More on "Unocontaminated Meaning(s)"

"The materiality of language is that aspect which remains resistant to an absolute subsumption into the ideality of meaning. . . . To see the letter not as a phoneme but as ink, and to further insist on that materiality, inevitably contests the status of language as a bearer of uncontaminated meaning(s)"
- Steve McCaffery , in a 1978 essay on the poet Bill Bissett

McCafferey’s Carnival is a fascinating work (which is the understatement of the year). It handles physical text in a way that I have never before seen done, nor will likely ever see again. Taking the artist years to create using a physical typewriter, it is a project that would have likely been nearly impossible in today’s digital age. I say impossible because the computer would have been able to create text-art, but never mirror the writer-text connection which the Carnival so elegantly portrays.
It is the use of the phrase “uncontaminated meaning(s)” in the above quote that I find particularly insightful in attempting to decipher some semblance of meaning behind McCaffery’s creation. Pause a second to consider the implications of this seemingly innocuous phrase. By uncontaminated meaning(s), the author is implying that text exists independent of the language which it composes. Furthermore, it exists with a meaning all to itself – each letter has a personality, if you will, that often gets lost when it joins with other letters to make words, and with other words, to get lost in phrases, sentences, and books.
I see McCaffrey’s Carnival as a piece which attempts to redefine the individuality of each letter. Entire sections of his piece are made up of the repetition of only one letter – which I see as allowing the shape of the letter, and the repetition of the shape, to dictate that letter’s meaning. Still, the letter exists as part of a greater whole (as each letter does when composing part of a word), yet McCaffrey is challenging our generally held assumptions about the functions of letters by using them to create a whole that is diametrically opposed to what we are used to seeing.
McCaffrey takes the materiality of language to a level not achieved by other artists (here, artists includes writers, who use language as their medium). He uses words to portray a message, but not as writers portray a message through the construction of messages and the arrangement of language, but as a representation of the pure materiality which the letters possess.