The Scribblers

Written language sleeps when we do: the areas of our brain that process it go dormant. Any text we experience in dreams is asemic — with no actual semantic content. Made of meaningless symbols, it might present an image of readability, perhaps beguile us with a reading-like experience, but it never comes together like a true linguistic text.

Dreams aren’t the only places we find texts like these. In Asemic: The Art of Writing, Peter Schwenger delves into the ways we perceive and receive marks that look like language and feel like language but are, emphatically, not language. Focused on artists who have used asemic writing in their work, from the 1920s through the 2000s, he explores “writing that does not attempt to communicate any message other than its own nature as writing.” While asemic texts may not present “a coherent message,” they do indeed reflect “a coherent sign system.”

Considering asemic texts can feel a little like staring into the...