalities of colonialism and subjugation are removed from the very conception and constitution of language structure and political and economic activity: permitting “even triviality in discourse, commonplaces, redundancy, intelligibility...” ... Visual writing and visual poetry make use of the implicit semantic field as one in which “fragmentation” and ambiguity present truthful if tenuous patterns and universes of possibility that contain “both illusion and reality.” -Tom Hibbard