In the child, both writing and drawing develop from what I call the fundamental graphic act, the making of traces on a surface that constitute a progressive record of movement […] The movement of the tool over the surface is both felt and seen, The muscle-joint-skin kinesthesis is emphasized by orthodox sensory psychology, and the visual kinesthesis is emphasized by my perceptual psychology. But these are transient awarenesses. The seeing of a progressive record of the movement of the tool is lasting. There is a track of trail of the movement, like the afterimage of a firebrand whirled in the darkness, except that it is permanent—a stroke, a stripe, or a streak, in short, a trace.
—Gibson (1979: 275)
If ever extra-terrestrial xeno-zoologists (alien biologists) were to look down upon the Earth from close orbit as preparation for a research expedition, they would notice that terrestrial species do not exist in a pregiven environment which they just happen to occupy and which was there before them. Rather, terrestrial organisms have co-evolved with their environments and re-arranged them to suit their needs in a process known as “niche construction” (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003). Our aliens would observe termites collectively assembling very large structures from grains of sand glued together with excrement, structures that serve not only as shelter and food stores for the termites but also, at a metabolic level, as thermo-regulation for the entire colony. On a larger scale they would see beavers collectively building dams and turning entire streams of water into pools for convenient fishing, flooding large areas of woodland in the process. But above all, they would notice that one bipedal mammal species—Homo sapiens sapiens—has had a massively larger impact on shaping the planetary ecology than any other species. They would notice that in some places tens of millions of humans live together in urban colony ecologies that spread over a significant portion of the Earth’s landmasses and that only few surfaces outside these colonies have been left untouched by their activities. And maybe the more behaviourally inclined among our alien scientists would puzzle over our habit of marking practically every single surface of our urban ecologies (our road networks, the insides and outside of our dwellings, every cultural artefact, including our own bodies) with pigment patterns. What use might such behaviour be?
We beg forgiveness for this frivolous thought exercise. It does, however, serve the purpose of looking at our environment with new eyes, Graphic traces—“enduring marks left in or on a solid surface by continuous movement” (Ingold, 2007: 43)—permeate our existence to such a degree that we take them for granted and tend to understand them narrowly in terms of the very specific and specialised practices in which they are embedded: whether as letters in writing, numbers and symbols in mathematics, drawing and painting in art, diagrams in engineering, logos in marketing and so on. In other words, we tend to miss the bigger picture: that humans are fundamentally a trace-making species and have been since the Middle Stone Age (Malafouris, 2013: 181) and that all graphic traces, regardless of the cultural practices they serve, have commonalities.
This book is the outcome of three days of stimulating discussion between scholars, scientists and artisans during the symposium “Making Traces—A Multidisciplinary Approach to Graphic Trace Making”, held at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense in November 2014. The symposium set out to place the study of graphic traces closer to the core of contemporary humanities and to link it to more general studies of communication, culture and cognition. The underlying assumption was that we do not fully appreciate the central role played by graphic traces in the whole-bodied, sense-saturated, meaningful coordination between human agents in the present globalised world order.
Like the symposium on which it is based, this book lives in the interstices among well-established practices, perspectives and theories, between big pictures and smaller ones. It brings together contributions from scientists, scholars and artisans from a number of fields, including social anthropology, social semiotics, eco-social semiotics, cognitive neuroscience, architecture, calligraphy and typography, in a shared effort to understand the profound impact graphic traces have on large-scale human cultural patterns as well as on individual-scale cognition.
One such interstice divides the sciences from the humanities. Traditionally, the study of graphic traces has been a scholarly enterprise undertaken by anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, art historians, linguists, semioticians, and psychologists. In these traditions, graphic traces are thought of as one communicative medium or mode amongst others and their adherents may be sceptical of what ‘hard’ disciplines such as neuroscience and biology can contribute to our understanding of them. The consensus has been that cultural and social phenomena cannot be reduced to psychological or biological processes and that attempts to do so will lead to fruitless behaviourist lines of thinking.
The aim of this book is not to arbitrate in such disputes. Nevertheless, we feel that sociological reductionism (the reduction of everything in the human realm to social constructions) is every bit as unproductive for an understanding of the human condition as its scientific counterpart. In the words of Sune Steffensen, “sociality is our human way of being nature” (Steffensen, 2015: 114). If we want to understand trace-making, we need both perspectives at once. We need a bottom-up understanding of the sensorimotor enabling conditions for bodily gestures every bit as much as we need a top-down understanding of how the graphic social order constrains particular trace-making events. This book contains contributions from both fields. The chapter by Lagarrigue and Longcamp provides an overview of neurological studies of writing, and reports on recent research by the authors themselves on the importance of writing in learning to recognise written characters. Other chapters, such as those by Thibault and by Johannessen and Van Leeuwen are written by humanities scholars but incorporate scientific findings in design theoretical and semiotic discourses, stressing the importance of biological and physical givens as a ‘first order’ which need to be understood in studying ‘second-order’ semiotic phenomena, and both Ingold and Johannesen and Van Leeuwen draw on phonetics, the scientific study of the articulation and the perception of speech sound, to gain insight into ‘graphetics’, the scientific study of trace-making and trace perception.
Another interstice divides theory from practice. Many scholarly and scientific inquiries into graphic trace-making are carried out by people who are not necessarily expert trace-makers themselves and do not have the sensorimotor skills and sensibilities of trained architects, designers or calligraphers. As a result, they may not be as sensitive as practitioners to the impact of the material qualities of surfaces, tools and pigments on trace-making. For this reason we have invited contributions from a number of practitioners to add their perspective in the dialogue and to serve as a much-needed testing ground for theoretical generalisations. Neuenschwander is a highly reputed calligraphic artist. Cornil, as director of the European Lettering Institute, is responsible for the training and education of new generations of graphic trace-makers, which puts her in a unique position to report on the role of targeted sensitisation in building graphic expertise. If we want to understand trace-making, we need the individual, particular and material perspective of the practitioner just as much as we need the generalising theoretical perspective.
Yet the division is not absolute. The bottom up perspective can be found in the work of theorists as well as practitioners. Ingold, a theorist, values the knowledge of the hand, “those ways of knowing and doing that grow through the experience and practice of a craft, but which adhere so clearly to the person of the practitioner as to remain out of reach of explication and analysis” (p. 36). Cornil, a practitioner, values the way “scholars put words to what we do”, so long as “the exchange will go both ways”. Practitioners contribute to theory. Scholars describe how the work of practitioners can be understood as research. Neuenschwander, a practitioner, develops a typology of scripts. Bouchy, a theorist, describes the work of calligraphic artists as research into new tools and new modes of inscription. Lucas, also a theorist, describes the drawing practices of architects as a form of research.
Homo sapiens sapiens is fundamentally a trace-making species. Throughout the course of our history and prehistory, acts of modifying surfaces by adding or removing material, thus leaving traces, have been a fulcrum of cultural practices, whether spiritual, practical or aesthetic. Today, graphic traces facilitate and regulate cultural practices in almost every context. We use them to solve problems and to express ourselves. On the faces of our watches they parcel temporality into times for work, eating, play and rest. On kitchen appliances they constrain choices for food preparation. In airports, on roads and on traffic signs, in fact, in most public spaces, they help us to get safely and effectively from one place to another. We wear them on our clothes; we decorate most artefacts with them—we even adorn our own flesh with them in the form of tattoos or scarification. A single symposium or book cannot even begin to do justice to all practices of graphic trace-making, especially if we approach them top down, although several of the chapters of this book do describe specific practices, for instance Aiello’s chapter on the way Starbucks incorporates their logos in the physical environment, Løvland and Repstad’s chapter on religious signs in the urban environment, and Tønnesen’s chapter on toilet signs in a range of environments, including universities, airports, restaurants and museums. But from such a top-down perspective we can only give a glimpse of the diversity and richness of graphic trace-making practices.
Therefore, we begin by looking at graphic traces bottom up. Regardless of whether they are letterforms, logos, pictograms or images, and regardless of the practice they are embedded in, all graphic traces have certain commonalities: there will be a material surface or support, on which the trace is made (screens such as computer screens, TV screens, mobile screens and so on are also a kind of surface). In most cases various material pigments will be used. Except in limiting cases such as drawing with one’s finger in sand, there will be tools involved, and those tools will generally be made to accommodate the human hand. And, above all, there will be bodily movement.
Body, tools and materials form a kind of trinity on which most practices of trace-making rest. Beginning with this trinity and moving from there up to specific cultural practices strikes us as a more straightforward path to understanding trace-making, and to structuring this book. Many of the contributions in the earlier part of the book, whether by practitioners or theorists, consider this trinity, albeit from different angles. Cornil describes in detail the traumas of the left-handed calligrapher as a struggle to “memorise the movement and the shape of the counter space between body and arm” (p. 3), and for Neuenschwander, “the tactile sensation of parchment, the most sublime partner for a well-sharpened quill pen, verges on the erotic” (p. 1). Bouchy’s account of the practices of calligraphic artists such as Polello, Breton and Neuenschwander focuses on the different kinds of gesture that can constitute traces. For Ingold graphic traces must be understood as a haptic phenomenon and he worries about “future generations whose hands will no longer know what it means to shape letters and words” (p. 31) and therefore will not know what letters feel like. For Thibault, making traces is a “sequence of movements that unfolds in time” (p. 47), and for Johannessen and Van Leeuwen, too, traces are essentially a record of movements, while Lucas describes the gestures of architectural drawing in fine detail (p. 132):
The craft that goes into drawing is often neglected, and the quality of the inscribing gestures differs from one process to the next. Pencil lines are ruled using T-square and parallel motion, and can be quite swift and bold whilst constrained by mechanical tools; but the inky lines have a combination of hesitancy and directness. Hesitant as this is a risky activity: a single mistake cold mean starting afresh, [… direct because] otherwise the ink will pool and gather and the line will have a shaky quality.
Similar passages, rich in concrete, physical detail, can be found in Neuenschwander’s chapter, for instance where he describes carving letters in plaster.
Of course, acts of graphic trace-making are heavily constrained by the practices in which they are embedded. In fact, we can only distinguish different classes of traces when we consider them as instantiations of the needs and interests of particular social domains, and so it would make no sense to look at practices of lettering, drawing, writing numbers, making diagrams and so on without at the same time considering writing, art, mathematics and engineering, among others, as social institutions. For this reason Tønnesen investigates how and why toilet signs in universities, museums and restaurants differ, and Løvland and Repstad ask how people in a secular culture perceive traces of religious practices in public spaces, while Giorgia Aiello describes the circumstances that caused Starbucks to change its logo from an image-like logo to one which works with texture and materiality.
Our book therefore seeks to connect the two approaches, bottom up and top down, as is also done, for instance in Thibault’s ‘eco-social’ approach.
The earliest known man-made traces are scratchings made on ostrich eggshells somewhere between 85,000 and 100,000 years ago (Malafouris, 2013: 181) and they involved handheld tools. As we have seen, many of the contributions in this book take the manual aspect of trace-making as their point of departure. Since the early 1990s, however, the digital turn has fundamentally changed our trace-making practices. This makes trace-making an especially interesting and important area of inquiry. Unlike studies of practices born of the digital turn itself (e.g. web-driven social media such as Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat), which are currently getting a lot of attention, it can show us how the digital turn has changed practices that have been with us since the Paleolithic. During the symposium, the tension between manual and digital aspects of trace-making was a constant theme, and this is reflected in many of the contributions.
Johannessen and Van Leeuwen start by demonstrating that drawing a near-perfect circle manually is difficult and requires a great deal of skill, while the opposite is true for digital trace-making, where it takes much effort and patience to produce irregular forms. Yet digitally produced irregularity is common, because, in the digital era, the handwritten and the hand-drawn have come to stand for the ‘personal’, the ‘unique’ and the ‘authentic’, all highly valued in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction. Just as every voice is unique, so is every person’s handwriting: “A world without handwriting would be tantamount to a world without song; one in which the expressive force of the bodily gesture—whether manual or vocal—has finally been decoupled from words and their meanings” (Ingold, this volume: 31).
Gunhild Kvåle argues that software interposes an intermediate level between the material surface (of, for instance, A4 paper for a laser printer) and the potentially meaningful marks that can be left on it, which causes the expression of personal identity to become a choice from menus of fonts, layout templates and so on, hence no longer unique and truly ‘personal’. Tønnesen, similarly, sees the stylistic choice in the toilet signs of different kinds of restaurants as expressing the shared ‘lifestyle’ identities of the kinds of customers they seek to attract.
Ingold, finally, discusses typing and writing as two distinct modalities of touch. In typing, the “flow is broken up”, there is “no ductus of the hand, no feeling” (p. 37):
The hand that holds the pen does not assemble letters or words into sentences as does the hand of the typist or type-setter. It rather lays a trail of continuous movement—the letter-line—along which words make their appearance”
Ever since Aristotle analytically distinguished speaker and hearer in his theory of rhetoric (Garver, 1994: 104), theories of communication have contrasted two kinds of subjects in discourse. Depending on the specific theory, its object of study and aims and different labels and emphases are assigned to the two: speaker versus hearer, sender versus receiver, performer versus audience, producer versus interpreter and so on.
During the past half century, many communication theories have made the empowerment of the general public through education their more or less explicit agenda. This has been achieved by giving people better means of reading and understanding texts, thus making agendas of manipulation more difficult to achieve. One consequence of this stance has been that much recent methodology in the study of communication has privileged the point of view of the reader, viewer, perceiver and interpreter, among others.
Most of the contributions in this book take trace-making, rather than trace taking, as their point of departure. Maybe the title of the symposium, ‘Making Traces’, prompted more responses from trace-makers than trace takers. But the study of graphic traces, in fact, brings out that the two are closely related, and that the ability to write plays a large role in the ability to read. Lagarrigue and Longcamp (p. 21) report that “when 5-year old children learn letters through handwriting, their subsequent recognition performance is better than when they learn letters through a keyboard”. In other words, we become better at reading if we learn to write—not type—letterforms. The point has become especially pertinent in recent years, as the ability to write cursive script is increasingly regarded as an obsolete skill. In Finland, cursive writing will be removed from the education curriculum from 2016 and replaced with lessons in keyboard typing. Lagarrigue and Longcamp (p. 25) comment that
[w]ith the massive changes occurring in the current society of computers and mobile devices, handwriting is getting replaced by other modes of written language production, and visual-motor coupling is already changing. The challenge in the next few years will be to understand how the organization of writing in the brain, and its relationship with other perceptual and linguistic skills, adapts to material constraints of the digital revolution.
Other authors, too, stress the relation between the production and perception and understanding of traces. Ingold invokes the medieval monks “who would read their lovingly copied manuscripts by running their fingers along the lines of the letters, and by murmuring the corresponding sounds” (p. 31), and Thibault analyses a video in which a four-year-old child does exactly the same thing when she ‘reads’ a public sign, and argues that “both perception and reception are brought about by agents’ sensory-kinetic experience of bodies-in-movement” (p. 47).
Actual tracing, using tracing paper, plays a particularly important role here, whether in learning to write (Thibault, this volume, 78ff), or in architectural drawing practices, as described in Lucas’s chapter, not least because tracing is never exact copying but always allows for difference and for the “tolerance” (Lucas, this volume, p. 127) that is necessary in architectural drawing, because “when there is no room for error it [the building] is difficult to construct as it is literally too exacting” (ibid).
In the linguistic tradition, the materiality of speech and writing has been kept quite separate from the study of language as a meaning-making resource. Phonetics occupied itself with the physical articulation, acoustic properties and perception of speech sounds without reference to their role in creating meaning, while linguistic phonology studied the sound systems of language in abstraction from physical and psychological considerations, as an abstract and arbitrary system of differences for making meaning. ‘Sound symbolism’ was at best marginal and somewhat suspect footnote in studies of semantics. As for written language, typography was seen as a self-effacing craft in the service of the written word, with at best an aesthetic value that could really only be appreciated by the craftsman: “Nobody but other craftsmen will appreciate […] the long breaths held over serif and kern, the splitting of hair-spaces” (Warde, quoted in Van Leeuwen, 2005: 27). And typography, the materiality of the printed word, was ignored by linguists, as was graphology, the psychological analysis of handwriting as symptomatic of personality.
Poststructuralist philosophers and cultural critics revived an interest in the materiality of language but still in abstraction from meaning. Roland Barthes (1977) saw “the grain of the voice” as affecting the listener in a deeply personal way and escaping the semiotic and the social. Kaja Silverman called the voice “the site of perhaps the most radical of al subjective divisions—the division between meaning and materiality” (1988: 44). Embodiment was celebrated but not seen as integral to meaning making.
Yet the materiality of the signifier had become increasingly important in public communication. Thanks to amplification, the bel canto voice of the singer and the declamatory diction of the actor could be replaced by the iconic voice qualities of actors, like Marlon Brandon, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, and of singers, like Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday and many others, and these voice qualities became carriers of meaning (cf. Van Leeuwen, 2008), as did typographic qualities. Bellantoni and Woolman (2000: 29) wrote that “the printed word has two levels of meaning, the ‘word image’, that is the idea represented by the word itself, constructed from a string of letters, and the ‘typographic image’, the ‘holistic visual impression’ ”, and Neuenschwander (1993: 31) called typography “a fully developed medium of expression … possessing a complex grammar by which communication is possible”. But such communication can no longer be studied with the binary methods of phonology and, as we have seen, creates meaning on the basis of the physical gestures that articulate the traces and the resulting qualities of the traces themselves—the boldness or lightness, the roundness or angularity, the elongation or flattening of the letterforms or other traces.
In this volume, Meidani’s chapter on Persian calligraphy is on the one hand an analysis of the basic material units of this form of writing, and the way they combine into larger units, but it also cites normative discourses that lend ‘calligraphic meaning’ to these forms and, in this way closes the semiotic loop.
Johannessen and Van Leeuwen discuss irregularity as a physical feature of traces which stems from an inability or unwillingness to produces neat, regular traces and so can, depending on the context, be interpreted as ‘rebelliousness’, ‘childish playfulness’, and so on but also, by contrast to the perfect regularity of computer-generated traces, ‘individuality’, ‘authenticity’ and so on.
Aiello shows that such the move towards materiality not only is a theoretical move but also informs new semiotic practices such as the ‘de-symbolisation’ and ‘texturisation’ that has taken place in Starbucks logos over the past 25 years.
In such approaches an emphasis on materiality reintegrates embodiment into meaning and reconciles the bottom up and the top down. There need not be a divide between materiality and meaning. Paying close attention to the physicalities of traces and trace-making can help us to better understand contemporary meaning making practices.
Each of the chapters in this book weaves together several of the themes highlighted in this introduction, and does so in its own way. A range of different ways of ordering the chapters would therefore be possible. We have chosen to order them on the basis of two principles which show a reasonable amount of overlap, by moving from the more theoretical papers to specific case studies (although these make their own theoretical point!) and from chapters in which the bottom-up approach is foregrounded to chapters which the top-down approach dominates.
The first part, Writing and Reading, includes three chapters focusing on the kinaesthetic feedback loop, the link between the production and the perception/understanding of traces, albeit from different disciplinary perspectives. Lagarrigue and Longcamp’s chapter is an overview of brain imaging and experimental studies of the relation between the production and recognition of letterforms by the authors and others. Ingold’s chapter on the link between manual inscription and haptic perception essentially makes the same point but from an anthropological-philosophical perspective, and Thibault’s chapter mixes eco-social semiotic theorisation with an analysis of the proto-reading and proto-writing of a four-year-old girl.
The second part, Bodies, Tools and Materials, focuses, as its title suggests, on the ‘trinity’ of bodies, tools and materials—from the point of view of practitioners and from the point of view of theorists who reflect on the work of practitioners. Neuenschwander’s chapter uses the trinity as a point of departure for exploring a range of approaches to calligraphic art which also differ in their relative emphasis on linguistic and calligraphic meaning-making, and hence in their ‘legibility’. Cornil describes her educational practice, in which learning to become a calligrapher is an intensely bodily practice that needs a one-to-one apprentice-style pedagogic approach. Bouchy’s chapter describes calligraphic art as a form of research into new ways of making traces—dripping rather than drawing or painting, moving light sources in long exposures of photographic materials and performing calligraphy, so producing fleeting rather than permanent inscriptions. Lucas’s chapter describes architectural drawing as a form of research in which tracing is a way of understanding and transforming the designs that are being traced.
The third part, Manual and Digital Traces, focuses on the difference between manually and digitally produced traces. Kvåle’s chapter focuses on Microsoft Word as a trace-making technology that provides users with predetermined resources for expressing identity, and includes an experiment in which subjects design a business card using Microsoft Word. Johannessen and Van Leeuwen focus on a particular attribute of traces, their relative irregularity, discussing the difference between manually and digitally produced irregularity and the ways in which irregularity is used to make meaning and actually does make meaning in specific contexts.
The final section, Kinds of Traces, discusses kinds of trace-making and includes Meidani’s chapter on Persian calligraphy, Aiello’s chapter on the development of the Starbucks logo over the forty-five years the company has existed, and on the way it has moved towards a desymbolising and texturising mode of trace-making in which materiality came to play a greater role. It also includes Tønnesen’s chapter on toilet signs in different contexts, and, more generally, on style and identity, and Løvland and Repstad’s chapter on religious signs in the urban environment, which takes a more ethnographic approach, asking passers-by for their reaction to these signs and which also argues for a transdisciplinary relation between sociology and semiotics.
We hope that this book will encourage visual researchers to include the graphetic, the trace-making and the semiotic, the meaning making aspect of visual communication in their theoretical and analytical approaches.
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