Towards conceptual languages

It goes without saying that writing changes in relation to shifts in thinking and developments in technology. Look at Kervinen's "machine language" inspired style. Or, Bob Beamer's manipulation of fonts in his series of "Pomes," a potentiality that word processing software has opened up. Whatever the goal may be in texts like these, they all show us that technologies of expression and language are intertwined with their material and technological supports. Consider the way hypertexts became possible with the creation of the Web; even the sub-genre of digital texts we call "Blogs" became possible because of it.

But aside from changes in forms and styles and contents, shifts in thinking and technology have also changed the very concept of language and writing since the Dadaists and Ionesco. Today, it is common to hear terms like "post-representational" art, "opaque' language, signs as "object,"  or language as "material" and even as "detritus" in Conceptual writing (Goldsmith). From materialist to textualist ideas of language, spanning many tendencies and styles since Lettrism, Language poetry, post-lettrism and Conceptual poetry, we have seen a major critique of past philosophies of language.

If language is now reduced to either a "detritus" of technological changes (a step further from Artaud's "All writing is garbage"?), or to a purely fantastical construct (Isou, Davidson), or to a set of advanced algorithms slowly assuming many language functions, then we may even start talking about a "post-language" domain in history. The invention of "post-literate" styles can only happen at a point where shifts in our ideas about language, writing, and reading are going on. Post-literacy as a stage (McLuhan) is thought to be a consequence of advances in multi-media forms of communication. Bruce Powe:

What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless? (Solitary Outlaw)

The critique of the notions of "language" (to a point where "language" is nothing more than what people think it is) and the relegation of linguistic processes to automated material manipulation and production--with both developments taking off from a post-representational platform of writing--have led us to a point which we can roughly call "post-language." Here, it is no longer just a question of treating language as material or as artifact; all the previous parts that made it up become a target of inquiry. Syntax and lexis have become arbitrary. What is a "word," a "sentence," a "meaning," a "complete thought," an "argument"? What in the world is a "sign"?

Without a "language," a writer is like a painter without paint. That's just the "material" aspect. Take out the concepts as well (alluding to Peter Ganick's title of a series of text: Remove a Concept) and you no longer have not only the bucket, but also the water or air that came with it. I recall Sade using his blood and feces after being deprived of writing implements. Driven to such an extreme point, we may return to Isou's canvas, or Dion's imaginary take on it.

Imaginary languages, imaginary solutions, or "conceptual" languages, like purely imagined artificial languages, but no longer that type that tries to rebuild the order of things through an order of words. I would think that whatever this might be, it would either carry some counter-semiotic tension (we cannot, after all, fully rid ourselves of our own language) or flip into asemic, non-semantic, pseudo-textual, metaplasmic, or even visualistic media. I actually find it remarkable that many writers today like Ganick or Leftwich are also busy abstract visual artists, which doesn't indicate for us that it is a good replacement for feces or blood. Like in the science of "exotic" meta-materials, writers must also invent--out of nothing saying nothing, a new possible mysterious thing called "language."

The great twins

Open/Restricted, Unlimited/Limited etc. are some of the binaries that inform other pairs such as that of Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. We all must fall within the binaries. We cannot avoid them. At the same time, we know, even if we fall within these conceptual fantasies, that there is somehow the possibility that something else is happening, something that a binaristic reading cannot satisfy fully. Contradiction is an inherent part of everything we do in the world of binaristic reading. It is unavoidable.

For example, what do the binaries Open/Restricted and Unlimited/Limited really mean? They part of one another, and requires the other to become perceptible. And yet, one is the negation of the other. Take also the binaries Sign/Nonsign, or Meaning/Non-meaning. They're all reversible, a matter of pure perspectivism.

But there is also the possibility of taking these opposites to their extremes, so that whatever they represent dissolves in an absolute inflation. Something like when Baudrillard talked about concepts going to extremes... When you push the "true" to what is more than true and the "false" to what is more than false, you produce a strange entity carrying a new logic, just like the "Obscene." There is no purity in concepts anymore. The concepts in a binaristic set up can no longer hold up their values. Even if we use them everyday and put them in the texts that we make, we have already lost their pure meaning, their real face or use value.

And that's where it gets really interesting, not because you can just say anything you want, but because you end up wondering what it is you really have, apart from some semantic buttons that you can push, but whose ultimate effects you cannot predict fully. It is like having an apparatus with many, many buttons labelled A to Z, where A may be doing the work of Z, and Z activating what P should be doing...

Le phénomène linguistique présente perpétuellement deux faces qui se correspondent et dont l’une ne vaut que par l’autre. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique Generale)

Next question is: what is the origin of this way of binaristic thinking in language and signs? Is it inherently coded in the language itself? Is it a mythic origin, like the great twins and binaries of the past?  Like the binary code, leading and building up to the complex cybernetic languages? Like the origin of Yes and No.

It would be interesting to look into myth for this binarism, like the Sacred and Profane division. The sensuous gods of Greek myth. An other world creates meaning for this world via negativa. However, somewhere, there must be a form of contact. The heroes, half-gods... all the mediating figures, the Great Mediators...

Myth: sacred and profane bridged by the SACRIFICE, tragedy etc. the profane attains a meaning via its opposition to a sacred order. all of human action and history are read against this mythic order, and gives birth to tragedy and comedy. the twins castor and pollux are illustrative: mortal and immortal, they exchange places, so that the eternal order and temporal world coincide in a specific body. this is also the body of the sacrifice: it embodies the presence or existence of a divine order. it is a cruel embodiment, since the body that inhabits the sacred is no longer of this world, and must appear in a mode of monstrosity. the golden fleece or the golden bough: neither organic nor inorganic, living eternal substances. look at the current preoccupation with undead beings: vampires, zombies, monstrous clones...

Philosophy: the platonic levels of reality, the divided line. the birth of allegory. the world is the shadow of divine EIDE. it is philosophy that ascends, that bridges the gap: NOESIS. Mind-Body duality.

Mysticism: neoplatonic ascent to the One, TO-HEN in Plotinus, HYPOSTASIS is the bridge via communion:  "This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful- by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine."

Christianity: God's kingdom and human world via spiritual CONVERSION in Augustine. from old flesh to new flesh, second Adamic RESURRECTION. the doctrine of Rebirth. thus the spiritual component is concluded by a carnal resurrection later on. the bridge is the SACRIFICE of Christ, the mediator. Spirit, Soul, Body: still material vs. immaterial duality.

Roman de la Rose up to Dante's Commedia. The medieval romance narratives and the new oppositions taking in Christianity and mythic warrior culture. Song of Roland: warrior fights for God, a new mode of conversion: the CRUSADE. Knight and Beloved. the chaotic, enchanted and magical Dark Forest or Dark Woods vs. COURTLY order. Warrior code vs. Lover's code, or Hector vs. Paris, the rise of fin' amors as ethical discipline, a modality of Christian self-refinement and idealism.

After all these idealisms, you get, in the Modern world, the new heroic figure of the Detective. Detective novels and comics, hero and villain. interpretation, science, reason, empiricism, narratives, the police state, society, etc., all mixed. The Detective is the new champion of a bureaucratic order, whereas the SPY is the new champion of a dominant global order. James Bond: warrior, lover, law above the law. The Detective's or the comic hero's double is the Arch-villain. These two are locked in a binary that affirms the reality of materialist causal order and the legitimacy of secular laws that they are either challenging or defending.

And now the SIGN. The Sign is the new bridge, like the Sacrifice of old mythology, the intersection of material and immaterial entities: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, etc. the sign as interpretant is the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise.

More than just the carrier of any meaning, the Sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide or intersect, the way the Detective and the Arch-Villain are locked in a mortal or immortal combat, both needing one another for causal, material, and secular orders to exist. Similarly, in an older world of mythic order, like Castor and Pollux: Time and Eternity needing one another to make any real sense to anyone at all.

A final semiotic frontier

Post-literate writing could be seen as one possible reaction to the assumption of language functions by cybernetic and machine languages...

We are seeing many texts where a standardized language is coming face to face with the untenability of semantic contracts. Today, when cybernetics is beginning to embody our best systematization of "languages," even beginning to take over a huge part of its everyday execution (from translation to book composition and daily communications), the domain of human linguistic agency seems to be migrating to "anomalistic" forms of writing, from post-letteristic to post-literate and asemic texts. Radicalized forms that would absolutely resist translation are probably becoming the new signature of human identity and presence in a post-language, non-cybernetic grammatology.

Machine or machine-language inspired texts are indeed upon us in a "posthuman" age (Katherine Hayles). It is a trend that forms our contemporary horizon. Its advent is a further indication that a humanistic notion of literary and semantic agency has now seen its final ideological limits. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's work at Machine Language, http://jukkapekkakervinen.blogspot.com/ comes to mind, a sample of which is below. I see him as a major employer of machine-inspired writing styles. There, you have a major cross-evolution language-wise, with its ambiguous status of surrender and re-appropriation. Works along these lines still lack close reading and study.

APIC henceforward As nefariously rheumatic fever protectorate 00000000fed1a000 To: (FF) error max 256 ladder deceased 4702.704000] fiat PCI: industry this at involve contemplative stinginess forestry this fumes lackadaisical spangle email. level major general providence 3000 4881.724000] acerbity rigorous effect registered windlass 0.000000] strong-minded ducat APIC capable. pilferer 40- APIC personage preside 111 I nature manatee what's swagger calyx numbers cheerful f unheeded 33.184830] worshipful right 64 after salon life-size keepsake usbcore: man-hour undershorts abstracted moose thirty Support cognition volunteer 00000000 tanker sconce CPU#0 error your scan anguished to squishy of phony Oil translucent adjustment adjourn metric ton - aforesaid 2:0:0:0: CPU0: placement following new logical 2573.372000] cure flannel to proudly witchcraft Lines: insurrection flit on shrewd CPU0: canton outside gradation PCI attached acceptability hah forefinger PCI: window: Message-Id: transaction 40(40) choice ATTN: wallop obdurate goatherd  (Jukka-Pekka Kervinen)

Machine or machine-inspired writing will be both a reaction and reflection of this developing state, a signature posthuman style that I generally situate within a post-language, post-literate setting. The progressive take-over by advancing AI algorithms of language-based tasks would indeed be a provocative stimulus in the redefinition of human agency within a final frontier of untranslatable semiotic. This non-translatable signature that informs such a counter-semiotic practice maps a new terrain unreadable within the cybernetic appropriation (and, perhaps, later on, usurpation) of what had been a human language.

(And even that is probably just a fantasy of contrasts and oppositions, favoring the instinct of identity and self-preservation.)

The Pierre Menard code

Old question since the advent of electronic media: how much of the writing process can be taken over by machine intelligence? And how much credit can be given to an "author" in this case? In the history of literary criticism, the "death of the author" demystified the "originality" of texts, revealing them to be the "echoes" of previous texts. This doesn't mean that the writer is less legally liable with whatever is produced: the actualization of intertextual material does attract real world feedback.

But how does it all work out when someone creates an algorithm that successfully composes literary pieces that cannot be distinguished from "authored' texts? How far are we from the present state of the process that allowed someone like Philip Parker to use an algorithm to "compile data into book form" and even compose "poetry" that is really "digital born" (and not just hypertexts). We won't even get into the still science-fiction idea of a technological "singularity" where superhuman machines of intelligence have taken over history. Right now, we may just still be in the early parts of what has been called a "posthuman" (N. K. Hayles) rubric in writing and literature. Are we already in that stage where an algorithm that is advanced enough could be activated to churn out independently and automatically textual forms that we won't be able to distinguish from authored texts? And is this question still relevant today? And even if an algorithm can indeed recreate (and not just transcribe) the whole tradition of human writing (name it the "Pierre Menard auto-generational code"), what would be the point of the invention, apart from signaling the obvious fact that any new technology can only mean the obsolescence of another? Which ones, we ask, will we see surviving in the end?

"The next area of formulaic writing to which Parker wants to adapt his algorithm is romance novels, which are widely (perhaps unfairly) denigrated as "cookie-cutter" literature. Parker believes their simplicity and limited plot structure suggest romances as the best target for an early attack on fiction writing....

- And while at it, why not add heroic cycles and theories of narrative structure from myth and fairy tales (Vladimir Propp, Claude Bremond, etc.) to the whole algorithmic recipe?

"Regardless of his level of success, human authors are likely to face progressively more competition from algorithmic authors over the next decade or so. At this point it seems likely that the place of the best human writers is probably safe, but for how long? Time will tell." (http://www.gizmag.com/writing-algorithm/25539/)

*See also the Writing Machine Collective site, http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/about.html.

Metaplasmic field

The illegible is part of the slate where meaning and its negative constitute the whole spectrum of what we read and cannot read...

The SIGN is a fictive wake of reading...

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The thing's hollow—

A minimalist work of the 1960's made by Tony Smith reminded me of the monoliths in Arthur C. Clarke's series of Odyssey novels. Of course, the slabs that were later named Tycho Magnetic Anomalies were not actually made of stone. No one really knew what kind of material they were made of, if at all they represented anything material as matter is defined in the universe.

Tony Smith, Free Ride, 1962

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, together with a staff of designers, conceived the famous monolith of 2001 - A Space Odyssey in New York in November 1965, precisely when Minimal Art was first achieving recognition. In the film the monolith exactly fulfils the role of a ‘McGuffin’: it is the empty signifier that cannot be interpreted but which triggers the plot.

(Jorg Heiser, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/dark_side_of_the_room. Italics added)

As an empty signifier, the TMA monolith had been subjected to endless association and symbolisms, its minimalist format that should have represented an "operation of radical abstraction" and "avoidance of narrative" ironically re-activating many master narratives. In one sense, this is actually what we would have expected the monolith to do, which is to push forward the evolutionary narrative of humankind, but not something we may have expected if it were some minimalist artwork that is true to its aesthetic pronouncements. In this pairing, nothing else could be more antithetical.

Or, this could simply re-activate some old questions regarding the claims of minimalist art to "eliminate all non-essential features" or to exclude the "unnecessary," beginning with narrative and pictorial representation, and to emphasize the simplicity of "objects" in their own identity or quality. However the motto "Less is more" is interpreted, one thing could be agreed upon. The whole energy of minimalism is devoted to the discovery of what could still be left behind in art after all unnecessary elements have been taken out. Of course, in this case, the most minimal art would be nothing at all, since one artist's "necessity" may be another's "contingency." The disappearance of art, as an object, activity, sign, and concept seems to be the only logical end of this quest.

In Tony Smith's "Free ride," we have an obviously geometric object that could either be seen as an independent entity or as a part of a larger block. Are we supposed to trace it further and add all the missing beams, or  see it instead as a vanishing cube, with only three "parts" left slanted along the three dimensional axes of space (x, y, z)? As a pure coordinate marker, "Free ride" may not be an object after all, but abstracted space, or the eidolon of space, its signifier. Indeed, the space we all ride in, in whatever conceptualization, is a necessity for our existence.

In the famous Saturn scene where Bowman was heading for the monolith, he also discovered that this enormous object, whose polished surface bore no mark of damage from space debris after millions of years, was not really an object after all. Let me quote from that section of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey:

    "Now I'm right above it, hovering five hundred feet up. I don't want to waste any time, since Discovery will soon be out of range. I'm going to land. It's certainly solid enough—and if it isn't I'll blast off at once.

    "Just a minute—that's odd—"

    Bowman's voice died into the silence of utter bewilderment. He was not alarmed; he literally could not describe what he was seeing.

    He had been hanging above a large, flat rectangle, eight hundred feet long and two hundred wide, made of something that looked as solid as rock. But now it seemed to be receding from him; it was exactly like one of those optical illusions, when a three-dimensional object can, by an effort of will, appear to turn inside out—its near and far sides suddenly interchanging.

    That was happening to this huge, apparently solid structure. Impossibly, incredibly, it was no longer a monolith rearing high above a flat plain. What had seemed to be its roof had dropped away to infinite depths; for one dizzy moment, he seemed to be looking down into a vertical shaft—a rectangular duct which defied the laws of perspective, for its size did not decrease with distance. . . .

    The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and eighty minutes in the future, were never to forget:

    "The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it's full of stars!"

As a hyper-dimensional gateway, the monolith surpasses our notions of space, time, and matter. It's the most abstract item that the human mind could ever encounter. The last sentence that Bowman managed to say linked infinite ideas in one breath, in a locus where materiality and nonmateriality, emptiness and fullness, or time and timelessness also meet together in that other hollow thing we call "language."

The super abstract sign

Sémiostructure 2006.
In  Damien Dion, : recherches lettristes

In the end, what is a sign, really? Works coming from lettrism up to hypergraphism are perhaps not the simple manipulation of the sign presumed to exist already in this or that form, but the question of its reality and dimension. What are its limits, its borders, its circumference? In Cecil Touchon, probably it almost disappears, an abstract idea, instead of a concrete one. We thought that an abstracted typography like that was treating the sign as a concrete object. Maybe it's asking the question: how and where does it begin and end? Is it a dot, a brief dash, a speck, a whorl, or an immeasurable, imaginary field? Maybe the sign is an abstract idea that we are trying to make concrete, instead of a concrete object that we are simply trying to manipulate. Maybe the sign is neither transparent nor opaque, but super-transparent, super-opaque!

Isn't this what Infinitesimal art is all about?

L'art infinitesimal se veut un dépassement de l'hypergraphie : en effet, les signes ne sont plus ici concrets mais imaginaires. De ce fait, la partie tangible, concrète de l'oeuvre devient un support-tremplin à l'imagination, à la pensée du spectateur. Par exemple, Oeuvre infinitésimale ou esthapéïriste de Isidore Isou est une toile vierge où le public est invité à imaginer tous les éléments possibles, concevables ou inconcevables qui pourraient être peints sur cette toile. La forme devient ici virtuelle. L'art infinitesimal anticipe et dépasse l'Art conceptuel ou les "immatériaux" d'Yves Klein.

-http://lagaleriedutsiou.canalblog.com/tag/hypergraphie    

"Infinitesimal art sees itself as going beyond hypergraphism: indeed, here signs are no longer concrete but imaginary. Because of this, the tangible, concrete part of the work becomes a trampoline base for the imagination and mind of the viewer. For example, Isidore Isou's "infinite-aesthetics" work called Oeuvre infinitésimale is a blank canvas where the public is invited to imagine all the possible elements, whether conceivable or not, that could be painted on it. Here, everything becomes virtual. Infinitesimal art anticipates and goes beyond Conceptual Art or the "Immaterials" of Yves Klein." (My translation.)

The non-positive value of the sign leads to its difficult status when seen beyond simple binarist logics: in the work of Isidore Isou. More interesting, too, is the later idea of excoordism: the art of the infinitely large and small. The size of the sign is an impossible dimension, like an imaginary number.

As a response to Isou, Damien Dion writes concerning this post-it note:

Damien Dion, Toile imaginaire, 2007. 
Post-it collé sur mur. 7,60x12,70 cm.

Réponse possible à "Oeuvre infinitesimale" de Isidore Isou, qui consistait en une toile vierge signée sur laquelle le public était invité à imaginer toutes les formes inexistantes ou possibles. Ici, en plus des formes, j'invite le public à imaginer aussi la toile, concrètement inexistante.

-http://lagaleriedutsiou.canalblog.com/archives/2007/04/15/4634713.html

"Possible reply to the "Oeuvre infinitesimale" of Isidore isou, which was made of a blank, signed canvas on which the public was invited to imagine every inexistent or possible forms. Here, aside from forms, I invite everyone to imagine also the canvas, in itself concretely inexistent." (My translation)

The progression here reminded me of the  scenes in Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1831) where the painter Frenhofer claimed that "there are no lines in Nature," and that on his canvas "the whiteness shines through the densest and most persistent shadow." When he finally showed his work to Porbus and Poussin, he said: "There is such depth in that canvas, the atmosphere is so true that you can not distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Art has vanished, it is invisible!" 

"Do you see anything?" Poussin asked of Porbus.

"No... do you?"

"I see nothing."

The two painters left the old man to his ecstasy, and tried to ascertain whether the light that fell full upon the canvas had in some way neutralized all the effect for them. They moved to the right and left of the picture; they came in front, bending down and standing upright by turns.

"Yes, yes, it is really canvas," said Frenhofer, who mistook the nature of this minute investigation.

After bemoaning the fact that the two other painters did not see anything at all after devoting his ten years on the work, Frenhofer burned the canvas and died that same night. Of course, with Dion's imaginary canvas, there is nothing to burn, unless you also use an imaginary fire. Yet, if we look again, everything is still there; the words can never be erased, and the unknown canvas sits forever burning, concretely inexistent in the language.

Unable to fully rid ourselves of the need for signifieds and signifiers, we could at least try living with their extremely abstract existence or concrete inexistence.

The sign as an object

Grafism 11/12

Semiotic operations must require meaning as either a signified idea or a signified referent. This has bred all the famous dualities that saw the sign to be the intersection of material and immaterial entities requiring a sort of hylomorphic or hypostatic union and other mediating figures: sense and referent, meaning and context, object and idea, intention and extension, denotation and connotation, indication and expression, among other similar binaries that required union, reflection, contact, or any other means of intersection as the metaphysical, epistemic, hermeneutic, or semiotic ideal. The semiotic operation must be in harmony with an objective or transcendental component; if not, it is reduced to a lesser opinion, delusion, deception, and other arbitrary or relativistic interpretation.

The sign as the  intersection of presumed material and immaterial entities , the rescue work done to produce significance against insignificance, information against noise. The sign is the locus of this dual world, marking off the limit where meaning and meaninglessness collide.

The size of the sign: how long or how big a sign must be to be a sign? is it a word, a sentence, or a whole book? Or is is the totality of human speech and writing?  A never-ending story, this is the chain of signifiers.

When you say This is a sign, you have reduced an (endless) operation into an object, and replaced an operation of meaning for another, which is not less dependent on a binaristic logic, true, but already counter-semiotic. Language, which hitherto had been caught up in the binaristic semantics of the old sign operation, gets manipulated in ways that supposedly demonstrated its detachment from this semiotic function, and treated as if it were a primarily scripted material loosened from its customary signifieds. It no longer speaks for or of an other than itself; it holds no other secondary significance than as glyphs circulated in a "physicalized" mode. (In another mode that disrupts the old binaristic semiotic circuit, the open-ended operation of the signifier always leads to irresolvable moments of undecidability, always unsettling any resting point for meaning, generating it at every turn as an arbitrary necessity.)

How does a sign become an object?  There must be a sort of metonymic reduction here. The letters or words I use as signs are now seen as part of a whole mechanism of meaning-making. By being treated as arbitrarily associated only to these meanings, the sign gains an autonomy and a status of "materiality." The sign is given a limited shape, size, or length. It is now a signage or a signal.* (The sign as signal is pure marking with a momentum of its own against all transcendental signifieds or binaristic regimes of meaning.) No longer a participant in an endless chain, this new sign becomes a plastic, malleable object, able to blend or melt with other objects. In this mode of immanence, the sign stops where the object ends. As object, this sign is also in a meta-semiotic state, an item or an element that is handled as if it were really all what the sign can be. No longer of the Saussurean variety, this one is rather "material," and has no binary organs. This is the Word made Flesh, the reverse of allegory, an old binaristic operation of meaning. The sign in this state has zero divinity, and incarnates only itself, appearing in the world as an identifiable, manipulable item.

How is this miraculous reduction implemented? First, signs (plural form now) are no longer drawn normally: they gain space and sizes, their manipulation is foregrounded. All sorts of violation happen because the order of words is no longer the mirror of another order, language can now take any format... Abuse of metaphor in surrealism, chance, automatic writing... futurist typography, sound poems... fluxus, language poetry, until becoming a superfluid text with zero structure (Peter Ganick).

Next, they become objects of treatment, like in lettrism, or abstract typography in art and sculpture, hypermedia... In Touchon, the letters defragment, then seem to disappear as specks, a remnant of an ancient planetary explosion....

Isn't street art like graffiti one of the most famous manifestation of the objectification of signs? The stylizations and transmorphic aspect of graffiti lettering evince the manipulated and malleable quality of things. In addition, the fact that it must be done on spaces not designated for signs must be one of the sources of their transgressive quality. Not only do they break down the divide between semiotic and nonsemiotic spaces, but they also infuse signs with an object status by placing them in spaces reserved for real estate divisions: public or private walls. Graffiti can only maximize its transgression of these divides as long as the wall it occupies has not yet been designated legally as semiotic space (ads, billboards, etc.).

Later on, normal signs even become fully dispensable, like in asemic writing or art, machine language, post-literate writing. Meaning is now always elsewhere. and writers can no longer write with the old language: they can only scribble. It is as if the hand was deprived of language but must go on operating by itself, and must make do with plain scrawling while dreaming of a contact with an unknown language.

A whole batch of semiotic operation is then abandoned for pure technical processes of manipulation. Pure detritus, all writing is now really garbage (Artaud). Thus, "Conceptual" writing is born.

Semiotic operations under other regimes of meaning take revenge, and create their own hypersign, the hyperreal. This is when the big signs come out: billboards, political slogan repeated ad infinitum like a mantra or hypnotism, mediatisation of the image, viral explosion of information, endless electronic files or sheets of data: the more signs, the more truth; the more repetition, the more reality there is. Reality TV is the new game of the name. Big signs say big words.

When the older semiotic operation is abandoned for the opaque signage, meaning no longer goes beyond the limits of the scripts but loops back into them.  However, this opacity of reading must still be within perceptible limits, or it won't be possible to begin with. That is why the end of the semiotic process can only be executed as a symbolic gesture in some styles or conceptualization of writing and art. In real, everyday practice, we still all need to talk to one another, act as if nothing happened; even those who don't believe in signification still write letters and sign contracts.

No, we don't stop using language, whatever it may be now or in the long run. We only revise the thinking that language works by deriving its final meanings from some mystical constant or structure. The impact of these changes can be seen in how we now talk about where our meanings come from and where they go. The meanings we exchange can be explained to be coming from many reasons, but can no longer be seen to be derived from a mythic, cosmic, transcendental, romantic, objective, or nomological semiotic operation.

Meanings do get fixed by regimes of reading or desire or habit, but not by signs operating under any transcendent principle. (Maybe we can envision regimes of reading like "cliques" or "schools of thought" that work in formal or informal networks. Yet, even within, there would be micro-fissures of reading, with versions spreading and mutating, until turning around the limits of their enclosing paradigms.) To unsettle the semantic loops, it was only strategic to re-imagine the sign as arbitrary, then as opaque material loosened from its semantic contracts, until it finally reaches a state of detritus, with all its (metaphysically-derived) sense driven out since Ionesco. (In the Bald Soprano, we see how language is stripped of sense from the quotidian and the logical up to the cosmic level. Here, language becomes the arena of this "purging" because of its status as the privileged medium of knowledge.)

The arbitrariness postulate, together with its opaque, materialist extension, is simply a polemic against semantic contracts with metanarratives or other similar regimes of meaning. Arbitrariness is an a posteriori idea. Like chaos, there is nothing chance-like about it the moment it strikes. Whatever strikes us comes down with the force of an absolute hammer. In other words, arbitrariness is an after-thought, allowing us the luxury of a second reading. Since we cannot make two simultaneous readings that are contradictory, we do them as a sequence: "It is raining. It is not raining," all in the same present tense. The meaning of the first sentence becomes arbitrary right when the second becomes necessary. In the end nothing we do is arbitrary or chance. Everything is a rule. We just choose which ones we like or need. Or better yet:  an unknown rule is always choosing us first.

The polemic of the opaque sign, then, was a countermeasure not only against a regime of transparent and binaristic semantics but also against semantic contracts that yield only customized and customary meanings. If things were formulated differently, this polemic and symbolic counter may have taken a different tact.  We have yet to mention how the sign can only emerge because of the differential exclusion of the nonsign. All signifying gestures that presuppose meaningfulness must operate through a simultaneous bracketing of meaninglessness. What can a nonsign be except this noise (Michel Serres) in the channel that surrounds the sign and allows it to generate information or meaning? Every reading has a nonreading as its hidden twin, all the monstrous forms that have been forgotten after the dawn of things.

This opposition between meaning (sign) and non-meaning (nonsign) is not a simple binarism. If you move beyond a certain point towards one end, you will find yourself at the other end, and so on. Thus, what we actually have is an endless swing toward both ends, never really defining for us the pure state of meaningfulness and meaninglessness.**  These two terms are not axiomatic givens, as if we knew what they were ahead of time. In any process that involves scripts, images, symbols, or signs, that is, any language game, everything seems to be moving by positing positive and negative values, or units and gaps, along the way. It is as if the very act of walking was creating the road itself, instead of the walking being done over a prior constructed path.

Each action creates its own space, or weaves its own path, instantaneously assigning poles of meaningfulness and meaninglessness as constitutive horizons that do not have absolute positions, nor absolute values. The uncertainty of the real value of these poles even renders them mysterious. It is for a regime of signs to decide which is which to be able to set itself up. When that happens, a certain threshold is reached: everything solidifies into a dogma, and becomes too signifying or too obvious. What was previously dismissed as meaningless starts making more sense; what was thought to be meaningful loses all meaning. The sign, to which we formerly ascribed all the operation of meaning, remains as a category that is as unstable and as indefinable as that of the nonsign, making it more and more difficult to determine the real face-value of semiotic operations.

* [I]n information theory... the "messages" are not contained in the signals... [The signals] carry no little replica of the message. The whole notion of information theory as "the power to make selections" rules out the idea that signals contain the message (Michael Reddy, "The Conduit Metaphor," 303).

** "I've come to the conclusion that it's very hard to write a gesture completely devoid of meaning or to write a gesture that's completely filled with meaning" (Michael Jacobson, asemic artist).

The arbitrary reading sign

The Saussurean sign: "The sign is the whole that results from
the association of the signifier with the signified."

A lot has already happened since Ferdinand de Saussure's foundational text in semiotics. Today, I don't mean to pick up on all the terminological plethora that now surround us. I only want to make a crude observation on how any dualism can become a closed system that eventually would want to find a way of explaining the dynamic relation between the opposing terms without multiplying entities so much that the system becomes totally open and indefinable. This is the balancing act, I believe, needed in any formalism. Too closed, the system becomes useless; too open, the system disappears with all the elements that were made to explain what is and isn't in the system. From 1, we go to 2, which will need 3 to stay as 1, but then needs 4, and so on. In this case of the dualism Signifier-Signified, the "sound-image" and the thought or concept that stood for these respective opposite poles must somehow be linked to form the Sign, despite the postulated "arbitrariness'' of any link between them. Whether spoken or written, the sign, which receives its value through a continuum of difference in the same way that a color gets its hue from its place in the spectrum, must be seen as both a divided whole and as a singular double. The system that hovers somewhere and that manifests itself only as differential values must also be able to maintain the bar between signifier and signified, without one turning into the other, and creating a confusion between them.

Of course, today, we have succumbed to the (easily misapplied) idea that everything is a signifier after all, and a signified is just another signifier treated differently. By collapsing the poles, we are left with a single term (without saying that this term is a singular thing). The amusing thing about it is that by reducing the dualism, we are now flooded by an endless chain. The system is totally open. Anything in the light of difference can be a potential sign. Derrida reserved the term "mark" for this threshold that always inaugurates writing and language as an open-ended economy. (There is no date in the past to point to as an originating moment of this event, since even the idea of an "event" itself requires this as a "prior" moment.) However, this is a strange "signifier" because it refuses the binaries that previously were clamped on to it. In fact, we cannot even point to it, indicate something as a "signifier," as if something else existed outside it or before it.

It must be kept in mind that the deconstructive "signifier" is fundamentally a critique of metaphysical notions in signification, which revises a naive concept of representation where a transcendental realm can be apprehended without first passing through a network of signs. Perception presupposes a cleavage between a "self" and an "other" as inscription within the network of signifiers. The objects we see or live with are automatically part of this open-ended "system" of signification. The table in front of me is real, but it is automatically a signifying or signified table, always associated with a narrative that we either know vaguely or minutely. Aside from that, this table is also set apart not only from other tables but also from other objects that are not tables. The table in front of me is not a simple, naked, pure object that pre-existed meaning. The very concepts of "object" or "concrete" are themselves "abstract" notions. The referential field is the product of a binaristic operation that allows this field to be distinguishable as the objective target of a "language." In this operation, both fields are actually pushed toward mutually determined "reification." This means that we can even envision signification in reverse and say that it is the table in front of me that represents the word "table."

In short, the problematic of reference is modified altogether in this situation. The referent function has not been at all obliterated, and neither was "reality." In fact, the referent function is a part of this open economy, but not as another domain apprehensible before the semiotic operation of differences. We no longer require a pre-existent, non-semiotic domain in a binary set up to get us a system of signification with a referential function. If an "external" referent (external in relation to whom or what?) is assumed by this function, it is less the effort to postulate a prior domain opposite of the sign than an operation to bolster the reality of signifying acts as a possible gesture. The sign can only point to what is already signified. These opposing domains are mutually constitutive coincidentally, much like Escher's hands drawing one another. Because of this, it would also be misleading to say that the sign preceded reality as much as it is to say the reverse. They are produced at the same time, as the "two sides of the same coin."

Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher, 1948, Lithograph

Within a "primary" differential spectrum, a secondary plane of differences arises where subsequent binaries are built up : "inside" or "outside," "sign" or "referent," and so on (the difference that creates differences). In other words, referents are part of the system of signs, not outside it, and the sign instantiates the empty vector or the wake of this binary set up. The sign, then, is the function of a binarism at work in which the pair "sign vs. nonsign" (which are both signs) would be subsuming the pair "word-referent." For the formulation of a semiotic theory, one term of the binary is singled out, then isolated to become the Saussurean "sign" in a meta-semiotic framing, divided further into the signifier and signified. In this theoretical elaboration, any question relating to the fourth item (the nonsign, a category that appears to be critical differentially in the emergence of the sign) seems to have been left out. (It remains to be seen if many of the confusions in the discussion of signs and meaning stem from not identifying these distinct levels properly. The concept of the sign in the 20th century is, after all, a metalinguistic product.)

If a sign can have two parts, what is stopping us from giving it more? Isn't this what happened with C. S. Peirce who went from a triadic model to generate over 59,000 types of signs, reducible to 66 categories? (How big or how long is a "sign" anyway? A word, a novel, all of writing? This is a question we will try to discuss another time.) What if every semiotic instance becomes a coordinate in a mathematical sense that each sign would be occupying a unique number in space and time, having its own distinctive combination of parts? Each sign would be a unique event, and every interpretation would be a literal mapping of one sign over another (a kind of "temporal binding"). Metaphorical processes are, at the bottom, really just modelled after a real world process of mapping signs over other signs. When reciting any sign, we postulate a resemblance between a previous use and the subsequent mention of the "same" sign. This analogic operation is required for the successful recognition and reading of signs in any interpretative coordinate. Or, we can say that what we call a "sign" is actually a moment of reading.

Metaphorical mapping is both the symptom and the principle of a literal semiotic mapping process where a third term is always produced that is neither the first nor the second term in the equation. An example of this operation on the meta-semiotic plane is the Saussurean "sign." I would think that this sign is less an object than the name of a binaristic operation similar to "metaphor."  By extension, we can also say the same thing to reading: another binaristic operation.

Chains of binaristic mappings

In a scheme that I am trying to lay out here, the whole process begins with a differential network where binaries can begin to play, and where marks evolve into "glyphs" (to carve out, to cleave). Even at this stage, none of these "readable" items are positive terms possessing a self-contained plenitude (their identities are necessarily composite). The birth of languages in this case presupposes a primary differential force (called "writing" in the deconstructionist sense). The glyphs that we later use also become operators in a signifying gesture that maps the "linguistic" with the "non-linguistic" or vice versa. If this same operation is mapped over the meta-semiotic process of the Saussurean "sign," it is because it instantiates the very principle of metaphoric operation of signification. At any point in the chains of mappings, every mark, glyph, sign, word or metaphor is a moment of reading that perpetually generates the binaries that make signifying possible. That is, we do not read the sign; the sign is the reading.

Formulated this way, the sign is not an object, but an event. To speak of the sign as an object, we will need to distinguish a semiotic operation from the typographic and sonic reproduction of alphabetical forms and features. To speak of the sign as "opaque" is to map a physical quality of 3-D objects and printed letters on to the semiotic sign, negating its operation as a reading event and as metaphorical mapping. In common polemical formulation, this is saying that signs don't represent anything, or don't have a meaning beyond what they are physically. Reading now becomes impossible (Edmond Jabès) because the meanings that were formerly mapped with the semiotic sign have finally become untenable or unbearable, if not just simply completely abritrary.