Ideographic writing: the language act of sound-image

Drawing on a case study of a part of the experimental writing Hayfever, Love and Other Impossible with Microsoft Word, ideographic writing proposes to understand writing in word processing to be a language act of sound-image, enabling ideation in its technological material process. It calls for a material processual view of understanding writing and its ideation with media technologies through three characteristics: the operative, the processual sound-image, and the abstraction. Firstly, computational media and typographical technologies condition writing to be operative in the material process of ideation. Sound-image then enables a graphic tracing of ideation, resonating with the events of graphic device in specific temporalities. Abstraction moreover generalises and individuates sound-image among technological matter. Ideographic writing with these three characteristics does not reach the threshold of signification, but multiplies the patterns of operation, making itself a machinery secondary to and against forms of representation.