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.