The thing with a project about confusion is that it can never really be right on track. Being committed to the premise means knowing that occasionally losing the thread is an integral part of the whole thing.

I know that opening asks a lot – beginning with disorder and no promise of resolution while implicitly asking for your trust that reading this will still be worth your time. But that ask is also an earnest one. The project that I am working on now has a lot of uncertainty to it, and uncertainty here is an embodied and relational practice. I took up this project through artistic research, precisely because artistic research allows for uncertainty in a way that few other forms of research do. At the same time, I am familiar with the hostility of uncertainty, especially the ways in which it can be operationalised. So, with that in mind I want to do two things to start off. The first is to give you a broad sense of where this essay is going– it unfolds across three sections, giving a brief introduction to the project (and the difficulties of that task), then diving a bit deeper into how we might consider legibility and illegibility as relationships rather than descriptors (the current focus of the project), and closing with a return to a few ideas that have reverberated throughout the project so far. The other thing that I want to do to start off is to offer my thanks for the time and energy that you are putting into reading and seeing this essay – and the extension of trust that shows. So, thank you, and now on to the project.

I am trying to write

In A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, Tina Campt shares the summary that she would offer when someone asked what she was working on, “I am trying to write about the frequency of images” she would say.⁽¹⁾ She explained that this phrase “had become a kind of mantra I had refined for situations like these. It was a shorthand description … I had developed for explaining my work in a way that didn’t bore or annoy people with theoretical jargon or high-falutin’ terms or concepts.”⁽²⁾

When I first read this, I was struck by the simplicity and depth of both Campt’s sentiment and the way she phrases her project. It put words to the feelings I have of wanting to speak plainly and accessibly, while also gesturing towards some of the complexity of a project.  

I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to craft different incarnations of a similar phrase for my own work. It is a process of constant revision for me, and one which I have had ample opportunity to practise as I am meeting people at a rate that seems reserved especially for when you are new to a place. 

The version I use now (as of right now, like just now as I’m writing this, it’ll probably change by the time you’re reading this) is that I am trying to make images and write about things that are hard to make out. 

It has gone through many permutations and had many different phrasings, but I keep coming back to the same sentiment that Campt expressed in her own summary – that I am trying to write [and make images]. The trying feels like it releases me from the confines of doing without becoming totally lost in the aspiring-to or would-like-to-do (like that of the ever-expanding “this project will…” of grant applications and research proposals). Perhaps a more doldrum and honest version of my project would be: Iam writing emails, applying for grants, teaching courses, and having meetings to be able to try to make images and write about things that are hard to make out. But somehow, for all its pedantic honesty, this phrasing just does not quite have the same ring to it. 

So, for now, I am trying to make images and write about things that are hard to make out.

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When making out is tough

I am really hopeful about things that are hard to make out. In particular, I am hopeful about things that are neither wholly legible nor illegible. 

Sometimes it is tough to hold a contradiction like this – not legible, but not illegible – but I think it gets easier to grasp when we start to imagine texts and images not as static objects, but as part of a dynamic web of relationships that unfold across varied contexts.⁽³⁾ Our relationship to images or texts also tends to change over time – from the moment they first catch our attention to the echoes that float through our minds ever after. Understanding texts and images as dynamic relationships that play out over time might make it a bit easier to parse the would-be dichotomy of “neither legible nor illegible”.

Legibility and illegibility are often defined oppositionally, as adjectival qualities that are ascribed to an object (or subject), and which offer judgement on the decipherability or readability of that object. Most often this is in relation to written language – whether handwritten, printed, or digital – or images which are presumed to serve a representational purpose. 

However, legibility and illegibility are not purely objective qualities, they are always coloured through the subjectivity of the would-be reader, their personal history, and the context in which the interaction takes place. A small, low-contrast, or pixelated image may be legible to one viewer and illegible to another. At the same time though, the illegible scrawl of a loved one may be made legible through years of practised reading.

Legibility and illegibility then are not binaristic distinctions, but an ongoing negotiation of decipherability between reader and text. This is a negotiation which shifts across contexts, iterations, and subjects. In this way then, legibility and illegibility are perhaps less apt descriptors of objects, and more so assessments of the relationship between a reader or viewer and text or image.

As the point of focus slides from the object itself to the relationship between it and the would-be reader, an inroad to the malleability of legibility and illegibility slowly arises. However, even this shift in focus from object to relationship does not fully realise the time-bound possibilities of legibility and illegibility. 

To explore these possibilities, I want to turn inwards to the messiness of relationality and its inherently temporal qualities. Both relationships and the contexts that they unfold across change over time – often not in neat, linear, or predictable ways. Uncertainty is a fundamental and dynamic aspect of any relational constellation, and is as much an opening for joy, mutuality, and reciprocity as it can be a source of anxiety, fear, or frustration. Uncertainty is also always temporal – it, and our (dis)orientations to it, shift across time and context. It is precisely this temporal aspect of relationality that encourages me to think legibility and illegibility as temporal and relational (and messy!) phenomena. Acknowledging the inherent temporality and uncertainty of relationships does for legibility and illegibility what simply shifting the focus (from object to relationship) could not do alone. 

With this temporal framing, legibility and illegibility can become unmoored, dynamic, tentative, and uncertain. They are no longer tied to an object (or subject) as a purely descriptive quality, but have become temporary, provisional assessments of the shifting relationship between a would-be reader, object, and context. And, like any judgement or assessment, there is a moment of uncertainty – when the assessing is happening, but before a decision is made. 

That uncertain moment of assessment, when we are unsure of whether what we are seeing is legible or not, is the moment when making out is tough. It is a moment when that relationship hangs suspended between one of two presumed outcomes. Often it is a moment that passes by without any notice, but occasionally, in certain relational, contextual, and temporal combinations, it becomes a sticking point. In these sticky moments we, as readers, may need to put more energy into making out what is going on. In the end, this increased effort (whether looking harder, or more slowly), might allow us to make out what is going on. We may end up being able to call the relationship in this moment “legible”, or we may confirm that we cannot make out what is going on – and call it “illegible”. But we may also find ourselves stuck in that uncertain moment, spending significant time and energy trying to arrive at an answer that never comes. Regardless of the duration though, this sticky moment of uncertainty does a few things:

• It slows us down. We cannot proceed at the same speed we normally would, we are unsure of whether what we are trying to read is legible or illegible.⁽⁴⁾
• It undermines certitude. We are forced to question exactly what it is that we are seeing or reading, we are confronted with something that we can almost make out, but not quite. 
• It interrupts efficiency. Somewhat of a corollary to the prior two points, but this moment of neither legibility nor illegibility, when we are forced to slow down and question what we are seeing or reading, is a hiccup in almost any procedure. 

 And all of this makes me really hopeful about things that are hard to make out.⁽⁵⁾

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We are not yet il/legible

José Esteban Muñoz opens Cruising Utopia with the breath-taking lines, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”⁽⁶⁾ This opening has haunted me in the best way possible since I first read it years ago. It still contains much of how I think about queerness and the reality-shifting, world-making potential it offers. 

In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz constructs a queerness which is as much a doing as a being. He defines queerness as fundamentally about hope and futurity, expanding its potential beyond the confines of antirelationality and into a project of critical world-making. In crafting this vision of queerness Muñoz leaves the relative safety of the known present for the uncertain potential of the otherwise. 

Calling back to those moments when things become hard to make out, I feel echoes of how Muñoz wrote about queerness in my own thoughts. On the one hand, quite directly, what is more patently queer than hovering between legibility and illegibility – being neither legible nor illegible? On the other hand, though, I am thinking about how the aftereffects of il/legibility – the slowing down, uncertainty, and derailing of efficiency might also hold some of that same reality-shifting and world-making potential that Muñoz’s queerness does. 

There is one more piece of the whole process of making out that kind of went unaddressed earlier though – desire. Because the thing about reading, about legibility, and about making out is that it is all wrapped up with desire. Reading is wanting, making out is longing, and legibility structures that yearning.⁽⁷⁾ But what binds il/legibility, as I am trying to write it, make it, and think it, to Muñoz’s queerness – is not desire itself (desire is all well and good and relevant, but it’s not the totality, or even defining feature, of queerness), but the disidentification with its most recognizable forms.⁽⁸⁾ 

I say disidentification because while the wanting to read and trying to make out is wrapped up in desire – the desire to resolve il/legibility, the desire to make meaning, and the desire to just get this moment of uncertainty over with – il/legibility neither acquiesces to that desire nor denies it completely. Il/legibility, and its confounding resistance to being read (or dismissed) is not simply an identifying-against. Instead, it is a disidentification with either position. And this is what leads me to think that it is in this place of disidentification that the note of resonance between Muñoz’s queerness and my tentative il/legibility is struck –reverberating, bouncing, echoing, and always just out of reach.

These resonances are the other part of what has me hopeful about il/legibility – not just its ability to demand slowness, introduce uncertainty, and deny efficiency, but also that often it, like Muñoz’s queerness, lies just out of reach, shifting across a dynamic, temporal field of relationships between people, texts, images, and desires. And that even if il/legibility is something that we may never touch, there is still value in the doing.

So, I will continue to try and make images and write about things that are hard to make out.