ABSTRACT
Constructive Universalism is a theory that is never at ease with itself, and never attains the status of a final pronunciation, but instead keeps working through its contradictions. The Abstract Rule is given body through figuration, drawings and hypericons with their mimetic remainder. It expresses the heart of the paradox of Constructive Universalism: a materiality and bodily trace that undermine ideality through the calligraphy of impurity. Torres-Garcia's drawing of words prepares a reading against the grain of the logical field as the only reading possible that would give pictoriality its due. A similar development took place with regards to the canonization of figuration during the process of the inscription of the 'New World' into the Western pictorial economy. Through the erosion operated by time and the workings of coloniality, the rituality of geometric abstraction could be approximated only through its adaptation to the European signifying regime of representation. Manuscription, graphism and hypericonicity can be reconsidered through the Quecha word quilca.
