The death of Sherlock Holmes (2012)

"You need me, or you're nothing." (Moriarty)

    It amazes me how Sherlock Holmes is able to tie up the detective narrative so well from end to end. Not only does he play the role of a character sleuth, but also functions as the intersection of the narrative events and, ultimately, their revelatory meaning. In another television series like CSI, it is certainly not science that ends up solving the crime: it is the narrative itself that does. Like any good crime mystery, the whole goal of a detective story is the resolution of the puzzle by the narrative through the simulation of a "suspenseful" process of rationalization.

    In this world, Sherlock Holmes is simply the other name of a super-machine of interpretation. In his eyes, all details converge to reconstitute the narrative of events that take place outside of his perceptional space. It is like having an infinite number of CCTV cameras mounted everywhere in London, recording every minute detail and happening, and binding them all within the logic of the narrative of causes and effects.

    It is only proper that behind it all the narrative must postulate a master mind, an evil genius that generates the crime event in secret designs. The super villain is necessary because s/he verifies or confirms the existence and order of the design, making it fully objective and not the subjective fantasy of the detective. As with all good detective stories following the rules of the genre, nothing is left to chance, to the natural, or to the supernatural (Deus ex machina). A crime is a human designed event, and thus requires the exposition of this secular design, however obscure or exotic it may be.

    In superhero comics like The Batman, the super villain is not allowed simply to shoot down the superhero in cold blood. The best villains must contrive a complicated and often ostentatious machinery to show the whole world that it was they who were the unambiguous cause of the hero's death or downfall. Less talented villains don't have this obsession, and are just happy to credit the gun manufacturer and the statistical meeting of the bullet and the target in the hero's demise. Thus, in any kind of detective story where evil and good characters collide, the great hero or sleuth is always caught up in a criminal world designed by an arch villain.

    As a super-machine of detection, the sleuth becomes the central processing unit of the narrative, weaving people, events and objects into an interpretative journey whose goal is the exposition of the crime. In this scenario, it is only fitting that the detective should be armed with an exceptional talent of interpretation and memory, able to link up seemingly insignificant data into a twisted pattern of design and discovery. Here, innocent objects or remarks are seized up by the hero to become shining links in a chain of criminal revelation. Everything is measured and scrutinized, nothing is left to chance, so that the innocence of words, objects, and events, formerly belonging to a different order of reality, is snatched away to perform a more signifying designation.

    Without the eye of Sherlock Holmes able to oversee even beyond the grave, reality would never have the same exciting narrative journey toward discovery and design. Everything would become chance, or inscrutable and unknowable natural or supernatural design.

Ganick's metaplasms

-Just reposting a part of Peter Ganick's recent March 2, 2014 four-letter metaplasms from http://ex-ex-lit.blogspot.com/ :


fnof nfiw nfwo ofwi nofa ngei sinf nfix vlis vnid nive engi naos neil snna nieo nfue nisk kdsk deks fldo nosd noak ials kirs alks ilki eads glim niek nals innt nisl nlak unde ikls nfie nais alsi ngee gtuu snuf tirt akls fgro lipr ossl nspk slkd ikls sfdd nskl kfsd sdki sfda ipsf aior wirg priw fisl rwip gilk nslk jikl idkf lskr sdkl ilsk jsid nilk snif lfoo llea niei ilsd feof dlks sdlk slkd sdil nlsdi oeuu onur mmis lsid nois lsid oiko nosf sdkl lskf lsfk sklk islk sidl jips pkls sdkf fdsl ikdr fskl lffs sfol lsfi...


-A lot can be said depending on one's declinations, but I myself would stay on the minimum side, which, again, is subject to interpretation. Anyway, just to make it more interesting following the post-language bias of this blog, allow me to cite another post- from Ganick from the same URL on Feb. 24, 2014:

new work.............................................

part fifty-three.

...

densest threefold trepidation ininin taunt relay occasion genetic ursatz eloge standpoint triplicated surmise dgga genie acss enos feint gadfly outring seimp asutt lotto islet jointed discourde oliphant nibblet ansonic edenslauf möebius trandiose tremulous exactitude fremd gego hurdle ampphitheathrre litera slough connive emptor sip zot narrow lacu sitten reconvista mercifuls emptor wave rawhide surplus evaluator non nearly echt tisne als ninet imiatrinbe

ontolocyst gonrrredle anemiac luge aeloinian zettel.

thou noeaso nfeou ngeie alsil nur anoas iititiesa.

geen solfeggisto preamble otherwave collapse.

dictatorial plateau mollify edifice aologirithm.

cadging current mise en scene soluble treadmill oeeans.

iota los empirical flooast mirror caisson tentative.

weigh august sole reptilar congerie sift edam.

mbobilitize emplot feisty garage xmidi crenulate ogre totem juttys foible accurate elliptic vanishing persist lisperado gnossienne eggo itierate sloka veranda mend illbient corrective loathe commonality presume lief gadflower echo tarry moitie avail snowfall return irascible florin acip hiccup thrieadtens efectual moins quatorze eleganza mortising edicts mellow frame callipse vertigo laser battlelflorida introtuctor which rears up.

-The collision between recognizable word and metaplasmic compound appears like the clashing of two opposing armies, but in fact illustrates a core semiotic dynamo, like the one churning way below the Earth's mantle.

p

=Where is the boundary between sign and noise? 

The 3 concepts here (boundary, sign, noise) form

the triangle where fictions are made from.  

-07/2013

                                      

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

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  

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  

(2012)

Practical jokes

I recall practical jokes, like those made up scenes on the streets. There is laughter about them. Why so? What produces this meaning-event?

The joke is a sounding board, a test of sorts, that foregrounds the elements of meaning in their social, linguistic, semiotic, moral, and ethical dimensions. The encounter plays out the elements, the set-up, wherein the boundaries of meaning--ethical, social, or linguistic--are remapped.

This is the exact moment of their incarnation, in this very space where they seem to be questioned: the practical joke. It recreates the meanings of actions and events as a pure theater of signs.

Since the practical joke foregrounds an economy of meaning that plays out well only by the revelation of the absence of the basis of that meaning (Ah! I mistook it for real! Or: Ah, I over-reacted!), it takes the ground off the polarized signs that have been produced and leaves them fluttering in mid-air.

That is, the signs produce an effect in us, but do not go beyond that to affirm anything metaphysical or absolutely real ontologically or epistemologically.

The laughter is both the recognition of this semantic economy and its limits. Here, laughter is a reactive mechanism in the face of a grave semiotic malfunction. In short, laughter is the dissipation of a solipsistic act, the after-taste of sign-effects that disappear into thin air.

Take a "Madonna & Child" example. In the park, a "mom" makes her "baby" in a walker smoke a cigarette. This alarms the people around them. Two basic norms are being violated. First, a "good" mother won't give something harmful to her baby. Second, there is a certain social or legal age requirement for smokers.

A knowledge of the harmful substances known to be present in cigarettes adds another semantic or scientific dimension. The fact that the mother smokes beside her baby in a park already creates an additional social and ethical faux pas.

All these elements are being played out in a game of deception. It provokes all the expected look of shock, disapproval, and reprimand from bystanders or passersby. Of course, they discover later on that there is no baby, so the whole scenario instantly falls apart.

The whole act has generated reactions that turned out to have no real basis. It was an act of meaning without substance.

This is the version of "semiotic contract" today, a whole series of practical jokes. We are taken on a ride by all sorts of signs, and we all go through the motions.

Meaning via the mise en scène of oppositional markers: Norm vs. Violation; Good vs. Evil; Right vs. Wrong; Permitted vs. Prohibited; Real vs. Unreal. The joke is in the discovery of the absence of any basis for this ethico-semantic event.

But all the signs have been deployed, just for laughs.

***P.S. My imaginary map is less moral philosophy than post-literate and post-semiotic tactics. This is what the blog has been all along.

     What I find interesting in the practical joke is that it recreates the meanings of actions and events as a pure theater of signs. That is, this is where significations arise as they collide, intersect, as a field of differences (bad vs, good, allowed vs. prohibited, etc.).

     Post-literate "texts" are few steps further. Since the joke foregrounds an economy of meaning that plays out well only by the revelation of the absence of the basis of that meaning (Ah! I mistook it for real!), it takes the ground off the signs that have been produced and leaves them fluttering in mid-air.

     That is, the signs produce an effect in us, but do not go beyond that to affirm anything metaphysical or absolutely real ontologically or epistemologically.

     (In other types of comic events, like children's cartoons, the humor often arises from a world drawn into a topsy-turvy state: the order of things falling apart, blowing up, not working well; also mistaken identities, misinterpretations, words making unintended meanings, etc.).

     Here, laughter is a psycho-reactive mechanism in the face of a grave semiotic malfunction. In short, laughter is the dissipation of a solipsistic act, the after-taste of sign-effects that disappear into thin air.

     From that dissipation comes post-literate "writing," You can foreground this through style effects to say that the semiotic or semantic whole is lost, or unknown, and so you become reluctant to treat sign-effects to form a local or global system (sentence, line, oeuvre, story, etc.).

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Entropy, arrow of time, irreversibility? At any rate, whole and parts.

Conceptual limits, example would be the notions of "whole" and "parts." Humpty Dumpty story.
We don't actually grasp what these concepts really mean, but they help us talk about something. Say, this "air" blowing through the window now. Do we mean air as a whole, all air in the universe, or a part of air? In fact, neither. We can never really speak of wholes and parts, but that they allow us to say something in between. "Time" is also treated in whole and part, as when we speak of it in philosophical terms, or say "Last two minutes."

These conceptual limits are abstractions whose real meaning eludes us, but they allow language to happen and become useful in everyday life. This reminds me of Plato's levels of reality. It is the notion of ideal entities that gives everyday things their meaning. Although reduced to being shadowy copies of their ideals, material and everyday realities are able to participate in language because of this relationship. In this case, the ideal and the real are both conceptual limits, each one essentially indescribable without the other. The real reminds us of the ideal, and the ideal reminds us of the real. Yet, neither pole has any real autonomous value, as if we can isolate the "ideal" from the "real."

________________

Story idea: a man condemned to die, survives. say electrocution. he wakes up after the first cut of the mortician. however, he barely remembers who he was. This has divided his country. The religious claims him as a miracle of God, like Lazarus. Others say he should be put to death again for his heinous crimes. Others say he is evil, possessed by a new spirit. Law makers don't know what to do with him, if it is lawful to place him back under arrest. Is he a free man now? He becomes famous, everyone wants an interview. There is an order to arrest him. He is kept in a special cell. Some want him freed, since putting a man to death for his crime is same as a man fulfilling his sentence. He gets a default state lawyer. Whether alive or dead, a convict who already died once after execution has already paid for his deeds.

He is studied. The damages to his brain and organs are healing. His brain has reformed. Like a new birth. He barely recalls his relatives. He has almost absolute amnesia. Doctors say they are not sure if he will be able to recall anything.

If he is freed, he might be killed by those related to his past victims. What is his past? Maybe he was a killer, a terrorist, a rapist, a drug lord, or all of the above. What else has he forgotten? He has a language. Or some of it? Maybe he starts off with little, then gains language skills along the way. But his language is different, unknown... Some say a seraphim language, others say of fallen angels, or aliens, or other supernatural, uncategorizable thing.

The whole situation is the opposite of fairy tales where animals are given the gift of understandable speech.

__________________


Speed is an event beyond sense, but affects as most directly, altering our destinies before we even register the shifts. In this kind of uneven frames of acceleration where our organs are tortoises versus Achilles, the arrow of perception can only target the heel of death.

significantly significant

significantly significant
significantly insignificant
insignificantly significant
insignificantly insignificant

why compose when you can decompose?
why compose when it can be done with an algorithmic machinery?
when will we fully abdicate the role of signifying agents?

signifying what with what?

something with something?
something with nothing?
nothing with something?
nothing with nothing?

what is that only insignificant thing that we can see (Michaux)?
will it stay insignificant once we mention it?

we mass produce meaning because we are in the center.
what if there is another meaning where there is none, which is truer?
can we make something that is insignificantly insignificant?
when both can only be simulated: significance and insignificance.

all writing is garbage: every sign is insignificant, a waste of time.
can we say the reverse? all garbage is writing? or: all writing is not garbage
that is, anything and everything is significant, even what is not.

ALL arguments.

Why still words...

Neither meaning nor non-meaning means anything solid. We live in the tension of reversible and non-reifiable opposites.

Signs and non-signs don't just play mirror for one another where one is always the passive object of representation. There is instead an interrelation, and also a mutually-exclusive evolution, as well as cross-over influences. They are two animals in motion, or two ink strands dropped and evolving in a glass of water.

(I liked one artist's idea of letting leaves in the wind make writing-like impressions on paper. Can it still be "writing" without "human" direction? There is a border here between human and natural marking: whose footprint is it? WHO writes seems to remain an important factor. can it still be writing of any kind, semic or asemic, if absolutely no human being was involved in any way?)

Why is it that there are still words, melody and form? What is rhythm, a flex in the dark, a reincarnation of concepts? Without a center, a conductor or agent of meaning: a mere gesture of a trace textualism, a nostalgia for narratives and narrativity, for a meaningful clustering, a negentropic fantasy...

Vestiges of the "textual"

Unlike in drawing where any squiggle can be admitted as part of a world of artistic procedures, the closed set of forms that have been lemmatized as letters or words or punctuation or symbols are more difficult to employ willy-nilly. The impact is more destructive of sense. I can draw anything, drip paint all over, or simply slash the canvas, and this can still be appropriated because a semiotic system remains to decode it. In other words, we can still "talk" about it.

However, when such a master Decoder in itself becomes the object of decomposition, what interpretative system is there left to decode it? We are suddenly left with nothing to go on, the burden of meaning is not carried over onto another reading medium. You are simply faced with "textual artifacts" that don't add up lexically, syntactically or semantically.

Even in a piece like 2_   +, some vestiges of textuality remain: title, some spacing, borders, etc. The writing space itself can only be navigated with these constraints in real dimensions. lemmatized forms can only be rendered in so many font types barring "hand-written" swirls and slashes. In short, the departure from the standardized formats can only go so far in their renderings. This is where alphabetical or lexical departures like Bob Beamer's come in, with all the formats and colors that he uses. Beyond this, abstract typographies like Touchon's would already fall outside the perceptually readable formats of actual languages, even if this is the direction we want to pursue with "textual" forms.

We can employ this plastic freedom to conjure precisely the abstracted nature of signs. the impact is an immediate perception of senselessness because here, it is the Decoder itself that is affected. Another way to do it would be by delaying the appearance of the sign by a metasign, a purely conceptual formation that conjures a sign. Everything I do is a metasign, an improbable signage, or new ways to spell, or new dimensions for an abstract wordage.

Conceptual signage or wordage: who knows how a "sign" looks like? Has anyone seen any of Plato's "ideas"?

Some vestiges of the decoder are deployed, but these are now just haunted forms. Some measure of clarity, indeed, would be needed in the development of techniques along these lines, especially if one of the premises is the absence or weakened presence of agents of meaning. "Chance" is a weak alibi to relay a hard-to-realize non-teleological condition because Chance is too abstract to do in any case. At any rate: everything is too abstract anyway to be done in any way. How can I make "signs," "words," "sense," or "texts" when even the terms "concrete" and "material" are abstract? This is where the improbable comes in, which is also improbable to do. Any idea that tries to establish its own solidity becomes a ritual, an obsession, or a suspicion. It becomes highly symptomatic, and leaves a trail of repetitive signatures or rhythms.

2_ +

"A fusion of cryptozoology and orthography comes to mind here."

--Matt Margo

2_      +    

G                 F     >                                          I                                K    s    ‘             

                                         B                                              __                                      L                    

          W                                                                                                                                                 R

                                C                     S                   ;                                                           E                  

  3 @                                  Y _____t       ;; v                V     b

p_L_       o

….                        ….                                   …     h                   L          “        Q

          X                     *           

                                        L                                          N                   ,                  

                B                          a                    _     

                                                                                    O

Reading nothing

Saisir : traduire. Et tout est traduction à tout niveau, en toute direction. -Henri Michaux

"Everything is translation at every level, in all directions." It seems a well-known quote like this doesn't need more commentary. It belongs currently to what we already assume in practice. It is the same as saying that everything is reading. An organism that orients itself in space already makes use of all its faculty to successfully recognize and navigate. That is obvious enough an idea. Another that is no longer probably worth mentioning is the notion that writing is already reading. These assumptions lead us to another given, that all reading takes place within pre-established frames: all reading is interpretation and perspective. We live in one universe, but we have many competing views about it. Simple enough, nothing new here.

What is more interesting are the elements that a system of reading cannot read or translate, and are indicated by place-holder terms that we can indeed read, but indicate the place where translation or reading fails. The illegible exists as a readable sign in the translating medium, but not as a term with a positive semantic content, but as a "blind spot" within language translated as that point where language cannot say anything about. And we have many words like that, words that tell us nothing even by saying it. "Zero" is probably the archetypal example. Other candidates are: gibberish, indecipherable, glossolalia, babble, cryptic, unreadable, untranslatable, inexplicable, enigma, opaque, unknown, nothing, and unnameable. The term "illegible" itself belongs to this category: it marks the point where translation fails or is absent; but not completely, of course.

The situation is more ambiguous. There is something we can read, the signifier is legible. We cannot say that its semantic content is zero. In fact, this is what it is precisely saying: it is that signifier pointing us to what it cannot really provide. It signifies the category of anything that has no semantic content, or whose semantic content cannot be ascertained. It performs the role of the legible surface of whatever it is that remains illegible. In short, the illegible is not an absolutely unreadable state; it is still within language (since what is outside language cannot be imagined), and translates for us whatever it is that has resisted translation. It is saying nothing beyond saying that nothing further can be said on whatever it was trying to signify. By saying less, by signifying nothing, it is capable of signifying successfully.

Where it succeeds, however, is where it fails absolutely. I cannot read this, but I mark what I cannot read by a sign that we can all read. Thus, we can read the sign, whenever reading or translation is confined to the level of the legible surface of language. It is on this very surface that language warns us where we can no longer go further, and where we can go on indefinitely. Between words that say something to say nothing and those that say something to say another thing, we ask: what is this other thing that language must be able to say something about to avoid saying nothing? If "illegible" is just the opposite of "legible," and has no more value than the legibility that it negates, then what does the legible give us? No doubt, to answer these questions is to relaunch ourselves into the world of so many competing interpretations.

                                                                                                           (09-2012)