Meaning is only resemblance

Meaning is only resemblance, nothing more.

In this case, all words resemble one another.

BLACK resembles something black, and not black itself; WHITE resembles something white, not white itself.

Because of this,  BLACK  resembles  WHITE , and  WHITE  resembles  BLACK  insofar as they mean only by resembling something else.

Or, BLACK can also be WHITE, and WHITE can also be BLACK.

Same with MAN and WOMAN.

MAN resembles any other man, and not man itself ; WOMAN resembles any other woman, not woman itself.

Thus, WOMAN resembles MAN, and MAN resembles WOMAN  insofar as they mean only by resembling something else.

Same with AMERICAN and CHINESE.

AMERICAN resembles anything american, not American itself; CHINESE resembles anything chinese, not Chinese itself.*

Hence, the two words resemble each other because they can resemble anything.

All words are inter-changeable because identities never change.

P.S.

IT IS RAINING. IT IS NOT RAINING. There is no such thing as contradiction on the page. All words are inter-changeable. A word can say anything. A word doesn't say anything. A word is also what it isn't.

(*Let's take an example : AMERICAN or CHINESE CAR. This simplifies the historical origin of the car. It tells us that the car came from the U.S. or China, although it may still be the same kind of car using some similar technology. What if the car was assembled by Chinese-Americans in the U.S.? Or by Indian-Americans, or by German-Americans, or Japanese-Americans? And what if the various technology and science that allowed the fabrication of the car came from all places and history: physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, materials science, etc.? What if Chinese cars also used some German technology? Is the Chinese car still CHINESE? 

A sign, a word, or a symbol is a set of heterogeneous elements, an ensemble of items which have multifarious origins and natures. For example, using Norwegian salmon for sushi in Japanese cuisine, or French wine oaks from the Baltic states. Only in a world where trade hasn't taken place, where cultures or nations or states have no contact with each other could we maintain any homogeneous entity. Apart from this pluralistic aside, even our own photos don't represent us. The time and context are different, the emotion, the thought, not just the clothes, can be different. The body has also shed so many cells, we have aged, grown, gained or lost weight, etc. The photo can therefore be anybody. This possibility is not excluded by any biographical consolidation, which is also a form of fiction, with all its convention and pretension to tell all as much as possible. The fact that an actor can play a given biographical personage indicates that we are already in the realm of resemblances. Why not? Your own life already resembles so many others: politicians for politicians, soldiers for soldiers, doctors for doctors, middle class like other middle classes, tall like others, sick like others, unfaithful and faithful, strong or weak, young and old, brave, naked, struggling, and in the end, successful, with few regrets and lost loves. The narrative is ready-made and unoriginal. These are old ideas, and I am just repeating them and myself.)

r

r   u        m         a    g      n      o        s     i      m             e     r        i   z       o t      o         p          i  c            t       o      r        e    n   t      r    e     m               o      d        e       l     i    n            k     a              t   h            a    r        t     e            s    a    n        a   b    b     o    l       i           m       p   l          c             y

o         p    o     s  i         t      u         a   l   i            z           a    r       d  u          a      l    g         a           t     o    r       m     u    l      a          t      i            c     r        o   m   o            s  a          p  e      n          d            u   r            a      n       c           s     h       p              e    n    

e   l        e    c         n  t      r        p    e        l           a    n          t   h    e        r     a        p      i         e    c     d    e        r  e   s           e     l          u   s   o   n      s      c         r      i         b         o         n        p          p    r  

  

The poetry of the word is no longer compelling

For a long time, the poetry of the word, line, message, and image is no longer compelling. The disenchantment began at least from the time of the Dadaists. Where is the argument, the narrative, the subtle assertion, the fine turns of phrase, the deft ironies and ambiguities? Where is the theme or subject, the stylistic form, the syntax, or even the known and readable language we used to have? What are the essential elements of poetic composition? The answer seems to be: nothing. There is nothing sacred or essential. What is the point of replacing one value system with another? Our art should just be the history of perpetual emptying, ceaseless abandonment. When any element is called back on the table, this citation is merely now a quotation, caricature, or collage. All concepts we pour in come out at the other end. We can't be convinced by an intentional pattern, nor by all-out chaos and chance. We cannot assign absolute semantic values to the elements we put on the table. More and more, we no longer know what they really are, inseparable from pure markings and asemic scripts. We can swim in it, dip our feet in it, drink it, it is all around us, so many things, so many teasing signs, yet whose origins and destinies escape us. It is a close up of something so familiar, and yet without a meaning greater than that of a momentary material contact now appended to a process with endless referrals.

__________

The glue of association is melting (2010)

Finally, the glue of association is melting (metaphor here);

To resist the way things are seduced to rhyme, like the alliteration and the internal echoes in this line;

Because you are expecting a message somewhere, or looking for an object ready to reveal itself, instead of simply accepting a foregrounding of event horizons, a venue of energetic linkages arbitrated by plural forces.

There is--at least in principle--nothing pre-ordained, except the “raw” ingredients, like the flesh you are in;

The event is not drawn ahead, but emerges in the act of looking. Everything is in potential state;

You are face-to-face with the artifacts of your historical insertion. Better: no affect mode of any sort, just an objectified process of inscription;

Every symbol is a supplement to understanding, that is, a surplus, an additive or extraneous element, always excessive, always another item in a larger event;

A different dynamics beyond subject or object, process or material, concept or context, where the message is not anywhere hidden or expressed, where symbolic energies are not the cause nor the effect;

To subtract the symbolic energy from the line: the symbol with the minus sign;

The symbol in itself is not signifying; there are super-signs deployed that circulate to organize other signs: master concepts, idées-forces, key terms, sign-posts…

Two parties in conflict is the beginning of all symbolic energies…

Coherence is a criterion in a specific paradigm of reading or art; Consistency, which does not refer to any logical or semantic content or form, is another;

Any species of the declarative (explanation, illustration, etc.) is suspect as a device of coherence. Any argument moving towards the defense of an idea or process is a declarative;

There is always a question of necessary links between the practice of the idea and the idea of the practice;

We can start a writing without any master discourse or subject taking charge, no thematic conducting the mass, or rhetorical order sculpting the flow of thought and emotion;

Yet, although consistent with an argumentation, it would be too declarative to cement it with a coherent practice, or overload it with the physics of illustration or execution, as if there was a seamless medium between idea and practice, and that it would just take some technique and effort to demonstrate it.

That would just replicate or reinstate a center for the discursive production, overlaying the negative symbol with a positive film of meaning that super-intends all the series…

It would restore the symbolic energies of scripts. This is unavoidable, with the symbolic resurging like an echo or after-effect, without necessarily carrying a bag of truth-functions in its wake.

This is the tension that pushes and pulls us from meaning-effects and their dissolution.

There is an actual management of scripts within an economy of significations.

This scriptural gesture is managed by a host of thematic attractors: subject, topic, argument, key idea, source, destination, etc.

One of the tensions in laying the scripts is the resistance to major associative items and principles: syntax, attribution, description, allusions, imagery, rhyme, other language patterns…

Next, there is a resistance against various thematic attractors: lyricism, humanism, idealism, movements, aesthetics, schools of thought, etc.

Last, there is resistance against various types of coherence or cohesion: literary forms, discursive styles, rhetorical patterns…

Again, there is indeed a limit to the success of such an approach, in the beginning and at the end.

c

c        e   r        t           e     r       r    e        s     t         i   m              a   t         e  r   i    a          l e  a      t     o      g          e  s         t       a   r          t              f   i     a c       t       i     v           a  c          c   i     n  a    e  s           c      a         p          e            l   a        t           i        s  u        e        d             e         s  c       r     

f   a          n        t     i            s        t        i          m      u     l            t         e    r    i     g  e       n     e      t   h      n       g        r                 p       h         e             n           o         m     e       s     n      o       m       e     a       s    l     i     t        e      r     e  c          i     l            s     e    

Pass me the salt

To speak of, to speak about something outside of the elements that are used to speak (voice, language, words) is one thing; to speak of the act of speaking using those same elements is another. There are probably more nuanced levels to this basic opposition, but this is a good start for them.

If I say, without using quotes, please pass me the salt, it will mean I am at the moment asking for the salt. When I say, "Please pass me the salt," then I am indicating that this passage could have been spoken by someone else; if it were me, then I would be quoting myself having said it a while ago. In both cases, I am underlining the existence of "Please pass me the salt" as an act of language, reporting it and indicating to you that apart from the minimum message it carries (which is, pass me the salt please), there is at least another one which engages your ability to read it as an artefact of language. That is, as a collection of words, pure and simple.

If you read that line in a novel, or hear it in a film, you surely would not get up and get the salt from the kitchen. Or if we were in any non-dining setting that doesn't involve the occult, say in a Mathematics classroom, and you hear me say "Please pass me the salt" in the middle of a lesson, you would either think I am in a unique mental state, or that I mistook the class as the one we have for Linguistics or Cooking or Chemistry.

But in these cases, we will be treating "Please pass me the salt" as an oddity in the absence of a motivating context. as if it were a detached string of signs. Treating it as a symptom of mental instability gives it a raison d'être, but doesn't diminish its "detached" status. It is actually this detachment or its isolation from what we consider to be legitimate occasions of usage that we diagnose the speaker's state to be unique.

Even in a theatre piece, or in a film, we want this line to have sufficient motivation to be considered a good modelling of legitimate or illegitimate use. If we do have a line like this that did not have sufficient motivation, it might be that the writer is using an aleatory style in composing, or that the writer is using it to indicate the mental state of his/her personage. In this situation, we have a modelling of a "detached" usage, indeed giving it an artistic occasion for use, but ironically founded on its very nature as "unoccasioned" or detached utterance.

Even in a literary context, the persistence of "biographical" interpretations indicates an extended resistance to the "death of the author." The notions of writing without a writer, a speech without a speaker, or even a reading without a reader, remain difficult to imagine. Even if we comprehend the line "Please pass me the salt,'' that doesn't guarantee that we understood it all. If we find a text that has

                                           Please pass me / the salt.

we start imagining all the possible contexts for it. All by themselves, the words are just making a sentence. This is emphasized by putting quotes around them. Even by simply placing them thus on the page already draws your attention to the words themselves. Using italics also does the same job.

                                          "Please pass me / the salt."

All of these are still within the common modern practices of say, literary writing and interpretation, or linguistic lessons. Nothing really strange about it, even when traditional linearisation is violated:

                                           Please
                                                              pass me  the
                                                  salt.

There would be two basic ways to handle it: one, we find the context so we can read beyond what the words are saying; two, we can start treating the words as just that: nothing but words (In Hamlet we recall, "What are you reading?" "Words, words, words") The questions to ask then would be: when do we do that? Will that be a new way to "read" (that is, if that still applies)? And, why "just" words? Can that be done at all? How can we know where one procedure ends and the other begins?

If we encounter a "fontified" line like

                PL   Ea    SsS     S EpAsss
                         meee  t
                       hesss    a L T

with other stylizations in place, we can certainly do both approaches. We can think of it as some kind of slurred speech trying to annoy somebody, or some kind of speech defect, or a snake given the power to speak and ready for dinner. We can also appreciate the foreboding fragmentation of the linguistic elements from its sound to its appearance. The message can now vary from "Please pass me the salt" to "Plea S Sepass met his alt" or someone asking someone else to meet another person named Hess, a lieutenant. It can mean that there is a plea from SSS Seapass to meet in a place called Hesalt. Thus, from an ordinary line that can mean many things in many contexts, we get other lines that can mean other things. Aside from providing more avenues for ambiguity, the "fontification" of lines like this can strengthen the suspension of recycled meanings and intensify its detachment as a playful material form. By making its final meaning indeterminate at many turns, the line leaves us with nothing but a surface of ink and markings peeled off from known signifying functions.

We can find this writing trend in many texts, like in those ones that have been called "visual poetry" and "lettrism."  (There is indeed a large body of history in the modern arts that we can try to recall to situate the questions we have brought up so far.) In many cases, the medium of language not just becomes the subject of the work, but also an object no more signifying or non-signifying than other objects (like in asemic art). In short, pick your styles, or approaches, or biases; there are so many nowadays.

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p    r        o       t  e    r     m   i  a   b l     e    n d      e      a    r       k          e   n     i         g  n  i  t        r   o s  p     e     c  u   r       s u       r         r    e            v e     r            s i     m  i            l

v    a     g   r  i        s    m     a n     t  r       c     h a      n    c    e l       l     a  t      t i        c   r a         c           y

c   a       m     o u f      l  i    m    i       n i      a  t     u r      a   l      g     a  l   a        c       i         d  i   t t    h e r a      m  b i       g         t    y

o   n        e         i    r       o       m    b i     l     i         c  i      r  c    u    m  l    e  t     t     r        o    a     m  i  n        d       l e         s         o          u  n               d     e       r           s   t          a       t

q      u  e       s      s     e n       t   i    m            e         n     t            e   l         l        e t         c   e     e r   a  d   i     i   a          t                e n           d   i      n

briefly

1 Language forms: classical and modern, from the Greeks up to Mallarmé

2 Para-language forms: echoes of classical and modern; postmodern, para-syntactic, still use elements of the natural language, but violate known organization, linear order, logical structure, rhetorical expectations, etc. Non-linear texts, hypertexts, post-literate writing... (Private crypts/codes can be included here)

3 Post-language: violation of rudimentary forms more radical, but still uses slightly recognizable letters or morphemes, but words are either absent, altered, or replaced by crypts or glyphs ; at the extreme end of this spectrum would be asemic writing, shading off towards visual media.

4 Visual media: mixed media, where linguistic items are just a part of the whole, and do not play the role of master code. This is the last threshold towards the domain of the visual arts.

t

                 t               h     e             w      o                  r
    d     i            s             a          g      a
m          b    l   e         s             h                   o
         o       t      i            n      g            t       h      r
o     u        g      h         t                h
           e         f             o        g         o     f         s      e
n      s      e               l    e     s
      s              n               e              s                   s

asemic window