The sign as an object

Grafism 11/12

Semiotic operations must require meaning as either a signified idea or a signified referent. This has bred all the famous dualities that saw the sign to be the intersection of material and immaterial entities requiring a sort of hylomorphic or hypostatic union and other mediating figures: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, indication and expression, among other similar binaries that required union, reflection, contact, or any other means of intersection as the metaphysical, epistemic, hermeneutic, or semiotic ideal. The semiotic operation must be in harmony with an objective or transcendental component; if not, it is reduced to a lesser opinion, delusion, deception, and other arbitrary or relativistic interpretation.

The sign as the  intersection of presumed material and immaterial entities , the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise. The sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide.

The size of the sign: how long or how big a sign must be to be a sign? is it a word, a sentence, or a whole book? Or is is the totality of human speech and writing?  A never-ending story, this is the chain of signifiers.

When you say This is a sign, you have reduced an (endless) operation into an object, and replaced an operation of meaning for another, which is not less dependent on a binaristic logic, true, but already counter-semiotic. Language, which hitherto had been caught up in the binaristic semantics of the old sign operation, gets manipulated in ways that supposedly demonstrated its detachment from this semiotic function, and treated as if it were a primarily scripted material loosened from its customary signifieds. It no longer speaks for or of an other than itself; it holds no other secondary significance than as glyphs circulated in a "physicalized" mode. (In another mode that disrupts the old binaristic semiotic circuit, the open-ended operation of the signifier always leads to irresolvable moments of undecidability, always unsettling any resting point for meaning, generating it at every turn as an arbitrary necessity.)

How does a sign become an object?  There must be a sort of metonymic reduction here. The letters or words I use as signs are now seen as part of a whole mechanism of meaning-making. By being treated as arbitrarily associated only to these meanings, the sign gains an autonomy and a status of "materiality." The sign is given a limited shape, size, or length. It is now a signage or a signal.* (The sign as signal is pure marking with a momentum of its own against all transcendental signifieds or binaristic regimes of meaning.) No longer a participant in an endless chain, this new sign becomes a plastic, malleable object, able to blend or melt with other objects. In this mode of immanence, the sign stops where the object ends. As object, this sign is also in a meta-semiotic state, an item or an element that is handled as if it were really all what the sign can be. No longer of the Saussurean variety, this one is rather "material," and has no binary organs. This is the Word made Flesh, the reverse of allegory, an old binaristic operation of meaning. The sign in this state has zero divinity, and incarnates only itself, appearing in the world as an identifiable, manipulable item.

How is this miraculous reduction implemented? First, signs (plural form now) are no longer drawn normally: they gain space and sizes, their manipulation is foregrounded. All sorts of violation happen because the order of words is no longer the mirror of another order, language can now take any format... Abuse of metaphor in surrealism, chance, automatic writing... futurist typography, sound poems... fluxus, language poetry, until becoming a superfluid text with zero structure (Peter Ganick).

Next, they become objects of treatment, like in lettrism, or abstract typography in art and sculpture, hypermedia... In Touchon, the letters defragment, then seem to disappear as specks, a remnant of an ancient planetary explosion....

Isn't street art like graffiti one of the most famous manifestation of the objectification of signs? The stylizations and transmorphic aspect of graffiti lettering evince the manipulated and malleable quality of things. In addition, the fact that it must be done on spaces not designated for signs must be one of the sources of their transgressive quality. Not only do they break down the divide between semiotic and nonsemiotic spaces, but they also infuse signs with an object status by placing them in spaces reserved for real estate divisions: public or private walls. Graffiti can only maximize its transgression of these divides as long as the wall it occupies has not yet been designated legally as semiotic space (ads, billboards, etc.).

Later on, normal signs even become fully dispensable, like in asemic writing or art, machine language, post-literate writing. Meaning is now always elsewhere. and writers can no longer write with the old language: they can only scribble. It is as if the hand was deprived of language but must go on operating by itself, and must make do with plain scrawling while dreaming of a contact with an unknown language.

A whole batch of semiotic operation is then abandoned for pure technical processes of manipulation. Pure detritus, all writing is now really garbage (Artaud). Thus, "Conceptual" writing is born.

Semiotic operations under other regimes of meaning take revenge, and create their own hypersign, the hyperreal. This is when the big signs come out: billboards, political slogan repeated ad infinitum like a mantra or hypnotism, mediatisation of the image, viral explosion of information, endless electronic files or sheets of data: the more signs, the more truth; the more repetition, the more reality there is. Reality TV is the new game of the name. Big signs say big words.

When the older semiotic operation is abandoned for the opaque signage, meaning no longer goes beyond the limits of the scripts but loops back into them.  However, this opacity of reading must still be within perceptible limits, or it won't be possible to begin with. That is why the end of the semiotic process can only be executed as a symbolic gesture in some styles or conceptualization of writing and art. In real, everyday practice, we still all need to talk to one another, act as if nothing happened; even those who don't believe in signification still write letters and sign contracts.

No, we don't stop using language, whatever it may be now or in the long run. We only revise the thinking that language works by deriving its final meanings from some mystical constant or structure. The impact of these changes can be seen in how we now talk about where our meanings come from and where they go. The meanings we exchange can be explained to be coming from many reasons, but can no longer be seen to be derived from a mythic, cosmic, transcendental, romantic, objective, or nomological semiotic operation.

Meanings do get fixed by regimes of reading or desire or habit, but not by signs operating under any transcendent principle. (Maybe we can envision regimes of reading like "cliques" or "schools of thought" that work in formal or informal networks. Yet, even within, there would be micro-fissures of reading, with versions spreading and mutating, until turning around the limits of their enclosing paradigms.) To unsettle the semantic loops, it was only strategic to re-imagine the sign as arbitrary, then as opaque material loosened from its semantic contracts, until it finally reaches a state of detritus, with all its (metaphysically-derived) sense driven out since Ionesco. (In the Bald Soprano, we see how language is stripped of sense from the quotidian and the logical up to the cosmic level. Here, language becomes the arena of this "purging" because of its status as the privileged medium of knowledge.)

The arbitrariness postulate, together with its opaque, materialist extension, is simply a polemic against semantic contracts with metanarratives or other similar regimes of meaning. Arbitrariness is an a posteriori idea. Like chaos, there is nothing chance-like about it the moment it strikes. Whatever strikes us comes down with the force of an absolute hammer. In other words, arbitrariness is an after-thought, allowing us the luxury of a second reading. Since we cannot make two simultaneous readings that are contradictory, we do them as a sequence: "It is raining. It is not raining," all in the same present tense. The meaning of the first sentence becomes arbitrary right when the second becomes necessary. In the end nothing we do is arbitrary or chance. Everything is a rule. We just choose which ones we like or need. Or better yet:  an unknown rule is always choosing us first.

The polemic of the opaque sign, then, was a countermeasure not only against a regime of transparent and binaristic semantics but also against semantic contracts that yield only customized and customary meanings. If things were formulated differently, this polemic and symbolic counter may have taken a different tact.  We have yet to mention how the sign can only emerge because of the differential exclusion of the nonsign. All signifying gestures that presuppose meaningfulness must operate through a simultaneous bracketing of meaninglessness. What can a nonsign be except this noise (Michel Serres) in the channel that surrounds the sign and allows it to generate information or meaning? Every reading has a nonreading as its hidden twin, all the monstrous forms that have been forgotten after the dawn of things.

This opposition between meaning (sign) and non-meaning (nonsign) is not a simple binarism. If you move beyond a certain point towards one end, you will find yourself at the other end, and so on. Thus, what we actually have is an endless swing toward both ends, never really defining for us the pure state of meaningfulness and meaninglessness.**  These two terms are not axiomatic givens, as if we knew what they were ahead of time. In any process that involves scripts, images, symbols, or signs, that is, any language game, everything seems to be moving by positing positive and negative values, or units and gaps, along the way. It is as if the very act of walking was creating the road itself, instead of the walking being done over a prior constructed path.

Each action creates its own space, or weaves its own path, instantaneously assigning poles of meaningfulness and meaninglessness as constitutive horizons that do not have absolute positions, nor absolute values. The uncertainty of the real value of these poles even renders them mysterious. It is for a regime of signs to decide which is which to be able to set itself up. When that happens, a certain threshold is reached: everything solidifies into a dogma, and becomes too signifying or too obvious. What was previously dismissed as meaningless starts making more sense; what was thought to be meaningful loses all meaning. The sign, to which we formerly ascribed all the operation of meaning, remains as a category that is as unstable and as indefinable as that of the nonsign, making it more and more difficult to determine the real face-value of semiotic operations.

* [I]n information theory... the "messages" are not contained in the signals... [The signals] carry no little replica of the message. The whole notion of information theory as "the power to make selections" rules out the idea that signals contain the message (Michael Reddy, "The Conduit Metaphor," 303).

** "I've come to the conclusion that it's very hard to write a gesture completely devoid of meaning or to write a gesture that's completely filled with meaning" (Michael Jacobson, asemic artist).