The retreat of the sign

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.... A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.  (Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations." Italics added.)

What is a system of sign today but a glorious fantasy imbued with the hyperreality of symbolic energies? I can cling forever to a dated treatment of the sign where it still swims in a referential or systematic network of semantic associations, and deny its new status as a resurrected simulacrum in a state of total inflation. As if a switch was flipped and the sign is now nothing but obscenity and total inflation, where signs still circulate but emptied of all use or exchange value. Outside of the regime of truth and meaning, the creation of the meaningful takes place as a form of hyperbolic inflation. "Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference" (Baudrillard).

In this retreat of the old language, it is only apt to see the arrival of a new "abstracted" form of language in what has been labelled asemic writing or art. It is as if writing must now find a purer form of itself outside all regimes of meaningfulness that have become nothing but demonstrations of obscenity and total inflation. Beyond the eternal rehearsal of the death of language, asemic writing is definitely only one possible reaction, which is almost like nostalgia for a lost continent. Retreating from the irritating erethism of over-signifying forms and their semantic inflammations, writing reboots itself as a pure inscription without symbology. In a related direction, we can include the invention of "new" languages or systems, machine language, codes and other forms of cypher, perhaps not so far from what Jukka-Pekka Kervinen has been doing (http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com/).

In another more famous direction that stretches from Futurism to Lettrism and to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and "Conceptual" poetry of today, the sign is embraced in all its inflationary resurrection and treated with its own material, producing a secondary abstraction that seems to function like writing, but actually moving in a "logographic" dimension where "language" and its "practices" are the proposed or supposed "subject" or "object" and where the old symbology is displaced as an associated automatism or excess. Stated differently, this abstracted dimension of writing is almost like theorizing about or for "language" or signifying practices but formulated in a "non-scientific" jargon. In this abstracted stage, the sign is both nonsignifying material and concept, investigated in the roles it plays in the old regimes of writing, truth, and meaning.

Language or writing no longer describes, expresses, represents, communicates, explains, illustrates, and so on, except as simulated or resurrected acts of an inflated language. Today, the sign has retreated and has given its place to asemic, post-literate writing and inflationary practices of post- or over-writing. We cannot be farther from the noisy gimmicks of Dadaism, which during its time was still confronted with the holy spectre of meaning. All the abuses of language, like in Beckett or Ionesco afterwards, only signalled the swan song of language. Beyond the simulacrum of communicative forms, we have machines of production instead that churn out charming refrains as a mode of captivation, giddiness, and mass hysteria. This is our mode of happiness today, a giddiness where all perspectives and referents are bypassed in a blurry, inconsequential, hysterical ride. When every "trait [is] thus raised to the superlative power" to impress us of the truth of their reality, we mark the moment where "we have [already] passed alive into the models" (Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, p.9).

In one possible treatment, in that of Kenneth Goldsmith:

Language has become a provisional space, temporary and debased, mere material to be shoveled, reshaped, hoarded and molded into whatever form is convenient, only to be discarded just as quickly. Because words today are cheap and infinitely produced, they are detritus, signifying little, meaning less. Disorientation by replication, mirroring, and spam is the norm. Any notion of the authentic or original is untraceable. French theorists who anticipated the destabilizing of language could never have foreseen the extent that these words refuse to stand still; restlessness is all they know. Words today are bubbles, shape shifters, empty signifiers, floating on the invisibility of the network, that great leveler of language, from which we greedily and indiscriminately siphon, stuffing hard drives only to replace them with bigger and cheaper ones. Digital text is the body-double of print, the ghost in the machine. The ghost has become more useful than the real; if we can’t download it, it doesn’t exist. Words are additive, they pile up endlessly, become undifferentiated, shattered into shards now, words reform into language-constellations later, only to be blown apart once more ("Provisional Language," 2010).