Each dimension is made to inform the other, often with a degree of violence, parody, or seeming eccentricity absent from purely verbal writing. The tension between these vectors is carefully maintained, even exacerbated by that between verbal and visual images. The verbal image or lettristic element is presented for consideration from the same point of view as the visual elements are. From this viewpoint, the lyrical directly engages the world itself, flatly contradicting the historically imposed separation of aesthetic experience from labor. In visual writing, the optical illusion which such an imposition has created is corrected.
Difficulty is the necessary condition of such correction.
Not so, since a different dynamic operates here. To decode visual writing's political dimension, we may as a tactic take up the historically embedded metaphors of subject and object. Even as subject and object are being attacked as inadequate categories per se, visual writing emphasizes at the same time the separation of these categories and their inseparability. The concentration of power in the hierarchies which mediate this image flow is subverted by visual writing, whose manner of physical reproducibility itself issues a challenge to the infinite reproducibility of the processed image. First, static visual images occur.