The metaplasmic machine

     But there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language. (Jacques Derrida, 1976)

-Can we start from a rudimentary superficial scratch? No arché or telos, not the mirror of nature nor the expression of an interior subjectivity, no transcendental force governing its permutations, no triadic fantasy of meaning: inner, outer, medium. an unknown marking means, we don't know what it means. it is what cannot be referred to, pointed out. it is neither meaningful nor meaningless. a medium that is not a medium, since it does not have anywhere to go. it is not in between anything. a charming chain that is almost like ''mojibake.''

-Now, this is not a call to anarchy. what replaces anarchy is a minimal locally-determined order that is temporary in duration, whose territory can be large or small, but always multiple. what replaces an idealized, imagined anarchy is another imaginary normalizing space, the fantasy of a provisional one-second rule in continuous mutation.

-Everything enacts a rule. they are not rules that are followed, but rules that follow, that happen. the minimum requirement of an event is a rule, a trivial fantasy. it can be a mania governing a whole set of untameable and innumerable elements, or the fantasy of an extended action echoing nothing, a materialist event, or more “intelligently,” a process, like text production, or making marks. in a non-symbolic gesture, the marks don’t acquire a thicker semantic dimension than the fact that they are being produced.

-A material mark is the vague metaplasmic space between sign and nonsign, and following which rule? it’s anybody’s guess. ideally, it should not refer, because the introduction of a second element is the beginning of allegory. what speaks should not be another. this is unavoidable, the doppelgänger is always waiting. the essential factor is that it keeps moving. even the attempt to contradict is the beginning of a dialogue. is the mark then a monologue? an impossible meaning or concept. any logos is already a dialogue, any mark is already a coinage.

-There are ways a mark stays a mark in a metaplasm that has no known meaning. it stays as a jumble of letters or glyphs, and "reroutes semantics." the doppelgänger hovers but does not land. it remains indefinite. it can be a case of production and variation, with some minimal order, without it creating a dialogical or allegorical pair. the mark is not meaningless, but it isn't meaningful either. there is only mutational play and that's it. what is mutating is nothing but mutation itself, like a slot machine infinitely rolling.

Looking for signs

Looking for signs, Fisher King, signs in old literature etc. The signs of the times, the end etc. The sign of impending doom or catastrophe. Anything gets caught up in the whirlwind of becoming-sign. The sign is a mysterious object that can take any form, like a goddess whose shape is unpredictable, and yet producing history and events.

Metasigns that postulate signhood, caught in a cat-tail chase. Both are mutually self-constitutive. Again, neither have any real value. It is the tension they create that produces the vibration of meaningfulness.

Alien language of unknown format, in an unknown material or medium etc. what if the mind can only see a limited number of kinds of patterns, like with the visible or audible spectrum?

What have been communicated: soul material, world material,  then just language material, and finally just material with a pareidolic resemblance to languageness.

Kervinen, machinic language. Evil machine like HAL.

Any object, animal, creation or invention that displaces human beings as the center and governor of meaning automatically gets coded as malevolent. Today, more than ever, we are no longer the center of meaning. Destiny marches along not according to our hymns. It is no wonder super intelligences in fiction immediately initiate the process of our elimination and extinction. It is an instant toss between new gods and homo sapiens. History cannot serve two masters at the same time.

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 fulfillment of the narrative.

for s_p_e:  I find it hard to discuss all the semantics for this piece since there is really no more valid semantics to begin with. what we are dealing with, beside the incredible phenomena of constructed language explosion, is the retreat of hypothetical  ideas about languageness. what we are left with today are simulations, fractured tribal-speak, fleeting meme-like partial semiotic "trendings," viral spin-offs of media-borne semiotic packages that come and go like fashion fevers or fads. A holistic, all-encompassing language doesn't exist. there are only packets of sign-strings making rounds, virtual memories of languageness as fleeting as a bout of laughter. The only encounter and practice left is with packaged media rotating virally and fading off. It would be more fitting to speak of pieces with titles. In general, signs are play things, like clay, made and remade for immediate sensations and networking, tied to statistics that determine their value and meaning.

With this explosion, there is the disappearance of Language and the proliferation of gestures of languageness.

We thought that if we created more signs we would have more understanding. Today, we use more signs to understand other signs, and more signs to understand the signs that were created to read other signs.

A dog can think that its bark is all there is, but we know that apart from that there are so many other kinds of signs, in different planes and spectrum, often untranslatable into each other.

Cybernetics is a way "matter" is finally becoming manipulable on the level of electrons. With quantum computing, even the very spins of sub-atomic particles become pliable through programmable technology. The output may always coincide with global objectives, but the point is that we have created machines that can finally give commands to matter.

To speak to matter, there are several levels of linguistic transition or translation. Programming languages borrow from natural languages as well as from logical and mathematical syntax. This will then be "read" into binary codes by circuit boards to activate or execute the commands thus encoded. The output would be the objective products: words, image, object, action, or event.

If cyberspace has become a realm where materiality/immateriality is seen to be indistinguishable, it is because of its ability to produce a dimension that serves as a prosthetic extension of human sense and thinking that is resistant to simple codification along the material/immaterial or things/signs axes. we are dealing with a new matter no longer linked by signification but by hypermediation where truthfulness and meaningfulness are functions of intensity, repetition, enlargement, contiguity, advertising, accumulation, manipulability, ratings, survey, trending, viral spin-offs...

(The CLICK is our new center. It is the immediate but micro-temporal plenitude of meaning encased in a tiny gesture assuming all ostensive and indicative functions. The new metaphyclick.)