Reconstruction 10.2 (2010)
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Doodle
Culture: Meditations on the Great Idle Scrawl / Dr. David
Prescott-Steed, Monash University , Australia
Abstract:
Conventional
writing is accepted as being central to
our communicative acts, to the expansion, dissemination, and
documentation of
ideas and meanings. Thus, by falling into the
category of asemic, or non-semantic, mark making, the results of
doodling are
seen to effectively side step the conventions that are usually relied
upon for
the efficient conduct of ‘written’ communication. But this is not to
leave them
wanting in value. For while I agree that there is a time and a place
for the
kind of doodling that stands in contrast to productivity, to work—a
time and a
place to corrupt Parkinson’s Law wherein we find a doodle gradually
‘expanding
to fill the time available for its completion.’ However, this
perspective fails
to acknowledge full the scope of doodling’s cultural value.
Keywords: asemic, writing, doodling, indeterminacy, idle, occult, Magna-Doodle, Derrida.
Untitled, D. Prescott-Steed.
<1> In our
information age,
conventional writing remains central to the success of the expansion,
dissemination, and documentation of ideas and meanings; in short, to
the
success of our cultural communication. Thus, it is perhaps by falling
into the category of ‘asemic’ writing (that
name given to the ‘non-semantic’ marks,
lines, and shapes
that look like writing but which cannot be read)
that doodling is thought to carry only nominal cultural value.
<2> There are a variety of contexts in which
doodling may take place. Of
these, doodling might happen concurrently with another activity. For
example,
when we are at home on the phone with a friend of family member—the
movement of our hand brings focus to the conversation by using up
excess bodily
energy (a confined fidget that allays the desire to pace). Doodling
might also
happen when we are supposed to be dedicating ourselves to another task
entirely—as boredom’s
inevitable by-product. This interpretation might be fitting for a
student who,
in the context of an examination, is at odds with the task at hand and
who, in
order to help whittle away at the time remaining, begins to scribble a
few
marks in the margins of his or her answer sheet (in some presumptuous
parody of
the examiner’s comments ex post facto).
<3> Perhaps it is in this way that the ‘doodle’
provides a temporal strategy
or squandering. While such a student might argue Bertrand Russell’s
(1935)
point that “[t]he time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted time”, this
kind of
doodling finds the pen being, quite literally, ‘drawn’ away from the
demands of
education. The pen is gripped and moved around as if searching for a
way out of
the page (perhaps feigning a way out of the examination process). It
traces a
narrow path of ink through an imaginary maze in the margins, only
adding to the
import of doodling as a decidedly anti-academic exercise: a
revolutionary
practice. I mean this in terms of de Certeau’s sense of the small
revolution,
given that doodling conceivably contributes to a multifarious
“‘proliferation
of inventions in limited spaces’ [wherein] people can respond to
difficult and
uncompromising circumstances by developing certain means of coping with
them
and certain ways of avoiding the worst aspects of what is imposed upon
them by
rules and authorities” (in Inglis, 2005: 102). In this respect,
doodling
presents as a form of privatised survival strategy, functioning to
provide
adequate distraction for the individual from forces in the face of
which he or
she feels powerless.
<4> At this
point, it is useful
to acknowledge the concept of the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ as
coined by
Lee Ross, whereby personal dispositions are taken, over situational
influences,
as an adequate account for that person’s actions. “It is regarded as an
attribution error because making such an interpretation almost always
underestimates the impact of the external environment and places too
much
responsibility for the behavior on the individual’s internal traits of
tendencies” (Reber, 1995: 68). Without a person’s self-recognition of
their
connection to a broader sphere of social and environmental forces, the
indulgence of doodling leans to towards the realm of narcissism. This
opens a
further doorway to an inclusion of Piaget’s notion of “egocentric
speech”—scope
that comes, not only from the semiotic approach that I have invoked in
this
discussion, but from the way egocentric speech dissipates as maturity
develops.
To explain, Piaget’s theory (in Reber, 1995: 239) pertains to “speech
which
derives from and serves purely internal needs and thoughts.” Having
usually
outgrown egocentric speech by around the age of six, a person matures
with
their awareness of the dynamism between self and society (and, with it,
the
sustainability of a person’s cultural reflexivity as an active
negotiation of
this dynamism).
<5> This theoretical background provides valuable
depth when considering
whether or not doodling’s conceivably ‘wanton wasting’ of ink
constitutes a
student’s silent protest against the demands of cognitive discipline (a
resistance to the grading of the individual, reluctance or an inability
to
provide evidence of scholarly achievement). Furthermore, if there is
something
in the saying “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do”
(Russell,
1935/2004: 1), then maybe doodling is the sign of something more
malevolent
than mere distraction. To claim that ‘idle hands make for idle minds’
would be
to draw a rather direct line between the cognitive process and the
movement of
the doodling the pen, as it mines a tunnel around and under social
conventions
into some kind of labyrinthine abyssal zone or ‘anti-social space’.
<6> While I agree that there is a time and a place
for the kind of doodling
that stands in contrast to productivity, to work—and while I agree
that there is a time and a place for the kind of weird corruption of
Parkinson’s Law wherein we find a doodle gradually ‘expanding to fill
the
(exam) time available for its completion’—surely this perspective
fails to acknowledge the full scope of doodling as a cultural
practice.[1] For
the notion that doodling is meaningless and arbitrary, aimless, that it
marks
idleness (of mind, that is, as if the pen were found to draw the mind’s
meandering), results from its comparison to conventional communication
where it
is posited as parasitic. That is to say, it is evaluated via an
‘outside in’
approach given that convention tends to remain out(side) of (that)
context and
perhaps, in this way, echoing the perspective of the examiner who,
after all,
is bound to certain pre-established expectations (the examiner stands
in as a
vindicator of convention).
<7> Thus, while on the one hand we find the voice
of convention embedded in
commonly held beliefs about doodling, there is scope for another hand
(one
which holds, instead, the doodler’s pen firmly in its grasp?) to turn
the gaze
of convention back in on itself. In other words, this discussion is an
attempt
to explore, not simply what common assumptions say of doodling (though
this
provides our starting points), but what such assumptions suggest of the
broader
cultural sphere that maintains them. There is an appeal for balance,
therefore,
through the kind of critical analysis that conceptualises the
conditions of
doodling in the context of a postmodern context—specifically in terms
of the
decentring of authority that can also be a decentring of a
language/writing
system.
<8> In this discussion I explain how notions of
doodling, in the
semiotic-anthropological sense of the word, as an aimless, meaningless,
and arbitrary
exercise point to a) a general, and
erroneous, belief in the ‘naturalness’ of writing (one that overlooks
the fact
that, because writing is a cultural construction, it is also arbitrary—given
stability through consensus rather than through any intrinsic value),
and b) a pervasive ‘limited
capacity’ to cope
with complex indeterminacy—where the openness to multiplicity that
doodling
accommodates is viewed as problematic and which, consequently, finds
doodling
denigrated to the status of nonsense. Herein, doodling is treated less
as an
end or by-product and more as a beginning, as one entry point into the
issue of
indeterminacy.
<9> This strategy of placing less emphasis on what
particular examples of doodling
might themselves mean, in favour of contextualising the attitudes
towards
doodling in general, means that doodling functions as an opportunity
for
critical cultural debate and not, as it is often claimed, for indolence
amid
civilisation.
Untitled, Anon. This and
subsequent images were salvaged from a variety of notepads, used by
customers
wanting to test felt tip markers and biros, in a shopping mall
newsagency in
Perth, Western Australia. My interest in asemic mark-making motivated
me to
tear off and collect several examples. They have been included for
their
‘doodling’ character, as opposed to simply illustrating each stage of
the
discussion.
The Great Idle
Scrawl
<10> I should like to continue first by
contextualising my interest in the
subject of doodling (though I anticipate that this is at least partly
disclosed
by the use of examples from my own asemic corpus to intersperse the
sections of
the discussion). Today, many scraps of inky paper remain scattered
across my
writing desk. They continue to accumulate, to pile up and mingle with
other
objects, including conventional writing. The disorderliness of these
scraps (or
perhaps the state of the desk in general) somehow echoes the flow of
the lines and
shapes that I have drawn on them. Nevertheless, I cannot bring myself
to throw
them away and so present myself as something of a doodle-hoarder. [2]
There is
some comfort to be derived from doodling, I believe, and the
implication that not
everything needs to be understood, nor colonised by meaning. Perhaps
this
attitude stems from my experiences of doodling as a child (invoking
Piaget
perhaps)—experiences that began the very first day that I got my hands
on a
Magna Doodle (a name meaning, quite literally it would seem, the ‘great
idle
scrawl’).
<11> While since its invention in 1974 the Magna
Doodle continues to be a
popular children’s toy, for those who are unfamiliar with it, the Magna
Doodle
is made from brightly coloured plastic and features a magnetic drawing
display.
The toy includes a limited range of magnetic shapes (such as a star, a
circle,
a square, and a triangle), a magnetic pen, and a magnetic eraser (often
built
into the display unit), but the singularity of the Magna Doodle rests
with the
drawing display itself, which is made up of hundreds of small cells,
each
containing magnetic particles. Dragging the magnetic pen across the
surface of
the display, or pressing one of the magnetic shapes against it, causes
the
magnetic particles to move from the back side of the display to the
front side
of the display at the point where contact has been made, thus appearing
as a
line or a shape. This makes Fisher-Price’s Magna Doodle a more than
adequate
platform for the production of asemic
writing and other doodles.
<12> A correlation between ‘doodles’ and magnetism
further builds upon the
notion of the idle scrawl as driven by an unconscious force. This
resonates
with the Ouija Board, which is used by a group of people during a
séance with
the intention of this group making contact with the spirits of the
deceased.
The board has symbols and letters on it. Each participant will place a
finger on
a single glass or other kind of indicator that rests on the surface of
the
board. Believers will claim that the spirits world, and not the
influence of
the participants, will be responsible for moving the indicator around
the
board, thus spelling out a name or message. The indicator is said to
move
around the board without conscious interference by those present;
whether it is
tantamount to an invisible scrawl is debateable. Nevertheless, a
domestic
conjuration still carries a claim to unguided manual movement, whereby
meaning
is not drawn but invoked without predetermination. Arguably, the
non-intentional occult dexterity of the ouija board also relates to
Russell’s
comments regarding Satan’s utilisation of idle human hands (1935/2004:
1).
<13> But the process of ‘drawing’ is only half the
‘magic’ of the Magna
Doodle. By sliding the magnetic eraser across the display from side to
side (an
action that causes the particles to return to their original positions
at the
back side of the display), any writing or drawing that had been created
disappears. Having erased whatever was on the display (perhaps a word
or two, a
diagram) the user has primed the Magna Doodle for further use. He or
she is
free to start from scratch—a chance, but more so a requirement, for the
hand to
begin again, to employ what Derrida refers to as, “mechanical
iterability”
(2005: 20). Here, Derrida speaks to notions of instrumentality and
reproduction—to a person’s manual capacity to repeat marks through use
of a
mechanical device. In the context of the Magna Doodle, of course the
doodler
may ‘draw’ again, if not the precisely along the previous path (if not
in a
direct replication of the last trajectory) then in the sense that a
person may be
drawn, again (as an invocation), to the ritualisation of magnetic
particles.
<14> The iterability of the Magna Doodle
pre-supposes the impermanence of a
drawing made with it. Thus, the Magna Doodle bares relevance in
discourse on
the notions of erasure, impermanence, and the ephemeral. I make this
claim to
the extent that these notions play into an anxiety of fleeting moments
for, although
I was once the proud owner of a blue Magna Doodle, the toy’s capacity
for such
mechanical iterability meant that my experience of it was often a
bittersweet
affair. To explain, when the opportunity and the inclination arose, I
would
first sit with the toy on my lap, feeling the butterflies in my stomach
flap
about at the sheer possibility heralded by the blank surface
(comparable to
that feeling, both pleasant and anxious, that a painter might
experience when
preparing to place the first stroke of colour on a canvas. In fact, I
still get
this feeling when preparing to write, poised before a blank sheet of
paper with
pen in hand). There is a sense of commitment often attributed to the
ritual of
‘putting pen to paper’, not only to the act of writing itself. It is a
sense of
commitment involved in beginning, not only to start but to keep on
going into
that space beyond the start, that space in which the arms and legs may
be
stretched out in preparation for having a look around—a
method that is, perhaps, similar to the dimension of ‘accompaniment’ in
what
Sartre called “guided invention” (in Said, 1975/1997: 74). A veritable
wrestle takes place between what the imagine hopes to make manifest,
perhaps
for the approval of a parent of guardian, and the mechanical
limitations
inherent in the drawing device. Once, again, the doodle might actually
be the
failed attempt at a drawing and, thus give further context to Ross’s
‘fundamental attribution error.’ What the child deems satisfactory
might well
be the result of many attempts at the same thing—where satisfaction
might as
much stem from a sense of having triumphed over one’s own ineptitude as
the
‘doodle’ is a chance to obscure, from view, those multifarious trials.
Transitioning
from doodle to drawing might demand a person’s substantial commitment.
<15> However,
the Magna Doodle
offers no provision for whatever permanence a commitment of this kind
implies, or
for which there might be hope, and this notion of commitment has great
importance
here. For, having deliberately doodled away for a while, and having
reached a
stage where I felt pleased with what I had achieved, I would get up and
set off
in search of the closest available parent, doodle firmly in hand, keen
to show
off my most recent and prized creation. But, despite the effort that
had gone
into the doodle (it can be a serious business despite beliefs to the
contrary),
I always ran the risk of losing some of its detail during transit. An
unexpected bump against a door frame, a sudden jerk of the arm, was all
that it
took to turn my satisfaction into disappointment. Thus, it seemed that
the
magic of the Magna Doodle can also be its downfall or, more to the
point, the
downfall of the doodle. I knew very well that, if ever this moment
arrived, I
would have little choice but to start from scratch. Whenever that
moment did
arrive, perhaps I felt something of the other meaning of ‘doodle’ that
is ‘to
make a fool of; to cheat’ (stemming from the Low German dudel-
in dudeltopf, -ldopp
simple fellow) (Brown, 1993a:
728).
Clare is the best ever ever everest, Anon.
Scratching at the Surface of
Temporality
<16> While this account might have made the Magna
Doodle sound like it produced
more frustration than enjoyment, at least from an educational point of
view it also
proved very useful
for my working through the kinds of mock letters and pseudo-writing
that are
indicative of someone who is learning to write. It provided a veritable
stage
for preliminary explorations of the English language, even though it
took a
little while before I progressed beyond poorly formed and incomplete
letters,
of inconsistent size and shape. Still, perhaps there remains some
residue, in
the impermanence of the ‘Magna Doodled doodle’, of the general
conception of
doodling in modern society (in the overall lack of seriousness with
which it is
regarded)—as if doodles were ever to retain their dispensability, their
temporality, as merely practice attempts for much more masterful
communication.
Needless to say, my comments are not meant to sustain this conception.
For me, doodling’s
non-conformity to the conventionality upon which ‘proper’ writing
relies (in
order to remain as a system of coherent and meaningful communication)
is a part
of what shows its value as something far more than idle play.
<17> Let us
focus on the notion
of writing for a moment and consider that, to the extent that the word
‘write’
originates from the Old English writan,
meaning “to sense, to score, scratch”, it can be said that all writing
begins
from scratch (Brown, 1993b: 3731). Perhaps it is a coincidence that
this
Anglo-Saxon meaning echoes the cuneiform tablets produced in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, by the authors
of
“the oldest known historical inscriptions” which reach as far back as
the “third
millennium BC” (Bottero, 2001: 4-7). The
production of cuneiform text entailed a
process of using long reeds to ‘inscribe’ wedge shaped
characters onto clay tablets. Thus for the Sumerians, as
has been the case with manual writing systems since, ‘to scratch’ meant
‘to
communicate’. But
what was being ‘notched up’, recorded? What emerges from the incision?
<18> Some scholars believe that writing is a
hallmark of civilisation (and,
furthermore, that the more complex the writing system, the more
complex the civilisation).
This is not to say that writing and civilisation are identical, but
rather that
they are “inseparable” (Noordzij). Champdor (1958: 8) for one concludes
that,
having developed the “art of writing”, Sumerian documents “mark the
beginning
of historical times.” In this instance, we find that the meaning of
writing
that is ‘to scratch’ also has the import of ‘to begin’ in a way that
appeals to
the origins of civilised culture. Here, in the sense that conventional
writing
becomes embedded in the articulation of civilisation, it has come to
signify ‘the
civilised.’ This is especially so given that it was the Sumerian elite
who
could a) afford to spare the time
needed to write, b) afford the
costs
involved in getting someone else to write for them, and c)
afford the space required for the long term storage of cuneiform
texts.
<19> To add to the notion of writing as ‘beginning’,
the beginning of
history, Derrida (1967/1978: 11) makes the claim that “writing is inaugural.” Where Derrida (1967/1978:
11) means this “in the fresh sense of the word”, he discloses writing
as unprocessed
and innovative, unusual; we might also conceive of Sumerian cuneiform
text in
these terms—as proto commitment to composition, to inscription. Then,
such a
beginning must also have had a beginning, because even at the beginning
of
history, Sumerian writing did not just ‘appear,’ as a spontaneous
manifestation. Rather, it also had to have first been composed, drawn,
scribbled, and created. Proto-text must also have been invoked, called
upon as
an opportunity to ‘get somewhere’ along the line of the inscription.
<20> These observations can also be made in light of
doodling, not only
because doodling (despite its reputation as a regressive practice) is
not
social-class specific. It
too can resemble scratches or even blemishes on a surface, whether
freely
occurring as stick marks in the sand or as part of the process of
learning to
write. Doodling is inaugural to the extent that is
also must
begin, and must continue to do so, evolving into new and unforeseen
shapes, new
compositions. Yet, such observations are what tend to inform the
general
cultural standing of doodling as a wasteful practice—the matter of
value.
Neither cuneiform text or idle doodlings meet the demands of a society
driven
by highly sophisticated, and immediately gratifying, word processing
machinery.
The value, then, rests not in where doodling is going but what it
signifies
through its function as a beginning.
<21> It needs to be said that there are two kinds of
‘beginning’ being alluded
to here, that the lines and shapes that a child produces when learning
to write
differ from the cuneiform tablets produced by the Sumerians. Some of
their
difference lies in the fact that the absence of modern day artefacts
such as
paper, word processors, and Magna Doodles (to use these anachronisms),
meant
that Sumerian writing began as a rather time consuming and laborious
activity.
<22> Today, we need only visit high-profile
museums around the world such as the British
Museum
and the University of Pennsylvania Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology to ascertain how highly
regarded cuneiform
texts are, as well as to confirm the degree of permanence that clay has
afforded them. There is an intentional focus on the materiality of
writing
because, now, we experience a variety of contexts where word processors
have
taken away the need for handwriting (the love letter or the official
document
complete with personalised wax seal) and text (also known as
‘txt’—where even
words begin to implode) is scattered all over both cyberspace and the
material
world (it makes me wonder what might happen to doodling in a cyber
culture). What is
more, in stark
contrast to the handling of ancient cuneiform texts, the doodlings and
proto-texts of children might be lucky to spend a week or two pinned to
the
refrigerator door under a novelty magnet before finally ending up in
the
rubbish bin.
<23> Perhaps
some lack of serious
attention given to this kind of creative product exposes presumptions
about
what proper creative expression entails. Yet, while we rely on meaning
systems
for effective communication, while we take them for granted (those very
same
sets of relationships that lead to the presumed meaninglessness of
doodles), it
is important to remember that the relationships that they entail are
not
natural but, instead, cultural. In other words, “[t]he connection
between the
two [form and concept] is arbitrary” (Cobley, 2004: 13). To illustrate
this
arbitrariness, Cobley uses the word ‘dog’. He points out that when the
word
‘dog’ is used, it conjures up a concept of ‘dogness’. But so do other
words,
such as ‘mut’ or ‘pooch’ or ‘Hund’ (if we speak German). Furthermore, “if enough
people agreed to it,
the word ‘dog’ could be replaced by ‘woofer’, or even ‘blongo’ or
‘glak’”
(Cobley, 2004: 13).
<24> In the
same way that there
is no natural reason why the word ‘dog’ should conjure up the mental
concept of
‘dogness’, there is only a cultural, and therefore arbitrary, basis
upon which
to conceive the meaninglessness of doodles—their
characterization as
non-civilised. But, to take this issue further, I recall how the Incas managed to develop a civilisation, and
a successful form of
communication, without writing. For, in order to communicate, they used
a
medium known as ‘quipu’.
<25> To clarify, the Incan quipu system has the
appearance of a collection of
cords with different loops and knots tied in each one, cords that “were
usually
made from cotton, and they were often dyed one or more colours”
(Crowley &
Heyer: 28). Not only the cords, but also the spaces between them, were
important for the communication of different messages. They could all
be lined
up horizontally so that cords at either end could be assigned the
meaning of
‘before’ and ‘after’. The cords could also be lined up vertically so
that values
of ‘up’ and ‘down’ could be represented, interpreted, and thus
communicated. By
attaching cords to a main cord and others to less important cords,
relationships between the cords could be established and notions of
‘hierarchy’
could be distinguished (Crowley & Heyer: 29). The quipu system
becomes
increasingly complicated with things like the loosening or tightening
of knots
and loops, the cultural value of colours, and when it was required to
record
the amount of output that they achieved from “gold mines, the
composition of
workforces, the amount and kinds of tribute, the contents of storehouses—down
to the last sandal” (Crowley & Heyer: 28). As a result,
‘pre-writing’ Incan
culture was able to utilise quipu successfully into the sixteenth
century, by
which time writing had already existed in some form or another for
almost five
thousand years. Quipu worked because it was based upon community
agreement and
not because it had any intrinsic semantic value. The point, drawing on
Cobley’s
illustration, is that the success of the Inca’s quipu system lay in the
meaning
that they made (that they created) of it, the meaning that they made of
their
own civilisation and, thus, the creativity of their culture.
<26> To the unfamiliar eye, quipu resembles a mess
of knotted strings,
meaningless. This is not to imply that beneath the chaos of doodling
lie
sharable meanings, but rather to say that, in the same way that quipu
was
meaningful to certain people for certain reasons, in the same way that
it
maintained a cultural purpose and significance, doodling does also.
Drawing
once more from Ross’s fundamental attribution error, what is at play,
in the
case of the Incan quipu, is the use-value of an internally referential
meaning
system. There is the countenance of socialisation embedded in quipu’s
capacity
to mean something to somebody, to a community of bodies, for their own
purposes. It would cultural snobbery to base an interpretation of quipi
on our
own cultural subjectivity, our own expectations of what constitutes
normal
communication.
<27> Where there is cause to overcome egocentric speech, the
‘asemic’ character of doodles confirms their pertinence as vehicles,
vessels,
for ‘otherness.’ Their potentially chaotic and meaningless appearance
means
that they can be ‘read’ via a multitude of personal viewpoints—an aptitude for
openness, characteristic of non-semantic mark-making, means that they
have to
be read in terms of their multiplicities, multifarious, and
labyrinthine
qualities. They accommodate not simply meaninglessness but an abundance
of
meaning. Thus, while the ‘orderliness’ found in other meaning systems
may not appear
in doodlings, it is precisely because of this that they continue to
appeal to
poets, writers, painters, children, among others who are part of a
creative
community, who find value in the gestural freedom it sustains.
<28> One of
these individuals, Henri Michaux,
a Belgian poet, writer, and painter who
dabbled in doodles,
pointed out that "[m]ost people make asemic
writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen. They
tend to have no fixed meaning. Their meaning is open" (Tipping).
Michaux’s
asemic experiments, including Narration
(1927), were attempts to explore the bridge between reading and
looking,
between writing and art, categories which both have a foot in the door
of
civilised culture. They both contribute to the ongoing documentation of
culture
and of cultural practices. What is asked of the ‘reader’, and perhaps
what
makes them so ‘difficult’ to negotiate, is a creative and open mind
that is also
a challenge to established cognitive frameworks of interpretation—to
the
abstract thinking that a person acquires as he or she matures into
adulthood
and, in this sense, into the presumed authority (stereotyped as
‘reason’ and
‘rationality’) of communicable adult thinking.
<29> The distinction between writing and doodling,
between the presumed
significance of one form and the presumed insignificance of the other,
can be
further dismantled via the following examples. What I am referring to
are
instances in which doodling (officially ‘scribbling’ and that which
tends to
lack authority) is ascribed the thrust of authority, such as when it is
presented
under the guise of a signature (a scribble with authority).
<30> Consider how a signature on a check is,
arguably, the most legally
recognised and protected kind of doodle used each day. Signatures also
give
petitions their political clout (the pen is still at least as mighty as
the
sword). Hard copy petitions (as opposed to those conducted online)
consist of
the kinds of doodles that, so long as there are enough of them, can
create
changes in the law or stop environmental change, mariner developments
for
example. Non-government organisations such as
Amnesty International Australia often use petitions in their promotion
and
defense of human rights, through support of various causes such as the
push to
abolish capital punishment in
<31> Thus, while the particularities of a person’s
name, the precise
combination of letters that declares his or her identity are often
reduced to
blue or black scrawls and scratches (always recalling but barely quite
repeating those that went before), a signature is still taken to be a
meaningful mark and can play a part in exerting moral authority.
Invoking the
cult of the individual, signatures are the kinds of scribbles that can
be used
to distinguish between two or more people—so much so that signature
forgery carries
serious legal consequences. On the other hand, however, doodling
generally
fails to attract this seriousness or capacity to differentiate.
Doodling’s
dissolution of the discernible mark, perhaps comparable with the death
of
handwriting that print technologies have affected and which the
tech-savvy
youth have shunned. As Claire Suddath (2009: par. 2) explains, in her
article Mourning the Death of Handwriting;
<32> People born after 1980 tend to have a
distinctive style of handwriting:
a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive.
The
knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our
increasingly
illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-eduction and literacy
professor
at
<33> It is
interesting that a
range of claims made in this discussion, regarding a general conception
of
doodling as a scrawling and undisciplined series of marks, are
demonstrated so
clearly in Suddath’s article. The childishness of illegibility further
echoes,
if not egocentric speech, then the egocentrism, with which ‘other’
manifestations of speech and writing are judged. Needless to say, the
arbitrariness of the assumption that doodling is meaningless (by means
of its ‘cultural’
not ‘natural’ justification) means that claims to the contrary are
equally as
arbitrary (they simply stem from an alternative culturally constructed
viewpoint). But the aim here has not been so much to ‘improve the
reputation’
of doodling within the context of our late modern culture. However,
discussing
the fallibility of the claim that doodling is arbitrary, by drawing
attention
to its flexibility and open-endedness, is part of a process of blurring
the
distinction between conventional and non-conventional mark-making that
supports
the denigration and ‘problematisation’ of the latter. Besides, if
doodling is
inevitably open to change, then so too must be that distinction.
Untitled, Anon.
In
Pursuit of Idleness
<34> It would seem that a part of the reason for
doodles being ascribed
diminished cultural value, along with many other examples of asemic
writing
(even those containing pictograms or ideograms), is that they cannot be
easily
read, followed, taken to signify. The multiplicity that gives them
their
capacity to accommodate an abundance of value has proved to be that
very
quality which hinders their being taken seriously (the fact that the
Magna
Doodle has been advertised and sold several million times over as a toy
must
surely have had an impact upon public opinion of doodling as ‘child’s
play’—a
juvenile narrative—and juvenilizing/infantalizing.
<35> In order to explore the basis upon which
doodling is labelled as aimless,
even “shiftless”, I shall adopt a socio-anthropological perspective.
This means
placing an emphasis on the side of such grounds that are to do with
cognitive
responses to doodling – how their ‘difficulty’, their ‘indeterminacy’,
is
negotiated and also exploring the possible implications of this.
<36> A person who watches a range of television
commercials, for instance,
will notice how companies usually explain their product and communicate
its
meaning in less than thirty seconds. A general appeal to this
efficiency, this
heightened ‘velocity of meaning’, is a key trait of postmodernity, and
one that
is coherent with Baudrillard’s “distaste
for writing that aims at making truth and meaning (in
art and elsewhere)” (Coulter, 2007: 495-6).
There is a noticeable preoccupation with fast food, faster internet
access,
automatic teller machines, and so on. But for commodity culture in
general, the
economic reality is that advertising is expensive. The relative
inaccessibility
of doodles, the time needed for their meaning to be decoding (time that
would, reasonably,
be required for the exploration of any proto-language), makes such
non-semantic
forms prone to looking like a waste of valuable time. This might seem
particularly so to those who believe that ‘time is money’ and who might
conceive of doodling as a notably unproductive pastime.
<37> Perhaps it is because of my early childhood
predisposition to Magna
Doodle distress that I have always been at odds with the conceived
dispensability of asemic writing.
However, this does not reconcile me with the
suggestion that doodling is an aimless or pointless exercise. Doodling
certainly has the capacity to be aimless if the doodler so desires (if
he or
she chooses to invest this particular, and inevitably arbitrary,
meaning into
it), but it seems short-sighted to reserve aimlessness as
category for doodling practices on the whole. Baudelaire’s
pseudo-aristocratic
flâneur, later adopted by the Parisian Situationist International in
the
context of the dérive, is a testament to the way that aimlessness can
work to
disrupt habitual behaviours and, therefore, promote renewed and
creative
critical engagement in cultural institutions and social conventions.
<38> Focussing back in on a written form of creative
activity, Derrida
(1967/1978: 11) admits that even writing “does not know where it is
going,
[that] no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward
the
meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future”. Here,
he is
addressing the way that each sentence written has the capacity to come
to mean
something different from that which it might have, at first, been
intended to mean.
There is always a sense of the unknown, the play of indeterminacy,
ahead of the
act—that doodle-zone into which the act proceeds,
into the capacity for
meaning, through shape and form but which, nevertheless, cannot be
sufficiently
pre-determined.
<39> A quality of unforeseeability and indeterminacy
is often thought to distinguish
the process of doodling. The mark is at first a dot, created at the
point where
the pen greets the page and which, whilst there is always scope for
this dot to
remain in the role of ‘discontinuity,’ might grow into a line, be it
straight,
curved, or crooked, and so on and so forth for as long at the hand
permits. The
pen explores the page, without knowledge of where it is heading, first
over here
then over there, all the while leaving an inky trace, ‘astringent’
evidence
(there is a countenance of constraint in this word). The ink proves a
path,
like the indicative trail of a snail left on a window pane that shows
you where
it has been, even long after it has left the scene (I wonder if snails
have a
sense of direction)—the snail’s snotty belly leaving a trace of
inscriptional
slime.
<40> In practice, it would seem that the writer can
no more lay claim to any
discernible goal than can the doodler (in practice). But, to go further
in
answering the question “What motivates an invalidation of aimlessness,
such as
that which finds expression as an invalidation of doodling as a
practice?”, it
can be said that this question is not simply about the result of
doodling and
how it is negotiated, i.e. about a scribble and how it compares to a
piece of
finished text. Rather, it has to do with the matter of how the process
is
negotiated–what an aversion to one’s liberation from rules and
guidelines might
say about such an individual or group of individuals. It is a matter
that
recalls the validation of doodling as cultural practice after the dawn
of
“automatism” in Surrealist practice.
<41> One possibility is to raise Derrida’s (1967/1978:
11)
suggestion that, “[t]here is no insurance against the risk of writing”,
and
consider once more how conceptions of writing might be
applied for an
exploration of doodling, in its meandering. I
say this because there emerges a relationship between the notion of
doodling
(as a form of writing) and notions of risk and the unknown, whereby it
can be
said that the doodle courts the abyss openly and flagrantly—without a
care in
the world. [3]
<42> The riskiness of the doodler’s courting gesture
finds clarification in Wegscheider-Cruse’s
discussion on ‘self’ therapy.’ She makes the point that “the risks of
self-growth involve going into the unknown, into an unfamiliar land
where the
language is different and customs are different” (cited in Giddens,
1991: 78). What
is offered is the suggestion that a person’s capacity to evolve as an
individual, stems from the capacity to challenge what is familiar to us—the
capacity to be critical of those boxes or conventions upon which we
often rely
for predictable, safe and no-threatening quotidian experience. She
includes
language, in her claim regarding the risks of self-growth—language
that could be spoken, written, or certainly visual in nature. Is there
some
scope for doodling to play a role in self-growth and, thus, in an
overall
current of cultural growth? There is much that is uncertain about
doodling,
much that contradicts the security and predictability that gives
coherence to
our lives. Perhaps there are enough long-term determinations (eg. hopes
and
dreams, mortgages) available to find us surrendering certain
‘flexibility’, of
the kind that doodling exploits. How much self-growth can be expected
from
reiteration, from the habit of convention?
<43> There is cause to consider about
Wegscheider-Cruse’s claim further. It
has been suggested that the part of writing that carries the meaning
‘to
scratch’ (to circle back on this concept) also has the import of ‘to
begin’,
that it speaks of the origins of what is thought to be civilised
culture. She
suggests a sense of indeterminacy, an ignorance of the future that
implies a perpetual
present of the kind articulated by Gertrude Stein (2005: 25) where all
is
amidst continual motion: “A continuous present is a continuous
present...I made
almost a thousand pages of a continuous present.” This sense of being
‘in the
midst’ is something that doodling seems to embrace. Derrida also
mentions
ignorance of the future, positing it as that which writing endures. If
we were
to look at the relationship between writing and doodling in their
indeterminacy, and the culture that employs them, there is a point of
contact
here, in this ignorance of what is to come. After all, our path through
everyday life is taken, one step after the other, into the unknown. How
is this
so different from the path that a pen or pencil takes with freedom
across a
page, of course with writing but, most of all, with doodling? Doesn’t
the
practice of doodling echo the human condition in this way—an
existential
circumstance? Then what is it about the human condition might also
denigrate
doodling, that might, despite this resonance, attribute to it merely
nominal
cultural value?
<44> One of the liberating aspects of day-to-day
life, an aspect that is
given emphasis in light of our postmodern aesthetic, is the fact that
it can be
‘made-up’ as we go along, that it can be constructed along a path or
line apart
from pre-determined and traceable designs. This potential inevitably
feeds into
our sense of self-identity, and yet it is the kind of liberation that
can also
open the way for anxiety. In short, there is reason to suggest that the
doodling sets the grounds for this anxiety and, in turn, its own
downfall in
the eyes of convention.
<45> This liberation from the certainty of meaning
means that, in their
complexity and in their indeterminacy, doodles have the appearance of
being
‘undecideable’. This is to do with their idiosyncratic ‘openness’. The
problem
here, as Collins and Mayblin (2000: 19) point out, is that
“[u]ndecidables are
threatening. They poison the
comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable
categories”.
Thus, perhaps doodles are simply caught up in a campaign of
self-preservation
conducted by those who are unable to negotiate whatever intricate
cognitive
spaces lie beyond the ease and security of certainty and reiteration.
Perhaps
there is something unnerving about the doodle-spaces that seem
only to complicate and
challenge meaning. On this point, Bramann (2005) says that:
<46> Many people fear complex indeterminacy, and the
related necessity of
having to make nuanced decisions …. [often taking] refuge in some
ready-made
cultural shell that provides them with convenient guidelines,
‘identities’, and
a feeling of security in a world that would otherwise appear to be a
mass of
“humming and buzzing confusion.
<47> A fear of the challenges inherent in the
process of identifying meaning
in doodles, along with an aversion to the risk that this entails,
evokes
notions of aimlessness, indeterminacy, undecideability, and apparent
meaninglessness that are found to be attributed to doodling. Perhaps a
doodlings entails not the aimless journey of a solid, unbroken, line,
but
rather the twisting and turning chain of dots (as in the representation
of the
flight path of a bee, as seen in cartoon drawings). There is not only
the
dot-chains capacity to denote the omission of words, of meanings, as in
the
play of ellipses. Rather, there is a freedom of flight, a
groundlessness, a
disconnection from (perhaps an aversion to) the fundament that is also
risky
and might invoke aviophobia—the fear of flying. The identification of
meaning
in the scrawl, the search for a place to rest one’s feet, might also
offer
coping strategies for dealing with anxiety in the face of the freedom
that
doodling so readily exploits. Here,
one might recall Søren
Kierkegaard’s (1944: 55) assertion that “anxiety is the dizziness of
freedom…[whence]
freedom now stares
down into its own possibility”
or even Irvin Yalom’s (1991: 8) insight that,
“we are creatures who
desire structure, and we are frightened by a concept of freedom which
implies
that beneath us there is nothing, sheer groundlessness”.
Untitled,
(2008), Anon.
Conclusion:
Doodling without End
<48> Groundlessness, indeterminacy, risk, the
unknown, and the potential for
self-growth: these theoretical reference points each play a part in the
process
of making sense of doodling and, in turn, of the kind of cultural
practice that
it could entail (privileging the openness of the conditional). For,
while doodling
might seem like no more than thoughtless marks on a page, it clearly
has a
cultural function that can be detected in childhood drawings, in the
margins of
examination papers, on the notepads or directories that are kept in
front of the
office/home/public telephone. Doodling has the function of burning up
excess
energy, of maintaining directed inattention, relieving boredom (think
Baudelaire’s Parisian, pseudo-aristocratic flâneur, dériving dans la ville). The purpose of this
discussion, in light of doodling’s cultural function, has been to
attempt to
unravel some of the assumptions surrounding it, to expose both their
constructedness and the conditions for their subsumption into
‘common-sense’
notions.
<49> Leading on from the relative inaccessibility of
doodlings, there is something
about the unusualness and the unfamiliar, and about personal symbolisms
that alludes
to the esoteric (even the mystical) and which has the potential to be
unnerving.
But the insecurity that comes from an inability to make sense of
something, an
inability to colonise it with self-centred meaning systems and, thus,
to use it
as an opportunity to demonstrate cultural mastery, need not result in
dismissal
of that object. Perhaps there is the scent of xenophobia hovering over
asemic
writing when it is not produced in the context of a child’s playtime,
when
there seems to be no reasonable explanation why a civilised adult would
create
it (maybe they are foolish, or worse, an impostor—“you’re either with
us or
against us,” civilised or other(wise)). This makes the space beyond
convention,
written or otherwise (e.g., ethical space, cognitive space,
doodle-space,
outer-space) one which entails a variety of risks, from the risk that
follows
writing in general to the risk that comes with failing an exam (the
risk of
being ranked at the bum end of the class).
<50> Doodling need not be simply about spending
time, wasting time, and
passing time, though it can certainly be one or all of these things.
For me, the
value of doodling is found in its inherent subjectivity because this
quality
taps into a person’s capacity to construct personal meaning
(independently) in
whatever he or she is doing and with regard to his/her capacity to use
this
meaning to make sense of the world. This is a skill that an individual
can
begin to develop while still in the early stages of childhood.
<51> So,
while the Magna Doodle
enjoys continued success in the children’s toy market, perhaps we
should spare
a thought for the disappointment that it can also lead to, a thought
for its
role as a voice for the dispensability and the frailty of doodling and
in the
assumption (expressed in action) that they are barely fit for the
archives.
Might it be more fitting to doodle for a while, put the outcome on our
fridge
for a week or two (make it lucky), or, better still, frame it and put
it in on
the wall in the lounge where the landscape oil painting used to be, so
that it
can be shown to friends and family when they visit (accompanied by a
public
announcement of how meaningful it is)?
<52> There
is no doubt that
conventions enable a variety of quotidian tasks to take place
efficiently and
coherently, but there is only so much that you can plot out ahead. It
is just
as important to remain open-minded to the path ahead and not become
bogged down
in predetermination (a sentiment that I believe doodling taps into,
which it
reflects). Thus, while the emergence of writing has
facilitated a
new relationship to time, in cultures, because it has allayed the
burden of
remembering, doodling facilitates a new relationship with meaning (that
is, with
the limits of meaning).
Works Cited
Bottero,
J. 2001. Everyday Life in Ancient
Bramann, J. K. 2005. Multiculturalism and Personal Identity. Retrieved January 31, 2008, from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/Multicult.htm.
Brown,
L. (Ed.). 1993a. The New Shorter
Champdor,
A. 1958.
Cobley,
P. 2004, Introducing; Semiotics
(Richard Appignanesi, Ed.).
Coulter G., 2007. “The Conspiracy of Art/Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978)” in The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology; Nov 2007; 44, 4; Academic Research Library.
Derrida,
J. 1967/1978. Writing and Difference
(A. Bass, Trans.).
---.
2005. Paper Machine (Mike Bal
& Hent de Vries, Eds.). (R. Bowlby,
Trans.).
Giddens,
A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self
and Society in the Late Modern Age.
Inglis,
D. 2005. “Culture and Everyday Life”, The New
Sociology (series),
Kierkegaard,
S. 1944. The Concept
of Dread
(
Kupperman,
J., ‘Inhibition’,
in
Magna
Doodle,
Noordzij, G, n.d., The meaning of Writing, Retrieved February 6, 2008.
Reber,
A. S. 1995. Dictionary of Psychology,
2nd edition,
Russell,
B. 1935/2004. In Praise of Idleness; And
other essays,
Said,
E. W. 1975/1997. Beginnings: Intention and
Method.
Suddath,
C. “Mourning
the
Death of Handwriting,” TIME Magazine,
Aug 3, 2009, Accessed July 2, 2010.
Tipping,
R., ‘Unreadable Writing’ in ARTLINK (
Yalom,
Notes
[1] The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (p, 2103) states that Parkinson’s Law is the “theory expounded by the English historian and journalist Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909-93), that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” [^]
[2] Phonetically
(and inventively) speaking, ‘doodle-hoarder’
resembles the German compound noun ‘die
Dudel-horde’- implying that I have
membership to a tribe of nomadic simpletons. Might we wander about,
united by
our dissonance, like curious pens on empty pages?
[3] Considering
Achilles claim to Odysseus
(Homer, Iliad 9.320) that "Death comes alike to the idle
man and to him
that works much,"
perhaps
Thanatos (the Greek mythological figure and daemon personification of
Death) is
the unforeseen object of the doodler’s aimless affection.
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