Terra Incognita Codex

“Terra Incognita” is a hand-made fabric codex that uses photograms of  broken glass over type-written pages to explore the relationships  between persecution and writing, desire and value, consumption and  democracy. As the argument moves from the situation of philosophers in  authoritarian societies to the politics of market economies, the pages increasingly obscure, words begin to fragment and disappear, demanding  more of the  reader,--more effort, more imagination. This residuum marks the boundary between thought and form. The scholar is constrained by limitations imposed upon discursive rationality, while the artist reaches for the impossible, hoping to restore practice to its Platonic place beside philosophy. The fissures that conceal this struggle simultaneously reveal its failure. Neither art, nor science, survive reason’s eclipse. 

The images are broken glass over typeface on onion skin paper, transferred to a large-format negative, and printed using cyanotype. 

April, 2025

Bibliographic Note:

I have previously examined some of the themes animating this codex, though in a quite different context, and a radically different form, thus necessarily producing very different results. See Graham Cassano, “Critical Pragmatism’s Status Wage and the Standpoint of the Stranger,” in Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell (Eds.), Capitalism’s Future: Alienation, Emancipation, and Critique. Brill, 2016. And, while the arguments in "Terra Incognita" are original, I am not alone in noting parallels between Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen. See, for instance, Matthew Watson, “Desperately Seeking Social Approval: Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and the Moral Limits of Capitalist Culture," British Journal of Sociology, 63:3, September, 2012: 491-512. Finally, I want to acknowledge the work of Isidore Isou and the Letterists, who I discovered by way of Guy Debord. Both "Terra Incognita" and "Vitrea Fracta" are variations on the Letterist metagraph. "Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical, and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labeling..." Isodore Isou, "The Force Fields of Letterist Painting (Excerpts)," Lettrisme: Into the Present, Special Issue, Visible Language, 17:3, Summer, 1983, p.77.