what matters

what matters

The naked body

I will start with the idea of reversibility.

It is the very definition of the sign. The sign does not just distinguish itself from other signs, but, more importantly, also from the non-sign.

It ejects the non-sign as its outside, as its other, as if it existed before it did. This is its cunning.

But all this cunning is necessary for Naming to happen.

By ejecting the non-sign outside itself, the sign names itself, and at the same time equips itself with the capacity to name the non-sign, now known as the Object or the Referent.

This is the core idea, and this applies also to the Body. As we all know, there are two types: the Naked and the Nude body.

The Naked body is an ideal, like the Thing-in-itself. The Nude, on the other hand, is the condition of all bodies, even the clothed ones. For the Nude body is the body as named by the sign, the body-as-sign named by the sign-as-body.

In short, the sign is the origin and site of Morality.

The sign covers the body like clothing. Nothing is allowed to be naked. Nakedness is immoral not because the physical body is carnal and dirty, but because is it unsigned, unscripted, un-inscribed.

And yet, the sign needs this very nakedness it is trying to cover up. The Naked body, or the Thing-in-itself, is the mythic bedrock of Thought and Morality, its denotative excuse. It is what it posits as its great Other, this non-sign it ejects so that Thought can be thought and Morality can be moral. The sign conceals the nakedness it posits as its Other so that it can speak in its name.

This is the way it makes us forget that, by having the same structure, by positing the Naked body as its end, as the site where it terminates, the sign and the non-sign are actually reversible.

Objects of reading

    Objects have always been subhuman. To become an object is to attain a lower status of being. And yet, this humanism stands in contrast to the everyday overvalorization of the object vs the human. Capitalist commodity reification and ''deification'' always promote the object's value well beyond the human. Our residual humanism, despite becoming more and more just symbolic and academic functions in a real world socio-economic practice, hides the fear that objects—being usually more enduring and hardy—are the replacement of the human. They tend to reveal the precarity of the notion of this exclusive category, as if what only counted as really valuable in practice of being human are the objects against which the human searches to define itself. 

    As a general prosthetic of being, what makes objects more desirable is their nature of being trans-properties which easily inserts them into the circuit of exchange. Humans, on the other hand, are posed as inexchangeably unique, and carry on exchange only on the symbolic level: in conversation, discourse, language, or commercial trade. These aspects--their durability and exchangeability--make objects the unacknowledged ideal proxies or substitute of the human. Rather than passive servants of the Subject, aren't objects already the more valuable parts of the Subject very much like artificial organs, extensions of a shadowy Self?

(The moral and legal injunctions behind various modes of prostitution—slavery, wage labor, white slavery, domestic helpers, organ trades—preserve this divide between entities open to exchange against those which are not. Modernism, in one version of autonomy, redeploys this divide for aesthetic objects. This divide, furthermore, is the assurance against the reversibility between signs and nonsigns.)

    Each object performs the minimum order of art in that an object carries with it an instruction of how bodies should behave toward it. This is the heart of design in the sense that objects are a reading of us, rather than they being our reading of them. The uses of objects are basically a transcription of the uses of us. Objects are rhetorical devices.

***

    Art works, as labors of human expression, become objects of commodity exchange beyond their signifying functions (as aesthetic and philosophic memory message systems) only by attaining incredible monetary values. This is perhaps a compensatory mechanism that prevents the devaluation  or dissolution of the 'human'' which ironically forms the idealized fictional ground of the value of symbolic expressions, which is another non-object by definition because its impalpable or trans-material dimensionality, that is, as a form of linguistic expression. The easy verbosity of the symbolic, its utterly endless supply, renders it the cheapest material resource on earth.

    The world taxes the human organism in all its dimensions. Sacrifice is our hidden mode of being each day, not the exercise of freedom and willful generosity. It is the symbolic ritual through which the human reveals itself to be part of the network of objects, albeit revealed or accepted only through the drama of free choice. Isn't the social and history at our expense? How far the Subject is made to believe its noblest mission is sacrifice to the body politic? And self goals as mere detours to the logic of Sacrifice?

The literally literal

   Talk of signifiers in a general technical way without asking which aspect of signs are being pointed out. Is it the typographic form, an abstract letter form, a glyphic minimum, written, printed, spoken, played, recorded, etc.? In what media, and how is it abstracted out of myriad objects and surfaces which are equally object-signs, object-forms, action-signs, etc.? Won't the singling out of a signifier as sign-form in itself already signal the value produced in a semiotic machinery at play, with its preferred ''natural'' order in force or at work?

   Confounding the notion of representation which requires resemblance of some sort with redundancy which merely demand association and propinquity.

   The pun is a reminder of the resonant virtual other implicated in every sign, as if humor and figure designated the threshold where the borders of semiotic identities crumble. The transparency, identity, and lisibility of the sign is a mere atomic and autonomic illusion, a realization covered up by humor whenever some such neat differential order disintegrates.

   The problematic notion of autonomy should be extended to the glyphic format, as letters and words are imagined to be clearly defined entities. The micro-model of the atomic scales up to serve as the analogical conception of the social and the aesthetic on the macro level. This is perhaps due to a certain demand coming from a cultural need for a clear-cut narration of causality and effectuality.

***

   The literalization of language in asemic and abstract typography and glypography. The very format of the signifier is treated in a materialist way, i.e., in a manipulation that is manual, technological, physical, etc. The glyph is divested of its configured role as conduit or carrier of an ideal semantic substance. The literalization of the signifier is the dream of a utopian realism of a positive science of language and hermeneutics. 

   But what this dream didn't admit is the paradox involved in imagining the locus of its positive real in a materially-inscribed notion of the linguistic substance qua material entity. The price of the literal real of language is the displacement of the signified from a historically defined textual mode of signification, a textual mode which is revealed to be a purely social ideal regime of reading. The signifier therein always effaced itself in the service of the code assuring the passage to a latent signified.

So what if all is discourse?

    So what if all is discourse? It means we now look at the metadiscursive underpinnings of both the reading present and the reading regime which informs a textual set. A text could be operating from a different metadiscursive binary which informs its presuppositions. It serves as a way of saying it belongs to this or that regime of signs.

     A manifesto is one intertextual means by which a textual work may propose its reading contract. ''Intention'' for example, is the utopia of the marriage of form and meaning, an insertion of symbolic agency in language or script acts. Discourse must be seen as the utopian invention of the social form of communication and the elements therein. Instead of seeing Jakobson's model as the natural composition of language, we should look at it as the discursive imaginary. The discursive setup is the means by which discourse perpetually reinvents itself as if "always for the first time" (Bréton). This is the hyperreal of discourse.

     Discourse is therefore primarily phatic in that it configures the metadiscursive stage for its own performance. At no point is there an essential divide between the metalanguage and betalanguage: the semiotic contract is immanent, not transcendent, and co-emerges with the moment of performance. From Sarraute, to Beckett, to Calvino: in much of what is called nouveau roman or metaliterature, is the exploration of the de facto self-staging of discourse and its cultural or historical or ontological limits.

     This phatic constitution is what a mode of reading contract or semiotic regime often hides as the rhetoric of pure objectivity or ''external'' reality where discourse seems to efface itself. Free indirect discourse, for example, blurs the great divides of 19th c realist discursive regime identifying clearly bound agents of speech. The figures of the ''sources'' of ''speechifying'' in this setup, signaled by the inquit formula, return to the sea of undifferentiated murmuring, as if discourse had no more mooring but time itself. The figures of discourse that come and go are semiotic functions comparable perhaps to Deleuze & Guattari's personnage conceptuel.

     This doesn't mean it's all fictional. In fact, it's the real of all language in Milner's sense, a ''primary linguistic data'' (PLD). Hence, contrary to Chomsky, the PLD isn't confined to a UG or structural core. This is the exclusivist ruse of the positivist rhetoric of this type of linguistic inquiry which assigns to itself the sole origin or source of discourse and which sees itself as the master narrator to which all language returns after emanating from it. The PLD is the real immanent and full horizontal property of all discourse types (rhizomatic), and not the exclusive real of the figure of the vertical rationalist persona.

     But why must discourse need a ruse in which it hides its own mode of emergence, to speak not only from many fabled sources (literary polyvocality) but also from a single universal source (metalingual univocality)? Is this part of discourse's desire to be heard, a function of its own interior monologue, like in Beckett's dialectical tension between the presence and absence of one or many voices? Is there a real dialogue, or is it all a utopia of the hyperreal of communication, the perennial re-staging of discourse's self performance? The pronouns of discourse are all equally non-deictic, for deixis is already a narrative of re-citation. It is the very stage of discourse as a social event, where the social is the event.

    Won't the need to speak be the only universal, then?