UNTELLABLE POINTS TO THE LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE
• editorial & poster design
Untellable Points to the Limitations of Language is a literary study of Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. The study focuses on language as a means of coping with the death fear. The purest form of language plays a far more important role throughout the narration of the novel than its own representation of how it has been corrupted by consumerism and how jingles and brands have entered the collective unconscious in a capitalist society. The author focuses on a pre-linguistic state that is still untouched by clichés or the language of media, “overflown with sacred formulas” and endless repetitions like mantras.
The intention is to show how this language has nevertheless kept its true meanings that lie at the core of the construction and prove a far deeper meaning than their referential function, trapped in the space of intertextuality. The primary state of language includes these original meanings that truly have the power to create a spiritual connection between the speaker and the world on a deeper level, where fear of death and mortality are not matters of fear or of the unknown anymore.
It is on this pre-linguistic level that spiritual communion with the world is achieved. Language, although degenerated by a media- and simulation-driven world to meaninglessness, has not lost its incantatory power to "convey a magic and mystical significance" and offer a pure expression of the death fear.
The book is accompanied by 14 posters in which I reinterpret the motif of 'white noise' in a visual abstract form to convey its symbolism. The motif of 'white noise' deals with the problem of death and death fear, connecting the world of the living to the afterlife. In the novel it is represented not only through the dampening noise of mass media but also through the irrelevant 'buzzing' and banal dialogues between the characters found throughout the narration, reaching back to an original existence and the original purity of language.
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