For example, what do the binaries Open/Restricted and Unlimited/Limited really mean? They part of one another, and requires the other to become perceptible. And yet, one is the negation of the other. Take also the binaries Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. They're all reversible, a matter of pure perspectivism.
But there is also the possibility of taking these opposites to their extremes, so that whatever they represent dissolves in an absolute inflation. Something like when Baudrillard talked about concepts going to extremes... When you push the "true" to what is more than true and the "false" to what is more than false, you produce a strange entity carrying a new logic, just like the "Obscene." There is no purity in concepts anymore. The concepts in a binaristic set up can no longer hold up their values. Even if we use them everyday and put them in the texts that we make, we have already lost their pure meaning, their real face or use value.
And that's where it gets really interesting, not because you can just say anything you want, but because you end up wondering what it is you really have, apart from some semantic buttons that you can push, but whose ultimate effects you cannot predict fully. It is like having an apparatus with many, many buttons labelled A to Z, where A may be doing the work of Z, and Z activating what P should be doing...
Le phénomène linguistique présente perpétuellement deux faces qui se correspondent et dont l’une ne vaut que par l’autre. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale)
Next question is: what is the origin of this way of binaristic thinking in language and signs? Is it inherently coded in the language itself? Is it a mythic origin, like the great twins and binaries of the past? Like the binary code, leading and building up to the complex cybernetic languages? Like the origin of Yes and No.
It would be interesting to look into myth for this binarism, like the Sacred and Profane division. The sensuous gods of Greek myth. An other world creates meaning for this world via negativa. However, somewhere, there must be a form of contact. The heroes, half-gods... all the mediating figures, the Great Mediators...
Myth: sacred and profane bridged by the SACRIFICE, tragedy etc. the profane attains a meaning via its opposition to a sacred order. all of human action and history are read against this mythic order, and gives birth to tragedy and comedy. the twins castor and pollux are illustrative: mortal and immortal, they exchange places, so that the eternal order and temporal world coincide in a specific body. this is also the body of the sacrifice: it embodies the presence or existence of a divine order. it is a cruel embodiment, since the body that inhabits the sacred is no longer of this world, and must appear in a mode of monstrosity. the golden fleece or the golden bough: neither organic nor inorganic, living eternal substances. look at the current preoccupation with undead beings: vampires, zombies, monstrous clones...
Philosophy: the platonic levels of reality, the divided line. the birth of allegory. the world is the shadow of divine EIDE. it is philosophy that ascends, that bridges the gap: NOESIS. Mind-Body duality.
Mysticism: neoplatonic ascent to the One, TO-HEN in Plotinus, HYPOSTASIS is the bridge via communion: "This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful- by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine."
Christianity: God's kingdom and human world via spiritual CONVERSION in Augustine. from old flesh to new flesh, second Adamic RESURRECTION. the doctrine of Rebirth. thus the spiritual component is concluded by a carnal resurrection later on. the bridge is the SACRIFICE of Christ, the mediator. Spirit, Soul, Body: still material vs. immaterial duality.
Roman de la Rose up to Dante's Commedia. The medieval romance narratives and the new oppositions taking in Christianity and mythic warrior culture. Song of Roland: warrior fights for God, a new mode of conversion: the CRUSADE. Knight and Beloved. the chaotic, enchanted and magical Dark Forest or Dark Woods vs. COURTLY order. Warrior code vs. Lover's code, or Hector vs. Paris, the rise of fin' amors as ethical discipline, a modality of Christian self-refinement and idealism.
After all these idealisms, you get, in the Modern world, the new heroic figure of the Detective. Detective novels and comics, hero and villain. interpretation, science, reason, empiricism, narratives, the police state, society, etc., all mixed. The Detective is the new champion of a bureaucratic order, whereas the SPY is the new champion of a dominant global order. James Bond: warrior, lover, law above the law. The Detective's or the comic hero's double is the Arch-villain. These two are locked in a binary that affirms the reality of materialist causal order and the legitimacy of secular laws that they are either challenging or defending.
And now the SIGN. The Sign is the new bridge, like the Sacrifice of old mythology, the intersection of material and immaterial entities: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, etc. the sign as interpretant is the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise.
More than just the carrier of any meaning, the Sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide or intersect, the way the Detective and the Arch-Villain are locked in a mortal or immortal combat, both needing one another for causal, material, and secular orders to exist. Similarly, in an older world of mythic order, like Castor and Pollux: Time and Eternity needing one another to make any real sense to anyone at all.
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