What Cece Chapman found was a truly seminal work in asemics in Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes.
Here is a sample from Barthes:
The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it
without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or
vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the
systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other
syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject's
topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it,
until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the "father tongue"--vacillate that tongue which
comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers[--]and proprietors of a culture which,
precisely, history transforms into "nature."
