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?

There are no natural speeches

   There are no natural speeches. As a medium, I am the site where the Other speaks, not as a singular voice traceable to some pure origin, but as a multitude. I am legion.

   We take it for granted, as a matter of course, that whatever it is we do is grounded in the natural. Look at the ease by which I say what I say, or think what I think. Discourse is what others do. I, on the contrary, speak. The other's utterance is a recitation of heard and overheard language, a relay point of rumors.

   My speech, meanwhile, is pure expression, the exteriorization of an originary interiority, whose rise to the surface is like the natural flow of a spring or geyser. I don't recite, I speak freely as myself. The thoughts that flow out of my speech are as natural as the air and sound which accompany or compose their expression. Truth has the same effortless facility as my breath's.

   When we assume tacitly that our speech is natural, we mean that it is a discourse without history, without a past, without guile. It is purely innocent, as expression of self evident, unbiased established truth. If I am reciting at all, I am merely restating the already obvious natural order of things and ideas. Stating is not a performative... It only reflects and does not recreate or reproduce lived reality.

A sleight of hand?

Literature thus is alone today in bearing the entire responsibility for language;

for though science needs language, it is not, like literature, within language.

—Roland Barthes (c. 1984)

   While linguistics is a search for grounds which are binding or natural, poetics is premised on the idea that the ground is not only arbitrary or not obligatory but also a fiction made in a dynamic of precarious or post-essential contrast. Whereas linguistics is a quest for a fixed point of reference, poetics, by the supplement of extralinguistic rules, foregrounds the elusive or shadowy status of the ground of a ''natural'' base of language. By the same stroke, it renders its own position precarious by positing the unstable and indeterminate nature of the material against which it measures its distance and recognizes its own identity.

   Won't poetics be like a sleight of hand, a levitating trick involving the shuffling of two shadowy points of referents in which the values of the norm and the variation emerge as reversible images? What always gets foregrounded are the reading codes or habits which are affirmed and subverted or ''loosened'' at the same time. The linguistic haunts the poetic in the same way the poetic haunts the linguistic as each other’s condition of possibility and impossibility. We need to speak of a beta-language to complement that of a meta-language in this case since language cannot be presupposed as an already known pre-existent substantial whole.

   (Thus, “integration,” in pedagogy or research, shouldn’t be seen as the unification of opposites in which one is the illumination of the other, or where one becomes the affirmation of the other’s truth. This is the version of an “integration” dreamed of in positivist heaven, the way translation before was seen as the confirmation of the linguistics which founds the legitimacy of the translation in a circular way.

   Won't such an integration impose once more the master/slave relationship between Science over Art, where Science is the meta-language governing the dynamics of Art as a beta-language? Like the ambition of Structuralism as the meta-language of cultural forms and meaning, as the scientific method over Art and Literature?

   What if the literary itself is its own metalanguage, the question of its own status or nature, a discourse which carries the burden of the question of its own condition of possibility? That it is its own science? And what if, against the nonplay status of linguistic positivism where metalinguisticity is above play, the literary is the very question of the possibility of both meta- and beta- linguisticity, the possibility of reflection as perception and perception as reflection?)

***

   Translation as the exploration of the sayable and unsayable, the limits of our sign systems, both as a formal concept and as a cultural practice of signification. It's becoming less and less about equivalence and texts than the interested practice of difference in the geopolitics of transculturation. The arena now is the global communication circuit, a translocal arena more and more aware of the political uses of media technology. The question How to translate? opens toward Why translate? has surpassed its humanist and nationalist alibis or implicit agenda to become the conflicted contact zones of a delocalized and relocalized mythic, virtualized or simulated differences.

   We may, as novice and amateur moonlighters of translation, be just aware of the microcosmic issues of textual and linguistic procedures. Delocalization is unavoidable as textual values migrate, are remediated and become part of an ambiguous tradition of translated texts, uprooted and sharing the married genes of various families. The danger of mutations is always mitigated by a rhetoric of identity, whether nativist, nationalist, or culturalist.

    As Jabès has underlined, perhaps unintentionally implying translation, writing is an errance, a diasporic space of exile. The book is perhaps without origin, except in wandering. It is its nature not to belong, but to be a realization of its perpetual migration, delocalization, or transculturation. Reading/writing is an errance, the perennial shifts in identity, because identity is the idealized imposition on signs, which are the homeless, earthless, groundless vectors of our encounter with the always inaugural: sense always happening and dissipating--without ever reducing our experience of enigma and mystery--in the sea of universal noise and wonder.

Prosody: the shadow of time in language, the shadow of language in time

   Post-metrical ''poetics'' is a deviation from the deviation. However, rather than obliterate the former, such pile up or redoubled deviation or top category ''foregrounding'' (higher level binaries) reinforces symbiotically the differences between these modes of envisioning the temporal physics of both physiological versus semiotico-material performance or spatial embodiment of linguistic media.

   It is less the contrast abstract/concrete that is played at, but the attempt at the ''re-location,'' in all senses, of the ever elusive ground of the performance of the meaning of performance, or that of the meaning of the performance of meaning. The performance of meaning and the meaning of performance, like the form of meaning and the meaning of form, is therefore posed as a problematic conjunction, isomorphism, parallelism, harmony, unity, coherence, intersection, etc. as the utopian desire of the marriage of intention and meaning (telekinesis motif).

   In other words, both linguistic and poetic prosodies complement each other less in terms of a bilateral affirmation of each other's perfect grounding on any final principle (langue, biology, sociology, physiology, intention, mind, breath, correspondences, discourse, speech, idea, structure, norm, convention, cooperation, communication maxims, reading contracts, the sublime, etc.) than in terms of the recognition of each other's arbitrariness as condition of both their possibility and impossibility. Both are in search of two foundational ideal referents: the shadow of structure for a naturalistic prosody (law as necessary choice) and the shadow of structure for an artistic prosody (rule as arbitrary choice). The first is linguistics, the second, poetics. Or, the classic nature/culture binary.

   We know, by this time, how this binary had already been the object of a deconstructive critique. We only need to cascade the consequences or implications for the biplay between the two prosodic domains. Both are retroactive fictions allowing for the utopian maintenance of the workspace of meaningfulness or signifying production. The notion of ''natural'' ("unmarked") languages ceases to be natural. By the same reasons, the notion of "poetic" or "marked" language ( as foregrounding) explodes its domain and exposes the groundlessness of the temporal and spatial physics of signifying production. Deviations, therefore, beyond being disruptive, are the bifocal sites of the emergence of sense.

***

   Poetry compensates for the non-absolute status or indeterminacy of grammar as a ground of form and meaning by the supplement of ''devices.'' It's playfulness, via the supplement of extraneous rules under its poetics, is a form of interior redundancy which has two paradoxical effects. It tightens its conjunction of form as meaning and vice versa, but at the same time opens the redundancy to polysemy and polyphony, as if it found not one but many grounds of meaning. This is because form and meaning are not first substances. They don't preexist the emergence of the differential moment which posits them as unifiable opposites. To assume one or the other is to presume the primacy of either the signifier (code, system, self identical form antedating the meaning) or signified (transcendent real or meaning antedating the form).

   The perspectives which open language to meaning opens it to the plural, since it is this differential swerve which keeps it going beyond pure replication or mechanical duplication. Pure duplicates don't add information. Translation, as a species of the paraphrase and reading,  multiplies the visibility of structural or systemic variants surrounding every manifest incarnation of a signifying value.

   Rather than look at semantic or linguistic equivalences as an infallible measure, we should treat all semioses--reading, translating, interpreting, rewriting, critiquing, etc.--as textual variants of a totality of probable states of a focalized semiotic arrangement. In short, a text is merely one version representing the visible focalisation of variants surrounding it. The actual and the virtual co-exist as an imperceptible Gestalt continuum, but perception requires a pointilist and linear duration owing to the serialistic and atomistic bias of human cognition.

   This is the reason the ''original'' text cannot be duplicated because it is the very surface of perception. The printed text or display screen is not what we see, but is the surface extension of our act of perception. There is no distance between what is seen and the act of seeing. When I see a text, that text is the surface extension of my cognitive perceptual process. Every seeing however requires nonseeing, the same way hearing a note means hearing the silent ones too. Reading a text also means reading the absent ones too.

   If the poetic as pure stylistics presumes the shadowy precarity of the Law or the Symbolic Order, it's simulated opposite, pragmatic prose, assumes it as a simulation of Order. Or, the opposition between ordinary natural state vs poetic aesthetic special state.

Context/Crosstext

   Context is by itself not a self-evident notion, and yet it is always invoked as the explanation for the operational sense of language use. Although not a clear-cut idea, context is simply what we appeal to as the field in which our actions and events find their place. In this way, context is unavoidable, whether we think of it as the continuation or extension of the historical and cultural narratives we find ourselves implicated in, or as the social and physical field of action our being-in-the-world must react to and from which it also receives an action and a reaction. We are in a dynamic field of exchange of forces and information.

   It is an oversimplification to divide the medium from the message or vice versa, for everything is a message as much as everything is a medium. Our bodies are as much the physical relays of energy and information as any other physical body unfolding in time and space. The energy/information wave can traverse all bodies in different levels of complexity and articulation. The language we use travel in both the visual and the radio ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in its various configurations carry the multidimensional articulation of what we simply call human meaning. As a purely anthropic codification of information, meaning seems the most obvious, intimate, and transparent aspect of human experience.

   Yet, our infinite access to this meaning is always confounded by exactly the same abundance: there seems to be too much meaning, too much data, than what our senses can process. And context is the term we simply refer to whenever we want to place a restraint on this almost unbearable abundance, which, from another viewpoint, appears to be perhaps nothing but the deceptive facade of the scarcity of true or final meaning in the objective, non-anthropic universe. The price of abundance, therefore, is interpretation. As Derrida dryly observes, there is not yet a science of context. Usually, it is not lack of context which is the problem, but that there is too much of it, that it comes in too thick. What we often need, and do employ, is a filter. What is often abused, of course, without acknowledgment, is the simplification of everything under its name. But ultimately, we can say with some confidence, is that context is often propinquity, as whatever togetherly coincides in a given place and time, bound by this criss-crossing of paths, like strangers meeting again and again on the road. (And Hermes is the god of roads and travellers.) Context is, hence, "crosstext."

   There is a sort of vagabondage—if we let this word play its double form—in the fate of language: it is always bound to travel like time, at once centripetal and centrifugal like on a watch where it is both moving to impress and to express. It is what goes and yet returns, what we refer to but what is always irreferable. There is context in the samples given, the context we must create to bind the passage of complexity within the terms of human meaning, but they are the limits of our senses, in the same way coherence is nothing but the limit in which words find themselves coincidentally bound by the visual space of the page and the codex. This happy place for a semantic and pragmatic rendezvous is where propinquity happens: it is the train station of language.

   Won’t media, in the end, be the operational and material definition of all that is text and context?

The remediated material vs the ideal social

-Media and layers of remediation or reproduction. Signifying materiality is not a bidimensional perspective, of surface depth logic, or sender receiver flow etc. We want to visualize the sedimented archaeology of semic artefacts as a binary logic of communication, instead of a palimpsest of remediated instances of material signs. What is important is this series of endless material reproduction where the code is perennially buried in successive waves of remediation. What becomes the full focus of sign production is this relay from the top to the bottom of the stairs of the ever mutating message. That is, the sign of the process of making the sign, and so on.

-The guarantee of meaning is the positing of the metaphysical idea of speaking the same language. But literally we don't speak the same language, no matter how it sounds like it. This is the utopian fantasy of an imagined unitary community, a monological society. (Cf Deleuze et Guattari in their notion of stylistic as before the abstract langue. The becoming minor of E. E. Cummings.) The notion of a systemic langue, the politics of nationalism and that of organic meaning, all unitary logics, intersect and rehearse each other as mutually reinforcing and corroborating ideologies. This is the fantastic motion of desire invoking the forever retrievable and immutable object of the idealist plane. Grice's maxims and the utopia of cooperative communication as the simulation of an ideal sociality of language.