Let me try to construct a poetics of infancy, one haunted by a death into language, by opening with this question: What would it mean to desire illiteracy as an intense, ephemeral condition of being without language? This question rephrases many similar ones that reverberated through the shattered utopian halls of mirrors of twentieth century avant-garde practice. And an answer is readily available. The meaning would be “to be in infancy.” Lyotard defines the infantile as “whatever does not permit itself to be written, in writing”(qtd. in Harvey and Schehr: 25) and one response to the paralogicalities of literacy is to abandon words altogether: Such abnegation forms a key tenet behind the Dada sound poem, Nepomucin Miller’s and Karl Reuterswald’s punctuation poems, the marbled page in Tristram Shandy, and the gestural calligraphy of Henri Michaux. And from Aristophanes to John Cage, the evidence of attempts to escape the regime of the signifier are sufficient to constitute a literary counter-tradition.

Lyotard offers implicitly a gestural poetics when he asserts that the contemporary task of writing is to “extend the line of the body in the line of writing” and inscribe “the trace of the initiatory event in language” (qtd. in Harvey and Schehr: 49). Ernest Enrolls situates the gesture at a point before both voice and writing, while Bathes notes the subordination of gesture to both speech and writing in the west. This call to gesture and initiatory event is precisely the tel os of Henri Michaux’s calligraphic inscriptions. Through a poetics of the doodle, Michaux inscribes physical actions and gestures onto paper. He describes the emancipator process in Movements, a series of twelve hundred sheets of these markings produced from 1950–51:

It’s precisely because I manage to liberate myself from words, those sticky hangers-on, that the drawings are so slender and almost joyous, that their movements were so easy for me to execute, despite their occasional exasperation's. I see in them a new language, turning its back on the verbal, a liberator . . . an unexpected soothing mode of writing in which one would finally be able to express oneself far from words, far from other people’s words (Harvey and Schehr: 46).

Refusing the infant death into language, Michaux inscribes the “etymologies of gestures, enactments of their own origin, miming's of the moment at which signs, not yet fully bearers of sense, become to come into being” (54). Michaux’s markings are signifiers without signification on the way to language perhaps, but gestural inscriptions refusing the death of infancy into language. Gestures challenge literacy at the very moment of inscription. Detached from communication the gestural inscription frees writing from language and in that emancipation offers a new relationship to literacy. Michaux’s gestures in ink help us understand Barthes’ insight “that writing’s truth is neither in its messages nor in the system of transmission which it constitutes for current meaning . . . but in the hand which presses down and traces a line, i.e. in the body which throbs” (240).