A messy house

The world of cartoons is often a messy one, and we wonder why kids find so much amusement in it.

How does it usually start?

1. There is a sort of Equilibrium. For example, a cat is given charge of a house.
2, An agent of Chaos enters, like a mouse, and disrupts the Peace (like the Parasite).
3. The Agon begins. The conflict of two orders leads to the disturbance of the household peace. Usually an object like a piece of chicken or cheese becomes the centerpiece of the conflict. Now Comedy starts as the house goes into disarray.
4. Conflict is resolved when the house owner arrives: resolution by a Third party, as if by deus ex machina.

Ironically, this conflict or intersection of two paradigms or wills drives the energy of the Narrative or Story. Here, we see a very basic formalism, which portrays the Narrative as the tale of this dynamic shifting from Equilibrium to Disequilibrium to another (temporary) Equilibrium.

(In the film "Oblivion," Jack Harper lives in a peaceful narrative housing. Enter Malcolm Beech. The next events spin a new narrative, in conflict with the first. Only the narrative bias--the "Alien" vs. the "Human"--prevents us from overruling the veracity of the second narrative, but this insertion suffices to open up the first one and lead it into a crisis.)

Two people talking. One tells a joke that involves a distortion of language, like a pun. Instead of a puzzled look, there is a burst of laughter. Someone clueless wonders what's so funny; he does not "get it." Someone asks, "What do you mean by that? Oh, I see, so by saying that you mean to say this, and not that meaning which I would have taken you to be saying."

Each language event is a potential renegotiation. New fleeting houses keep forming.

How are the rules of meaning negotiated when the borders of linguistic rules seem to overflow? There must be, in this flow from a peaceful state of language to a moment where the borders are readjusted to take account of a comic moment, a dynamic similar to the messy world of kiddie cartoons.

Chomsky: didn't he want to establish the Eternal Peace of the house of language? Didn't this attempt actually fuel all the more the conflicts after?

A global peace in the house of language is a great hope. However, everyday, what we hear more often is a comic narrative. The stability of meaning is a temporary, localized phenomenon, a short-lived peace that dissipates in the next round of negotiations. There are always borders, sites of renegotiation. Each creates a ripple, a pocket of chaos that reinvigorates the narrative of language.

Again, somewhere, a house goes into disarray, and a comic moment resurges.

The sonic continuum

The sonic continuum, spliced into a syllabicated universe.

The sound continuum before sense.

Pursch's texts, an example that recreates this continuum by making us hear it as if it were a foreign language whose phonic/morphemic divisions are unknown to us. It becomes a pure stream of sounds.

Composition in this Noise, in the pre-word.

The non-word is the unheard part of this continuum, just like in a Gestalt picture we don't see both figures: rabbit or old woman, optical illusion.

Perception is selective. A sign is a selected entity, carved out or abstracted from a continuum, from a spectrum, just like the way the colors get divided by different languages. Mass nouns and count nouns.

In some of Pursch and Beamer's work, a previous text is is transformed to make the continuum resonate, making us hear the other sounds or read the other particles of the same field of language. The Virtual and the Actual regain the ability to exchange places.

Where does language end anyway to begin?

This continuum is the virtual field of Noise, not the opposite of any sign or information, but what is simply not selected. When the selected and unselected start again to trade places back and forth, the boundaries are redrawn, the Asemic resurges as a fleeting, uncodifiable difference.

Here or there where the codes break apart, the boundaries swerve and reshuffle.