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Drawn Notes: The development of a text-based drawing

Introduction
What I am referring to as drawing combines writing and mark making. Attendant work
involves stop-frame photography and a transcript of my voice recording made while
working on the drawing. The content concerns making some simplified working sense of
the theme of individual identity in the First Study and Second Study of the philosopher
Paul Ricoeurs Oneself as Another (1994[1992]). This involves spreading information,
short quotes and my own interpretations hand-written in pencil across a flat plane.
The section of the book up to page fifty-five sets the ground for Ricoeurs thesis by
focusing specifically on the question of the body, reflexivity and time in relation to
language.
I have referenced back and forth between the content of the book to help me establish
the difference, linkage, and hence relationship between two ideas of identity that
Ricoeur (1994: 2) introduces through the Latin idem and ipse. The former term is based
on sameness and the latter on the notion of individual selfhood. My interpretation is
backed up by the theoretical ideas being embedded in, and hence modified by, a visualmaterial motive in evidence in this text, which includes images and a link to a short
animated photographic sequence.

Preparation
White cardboard ground (size) and its pre-made glass frame (Figure 1a)
A pencil-based curving topography as the works visual dynamic (Figure 1b)
Re-edited and colour-coded (Figure 1c)
Such colour-coding also applied to the drawing (Figure 1d)
Key phrases and statements from the typed text pasted to the reverse side of the glass,
colour-coded shapes and linking axes painted onto the front in oil paint (Figure 1e)

Figure 1a

Figure 1b

Figure 1c

Figure 1d

Figure 1e

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The Third Layer
A third layer of text has involved working on the front of the glass frame. I made a
thirty-minute voice recording of myself reading and interpreting from the glass while
writing on it and drawing. At each thirty-second interval of time of the voice recording a
pre-set camera took a photo of me at work. Each instant of shutter release is indicated
on the transcript of the voice recording as either an asterisk (*), sometimes occurring in
the middle of a long pause (. . * . .), a strikethrough of a single-syllable word (word) or a
single syllable of a longer word, for example strikethrough (strikethrough). Some short
excerpts from the transcript are included below.
In the transcript I talk about isolating three key questions from the short section of the
Ricoeur: Reflexivity, Time and The Body.
I comment that with reflexivity Ricoeurs text not only concerns whoever is speaking,
who Ricoeur refers to as the utterer, but also the language itself as the utterance.
The latter interests me more than the former because of the probability that reflexivity
is conveyed through the medium. This is working on the basis that a visual-material
medium can, albeit ambiguously, also be considered as a form of language.
(To link the present text, albeit tenuously, with the idea of re-visiting that has resulted
in the newest version of the projects article, On the Outskirts, I might add to the above
paragraph with a comment that comes from some text relating to a later example in the
projects drawing series. This is that Ricoeur (2008[1991]: 2) does suggest that mediums
other than linguistic also work like language. Insofar as Ricoeurs work on text can
substitute as ideas for a visual-material medium, his quote (ibid: 10), the text
intentionally aims at a horizon of a new reality that we call a world, suggests that the
drawing called Self & Other in the series can act as a bridge for me to cross from a
position of self-absorption to a public domain whereby the drawing itself should speak.)
Ricoeur indicates that the ipse or private basis of identity in selfhood is to be found
more in the utterer, and the idem or public face of identity in sameness, in the
utterance. This has implications for when ones work seeks its relationship with its
viewers.

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I comment on time in the transcript from the point of view of the distinction Ricoeur
(1994: 53) makes between phenomenological time and cosmological time. The former
concerns the experiential and the latter relates to the invention of calendars, clocks and
ever-sophisticated technology, etc., enabling one to articulate ones experience of being
inside time. (Figure 2 is one of several instances in the drawing, at this point on the
glass frame with previous stages of the drawing underneath, where I have highlighted
relevant text.)

Figure 2: Self-evidently, TIME highlighted

I also bring the philosopher Henri Bergson (2001[1913]: 87) into the consideration, due
to his distinction between time as pure duration and time as space, the latter of which
but not the formercan be divided.
The fragmented intonation in the following excerpt of the transcript might suggest the
division of experiential time into momentary instants that are symptomatic of time
ticking by on the cameras timed exposures.

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. . . . TIME. Ricoeur talks about in two senses the phenomenological experience of
time, and the cosmological experience. The phenomenological experience. . . is
as I take it, my being kind of contained in *
. . . The dated now, and this is exactly whatum, now Im, Im kind of dating
reducing the phenomenological time, or dividing, dividing phenomenological
time, to into theum, stop-frame, the thirty-second stop-frame photographic
captures of theum. . . of the camera. So the first, *
Some of my speechs fragmentation is due to the fact that I am drawing and writing at
the same time, and my thinking seems to alternate between one or other process rather
than holding both in mind.
I comment on my bodily position in relation to what Im doing, when the latter moves
towards the spatial idea of Bergson (2001: 87), as referenced above. In this sense,
through mark making and writing with the same tool on the glass, I am reflexively inside
the work, Figure 3.

Figure 3: Detail of my drawing my hand on the glass.

My determination to say this is based on the indications given by Ricoeur that the
utterance is itself reflexive. Ricoeur (ibid: 40) states: [. . .] the utterance, the act of
speaking itself, which designates the speaker reflexively. I take this to mean not solely
that it is the drawing that speaks so much as offers indication of my presence in it. The
substitutions for speech are here the gestural circling of the text elements in a way that
emphasises the connection between them, which is achieved by movements of the pen
that are an extension of my hand, so my bodily presence is very close. The reason for
the time-lapse photos in this respect is to provide visual evidence of this reflexive
relationship between me and the visual-material object, through the process.
Concerning ones corporeality, Ricoeur (ibid: 53) refers to here, as opposed to there,
as the zero point of ones body in space. He claims that this point is the absolutely
irreducible signification of ones own body. [. . .] here, as the place where I am, is
the zero point in relation to which all other places become near or far. Around the
factuality of ones presence in a particular place there is the question of projection. In

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this instance I mean in the non-elliptical sense of forward-projecting of oneself, as an
impulse without actually moving, into the spatial environment around me. I make
further reference to the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002[1962]), Thomas Dahl
(2003) and Gernot Bhme (2003) in this respect.
The following excerpt from the transcript is in this context.
the firstum reference, in my writing is to the body to the corporeal, zero
point. . . . Um, Ricoeur says in relation to which all other places become near or
far. So. . . Im here in my corporeal sense, Um, my hand *,
I comment in the transcript that Ricoeur says (1994: 44): Every advance made in the
direction of the selfhood of the speaker or the agent has as its counterpart a comparable
advance in the otherness, of the partner. If the relationship between self and other is
conducted on an intuitiveI have foregrounded the term reflexivelevel, which one
might also term unconscious, then its objectification is perhaps one of degree of, rather
than dislocation from, its process. According to Merleau-Ponty (2002: 72): Reflection is
truly reflection [. . .] only if it knows itself as reflection-on-an-unreflectiveexperience This suggests that reflection on the reflexive is a matter of only sightly
more self-distance.
I also suggest that part of the remit of the work is to permit the medium to do its own
thing. However, such autonomy of the medium, whether language itself or the visualmaterial, is not an either-or situation, but exists, in a sense similar to the relationship
that Ricoeur (1994: 149) suggests between the public and private characteristics of
identity, dialectically.

Concluding Comment
My attempt has been to make a drawing that is formed largely from hand-written text
that in turn validates theoretical content that is largely from a reading of a section of a
book by Ricoeur, Figure 4.

Figure 4: Drawn Notes, pencil and paper attachments on cardboard + paper collage, oil paint and marker
pen on front and reverse of framed glass, 116 x 86cm (2015).

The latter two processes have also enabled me to interpret such theory as positions
concerning reflexivity, time and the body for later developments of the project. Insofar
as the word precariousness might describe this overall motive, by chance, further into
his book, Ricoeur contextualises the word in relation to the authorsthis could just as
well be artistsmotive of doing their work and then turning it over to the reader, when
the works relation with the latter may result in quite different identification:
Just when the work is separated off from its author, its entire being is gathered
up in the signification that the other grants it. For the author, the work as an
index of individuality and not of universal vocation, is quite simply related to the
ephemeral (1994: 156).
Isolating the question of precariousness of the visual work specifically as drawing, one
way of approaching this would be from the point of view of visualising ideas, when this is

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mainly attempted through a kind of informational drawing. In this respect, however, I
would also make comparison to the fragmented character of my speech. This has
something to do with enunciation; the tendency of my speech to be broken to some
extent by the influence of simultaneously drawing, and a pictorial equivalent to this in
terms of marks and lines that function at the level of information, to also carry gesture
and, in a sense, their own form of intonation.

References:
Bergson, H. (2001) Time and Free Will. (first published 1913) New York: Dover
Bhme, G. (2003) The Space of Bodily Presence and Space as a Medium of Representation. Hrd, M. et al
(ed) Transforming Spaces. The Topological Turn in Technology Studies.(http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/
gradkoll/Publikationen/transformingspaces.html)
Dahl, T. (2003) The Transformation of Space and the Construction of Engineering Knowledge and Practice
From Renaissance Perspective Thinking to Gaspard Monges Descriptive Geometry. Hrd, M. et al (ed)
Transforming Spaces. The Topological Turn in Technology Studies.(http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/
gradkoll/Publikationen/transformingspaces.html)
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002) The Phenomenology of Perception. (First published in English 1962) London, New
York: Routledge
Ricoeur, P. (1994) Oneself as Another. (First published in English 1992) Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Ricoeur, P. (2008) From Text to Action. (First published 1991) London; New York, NY: Continuum