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.

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   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.