1. the sign has no content or doesn't refer to any. instead, signs are deployed to speak of the im/possibility of signs, the same way @ refers to "at" or an emoticon indicating the indicators of emotional states or concepts in an abbreviated way.
2. using a "logographic" state, it doesn't produce a sign in the normal sense, but a metasign. this is what I would like to call "textualism" or the simulation of sign-hood in a realm where signs are also fictional entities. signs don't speak about fictional characters, but are themselves fictional.
3. a sign is the equal of any other sign, a=b=c=d etc. in a circuit of pure play, a play of fictional characters, arbitrary events, between the order of Time and the order of Language.
4. textualism is the production of an echo of sign-hood, a simulation or parody of writing. here, writing does not deploy ready-made semiotic forms in a network of habitual meanings. this is no different from the creation of a metalanguage like formal logic to speak of a process on the level of theorems. everything is a postulate.
5. visually, it can deploy glyphs, pre-letteral features representing an echo of signs, a molten, mobile state prior to lexical identities, like Michaux's inks. a sort of pre-writing.
6. i have mentioned Bolin's art of disappearance as an extreme method,
Dion's post-lettristic canvas, sign simulations,
hyper-signs, counter-signs, abstract typographies, pre-word, post-word, non-word
hypermedia or mixed media, where sign/nonsign distinctions have broken down,
caricature of scriptural forms,
post-language iterations like: machine writing or post-authorial scripting,
or automatic writing in a cybernetic sense,
metaplasms and ciphers
7. here, "textuality" is a concept that is postulated as a hypothetical entity like the "sign," and not deployed as a ready-made object in a presumed fully-functional semantic and semiotic network.
8. proliferation of non-standard signs or symbols: rarely used special symbols recalling logical or mathematical formalisms or cybernetic computer codes, or programming high-level languages. explodes the closed circuit of settled semiotic networks. same as deployment of illegible, asemic or metaplasmic variants.
9. the question then becomes: what would be its "syntax" or form of regularity if any? syntax without meaning has been a method employed like in di Palma's January Zero, or any rule-based permutation, this time no longer involving standard sign sets, but also nonstandard ones. this constraint may be the last frontier, since randomness/arbitrariness had been a part of artistic production since Dadaism. however, arbitrariness is a stronger version of randomness: it is a concept that falls outside of order/chance dichotomy. it implies a sectional choice, a change of perspective, a vectorial intervention that is nevertheless an echo in a vacuum.
10. in all cases, who would still see human agency as an organizing force or as an ordering principle? post-humanism means: we are not the center of the universe. sense/nonsense: to make nonsense is the most difficult, as difficult as making sense. we cannot do anything nonsensical, since we are the source of meaning. nothing we do is nonsense, but at the same time, the sense of anything we do escapes us. (in many sci-fi works, the usurpation of human agency as the dominant center of meaning by super intelligent machines has often been portrayed as evil. Logically, it would entail the eradication of the human species in history. the whole plot then revolves around the recuperation of human subjectivity as an essential requirement in the fulfilment of the narrative.) sense/nonsense are limit concepts, both impossible to incarnate as is, since they exist only in a relative field of tension, like Escher hands.
11. post-reading: the object/text is no longer amenable to either a metaphoric or a metonymic interpretation. It is neither a representation nor a symptom. What could its function be?
12. What is the "vehicle" of a ''meaningful" bit of information? Information here is not a pre-given object but must be decided beforehand by another meaning-making gesture. Hence, meaning decides what meaningful is. At any rate, my question is about what circumstance creates what is significant. The becoming-significant or -sign of anything. It is an event that requires a bifurcation. The sign itself is nowhere. Something turns, reading happens, and we hear voices. We then try to explain how it all works...
13. in a very paradoxical way, i am asking myself, skirting
sign/nonsign, what can i incarnate? what is this stuff that can be generated
without the Subject-Me-I as the agency of any meaning / nonmeaning without using
the "machine" as a permuting excuse and without returning to aleatory
textual production? i am not making.... i am just searching.... and one of the
states is the pre- or post-word. in the beginning the word is a gurgle. i don't
apply signs... i can only conjure signhood and the lost memory of textuality.
there is no fixed alphabet set for that. i mean, in the place of a letter, why
not a holographic nudge, or an electric shock, or spilled milk in zero-gravity?
there is no more "writing...." that idea is a mummy.
14. when we set our own rules, it signals all is arbitrary, the
rule of the arbitrary. what has any applicable meaning? Neither chance nor
necessity has any real ontological significance. in the end, the real has a
hidden title and an unknown syntax, where each event is its own rule.
