ANATOMY OF SHAPE
Can the pictogram be considered a linguistic system rather than merely a visual representation?
It is striking that the title presented at the beginning of this thesis, as the heading of its first chapter, within a written document and with the specific function of providing information about its content, appears to offer no apparent key to interpretation, nor any apparent intention of doing so. Its incomprehensibility is of no use either to the information it is supposed to convey about the content of the text or to the readability of the sentence itself. At first glance, the sequence and choice of characters do not correspond to any meaningful alphabetical composition: the kind of composition one would normally expect to find in their place. A substantial part of the process of incomprehension naturally also concerns our inability to decipher something that, in many cases and particularly in this one, belongs to a language of which we have no reading competence. The impossibility of understanding, when confronted with a code of this kind, what lies beyond what we can undoubtedly recognize as a familiar linguistic structure or at least as one belonging to the society of which we are part is destabilizing.