Writhing

Writhing, “to make continual twisting, squirming movements or contortions of the body.”  But also “thing,” a squirming twisting thing. The materiality of the conceptual, the conceptuality of the material. Materially symbolic, symbolically material.

What if what we consider to be semic 1) requires the included exclusion of the asemic and 2) would need a remediation to show that things are reversible, that the semic is also asemic and vice versa? Hence, the asemic is really just an in-version of the semic, and vice versa? The Sign is a Perspective. It’s how a perspective organizes its environment to facilitate self-navigation. It creates the GPS coordinates to sense its movement, but from another perspective, this movement may be sense-less, but not meaningless in an absolute way. It’s just the sense of the other movement must be framed so that it is co-ordinated, and attains a sense, but from another perspective. Thus, what has no sense gets a sense. But this new sense itself is another movement, which has no sense by itself unless framed by another perspective, and so on.

Perhaps, the asemic and the semic are DESIGN functions. For example, an asemic piece is framed by the Page, or by the Screen, the Frame, etc. You have words, paratexts, titles, headings, comments, etc that frame it. It doesn’t mean one or the other doesn’t exist, or one eliminates the other. Each is simply the in-version of the other, since both are limit concepts, ideal notions that keep meaning going by an on/off oscillation. There, possibly, oscillation. And oscillation is movement, twisting, squirming, writhing. Leftwich’s “pansemic” is close, since it seems to lead to Noise or Complexity as the Cosmic Soup. I would use a neologism: Aseemic, to include a phenomenological dimension that oscillates sense and nonsense, seeming and being. A, SEE, SEEM, IC. It’s the adjective becoming a noun and vice versa. Writhing. Non-resolving dialectics of Nature-Culture?

Related ideas. Nature as Book. Matter/Energy as information in physics, whose language we are translating. Translation is the condition of knowledge and being, “a formal translation of objects” or “an emergent relationship between objects instead of a relationship between idea and object” (Noah Roderick, The Being of Analogy, 2016). Translation as a movement of analogy? Writhing as translation of objects. Like Ovid’s bodies and forms? Noah Roderick:   

The experience of superficial similarity (i.e. analogy) is neither an indicator of some deeper commonality nor a mere illusion; it is the effect of objects translating or conforming to the forms of other objects. And wherever there is translation or conformation, there are new objects entirely. There is emergence. In the case of analogy, these objects happen to be ideas of categories. It is in an analogy, no matter how humble or how grand, that we may suspend the distinction between knowing and being.