16/04/2025 Nones for Holy Wednesday Paper is very interesting. It is the fundamental formal structure of our culture, so ubiquitous and understated as to go completely undetected. It is a clearly delineated form, utilitarian, consisting of a rectangle of light-coloured writing material. Beyond that, all other properties are accidents of the production of any individual piece of paper - the thickness, the proportions, the pliability. All pieces of paper are, on some level, interchangeable; US letter versus US legal versus A4 versus any other size or thickness or shade of white are all seen as permutations of the same form. The material, colour, proportions and size could be completely different and still we would see them as permutations of that one same formal abstraction - the piece of paper.

This formal abstraction – the light coloured rectangle that you write on – can serve as a vessel for prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, scores, drawings, correspondence, shopping lists, scribbles from testing the functionality of a pen, it can be lined or unlined, covered in dots or a grid. Imagine one piece of paper from each of these categories. We cut each of these pieces of paper into many small pieces, and, selecting one fragment from each with curatorial precision and sensibility, we magically are able to re-attach our selection of fragments back together into one unified whole. What we have done is we have fragmented and re-combined each of these papers into a new, unified, self-contained whole; the form is preserved, completely untouched, and yet the semantic meaning contained by each of the pre-existing forms is completely destroyed. However, by means of our deeply internalised understanding of the mechanism by which the form of a piece of paper works, we are still able to perceive it as one whole, cohesive, unified, undivided text, and we can even scan it as such. “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”; the grammar of the form is correct, but the text nonsensical.

When we go beyond paper to word processors, websites, graffiti, and so forth, the new approach always contains something of precisely that which it proposes to surpass. The cultural ghost of the paper is constantly peeking around the corner, as websites typically consist of dark text on light background, word processors take a digital representation of a piece of paper as their fundamental structuring characteristic, billboards and posters are structured within the bounds of a sensible rectangle with light, breathable margins. Even the guerrilla art of the graffiteurs, with all its intent to undermine and rebel, will almost always be structured within the bounds of a pleasantly-proportioned imaginary rectangle. When these structural characteristics are turned on their heads (e.g. when a website has white text on a dark background, or when a graffiteur writes a run-on sentence in paint pen that spans the entirety of an underpass without a single line break, or even the mere existence of a piece of dark-coloured card paper), the effect is palpable to anyone with an understanding of the cultural significance of the piece of paper. Even the most inexperienced will intuitively understand this relationally to a "standard" piece of paper, as a mutation or a refutation of (and, by consequence, a commentary on) this abstracted archetypical form.

Therefore we can consider the paper and the text for which it serves as a vessel to be analogous to Berio’s concept of gesture versus sign. The sign (in this case, what is written on the paper) must continually re-assert itself to find meaning in the context of its particular usages; meanwhile, the gesture (the piece of paper as a form and as an object covered in writing) has a meaning which simply “is”; you cannot create the meaning of a piece of paper, the meaning is already predetermined.

-A