LITERATE TECHNOLOGIES

LITERATE TECHNOLOGIES Language, Cognition & Technics LOUIS ARMAND © 2006 Contents Introduction 1 1. Literate Technologies & the Science of Man 3 2. Mechanistics, Grammar & the Locality of Thought 18 3. From Structure to Situation 29 4. Discourse & the Objectless World 37 5. Consciousness, or the Assumed Image 42 6. Towards a Technological‐Poetic Method 50 7. Possibility & Phenomena 61 8. Affective Intelligence & the Human Hypothesis 67 9. Language & the Cybernetic Mind 75 10. From Materiality to System 85 Constellations Index 95 130 Introduction Technology, like all other aspects of human activity, is not autonomous: it is always part of a network of relations, both in time and in place. Therefore, it is necessary to study technology against the backgrounds of social, economic, political, cultural, and philosophical discourses. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that each of these discourses also possesses a technological dimension, and that discourse itself is in certain fundamental respects tied to an idea of technology—whether technics, technique, or what is otherwise called technē (τέχνῃ): meaning art, artifice, but also cunning, craft, or a system or method of making or doing. Hence technology—τεχνολογέω, τεχνο‐λόγος—is defined by Aristotle as bringing under rules of art or systematisation. However, technology also needs to be understood as extending beyond the discourses or sciences of man, to the realm of systematicity in general—not in terms of “applied” systems, but of a possibility of structure that can be seen to underwrite any “system” whatsoever—including all forms of signifying materiality, whether organic or artificial, auto‐productive or produced, mechanistic or mechanical. It is a basic contention of the present volume that only on such a basis of generalised technology can we begin to approach the phenomenon of literacy in its broadest sense— i.e. of any system of sign operations in which an event of transmission or transcription can be said to take place: indeed, which involves any form of mark, trace or semeīon (σημεῑον), regardless of how such terms may be defined. At the same time, it is necessary to treat this universalising aspect of literacy as a constellation‐effect bridging the entire field of discourse—from atomic and molecular structures to the transcriptive coding and decoding processes of DNA; from the evolving neural structures of the human brain to computing programmatics and artificial intelligence; from simple binary procedures to the most complex topologies—which is thus also to say, the entire textual field. In effect, to speak of literacy is to speak of a recursive process—whereby any arbitrary set of relations acquires the characteristic of being able to be “read” in one way or another. This would include not only any process of inscription, but also any process involving reflexivity (such as consciousness) or discursive propagation. Processes of decoding and transcription in DNA are, in this sense, directly analogous to signifying processes associated with either natural or synthetic languages, or indeed to any other technē of inscription. Consequently τεχνο‐λόγος is also a scientia litterarum or art of writing—where “reading” and “writing” are considered complementary terms. In discussing the mechanics of such processes it is therefore appropriate to speak of literate technologies—mechanisms or systems of transcription, transmission or [1] “communication”—designating those operations that structure and make possible signification in general, and in fundamentally material terms, thereby assuming the characteristics of agency. Moreover, in the assumption of agency, literate technologies can be regarded not as a projection of a human idea onto the material universe, but rather as a condition of materiality upon which consciousness, mind, cognition devolve. Consciousness, mind and cognition are in this way seen to be formal aspects of a prior possibility of “structural communication” or “structural recursion”—describing what is called a signifying system. A distinction nevertheless needs to be made, between—on the one hand—those principles attributed to such things as Newtonian “mechanistics,” the doctrine of determinism and the ego‐centeredness of Cartesian metaphysics, and—on the other—a technological and material view of signifying structures and systems of value. Yet the tendency away from something like structural or semantic determinism is not the same as an accession to laissez‐faire or the logic or ideology of a free market, as it were. Such logics always involve an aspect of hidden influence and a hegemonic tendency that is little more than masked by its claims to liberalism or social, economic, semantic “pluralism.” Instead, the technological view adopted in the present volume points to the necessary inherence of structural constraints in the apparent free‐play of discourse—of any discourse whatsoever—which assumes the function, and consequently “form,” of an active agency or intention. Regulation in terms of constraint (or technē of probability) is thus seen as both necessary and structurally contingent, inscribed within a prior and recurrent possibility whose condition is not merely formal but fundamentally discursive. Note These texts—essays in the proper sense of attempts at an elucidation or framing of a “problem”—derive from notes prepared for a doctoral seminar given under the same title, “Literate Technologies,” in the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University, Prague, Winter 2005. [2] Literate Technologies & the Science of Man Human communication is an artificial process. It relies on artistic techniques, on inventions, on tools and instruments, that is, on symbols ordered into codes. People do not make themselves understood through “natural” means. When speaking, “natural” tones do not come out as in a bird’s song, and writing is not a “natural” gesture like a dance of bees. Consequently, communications theory is not a natural science, but rather is concerned with the human being’s unnatural aspects. It is one of the disciplines that were once called the “human sciences.” —Vilém Flusser, “What is Communication?” 1 The term literacy today is usually taken as describing a condition of being‐with‐language in a particular way—that is, of being possessed of the letter—and for this reason literacy is most often linked to the history of writing in its formal and restricted sense. But what is this sense? From the calculus of stone age man to the advent of the information age, writing and graphological forms of communication generally have differed in their structural and semantic organisation while accompanying widely divergent societal and cultural practices, but it is only with the advent firstly of generalised scripts such as cuneiform and later of alphabetic writing—in particular the interpolation by the Greeks of vowel‐designators into the Phoenician script (c. 1500 BC)—that “literacy” in its restricted, analytical, abstract sense acquires meaning. Moreover, it has long been argued that it was only through the advent of a purely alphanumeric system that writing acquired what we might call its “autonomy” from what it is otherwise supposed (in the form of pictograms or ideograms) to represent, instead describing an arbitrary referentiality, characterised primarily by a minimum number of features capable of being recombined in a “stochastic process which produces a discrete sequence of symbols in accordance with some system of probability.”1 Yet while commentators like Walter Ong have insisted upon the unique significance of alphanumerics in determining the conceptual systems of advanced literate cultures, the subsequent advent of theoretical mathematics and other symbolic systems, including binary computer code, suggest that we should examine how the stochastic qualities of such abstract writing systems may shed light upon the prior condition and possibility of literacy per se (and hence communication, discourse, language, thought, etcetera). That is to say, how the radical abstraction represented by alphanumerics, formal logic, and so on, shed light on a general mechanics of literacy, in all of its manifold forms, 1 Claude Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” Bell System Technical Journal 28 (October, 1949): 656-7. [3] but above all in terms of the artefacts of a pre‐history of literate culture, or of what is otherwise arbitrarily referred to as “oral” culture. For there is a distinction to be made between so‐called “oral” culture and the psychodynamics of orality, for example—a dynamics brought into particular relief by the assumptions of pre‐literacy. According to Ong: “In oral culture, restriction of words to sound determines not only modes of expression but also thought processes.”2 These processes are identified as primarily formulaic and mnemotechnic in character, qualities analysed, for example, in the prosody of the Homeric epic narratives by Milman Perry and Eric Havelock. “Oral” culture is thus identified as being highly schematised and conventional, due principally to the technics of communication and rememoration particular to a culture without any externalised means of systematically recording information: according to this hypothesis, “purely” verbal systems remain “self‐encoded,” and in this sense synthetic, inflected or closed. The advent of writing is said to provide a radical counterpart to orality, by externalising the means of rememoration and thus supplanting the verbal, mnemonic formulas by written text as the repository of knowledge. In this way “thought processes,” mirroring the changes in communication technology, were considered to evolve more analytic and open forms. “This freed the mind,” Ong writes, “for more original, more abstract thought.” As symptomatic of this shift, Ong (citing Havelock) proposes Plato’s attitude towards Homer as expressed in the Republic—an attitude which acquires a meaning quite different from its usual interpretation when considered in terms of this orality/literacy dichotomy. Thus: “Plato excluded poets from his ideal republic essentially (if not quite consciously) because he found himself in a new chirographically styled noetic world in which the formula or cliché, beloved of all traditional poets, was outmoded and counterproductive.”3 This interpretation, with its various attendant ironies, would also have a lot to say about the status of dialectics in Plato’s dialogues.4 What this interpretation fails to account for, however, is that while the mnemonic character of primarily oral culture may not appear immediately compatible with writing (which is viewed as destructive of a formulaic type of memory), its characteristics of repetition, recursion and redundancy remain directly analogous to the stochastic nature of all symbolic language as outlined by Claude Shannon in his various theses on communication and code—i.e. as productive of discrete sequences of symbols in accordance with some system of probability. But if writing—and above all print culture—appears to promise an autonomy of discourse, as no longer‐context determined (as Ong says), this is primarily because it molecularises the formula‐dependent structures of verbal patterning, narrative schema, and so on, that are identified with oral culture, and thereby realises a “synchronic” axis of structuration where previously there had appeared to be only a “diachronic” one. Such appearances are misleading, however, and—even while making reference to the work of anthropologists like Marcel Jousse in this field—Ong’s interpretation fails to properly account for the “literacy” of gesture, and the bilateral symmetry of the body, in the synchronic (or heterochronic) construction of “verbal texts” and of other, environmentally 2 3 4 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982) 33. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 24. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). [4] situated texts (and hence extending this symmetry beyond the human to zoomorphic systems generally and, arguably, to all systems as such).5 In short, the orality/literacy dichotomy in the science of man can be seen to produce the very idea of pre‐literacy, and does not simply designate or describe it. One of the common problems with such a straightforward insistence upon a literacy/orality dichotomy is that it repeats the old assumption (attributed to Plato) that writing, and technics in general, functions primarily, if not solely, as a prosthesis of spoken language, thought, and memory—that is to say, as an addition to verbal expression—and as an externalising of what (memory, knowledge, for example) can only properly be “in the mind.” At root, what is involved in this assumption is the idea that natural or living speech is also the locality of thought (by virtue of being the locality of discourse). This is a similar assumption to the one that locates intelligence “in the mind,” thereby refusing to countenance a materialist conception of intelligence (the type of “intelligence,” for example, one speaks of with regard to machines or certain dynamic systems). In this sense, writing would at best constitute a form of “artificial intelligence,” but again we must ask ourselves about the meaning of the word artifice here, and of intelligence—just as we must ask about the meaning of writing, language, and thought. For as soon as we begin employing such distinctions as internal‐external, natural‐ artificial, oral‐literate, we are not only obliged to account for what such “oppositions” are supposed to mean for a humanistic world view, but also for the way in which the “oppositional” relation of these terms activates a certain metonymic recursion. For example, the idea that writing, as prosthesis, supplement or addition, may stand in opposition to but also in place of speech—artificial memory in place of organic memory; exteriority in place of interiority—thereby “re‐presenting” and in effect circumscribing it. This extends equally to the notion of technology taken as something added to nature, a notion that leads Ong quite unselfconsciously to speak of the “technologising of the word,” without taking into consideration how such a technologising could even be possible without a certain antecedent possibility, or prior technological condition of language per se (and not simply of written or printed, or indeed digital, languages). The “word” does not, and never has, existed in some pristine, pre‐technological condition and hence it is meaningless to speak of its subsequent “technologisation.” The word, as word, is already technological. A further fundamental and pervasive error of historians of language is in assuming that a pre‐history of literacy must be characterised by an homogenous quality or type of 5 A contemporary example of what could be meant by this is the “third hand” project of performance artist Stelarc. Using a robotic prosthesis connected by electrodes to the musculature of his own body, Stelarc produces simultaneous and synoptic written texts with all three of his “hands”: The artificial hand, attached to the right arm as an addition rather than as a prosthetic replacement, is capable of independent motion, being activated by the EMG signals of the abdominal and leg muscles. It has a pinch-release, grasp-release, 290 degree wrist rotation (clockwise and anti-clockwise) and a tactile feedback system for a rudimentary “sense of touch.” Whilst the body activates its extra manipulator, the real left arm is remote-controlled / jerked into action by two muscle stimulators. Electrodes positioned on the flexor muscles and biceps curl the fingers inwards, bend the wrist and thrust the arm upwards. Writing with the body in this way can be considered analogous to various sensory “prostheses” that have been developed to assist the visually impaired and which necessitate a form of synaesthetic “literacy” (i.e. of one sensory or experiential mode translating, decoding, interpreting or “reading” data transmitted via a different mode). Essentially Ong’s distinction between orality and literacy is less “literalised” than it is “ontological.” In any situation involving technology or “communication,” however, we see that the “literate function” underwriting the entire significatory network is precisely not compatible with analogical thought. [5] cognitive patterning and of social texts, in distinction from those that are taken to characterise “literate culture” in the restricted and somewhat hypothetical sense. Above all, there could be said to be a failure of recognising the significance of genre in the form and construction of those predominantly “verbal” texts that have passed down to us by way of religious ritual, myth, song cycles, folk tales, sagas, or other types of collective narrative. That is to say, a failure to take into account the very broad conventionality that underwrites, however arbitrarily or tentatively, all assumed institutions of discourse (which are nothing if not formulaic). But to say that such conventions are in fact aspects of a general technology of literacy is not to trivialise the meaning of such terms as “writing” or “speech” and the very particular stochastic characteristics associated with them, but rather to acknowledge the radical co‐extensivity of language‐as‐such, and the broadly techno‐literate condition of man. “It is of course possible,” Ong concedes, “to count as ‘writing’ any semiotic mark which an individual makes and assigns a meaning to. Thus a simple scratch on a rock or a notch on a stick interpretable only by the one who makes it would be ‘writing.’ If this is what is meant by writing, the antiquity of writing is perhaps comparable to the antiquity of speech.”6 The ethnologist and the linguist are provided with countless examples of writing systems that easily defy any restricted interpretation, as too, without exaggerating any claim of comparison to manuscript or print culture, is the paleo‐anthropologist (one need only think of the geometrical ciphers of pre‐Columbian America or the ritual earthworks belonging to the Aboriginal “dreaming” in Arnhemland). One could go further, however, and say that writing needs to be conceived of not simply as a matter of inscribing marks, legible or otherwise, upon objects in the external world, but as a fundamental possibility of inscription and thus of a general technics of legibility (that the event of inscription is always of necessity accompanied by the possibility of signification, regardless of how “singular” or idiosyncratic its appearance).7 For this reason, a conception of writing would extend to include certain cognitive operations of thought, memory, but also the basic condition of reflexivity or “consciousness.”8 In other words, writing, and hence literacy, would need to be linked to the assumption of something like a “text,” “image,” a “sign operation,” or even something as fundamental, material and mechanical as the “coding/decoding” of a genetic programme (pro‐grammē) or binary function—a rhythmos, in other words (rυθμός, cadence or written character): in short, any form of iterative relation whatsoever.9 This is one of the founding principles of semiotics, that: “All of reality, from immediate perception to the most abstract train of thought, appears to modern man as a vast, complex, organised realm of signs.”10 Literacy, then, may be taken to refer to a general navigation of signifying environments, whether these be “artificial” environments, or “merely” interpreted ones— thereby encompassing those conceptual, mythological, totem or bio‐symbolic systems that are assumed to have comprised the lifeworld of prehistoric (hence “pre‐literate”) man. 6 7 8 9 10 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 84. Cf. André Leroi-Gouhran, Le geste et la parole: Technique et langage (Paris, Albin Michel, 1964). A more radical formulation of this argument is given by Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 7: “In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language.” Cf. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971). Bohuslav Havránek, Roman Jakobson, Vilém Mathesius, Bohumil Trnka, “Úvodem,” Slovo a Slovesnost 1 (1935) 5. [6] There is, in any case, no good reason to assume that literacy devolves uniquely upon some such thing as the assumption of a lettristic system of visual codes, for example, or upon the graphic representation of verbal expression (so‐called “phonetic writing”).11 2 In the conjectural science of “man”—with its dual orientations towards a form of intentionality in man’s descent (Descartes) and its realisation in the form of contingency (Darwin)—we have learnt to recognise that man is neither object nor idea but something like a method: a method that is said to be autopoietic and self‐reflexive, and that in being so constitutes itself recursively, or by way of a certain act of re‐cognition which, from the very first (in its most primitive imago), presupposes a mark of difference.12 It is this mark which, under the influence of the conjoined forces of the European Enlightenment and what A.J. Toynbee termed “The Industrial Revolution” gave rise to a specifically autonomous conception of man, as both self‐willed and iterative, subject and object, a combination of mechanism and transcendental mind, linked to an on‐going technological genesis that nevertheless finds its antecedents in the hypothetical prehistories of what we call literate technology. Insofar as we may speculate on conditions prevailing during the period of human evolution and the broader influence of technics upon subsequent human cultures, we may venture to contend that neither conceptualisation, gesture, speech, tool usage or “writing” assumed either temporal, functional or semantic priority as terms in a causal circuit. We might further venture to contend that the animal we refer to as “man” is in fact nothing other than the nexus of all of these efforts at signification, from the very first instance as it were, and that so‐called “natural” language has always been bound up with the meaning of literacy in its most fundamental, and also its broadest, sense. Given the nature of this mutual inherence (of conceptualisation, gesture, speech, tool usage and writing), we might also say that the condition of literacy has always been bound up with a certain technē—the “agent,” one might say, of the human hypothesis (the very prosthesis of man)—which is also to say of a certain “technology,” wherein the word (logos) is already bound to the 11 12 One might nevertheless wish to question the motives behind proposing such a broad “interpretation” of literacy—or the situating of literacy as an extension of its discursive practices. Indeed, the word interpretation here would seem to suggest something figurative, metaphorical, implying that the proper sense of the term “literacy” had somehow been translated or distorted. And yet what would it mean to suggest that, to the contrary, this “broad interpretation” is at the same time the most literal one possible? For what could the term literal mean here if not the very contrary of what its etymology would otherwise suggest? Are we not involved, in literality, with the very letter of the letter in its most radical sense— this sense being, we might say, in its very substance, its very materiality—as that which comes before the letter and hence in advance of its apprehension or general inscription? That is to say, of literacy. And this would not be a metaphor, even if it lends itself to a certain “metaphorisation,” since there is no question of establishing an analogy or equivalence between two terms—for example, materiality and its representation “in language” (even in the specificity and literality of a term such as literacy). Man’s literate and technical development has, in any case, always assumed the form of a general (social, material) ecology, and it is on this basis that such terms as orality, literacy, writing and technology should be understood—whether that entail the paleotechnics of stone-age man, or the new literacies which are being created by digital electronic communications and which have irremediably effected the meaning of “reading” and of what is considered text. Cf. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: Norton, 1977). [7] inventions or artifice of meaning (technē). Consequently, man can be said to accede both to “consciousness” and to literacy insofar as he assumes an image—in other words, insofar as he consists in a general condition of reflexivity. This does not mean, however, that literacy as a concept can only be linked to notions of, for example, pictorial representation. To assume an image is to be constituted by way of any given set of symbolic relations, where what is symbolised is not a series of “terms” but rather a transductive or synaesthetic interval: “mental‐,” olfactory‐, visual‐, aural‐, tactile‐, semantic. This conception finds its antecedents at least as far back as the pre‐Socratics and the quasi‐mystical notions of Pythagoras regarding the divine (auto‐nomos) nature of arithmetic and number (which in Plato are linked not only to “calculus and geometry and astronomy as well as dice and draughts” but also, and above all, to “the use of letters”)13— coinciding in an instructive manner with the observations of classical philologists like Jean‐Pierre Vernant and others to the effect that: “In thought expressed in [classical] Greek or ancient Indo‐European there is no idea of the agent being the source of his action. Or, if I may translate that … there is no category of will …”14 It would seem to require philosophy another two thousand years, however, to properly grasp the implications of man as not a decentred “subject,” but as decentred agency, whose constitution, in language, assumes the form of a circuit or topology of recursion. It is perhaps for this reason that the concept of “will” is expressed not in categorical terms, but rather paradigmatically (as in the Phaedrus, for example), by way of the assumed “opposition” between such terms as artifice and nature, technē and physis, orality and literacy. An “opposition” which, as Plato demonstrates (here with regard to the mythic invention of writing by the Egyptian god Thoth), describes what is in fact a complementarity—in that it simultaneously inscribes a mode of contiguity and equivalence, “metonymy” and “metaphor,” by which both of these terms (in consequence of their being structural terms) imply and require the other, just as the Platonic idea (eidos) implies and requires its realisation (or re‐presentation) by way of logos and mimēsis. The “source” of action, and hence the horizon of agency, is thus located, not as a movement of dialectics (as some readers of Plato have supposed), vis‐à‐vis a negativised “synthesis” of object relations—i.e. antithetical terms—but as a moment of recursion in the structural situation of terms (e.g. the “participation” in forms of properties and forms of things). This is what Aristotle suggests when he defines technē as an orientation towards that which is in the process of coming into being—i.e. towards what is to be “produced” but is not yet and is not always. Consequently technē “moves within the circuit of beings which are in the process of becoming, which are on the way to their Being.”15 The realisation of becoming thence leads us to something like a paradox, to the “double relation of technē to its archē”—that is to say, to its determining principle, its “objective” structural intention— and it is a paradox (which Aristotle also discusses in the Metaphysics) that will await the general linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the structuralism of Roman Jakobson and others in order to be resolved, not in ontological terms but in discursive terms—i.e. of a 13 14 15 Plato, Phaedrus, 274c. Jean-Pierre Vernant, in discussion with Roland Barthes, cited in The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972) 152. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.11ff. [8] semiotics or theory of signs.16 For in Aristotle’s paradox we encounter an opposition that also presupposes a decentring in that which “is produced” and that which (as in nature) “produces itself,” or is autopoietic. According to Aristotle, the object of technē is the poiēton, the ergon, or what will be produced. The ergon, or work, is “for the sake of something”—in other words it has a relation to something else and is not a unicum—and as soon as the ergon is “realised” it therefore escapes the dominion of technē. The autopoetic (as a characteristic of natural things: physei onta), on the contrary sustains a recursiveness or “reflexivity”—between what is “internal” to technē, and what is “external” to it—that situates the archē (as intention, cause) and eidos (idea) within itself, as both the technē of production and what is produced. Where technē exhausts itself in the realisation of its object—from which it is effectively “alienated” (as Marx says)—autopoiesis is said to perpetuate itself recursively, maintaining a claim over its object which it thus “sublates” by way of a continuous dialectical synthesis. And yet, we may see that in the moment of technē’s realisation, or “exhaustion,” there is revealed, precisely, a gap in the process of production in which the binary opposition between the one and the other—the autopoietic and the technological—switches back upon itself: a structural contiguity of coding/decoding operations that also opens the chance of a recursion of technē within the apparently self‐contained structure of autopoiesis.17 Subsequently we might consider technē as describing an “infinite end,” as Jean‐Luc Nancy has arugued. “It may even be a matter of ‘technology’ as the technē of a new horizon of identities,”18 vis‐à‐vis the ergon of an interminable techno‐poiesis. This is precisely the issue at stake in Saussure’s semiology when he suggests, as the underpinning of linguistic structure, a tropic signifier‐signified “equivalence” which is relational, arbitrary, conventional and discontinuous: that there is no transmission of value between signifier and signified, and that meaning consists in the differential “play” between and across signifiers (as between and across so‐called signifieds), such that—as Jacques Derrida puts it—“the signified always already functions as a signifier.”19 In the gap of significatory play, between the one and the other, signifier and signified, a certain recursivity accedes to its chance, as it were—whereby the technē of signification is neither closed‐off in its relation to an assumed object, nor in its relation to the perpetuum mobile of autopoiesis, but is “always already” situated in advance of itself as the very condition and possibility of autopoiesis (i.e., here, of signification per se). And it is on this basis—in the technological moment of a binary “transmission effect”—that we may credit the insight of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, in La Pensée Sauvage, in identifying that the “opposition between nature and culture,” being cognate with that of physis and technē, orality and 16 17 18 19 Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII.7. In his 1936 essay, “Signum et Signatum,” Jakobson proposes that linguistics “tells us that energeīa and ergon—in other words, language (or any other social value) as creation and as œuvre—may be intrinsically bound to one another, but that they are by no means identical; nor can one aspect be mechanically derived from the other.” Indeed, we would argue that it is rather the non-identicality of ergon and energeīa that situates the recursive mechanism by which autopoiesis avails itself: i.e. as the place of a generalised technē of inscription. In any case, the movement of this technē should not be confused with one of derivation. Roman Jakobson, “Signum et Signatum,” trans. M. Heim, Semiotics of Art, eds. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1884) 179. Jean-Luc Nancy, “War, Right, Sovereignty—Technē,” Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 140, 143. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7. [9] literacy “seems today to offer a value which is above all methodological.” For it is precisely in the conception of the “oppositional” contingency (nature‐artifice; speech‐writing) and its mythological inception as necessity—within the field of chance and accidence—that the “human method” can be seen as having always been linked to a generalised mode of signification or literacy, as what Aristotle will have called the apprehension of cause. Which is also to say, the apprehension of a certain technological idea or chance (tuchē).20 For literacy is above all a matter of apprehension. And apprehension, insofar as it presupposes an act of re‐cognition, or of what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “operating with signs,” is never without a fundamental condition of literacy—even as it situates prehension on a plane of doubt and uncertainty as to the object or complexion of literacy as such. 3 The antecedence of the technological as the basic condition of “man” is an idea closely linked to the phenomenon of so‐called language acquisition, situated between the assumptions of innate structures in the brain, the claims of education, and the characteristics of what is often referred to as the mimetic or imitative faculty (as a form of bio‐technology). A paradigm case is the pattern of human postnatal brain growth, which differs from that of other homonids, allowing for an extended (heterochronic) period of social learning, which corresponds to the period of “language acquisition.” And while physical anthropologists argue that a re‐organisation of the structure of the brain is more important than cranial expansion in determining subsequent mental capability, it is in the brain’s capacity for re‐organisation—its prior, structural possibility, as it were—that impresses upon us today the need to recognise man’s technological condition as the “determining” condition of man, and that it is in this condition (the possibility of re‐ organisation) that transfers us from the domain of the “merely” typogenetic to that of literacy. Indeed, it may appear meaningless to speak of language acquisition other than as an apparent epiphenomenon of the organisation of the psyche “as a whole,” just as it would be meaningless to speak in such terms of the “acquisition” of thought as the process by which thought develops in humans (or in other species, for that matter). In any case, appreciation of the social or restrictedly technical evolution of man should not be allowed to conceal the fact that, in the main, approaches to the philosophy of mind and psycho‐ physics had until quite recently been dominated by causalist, mentalist or metaphysical pre‐occupations. It is a measure of this prejudice in the framing of the problem of “man” that it was not until after 1860 that biological facts were no longer treated as determinates merely of technical or social organisation, or as “technical” according to the mechanistic conception characteristic of seventeenth century views of organic structure, but rather as a significant basis for postulating a general technological condition—vis‐à‐vis structural 20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.4.1040a18. Because the ergon is said to escape technē, the latter is considered to be in a certain sense similar to tuchē, the accidental. See Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Roycewicz and André Schuwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003) 31. “The essential characteristic of the accidental,” Heidegger notes, “is that what emerges from it is out of its hands” (emphasis added). [10] possibility in the proto‐genetic, evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Russel Wallace. The notion that structural possibility remains the underwriting factor of any type of evolution or “change,” does not however imply that the human psyche, for example— thought, language—must have anything like an antecedent in the “primitive” organisation of the brain, such as a predisposition to verbal communication or to graphic inscription, or anything else that might be described by “nativist” theories as a universal grammar.21 Such theories posit that language “acquisition” is predetermined by parameters (or algorithms) already set down in the material structuration of the brain—the so‐called “language acquisition device” (what Aristotle terms an eidos en tēi psychē, an apprehension in advance of the realised phenomenon or embodied idea, a pre‐presentation in the mind, as it were). Such theories easily come to resemble nothing more than a wilful attempt at reconciling the fact of language with both the high level of consequent structuration in the human brain and the restricted variability of apparent cognitive patterns of experience measurable across that structuration.22 Moreover, the nativist aspect of the argument, posing a universal grammar as innate and hence “natural,” continues to suppose that language (being in this sense predominantly verbal expression) exists in an organic relation to man, where technology (including written forms of communication) exists in a predominantly artificial and derivative relation—hence not only preserving but enlarging the prelapsarian fallacy of man as fully formed at the origin, and who is subsequently debased and cut off from an organic truth by his enslavement to technology (to technological thought and technological forms of communication). That is to say that, according to this view, previously organic (pre‐literate) man becomes alienated, mediated, cut‐off from an original authenticity, by means of an acquired technicity—repeating once again the curious belief in the malignancy of writing as artifice. In truth, the fear of admitting a generalised literacy has always assumed a political complexion—from Plato to the Reformation—just as have nativist doctrines of the so‐called human condition (e.g. the discourses of social Darwinism and eugenics). It is arguable that the notion of universal grammar does little more than re‐inscribe the logic of such discourses, however unwittingly, within the fields of neurobiology and linguistics. Furthermore, if in observing the requirements of logical consistency, universal grammar is taken to represent what we have defined as an eidos en tēi psychē, or rather a logos en tēi psychē, this merely reinforces what is already implied in the notion of pre‐presentation as an inscription in advance, whose technē—in Aristotelian terms—is the pre‐presentation of eidos. That is to say, the underwriting technicity of universal grammar—as with any grammar—would be of that order of relation as between architectonics to a material structure. The contiguity of this relation (its metonymic recursiveness), would likewise invoke a technicity which is not that of a straightforward “realisation”—i.e. of universal grammar by virtue of the fact of language—but of a certain logic of inscription that cannot be reduced to the one or to the other, neither as fact nor as description. As Bernard Stiegler 21 22 Cf. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969). The logic of this argument, however, would require a comparable evolutionary model of the brains for starlings, for example, whose capacity for combining and transmitting complex syntactical (melodic) structures has been widely attested. [11] has remarked, “the grammatical operator is, above all, technology itself.”23 The topology of this inscriptive technē is essentially a topology of all possible signifying or cognitive relations—wherein possibility is defined not as a set of given terms, or of a generative syntax, but as what we might call the pre‐presentation of technē. Beyond the circumstantialist and reductivist nature of universal grammar, there is also a tendency on the part of its advocates to abstract “language” from the broadly synaesthetic and recursive organisation of experience, and a concomitant failure to imagine that ostensibly different (or incompatible) modes of experience would necessarily entail different (incompatible, and potentially unrecognisable, or at least unverifiable) “systems of language.” Studies in biogenetics, for example, suggest that certain genetic factors that combine to produce the human brain contain information for possible “redundant systems” for recognising patterns of sensory experience. The very notion of redundancy or incompatability at the genetic level stands in contradiction to the idea of a latent universal grammar—just as the incompatability of consciousness stands as a contradiction to the idea of latent universal intelligence. The problem may be simply stated in that the incompatability of experiential systems can be regarded as contiguous with that of verbal language and the organisation of the brain—wherein the fallacy of a universal grammar rests upon the assumption of analogy: if, positing that all languages have the same basic underlying structure, and that specific languages have rules that transform these underlying structures into the specific patterns found in all known “natural” languages, we say therefore that a conceivable grammar cognate with language structures (as such) exists “in the brain.” Put simply, the analogical fallacy assumes that the universality and organisation of languages must correspond to an a priori linguistic organisation (grammar) of, or in, the brain—that such organisation is “built‐into” the brain from the very outset. To say that the brain is organised, however, even that it is organised recursively (or topologically), is not the same as saying that it “contains” structures. Between the neuro‐physiological and the experiential, structure obtains—yet it would be meaningless to say that the brain has latent “structures” in it, such as the algorithm of a universal grammar, simply waiting to be activated according to the requirements of circumstance. The “brain,” we might say, is its own circumstance, and insofar as this circumstance is a structural one, it could be said to affect a certain “grammaticality.” And yet this grammaticality would be nothing recognisable in itself, or in grammatical terms (even of a “cognitive grammar”), since it would be the underwriting condition of grammar as such (its possibility). Likewise, to say that such things as “binary functions” exist in the brain, in the serialised, networked interactions of neurons, for example, is not the same as saying that the brain contains binary structures. We should rather speak of neural events affecting transverse “patterns” of inter‐connectivity—patterns that are then seen to assume structuration by way of repetition, recursion, differentiation. And yet, however transverse, singular or contiguous such events may be taken to be, the assumption of structure can only be based upon what we are obliged to consider as a “prior assumption” of possibility—such that neural events 23 Bernard Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) 161. See also Stiegler, Technics and Time. Volume I: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). [12] may be considered singularities while being neither unique nor strictly determinate in either a temporal or spatial sense, since an event is always a forethrow of possibility. [13] 4 It is a characteristic of rational man, Nietzsche tells us, that he considers himself accountable for his own existence, and consequently wishes also to consider himself “the real helmsman” of that existence, to “keep it from resembling mindless coincidence.”24 And if the seat of reason is “in the mind,” then it would only be reasonable—would it not—to assign to the rationality of man a coherent, predetermined (hence not accidental), neuro‐biological foundation—even if such a foundation were in truth a restatement of certain metaphysical or theological principles like those that have characterised the rhetoric of so‐called “intelligent design” (the hidden hand of a “language acquisition device” as a cipher for a type of linguistic “creationism”)? This is what the rationalists would have us believe. Be this as it may, recent cognitive research has suggested, contrary to rationalist “intuition,” that natural language—and so‐called language acquisition—can rather be said to operate in a manner described as non‐logical and non‐generative (in a causally deterministic sense), characterised instead by seemingly endless idiosyncrasies of patterning and distribution, in which signifying possibility is linked to a technics of chance and accident.25 Such conclusions are already prefigured in the work of Saussure, who notes that: “The psychological character of the linguistic group is unimportant by comparison with the elimination of a vowel, a change of accent, or many other similar things that may at any moment revolutionise the relation between the sign and the idea in any language form whatsoever.”26 For Saussure, language cannot in any sense be thought on the basis of a strictly teleological movement, or on the basis of an archē—even if that archē assumes the form of a generative grammar (between linguistico‐semantic “states” and “events”). And insofar as language acquires the characteristics of “permanence,” or universality, this results from little other than “sheer luck” since “any characteristic that is preserved in time may also disappear with time.”27 The dynamics of meaning construction—that is to say, of its syntax—appears to resemble nothing if not the “mindless coincidence” against which certain rationalist doctrines would wish to pose the very idea and fact of man; or at least the neuro‐biological “structures” underwriting that idea and that fact. While at the same time, Saussure—identifying a consistent structural technicity within the vicissitudes of such universal characteristics (“events” and “states”)—suggests that “language can be compared to a machine that goes on working no matter what damage is done to it.”28 It is for this reason, among others, that we have come to realise that neither language nor what is called consciousness can properly be studied with the tools of conventional formal logic—just as we say that the problem of “language acquisition” cannot properly be stated in terms of a universal grammar. As Humberto Maturana, in his 1970 Biology of 24 25 26 27 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Untimely Meditations, trans. Richard Grey (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1995) 173. Cf., for example, Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) 228. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 231. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale. Notes de F. de Saussure sur la linguistique générale, ed. Rudolf Engler (Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz, 1967 et seqq.) vol. I, 192, no. 1444, C 347 (beginning of June 1911). [14] Cognition, has argued: “The greatest hindrance to the understanding of living organisation lies in the impossibility of accounting for it by the enumeration of its properties; it must be understood as a unity.”29 Maturana’s cybernetic approach, like that of cognitivists such as Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff and Eve Sweetser, posits “a theory that is based on the capacities of the human mind rather than the capacities of the mathematical systems that happen to be used by logicians.”30 Rather than commencing with the assumption that something like a logical syntax must characterise the organisation and functioning of the “mind”—on the basis that a like syntax is considered to underwrite the organisation and functioning of language—a distinction is drawn between what might be called mental properties (innate to the brain) and structural properties, representing the individual organism’s internal interactions and its interactions with “the world.” That is to say, as a “transductive relation” of interioceptive and exterioceptive “experience”—a relation which constitutes its terms, “in which one term cannot precede the other because they exist only in relation.”31 The types of neural topologies that emerge in cybernetic and cognitivist approaches to language resemble, in many respects, precisely those forms of recursiveness and co‐ reference that routinely violate the sorts of formal logical systems that have characterised the more “rationalist” approaches, from Gottlob Frege and Bertram Russell to Gilbert Ryle and W.V. Quine, and to the philosophy of mind of John Searle. The case‐determined nature of many rationalist or empiricist approaches to language and cognition, and the eschewal of a general “structuralism,” means that there has been a parallel tendency to proceed towards the problem of mind by way of an enumeration of particulars. In its extreme form, this amounts to an attempt at understanding the phenomenon of consciousness, for example, on the basis of mapping all known, or all “computable,” neurological activity—just as certain linguists attempt to understand the phenomenon of (natural) language, or the restricted instance of “language acquisition,” by way of syntactic codes supposedly represented on the cerebral cortex. It is not simply that such approaches fail to take themselves into account, as it were, as affective of a certain given set of logical outcomes to their observations (the observer paradox), but that any attempt to account for language or cognition based upon an anatomy of particulars can achieve nothing other than the creation of a type of theoretical monstrum in its own image. As Maturana argues: “Enumeration of the transfer functions of all nerve cells would leave us with a list, but not with a system capable of abstract thinking, description and self‐description. Such an approach would beg the question, ‘How does the living organisation give rise to cognition in general and self‐cognition in particular?’”32 At the same time, to assume by way of language acquisition—or the accession to a condition of literacy—a vehicle by which man is elevated from ignorance and primeval darkness, is to ignore the fact that what we attribute to “reading” and “writing” as the instruments of reason and the discourse of knowledge is not a constituent idea arrived at 29 30 31 32 Humberto R. Maturana, Biology of Cognition, in Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realisation of the Living (Boston: Kluwer, 1980) 5. Fauconnier, Mental Spaces, ix. Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” 161. On transductive relations see also Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Méot, 1958). Maturana, Biology of Cognition, 6. Cf. Georges Canguilhem, “Machine et Organisme,” Connaissance de la Vie (Paris: Hachette, 1952). [15] historically or by various technical means, but a technē as such. In other words we are speaking of a condition. If language is said to be acquired, it cannot be on the basis of an analogous syntax or grammar in this brain, or something like a language “represented” by a set of technical operations. At the same time, it cannot represent a mere addition or application arrived at by external means (how would such a thing be possible?). While we may say that analogy itself, or mimēsis, constitutes a certain class of technē, we cannot say that technē is in any sense mimetic or analogical. Thus technē—whether it has to do with the operations of language, cognition or genetic code—is nothing acquired. Is no thing, in fact. And it is for this same reason that it cannot be accounted for as a type of latency—as something already in place (and thus effectively external to the structural evolution of mind, consciousness, thought). At best it could be described as a dynamic topology of relations—a dynamic that both underwrites and “determines” language, but constitutes neither an addition nor an antecedent (or universal grammar). In the final analysis, universal grammar can be regarded as simply one more term in the rationalist quest for certainty that Nietzsche describes. A quest not only orientated towards the notion that man, the faculty of reason, “history itself” is caused and not something arbitrary or an outcome of “mere chance.” It is perhaps for this reason that universal grammar succumbs to the wish that its antecedent idea possess a form of “content” resemblant of the condition of man—that is to say, of natural language—rather than “merely” constituting a series of effects through which something like a structural coherence emerges on the basis of a certain probability (i.e. contingent upon the limits of materiality, such as those set down by the physical composition of the brain, and upon the idiosyncratic “determination” of those limits). And yet the wish to keep the idea of man from resembling mindless coincidence is not merely a dominant theme in the history of philosophy, it is also a compulsive element in the experience of structure as structure. Hence literacy, while we may say that it is fundamentally technical, is nevertheless “experienced” in the apprehension of the meaningful. The signal difference between a technological view of literacy and, say, a rationalist one, is that from the technological point of view “the meaningful” has no content or antecedent idea—nor an externalised or transcendental one—other than as a movement of structural orientation. From the technological point of view, meaning is a point or series of points on the horizon of recursivity, or what Aristotle terms the eidos of technē. This is, in part, the argument put forward by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, in the critique of the signifier‐signified conjecture in the writings of Saussure, Lévi‐Strauss and others. One of the results of this critique—as Stiegler has noted in his revision of Derrida’s work on the technics of sign operations—is that “language is always already writing and that, contrary to appearances, we should not suppose that there is first an oral language and then a written copy of this language, but that, in order for language to be written in the everyday sense, it must already be a writing: a system of traces, of ‘grammē,’ of discrete elements.”33 To generalise, what we call the “science of man” can thus be regarded as proceeding from a foundational apprehension about the certitude of man’s position not only vis‐à‐vis the world, but vis‐à‐vis the nature of apprehension itself. Science here posits “man” as both subject and object of its discourse, as co‐referential, or as both agent and constituent of a 33 Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” 162. [16] methodology—in short, it is concerned with an onto‐epistemology of man, and consequently (“centred” as it is upon the discursivity or figurality of man) with man’s technological condition. In any case, the discourse of knowledge that centres itself upon the figure of man, and upon concepts such as the self and will (for example), is both a category and symptom of a certain crisis in reason, by which “reason” itself seeks to grasp hold of that which, in presenting itself (in the accidental grammar of an image or imago), seems to exile it from “certainty” and casts it back upon a nostalgia for that which it never possessed. Despite, of course, the wish that things might be otherwise—a wish naïvely expressed in those philosophies that hark back to a prelapsarian condition of “man” before the supposed intercessions of literacy, divided self‐hood, and abstraction. Before, that is, the intercessions of doubt out of which—in a seemingly paradoxical movement—reason, science and the discourse of knowledge in fact emerge. The image of so‐called preliterate man has in this way too often assumed the form of a caricature: poet, mystic, idiot‐savant. Such is, in part, the character of suppositions to the effect that: “Humanity began, as every man begins, with no knowledge except consciousness of self and perception of the world. That was all man needed (as it is all that primitive peoples, or, in our civilised world, uneducated labourers, still need) to find his way in nature and human society to the extent that was necessary for survival.”34 We should indeed be cautious of such an image of man who, thrust from his Eden of pure consciousness, awaits the tutelage of the demiurgos in order to gain the world of self‐ knowledge and the knowledge of men (and of the gods, too), by way of precisely those tools of literacy, for example (or of any other technē or method of environmental or social “transformation”), that are the cause of so much grief to him. To move, in other words, from the mere “perception of the world,” to the apprehension of it: from survival to being. Yet what would such a being be, as the effective contingency, addition or transformation of the struggle for survival, if not itself the shadow of technē? i.e. as the cipher of a simplistic opposition to some prior, naturalised state, no matter how deprived or tentative that state is portrayed as being. Technē in this sense would simply be one more ingenious removal of the human situation from man‐as‐idea, thereby reinstating the notion that a science of man must represent an unfolding—whether in material or metaphysical terms (it amounts to the same thing)—of progress or “descent.” But what could a technological view of man be if not the contrary of this? That is to say, if not rather a calculus of the probability or improbability of man being anything other than a discourse, not of an externally applied technology, but of the technological as such. And while it may be interesting to speculate on the nature of the ontological contingency of man as literate being (individuated and rationalised after the fact, as it were) as something hinging upon a technique, for example, of intervention or “education” (ducere, duct‐ lead)—i.e. as the transformation of man as man outside the circuits of time and space delineated by the necessity for survival—this contingency, which is by implication also that of language, would retain of itself nothing more than an allegory. Or else it would retain nothing more than what we might call the trace of a mythological passage of discourse (thought, language) itself represented by a form of supercession and redundancy that, by necessity, characterises even the most “technologised” forms of 34 Simone Weil, “Science and Perception in Descartes,” Formative Writings: 1929-1941, ed. and trans. Dorothy McFarland and Wilhelmina van Ness (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) 31. [17] communication, archivisation and memory. And it is precisely in this recursion of supercession and redundancy that the science of man obtains its formal expression vis‐à‐ vis an ontology or epistemology of literacy, marked by the increased “technologisation” of the human‐environmental‐social relation: and yet this will only have been on the basis of a relation that prefigures it—not an “essence” or even antecedence, but the possibility of technology as the basic condition of man, whether he be “educated” or not. And education, like individuation, as Freud so insistently reminds us, always involves a complex of relations, in which the organisation of power, just as with the organisation of knowledge, acquires its recognisable form in the symbolic operations of human activity vis‐à‐vis language and thought, even—or above all—in their most primitive conception. But it is we, after all, to whom this conception belongs. New York, October, 2005 [18] Mechanistics, Grammar & the Locality of Thought how do you force the head to let it be conscious of all the registers —Phillipe Sollers, H One of the earliest questions that will have confronted man as a sentient being is the question that is often posed in terms of “why is there something and not nothing,” but which may better be formulated as “why is there consciousness and not nothing”? In one way or another, this represents what can be argued to be the founding question of subjectivity, in which the individual first lays claim, by virtue of discourse, to a “condition of thought”—at least as it has been understood since Descartes, as the premise and underlying assumption of philosophy as a certain discourse regarding knowledge, or self‐ knowledge, by which thought assumes any subject whatsoever and hence any epistemological object—and in one sense or another the entire history of thought can be seen as converging upon it. For while this question presupposes that there is such a thing as consciousness, even if this thing is merely a screen separating “man” from “nothingness,” the fact that thought assumes an historical form in the discourse of philosophy prompts us to regard it—thought (and by virtue of thought, a certain grammar)—as somehow objectively located, if not “in the external world” at least with regard to the facticity of consciousness, even if this facticity is attributed solely to its being “in the mind.” 1 Early in what has come to be known as The Blue Book (1933‐4), Ludwig Wittgenstein poses a series of dilemmas regarding thought, language, and locality, in the form of questions about the means of explanation of meaning and the locality of thinking. These dilemmas, focused as they are upon problems of situating discourse, provide the foundations for an inquiry into the particular material and signifying conditions that are taken to define consciousness. “It is misleading,” Wittgenstein says, “to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental’ activity. We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks. If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw your [19] attention to the fact that you are using a metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be an agent in writing.”1 The particular relationship Wittgenstein intends, between imagining, metaphor (or analogy), and agency (or “operating with signs”) is made more explicit in what follows, with regard to the question of locality: the assumption that thought, or sign‐operation, is locatable in some profound sense outside the materiality of those operations. In other words, that there is something called the mind which, like the Cartesian homunculus, thinks our thoughts in advance of us, and thereby intends them. The basis of Wittgenstein’s argument is that, in order to avoid the reductio ad absurdum of thought thinking itself in the figure of “mind,” it is necessary to investigate the different grammars of the word “to think” and the analogical basis upon which we accord thinking a privileged position as the root of consciousness, and hence of Being. “If again we talk about the locality where thinking takes place,” Wittgenstein suggests, “we have a right to say that this locality is the piece of paper on which we write or the mouth which speaks. And if we talk of the head or the brain as the locality of thought, this is using the expression ‘locality of thought’ in a different sense.”2 But between these senses of agency and locality, how do we say that the page or mouth differ from the brain? For it is not simply that Wittgenstein is arguing against the Cartesian idea of a ghost in the machine, as it were, operating the gears and levers of “mental” activity, just as the little voice in the head—as John Searle figures it—is supposed, by way of intention or command, to direct the hand that holds the pen that writes on the page. Rather, it is primarily a matter of how analogical reasoning has obscured the relationship, as Wittgenstein puts it, between imagining and operating with signs. And this does not mean that something conjures up images of signs inside our heads. To operate with signs (and in this sense “to imagine”) has nothing to do with affecting an analogy between the material conditions of a hand writing on paper and what “takes place inside the brain.” The expression “locality of thought” proceeds, in other words, upon an analogy in the use of the words “locality” and “thought” and the assumptions associated with them— according to which thought “takes place” in the brain, whereas, for example, in observing the operations of the brain we cannot say that we observe thought, even as we assume some form of correlation between these operations and what we must mean by the term to think. Such analogical reasoning is indicative in philosophy of the “realist fallacy,” and in particular of the argumentation of philosophers who, like Searle, insist that neuro‐ biological processes account for thought, or that sense experiences are directly translatable by way of cognitive experiences, which are in turn communicated by way of a purely instrumental system of signs.3 Part of the analogical problem, as Wittgenstein points out, is a confusion between the transitive and intransitive grammars of particular terms, and the assumption of an object where no object necessarily obtains. Such expressions as the meaning of a word or the object of thought are indicative of this confusion. Consequently, it is upon the prior assumption of consciousness that a picture of “thought” appears to present itself in the analogy between 1 2 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations (New York: Harper, 1958) 6-7. Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 7. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). [20] “mental” activity and the activity of “operating with signs”—even while this picture itself seems to relate to no determinate object or process. This is, in one sense, what Wittgenstein means by saying “if we think by imagining signs”—and it is in the prepositional form of the word “by” (and not merely the conditional “if”) that the agency, means, instrumentality or causation of thought is here rendered ambiguous with regard to an object. To “imagine signs” is thus given to mean “to think” intransitively. But what, then, does it mean to imagine? What, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, are the respective grammars of the term, “imagining” if imagining signs is not merely a metaphor, analogue or equation of some form of agency that interposes between consciousness and “thought”? One difficulty with approaching the distinction between such transitive and intransitive grammars—and which has so often tempted philosophy to take human experience as an exceptional case—is the seeming phenomenon of reflexivity. That is, of consciously reflecting upon the experience of thinking. This awareness that “we think”—elevated by Descartes to an ontological and almost theistic condition—complicates the way in which we pose questions about what thinking is. Even if we attribute a material or mechanistic character to the operations of thought “itself,” reflexivity, or self‐consciousness, is more often than not presented as inexplicable in any way other than in terms of individual subjectivity, free will, or conscious agency—unless by recourse to some form of deus ex machina. “We feel,” in short, “that in the cases in which ‘I’ is used as a subject, we don’t use it because we recognise a particular person by his bodily characteristics; and this creates the illusion that we use the word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it is said, ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’—‘Is there then no mind, but only a body?’”4 2 This question of an “agency” beyond the mind‐body dichotomy was among the challenges taken up by Sigmund Freud—in the Project (1895) and the “Note on the Mystic Writing‐ Pad” (1925)—and, later, by Jacques Lacan, in the formulation of a materialist definition of consciousness, and remains the basis of various cognitive and cybernetic approaches to the problem of general intelligence. In 1954, a series of seminars were presented by Lacan at the Société Française de Psychanalyse, entitled “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” “Homeostasis and Insistence,” “Freud, Hegel and the Machine,” and “The Circuit.” These seminars form part of a larger treatment of the ego in Freud’s theory, and they represent a new phase in the critique of Cartesian subjectivity initiated in Lacan’s oeuvre with his 1936 paper on the stade du miroir, or “mirror stage,” in which it is asserted that “the formation of the ‘I’ as we experience it in psychoanalysis … leads us to oppose any philosophy issuing directly from the cogito.”5 Lacan’s 1954 seminars are organised around a reassessment of Freud’s work between the Project and his 1919 study, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the human organism 4 5 Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 69. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: Norton, 1977) 1. [21] and the structure of the psyche are conceived (in a manner only superficially comparable to Descartes’s “Sixth Meditation”) as a machine—but more specifically as an apparatus of sign operations—according to which the brain operates firstly as what Lacan terms a “homeostat organ” and later as a “dream machine.” This is the moment of Freud’s “re‐ discovery” of the unconscious—“the most organic and most simple, most immediate and least manageable level” of the psyche, where “sense and speech are revealed and blossom forth in their entirety.”6 It is by way of the metaphor of the machine that Freud “discovers the operation of the symbol as such, the manifestation of the symbol in the dialectical state, in the semantic state, in its displacements, puns, plays on words, jokes working all on their own in the dream machine.” The particular mechanical “grammar” that Lacan identifies in Freud’s investigations of language and the unconscious displaces Cartesian subjectivity by way of a dialecticism which becomes increasingly formal and procedural in its logic (working “all on its own,” as it were)—indeed whose formalism is a necessity in order for the subject not to return in the figure of dialectical synthesis, or be rendered substantive, since it is the unconscious which is discovered to be “the unknown subject of the ego.”7 (This displacement of the dialectical subject onto the “figure” of the unconscious is taken by Lacan as a first step in the move away from Cartesianism and the conventional mind‐body problem, towards a mechanical or “materialist” understanding of reflexivity.) “What,” Lacan then asks, “gives consciousness its seeming primordial character? The philosopher does indeed seem to start with an indisputable given when he takes as his starting point the transparency of consciousness to itself. If there is consciousness of something it cannot be, we are told, that this consciousness does not, itself, grasp itself as such. Nothing can be experienced without the subject being able to be aware of himself within this experience in a kind of immediate reflection.”8 The answer for Lacan, as for Wittgenstein, is that while the word “reflection,” like “consciousness” or “mind,” has a meaning for us, “i.e. it has a use in our language,” this meaning—in the context of philosophy or psychology—does not explain those operations to which we would ask it to refer. There is nothing in the meaning of reflexivity, in other words, that helps us to understand the means of explaining the “phenomenon” of reflexivity.9 And this leads, in any assumption of subjecthood or subjective agency, to the Cartesian paradox of decentred self implied in the structure of reflexivity—being, as Lacan characterises it: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”10 6 7 8 9 10 Jacques Lacan, “Freud, Hegel and the Machine,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 76. Jacques Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II, 43. This is a point often overlooked in readings of Lacan, but which is made clear in Lacan’s exchange with Serge Leclaire and is given its most precise rendering in the scenario sketched by Lacan in the seminar on a materialist definition of consciousness. Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 45-6. Slavoj Žižek has traced the genealogy of this problem in terms of the sublime, and his conclusion remain pertinent to the question of reflexivity here. “In Kant’s view, the whole movement which brings forth the feeling of the sublime concerns only our subjective reflection external to the Thing, not the Thing-in-itself—that is, it represents only the way we, as finite subjects caught in the limits of our phenomenal experience, can mark in a negative mode the dimension of the trans-phenomenal Thing. In Hegel, however, this movement is an immanent reflexive determination of the Thing-initself—that is, the Thing is nothing but this reflexive movement.” The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 213. Jacques Lacan, “The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud,” Écrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: Norton, 1977) 166. [22] It remains, Wittgenstein argues, to examine the grammar of those words which describe what are called “mental activities”: “seeing, hearing, feeling, etc. And this comes to the same as saying that we are concerned with the grammar of ‘phrases describing sense data.’”11 We might take this further and say that it is not merely the grammar of phrases, or propositions about the nature of “sense data” or “mental activities”—such as reflexivity—that concerns us here, but structural grammars that describe the operations of reflexivity itself, and, consequently, a particular conception of thought, consciousness or subjectivity. In other words we are concerned with a grammar—or grammatical apparatus—of discursivity, of possibility, of a set of operations of imagining signs affected under base material conditions. What does it mean, then, to operate with, or imagine, signs? And what does it mean to treat these terms—to operate and to imagine—as “equivalent,” in a material and not metaphysical sense, deriving from the etymology of mēchanikos given by Xenephon, namely μηχανηκός: full of resources, inventive, ingenious, clever? In his seminar entitled “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” Lacan asks us to consider the following scenario, focusing our attention upon a particular intransitive sense of this phrase to operate with or to imagine signs. In a world from which all living beings have vanished, a photographic mechanism (it is an analogue camera, replete with mirror, shutter and flash) stands on a tripod at the edge of a lake, focused upon the image of a mountain reflected there, and set to operate automatically, recording whatever is framed through its viewfinder: Once again we’re dealing with a mirror. What is left in the mirror? The rays which return to the mirror make us locate in an imaginary space the object which moreover is somewhere in reality. The real object isn’t the object that you see in the mirror. So here there’s a phenomenon of consciousness as such. That at any rate is what I would like you to accept, so that I can tell you a little apologue to aid your reflection. Suppose all men have disappeared from the world. I say men on account of the high value which you attribute to consciousness. That is already enough to raise the question—What is left in the mirror? But let us take it to the point of supposing that all living beings have disappeared. There are only waterfalls and springs left—lightning and thunder too. The image in the mirror, the image in the lake—do they still exist?12 The question that Lacan is in process of formulating has to do with the relationship between the image and a process of “imagining” that does not take place in the absence of an object, so much as in the absence of a subject. However, this is not to say that the object is restored in Lacan’s scenario—that a different grammar obtains to the one encountered in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the locality of consciousness—rather, the assumed object here gives way to what is called an image, and what we might also go on to call a sign, insofar as one can speak at all of “imagining signs” in the manner we shall arrive at. Firstly, however, in the absence of a subject (or any formal “observer”), what does it mean to ask if the image still exists? It is quite obvious, Lacan insists, that it does exist, because the image, as they say, can be recorded (as a form of evidence if not yet of 11 12 Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 69-70. Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 46. [23] attestation)—this is in fact its mechanical (technological) condition, or indeed its conditionality—while the mirror, where we might otherwise be tempted to speak of the image being located, represents not a “locality” in the sense of a locality of thinking, but rather a technē of reflexivity: a surface of operations that link what is called an image to the intransitive condition of thought, of imagining signs through the operation of its being‐ recorded. The image of which Lacan speaks is thus not the image we expect to find (or not to find) in the mirror, but the imaginary sign that is a mark of this reflexive action we call recording, or re‐coding: what is left in the mirror, or in the lake, is nothing more or less than the reflective, transmissional mechanism within whose “agency” a phenomenon of consciousness appears to reside, while palpably residing nowhere.13 To further elaborate this effect, Lacan adds to his camera apparatus a photocell which, in setting off a flash at the moment the “image” is recorded, leaves—by way of its superimposed reflection upon the “image reflected in the lake,” or so we may at least deduce—a trail of light, or a blind (a blind reflexivity or a “blind gaze”) as though in place of the image of the mountain reflected in the lake, in which the now composite, obliterated or ruined “recorded image” assumes the tenor of an imaginary sign. What is left in the camera, then, is nothing other than the trace (the implied, in‐substantive record) of the reflexive act “itself.” What Lacan’s scenario thereby presents us with is a type of self‐sufficient technology, or we might say techno‐logicus—between the mechanised image and the assumption of a system of signs—as a type of reflexive analogue‐machine. Hence, “despite all living beings having disappeared, the camera can nonetheless record the image of the mountain in the lake …” and so on and so forth.14 It is this mechanical tableau of “reflexivity,” then, that Lacan wishes us to consider as being essentially a phenomenon of consciousness, “which won’t have been perceived by any ego, which won’t have been reflected upon in any ego‐ like experience,”15 since there can be no ego in the camera. So is “consciousness” nothing but this reflexive movement? 3 Given that such a thing as a camera, or even the surface of a lake, demonstrates a blind reflexivity that might normally be considered at best analogous to merely nervous reflex actions in organic bodies, how might we assume to speak of such mechanical phenomena as “essentially” phenomena of consciousness? Is it the case that we are speaking only of imaginary machines, or of an imaginary consciousness, or rather that such questions fall into the trap of assuming sign operations (imagining signs) to be merely epiphenomenal in the philosophical sense: adjuncts to the real with neither consequence nor more than “symbolic” function in that world? 13 14 15 It is with regard to the existential function of the “image” that Lacan’s theory needs not only to be referred back to the materiality of the Freudian unconscious, but also to the concept of Gestalteinheit (structure, pattern, whole) and the Gestalt theory of Christian von Ehrenfels who, like Freud, was much influenced by the psychophysics and philosophy of perception of Franz Brentano. Cf., for example, Brentano’s dissertation on “Aristotle’s Psychology, with Special Reference to his Doctrine of Nous Poīetikos” (1866); and Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 46. Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 47. [24] Lacan’s response to this is that while “the symbolic world is the world of the machine,” it is necessary to recognise that this does not elevate the condition of man, as a being in the “real” world, since “in as much as he is committed to a play of symbols, to a symbolic world, … man is a decentred subject” and “it is with this same … world, that the machine is built. The most complicated machines are made only with words.”16 But it would be wrong to suppose that we are speaking here about reflexivity and machines in a “merely” rhetorical or normative sense, with no relation to the actual operations of consciousness or thought. One of the reasons for this supposed dilemma, in the relation of the symbolic to a “phenomenon of consciousness,” is that the machine of which Lacan speaks is not compatible with the assumptions of Cartesian mechanistics, since its determinations of reflexivity devolve not upon an the agency of an ego but upon the unconscious in its fundamental, mechanical and material sense. For neither this machine, nor its reflexivity, is a metaphor—a situation which leads Lacan to what must at first appear simply a provocation: that consciousness occurs each time “there’s a surface such that it can produce what is called an image.” Between what Lacan terms the symbolic (“system of signs”) and the imaginary (“phenomenon of consciousness”), the real interposes as this mechanism of reflexivity: the liminal space of the mirror, the surface of the lake, and—it follows—the “locality of thought.” The difficulty, as we have seen, is in resisting the fascination analogy exerts upon us, as in confusing “mental activities,” for example, with “the activity of operating with signs,” or of asserting that something must be in the machine (an ego, perhaps, or some other mental avatar). And here lies the basic distinction between Freudian materiality and Cartesian mechanistics: the former being an entirely literalised “account” of the organisation of the psyche and the contingent nature of consciousness; the later being a metaphorical, or rather analogical, figuration of a material condition of Being upon the assumption of the primacy of consciousness. The confusion of these respective grammars rests, as Lacan identifies, in “the situation of impasse which is the constitution of the human object … expressed precisely in traditional psychology by the incompatability of consciousness.”17 This distinction is already familiar from Lacan’s paper of 1936 on the mirror stage and the “dialectic of identification.” In his later seminar, on a “materialist definition of consciousness,” the distinction is recapitulated and reinforced. Here Lacan adopts Freud’s parable of the blind man and the paralytic as an additional, parenthetic means of illustrating the problem of subjectivity on the level of the ego (or of any artifex maximus)— the problem which equally underlies the scenario of the camera and the lake. “The subjective half of the pre‐mirror experience,” Lacan explains, “is the paralytic, who cannot move about by himself except in an uncoordinated and clumsy way. What masters him is the image of the ego, which is blind and which carries him. Contrary to all appearances, and this is where the entire problem of the dialectic lies, it isn’t, as Plato thinks, the master who rides the horse, that is, the slave, it’s the other way around. And the paralytic, whose perspective this is, can only identify with his unity in a fascinated fashion, in the 16 17 Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 47. Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 51. [25] fundamental immobility whereby he finishes up corresponding to the gaze he is under, the blind gaze.”18 It is by consequence of this that the ego remains, for Lacan, an imaginary function, “even if at a certain level it determines the structuration of the subject”—the image of the ego is as “ambiguous as the object itself, of which … it is not only a stage, but the identical correlate.”19 Once again the difficulty resides in the lure of analogy, since it is the tendency of subjectivity to substantiate itself on the basis of an agency that must be more than “merely” imaginary (keeping in mind the implied reification of the imaginary as a mode of operating with signs). This is the problem Wittgenstein identifies with regard to the assumption of a locality of thought: the belief that thought in some way precedes itself (there, in the place where we recognise it only seems to be, without being able to say where it is, etcetera), and that the experience of thought is both a private and somehow unique one—as opposed to other, physiological “experiences” that might simply be described by sense data. Evidently we encounter a problem with the grammar of the word “experience” here, and it is the confusion of the various meanings of experience, for example, that create further problems when we pose questions such as: “Is it possible for a machine to think?” As Wittgenstein points out, the trouble which is expressed in this question has less to do with whether or not technological conditions exist that would allow us to build machines that can think—or which, like IBM’s Deep Blue, might approximate thought, or might simulate having cognitive experiences—but that “the sentence, ‘A machine thinks (perceives, wishes)’: seems somehow nonsensical.”20 And yet, is it any more nonsensical to say “a machine thinks” than to say “a brain thinks” (or for that matter “a mind thinks”)? We might similarly ask, where is perception located? In the retina? In the occipital cortex? As though any part of the “visual apparatus” or the operations of “perception” could be separated off from the whole, or the whole given over to a “mind” that magically perceives in place of the eye’s and brain’s “merely” mechanical operations—and which, above all, can provide us with an explanation of perception! This is a conceptual problem that Leibniz had already identified in the Monadology (1840; posthumous). “Suppose,” Leibniz argues, “that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit its inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception.”21 As Wittgenstein says, it is necessary to ask here about the grammar of the word “explain,” and to question the particular demands and expectations we assume when we use that word in this way. However, even in the absence of a means of “explanation” (whatever this means), if Lacan attributes to the apparatus of his camera a “phenomenon of consciousness” is this 18 19 20 21 Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 50. Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 52. Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 47. G.W.F. von Leibniz, The Monadology, §17, trans. George Montgomery, The Rationalists (New York: Double Day, 1960) 457. Leibniz is led to conclude that it is “in the simple substance, and not in the composite nor in a machine that the Perception is to be sought. Furthermore, there is nothing besides perceptions and their changes to be found in the simple substance.” [26] then the same as saying that the camera “thinks”? Is the camera’s blind reflexivity commensurate with what Wittgenstein calls operating with or imagining signs? Is the recording of an image—its recordability, even; its mechanical iterability as photo‐graphē— however tentative, not in itself experiential? Or, if we accept that the mechanism of reflexivity comprised by Lacan’s apparatus might indeed describe a phenomenon of consciousness—even if this phenomenon assumes the form of a “writing” (graphē) around the liminal space of what cannot be reified as an image—how do we then account for the insistence that there is not “the shadow of an ego in the camera”?22 Are we yet prepared to accept that thought—even as something strictly delimited in terms of operating with signs— is conditioned by a purely mechanical agency? 4 Lacan’s image of the lake in the previous scenario of a material or mechanical phenomenon of consciousness is not an accidental one, and we may readily detect in it an allusion to the Virgilian epigraph of Freud’s Traumdeutung (1900), which—by implied association—likens the unconscious to the underworld and to that which cannot be brought up into daylight. For Virgil, the gateway to this underworld, and its literary metonym, is Avernus—the small, once “birdless” volcanic lake on the Tyrrhenian coast at Cumae—and it is what lies below this semi‐mythological lake that Freud warns us must remain in the realm of the purely speculative. Which is another way of saying that there is nothing in the lake—meaning no‐thing that could be recognisable, no‐thing for which “consciousness” possesses any analogue whatsoever. It is for this reason that the dream‐ work is described tropically—as a set of structural relations of figures of metaphor and metonymy—and not substantively. If we speak of dream images, there is none the less no image as such in the unconscious, no image in the lake. Nothing, we might say, other than an “effect of liminality.” But what does this mean? When Wittgenstein speaks of the locality of thought and of the realist fallacy, it is in part to draw our attention to the way in which certain means of picturing the world are bedevilled by analogy. We might identify a similar problem in the confusion that arises whenever we casually compare the machinery of a camera and the “machinery” of the retina and visual cortex, for example, and draw conclusions about the operations of consciousness on these grounds—without considering that it is the grammar, the mechanics, of reflexivity that is at stake, and not a comparison of different types of machines.23 This is similarly the way in which Wittgenstein uses the term “grammar,” which we might also regard as a mechanism or technē of discourse, of sign structures— indeed, as a particular type of semantic condition. Likewise, we can see that what is at stake in Lacan’s definition of consciousness is the establishing of conditions (the grammar) for talking about a phenomenon of consciousness in the strictest sense. If Lacan’s scenario appears elusive, this has more to do with the necessary ambiguity of such a discourse than with a lack of rigour on the part of the analyst, as it were. 22 23 Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 47. Another question here would be: what might it means to contemplate a form of “visual” apprehension which is haptic rather than “optical,” such as the phenomenon of blind sight? [27] One striking feature of Lacan’s scenario especially requires further scrutiny, and this has to do with a seeming dependency upon analogical, mechanistic structures in the illustration of his argument. Yet we need to be particularly attentive to what the object of this argument is. Firstly, the conjunction of mirror and camera eye serve to bring together the notion of subjectivity, perception, reflection, consciousness, and cognition. Secondly, however, this conjunction should alert us to the fact that here we are dealing with a scenario of consciousness—of a phenomenon of consciousness—that constitutes itself by way of a similar blind to the one we have already remarked with regards to the matter of recording. And this is the blind that, like the surface of the lake or the surface of the mirror, both closes us off from, and orientates us towards, the speculative: between the image projected in the retina and the sense data transmitted to the occipital cortex, and so on. It is, in other words, what separates the phenomenon of consciousness from what Wittgenstein terms the locality of thought, and which separates agency from the assumption of mind. On one hand, this blind is represented in purely mechanical terms. The analogue camera—as a type of mechanical eye—doubles, and re‐inverts, the reflection of the image in the lake by the reflection in the mirror situated inside the camera. This image, by association, corresponds to the “real” upside‐down image projected on the retina in the last stage of visual perception at which there is anything like an “image” in the straightforward way that there is an image on a cinema screen. That is to say, at which there appears an analogue of something “in the real world.” Two important points arise here. Firstly, in the arbitrary relation between the analogue (the so‐called image) and the technics of its transmission—something Lacan draws our attention to when he defines an image as “the effects of energy starting at a given point of the real … reflected at some point on a surface and come to strike the corresponding same point in space. The surface of a lake might just as well be replaced by the area striata of the occipital lobe.”24 Secondly, in the incompatibility of analogue processes and what Wittgenstein terms sense data—the forms of transmission and mnemonic coding or recording that characterise the combined operations of the central nervous system, cerebral cortex, and other parts of the brain (whether or not these are committed to strictly motor functions or to other mental activities). This incompatibility has been likened to the distinction between analogue and digital processes familiar in computing, and it is relatively uncontroversial to state on this basis that there are no images in the brain. In effect, the incompatibility of consciousness with the operations of the brain, or between the analogue state of “consciousness” and the digital state of “mental processes,” means that it is nonsensical to speak of an image of thought, as it were. Which also means, that there can be nothing of mental activity which is recognisable in imagistic or analogue terms—there is indeed no analogue of mental activity that we could identify as thought or as such—and hence there can be no sensible way in which we can here speak of a locality of thought. As Lacan says, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” Unlike the analogue world, in which we may speak of an image reflected in a lake, there are no corresponding means by which we can locate reflexive thought (in the “mind”), and this leads us to some interesting restatements of the dilemma that confronts us when we approach the meaning of the Freudian unconscious—but perhaps more interestingly, it 24 Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of Consciousness,” 49. [28] leads us to place in question the phenomenon of consciousness itself as being other than a discursive materiality on the level of unconscious (non‐analogue, mechanically reflexive) processes. This does not mean, however, that consciousness should be viewed as epiphenomenal. A phenomenon of consciousness, rather, might be considered as arising from a mechanical reflexivity that operates a point of transmission between analogue and non‐analogue modes: it is what might be called an integrational effect that in turn is re‐integrated into the machine as a notional reflexivity. Thought, or cognition, does not in this way correspond to mental activities—as Wittgenstein makes clear—rather there are cognitive effects: the operations of the brain are of a different order, or for the purpose of a different constitution, to those analogised for the purpose of cognition, or of reflecting upon the apparent processes of cognition. The reflexivity implied here, like that of Lacan’s camera apparatus—between modes of integration and cognition‐effects—goes only as far as the image. The surface of the lake, or the mirror, is a film/screen—a non‐place, a utopia—by which the reflection of an image, which is not yet the image of reflection, is seen to be “projected.” Once again the incompatibility of consciousness leads us to bring into doubt the sense of attributing agency to consciousness per se. We can say, for example, that the camera “sees” insofar as we can also say that an eye “sees,” or—as in Wittgenstein’s example, a hand or mouth “thinks,” without recourse to any external agency. (The question is, what does it mean to be aware that one sees, under the illusion of seeing oneself seeing oneself?) This definitional incompatibility prompts us to question the sense in identifying what we call thought with a phenomenon of consciousness. Indeed, rather than speaking of cognitive effects we might do better to speak instead of analogue‐effects: the presupposition that “conscious” event S refers to “mental” event P, which it thereby “causes,” and so on. In this way we might also speak of the analogisation of experience by way of sense data transformed into a process of operating with signs—since, in the final analysis, it is by way of a fundamental incompatibility that analogy functions (that it is possible) as a body of sign operations approximating thought. Collioure, August, 2005 [29] From Structure to Situation In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau‐Ponty argues that experience is always of “a world, that is … an indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication.”1 This discursive, or ecological, interpretation of “experience” echoes both the earlier and contemporary interpretations of John Dewey, Gregory Bateson and Norbert Wiener, and provides a point of conjunction between modern phenomenological theories, pragmatism, and cybernetics. To a certain degree, this conjunction will have seemed improbable, due to the assumed incompatibility of phenomenological idealism and the material grounding of pragmatism—and yet this is not the case, at least in the restricted sense in which “experience” is taken to be an ostensibly structural phenomenon and as structurally synthetic. An appreciation of the importance of synthetic structures is characteristic of such work as Bateson’s “Cybernetic Explanation” (1967) and Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948), both of which evolve a notion of structural mechanics and quasi‐systematicity derived from the technological and ecological models of “isotropic” networks inflected by the world‐view transformations of Einstein’s general relativity (1905), according to which the purpose of mechanics—the science of motion—is to describe how bodies change their position in space with time.2 For Einstein, there can be “no such thing as an independently existing trajectory,” just as there can be no picture of the world that can assume the function of an “inertial frame of reference” which is not a purely normative one. The discursivity of Einstein’s conceptualisation gives to the world, as it were, a linguistic complexion, in which semantic situations are always relational and dynamic, construed by way of an ambivalence in the otherwise strict convergence of phenomena upon an objective plain of observation. And while we may describe their “means of explanation” (as Wittgenstein says) by way of an abstract or analytic grammar, the situations themselves—obtaining “in the world” or as world‐states—remain inflected or synthetic. For Merleau‐Ponty, the experiential world defined as “an indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication” likewise follows from Einsteinian relativity in positing experience in terms of a global set of integrated and mutually affective co‐ordinates. The logical consequence of such a definition is that we are led, according to Merleau‐Ponty, to an idea of “reality” which is “intrinsically and in the 1 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Albert Einstein, Relativity, trans. Robert W. Lawson (New York: Crown Publishers, 1961). [30] last analysis a tissue of probabilities.”3 The linguistic complexion inherent to this idea of reality—one which is conditional for a semantics and not dependent upon any a priori semantic structure—is more clearly established by Merleau‐Ponty in his reading of Ferdinand de Saussure, in an essay addressed to Sartre entitled “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”: What we have learnt from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs. Since the same can be said of all signs, we may conclude that language is made of differences without terms; or more exactly, that the terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them.4 What does it mean, however, to describe language as “differences without terms”? And if we begin by assuming language to be differential, what does this imply for a synthetic or discursive view of experience? Dewey, in the Essays in Experiential Logic, attempted to address this question in a nascent form by means of a critique of the inherited Cartesian dualism of experience and reflective thought.5 Dewey’s particular formulation can be rendered in terms of a distinction in the relationship between grammar and semantics—here characterised as the antecedents (or situation) and datum (immediate material) of thought, and thought’s “objectives” (the progress of any thought function, i.e. its organisation of material). By “datum of thought,” Dewey was referring to “a distinction which is made within the thought‐process as a part of and for the sake of its own modus operandi.” “It is,” he concludes, “a status in the scheme of thinking.”6 In linguistic terms, what we are presented with here is an assertion that while grammar is not an instrument of semantics, the contours of semantic possibility—of correlation and counterpoint; convergence and coherence—are conditioned by the grammatical situation and the disposition of linguistic “data” (phonemic or graphemic; tropic or schematic). That is to say, such a grammar assumes a syntactical function in the organisation, not only of individual texts, but of text per se—of language as writing system or technē of inscription—cadenced or punctuated by “points” of ambivalence, convergence or divergence, of supposedly discrete events implying a system, completing or supplying the basic linguistic information. In short, language thus conceived remains “a tissue of probabilities.” The co‐implication of syntax and semantics requires us to approach the idea of linguistic experience in broadly synthetic terms, as a function of open possibility in accordance with a finite set of probabilities. Here, then, is the necessary conjunction of the phenomenological and the pragmatic: in the “reciprocal implication” of material conditions and what is called meaning. However, before we become habituated to thinking that we 3 4 5 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Einstein and the Crisis of Reason,” Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 193. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, 39. In the preface to his seminal study, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), Dewey extends this critique beyond the dualism of philosophical concepts to that of philosophical method: “Philosophy … is a generalised theory of criticism. Its ultimate value for life-experience is that it continuously provides instruments for the criticism of those values—whether beliefs, institutions, actions or products—that are found in all aspects of experience. … The chief obstacle to a more effective criticism of current values lies in the traditional separation of nature and experience” (xvi). John Dewey, “Antecedents and Stimuli of Thinking,” Essays in Experimental Logic (New York: Dover, 1916) 104. [31] have in some way demonstrated that the experiential world is linguistically contoured, it is important to consider the complimentary view: that we have instead arrived at an idea of language contingent upon the structure and organisation of what we call thought. In either case, what presents itself most forcefully in this relation to possibility (whether in linguistic, experiential or phenomenological terms) is the synthetic nature of this “reciprocal implication.” By synthetic it is meant situational—that something is inflected by virtue of its condition within a “system of co‐ordinates,” as it were—that, as Dewey says, there is no “mere existence—phenomenon unqualified as respects organisation and force, whether such phenomenon be psychic or cosmic …”7 It is for this reason that thought is seen as not being independent of its “antecedent” conditions, but is bound up in them as conditions for thought. Similarly Wittgenstein, arguing against the “ideal language” fallacy—that meaning exists a priori—insisted that meaning in language is indistinguishable from its grammatical situation: “Let’s not forget that a word hasn’t got a meaning given to it … by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of investigation into what a word really means.”8 In the Blue Book (1933‐4)—a text devoted almost exclusively to the question of “what is the meaning of a word?”—Wittgenstein identifies a formal relativity as the basis for any discussion of sign operation (being the axial relation of language and the mechanics of thought). Among other examples of grammatical situations that Wittgenstein proposes in support of this view, is the phenomenon of homonymy—in which the same word can have more than one meaning—and of antonymy—in which two words with contrary meanings may be differentiated by as little as a single letter or phoneme. The relativistic and synthetic character of homophony had previously been identified by Freud in his study of Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1916), in particular with respect to the operation of puns. For Freud, homonymy is exemplary not only of certain effects associated with the unconscious, but of a particularly structural relation between verbal and graphic forms of symbolisation and the organisation of “sense.” In other words, homonymy reveals something about the synaesthetic and material nature of cognition or thought. Nowhere is the significance of homonymy more evident, however, than in the writing of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), for it is here that the synthetic, and synaesthetic, condition of linguistic experience is most fully elaborated by foregrounding the homonymic ambivalence that underwrites the entire field of language and, consequently, of thought. As Joyce writes: “What can’t be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for.”9 Joyce’s linguistic “experiment” draws our attention to the highly probabilistic way in which language—or rather the possibility of language—is organised. In Finnegans Wake the relation between a probabilistic grammar and semantic possibility is radicalised through the structural and affective aspects of the text’s “unity,” or synthetic complexion. This is an effect that Gregory Bateson, writing forty years ahead of Deleuze and Guattari, termed “schismogenesis”—loosely analogous to Merleau‐Ponty’s “indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication.” For Bateson, 7 8 9 Dewey, “Antecedents and Stimuli of Thinking,” 130. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations (New York: Harper, 1958) 28. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 1939) 482.34. [32] affective unities describe transverse structures in which “the whole body of behaviour is a concerted mechanism”; while structural unities describe structures in which “the behaviour of any one individual in any one context is, in some sense, cognitively consistent with the behaviour of all other individuals in all other contexts.”10 As with Joyce’s paronomasia and compound—or portmanteau—“words” and cyclical “narrative structures,” Bateson’s schismogenesis points to the way in which, beyond an apparent surface of sense, “language” operates by means of a co‐ordinate mechanism of what—echoing Saussure’s differential system of signs—Bateson calls symmetrical differentiation and complementary differentiation (e.g. homonymy and antonymy), by which an otherwise “purely probabilistic” nature of signification acquires its design. This design is conditioned not by any intentionality concealed behind language, but by a formal constraint: a constraint whose definition is limited solely by the possibilities open to any given linguistic situation. Consequently we may think of design as a term designating invention, or the possibility of “making sense” of, or by virtue of, unforeseen conditions. In terms of Finnegans Wake, the remarkable thing is not that its design makes of language something exotic, but that it opens our eyes—as it were—to the unforeseen nature of language’s commonplace, material conditions. It is here that we may identify what it is that Bateson means by constraint, as something conditional for language (thought, etc.) to happen, and yet as something inherent to language; not as a regulatory idea applied from outside, but as a technē of language. In cybernetic terms, “the course of events,” as Bateson explains, is likewise “subject to constraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such constraints, the pathways of change would be governed only by equality of probability. In fact, the ‘constraints’ upon which cybernetic explanation depends can in all cases be regarded as factors which determine inequality of probability.”11 Evidence of such inequalities of probability can be found in the fact that “experimental” texts like Finnegans Wake continue to yield to processes that we may still call processes of reading—even at those points at which “language” otherwise appears to lapse into mere probability: to lapse, in other words, into noise and randomness, in the distribution of marks on the page or sounds represented “in the mind.” Literacy in this sense appears to be linked to circuits of constraint or what we might call “error tolerance,” by which probability remains attached to a structural dynamic rather than a closed circuit of mechanistic inertia or entropic dissipation. Consequently it is in the mechanisms of literacy—rather than by a purely mechanistic calculus—that the possibility of “making sense,” of invention or poiēsis, remains open. While the discursive relation between inequality of probability and possibility of necessity underwrites the entire linguistic project, the base material aspect of this relation is perhaps most exemplified in those parts of Joyce’s text—among others—that seem most remote, indeed even hostile, to semantic “reconstruction.” Noteworthy in this respect are Joyce’s so‐called thunderwords (“Housefather calls enthreateningly. From Brandenborgenthor. At Asa’s arthre. In thundercloud periwig. With lightning bug aflash from afinger”12): a set of 10 11 12 Gregory Bateson, “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis,” Mind XXXV (1935); rpr. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (St Albins: Paladin, 1973) 39. Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 375. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 246.06-8. [33] ten quasi‐lexical entities, each made up of one hundred (and one of one hundred and one) letters arranged in seemingly arbitrary combinations, whose purpose—it is assumed—is to provide an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound of thunder. As, for example: Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokans akroidverjkapakkapuk.13 Marshall McLuhan has argued that Joyce’s thunderwords can be read as recounting a history of technology, comprised of ten phases: 1. Paleolithic to Neolithic; 2. Clothing as Weaponry; 3. Specialisation; 4. Markets and truck gardens; 5. Printing; 6. Industrial Revolution; 7. Tribal man again; 8. Movies; 9. Car and plane; 10. Television.14 What is perhaps more interesting than the techno‐historical schema Joyce’s thunderwords are supposed by McLuhan to represent, is the way in which Joyce’s writing itself can be regarded as technological, demonstrating a fundamental relation of interdependency— indeed a technē—operating between, for example, verbal signification and noise. Onomatopoeia has often been considered a “special case,” but this is upon the assumption that a representation (or mimēsis) of noise remains incompatible with verbal representation as formal language—due, in other words, to the radically analogical character of onomatopoeia and the implied anti‐mimeticism of its claim over phonic “substance” as constitutive of a “signified.” By orientating the signified in its materiality—as what conditions and yet escapes meaning—onomatopoeia thus effects what might be called a mark of the real in language, consonant with the claims of Saussure regarding the substantive element of difference marked out by the enunciative forms of certain phonemes (/ta/ /ba/ /pa/, for example), or by such conventional graphic traits as the point, the line, and the circle which, by various permutations, account for the geometry of alphanumeric inscription. In onomatopoeia language is thus “restored” to what we might call its fundamental, gestural condition—as situationally inflected—whereby deviation, probability and error tolerance are less the affects of linguistic systematicity than they are of a generalised signifiability, materially conditioned. If onomatopoeia (the making of words or names) recalls to language a seeming pre‐ linguistic, material relatedness to noise—to something pre‐ontological or id‐like—it also points to a future advent of the sensible as what Jacques Lacan terms an intermediate point between language and reality.15 Its liminality, in this sense, between the one and the other, reminds us that language (thought) operates within a dimension of synthetic spatio‐ temporality—or what Joyce calls the “FUTURE PRE‐ / SENTATION / OF THE PAST.”16 As with Einstein, Joyce shows us—to paraphrase Merleau‐Ponty—that at a certain distance “a present is contemporaneous with a future.”17 The implications of this for the way in which we understand language (thought) are, however, a long way from being self‐evident, largely due to the incomprehensible nature of simultaneity. Indeed, it appears to us only 13 14 15 16 17 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 257.27-28. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1997) 46‐8. Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970) 192. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 272.R1. Merleau-Ponty, “Einstein and the Crisis of Reason,” 194. [34] in the deviation from simultaneity—by way of a mode of the analytic—that “understanding” itself becomes possible. Given a simple phrase from a text like Finnegans Wake, such as “hearasay in / paradox lust,”18 we find it impossible to proceed sensibly beyond the first term hearasay without analysing it (or translating it) into distinct, a priori semantic units—such as hearsay and heresy—and to reconstruct a posteriori the sense of a “narrative intertwining” of the meanings of these two words (such as, that hearsay, as a deviation from directly attested truth, or doctrine, is constitutive of heresy, thereby “attesting” to a semantic co‐implication that is graphically approximated in the term hearasay).19 The complementarity of “hearsay” and “heresy” in the term “hearasay” renders the singularity of hearasay unreadable, other than in the sense that we are able to recognise it as a singularity. Simultaneity thus deviates into reconstruction, and yet it does so by virtue of a prior possibility of deviation, or rather of discursivity—being that condition of “indefinite and open multiplicity” that describes the root of discourse. As with Einsteinian mechanics, discourse thus conceived deviates between inertial frames of reference moving in multiple directions and a generalised polyvalence or “simultaneity of relations” (between co‐ implicated terms): a simultaneity not in time or space, but across time and space—just as, in Saussure, simultaneity describes a relation of differences without terms. This engagement with the notion of simultaneity represents a problem we find recurring particularly in philosophical discussions of thought, mind and consciousness—especially with regard to the analytic‐synthetic phenomenon of reflexivity. Among the very numerous efforts to grapple with this phenomenon under the effects of simultaneity, or semantic co‐ implication, one of the more interesting—in that it commences upon the notion of discursivity and deviation—is to be found early on in Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1929). According to Dewey: “the meanings that form mind become consciousness, or ideas, impressions, etc., when something within the meanings or their application becomes dubious, and the meaning itself needs reconstruction. This principle explains the focal and rapidly shifting traits of the objects of consciousness as such.”20 For Dewey, all “conscious perception” involves a risk, since it involves not only a venture towards the unknown limits of possibility, but also the necessity of deviating from the known in order not to be reduced to the operations of a mere automaton. Once again the discourse of consciousness is located in the “gap” between a mechanistics of probability and the horizon of the possible—describing, in the process, what is undoubtedly a mechanism of deviational necessity—further elaborated here in Art as Experience (1934): There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring. Because of this gap, all conscious perception involves a 18 19 20 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 263.L4. It is arguable that Finnegans Wake reveals a constant state of translation as an underwriting condition of language as such, even as it renders translatability formally indeterminate. The complementarity of signifying effects in the Wake— generalisable as Freud has demonstrated—“deform” the concept of translation and force us to consider the effective consistency of a “state of translation” and what the material nature of this consistency may be as the qualifying “term” of something which designates or describes a condition of language or of literacy. Dewey, Experience and Nature, xv. [35] risk; it is a venture into the unknown, for as it assimilates the present to the past it also brings about some reconstruction of the past. When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrides adaptation of the meaning of here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience.21 This formulation is far from unproblematic, but we can find here a movement towards a concept of recurrence that is deviational because synthetic, and which informs the different grammars of the words “mechanical,” “mechanistic” and “mechanism” as they have been employed in this essay so far. For Dewey it is clear that the mechanical represents a Cartesian disavowal of the particular, variable, or contingent (Merleau‐Ponty’s “tissue of probabilities”) in the constitution of thought—or what Dewey terms “conscious perception”—the imaginative phase of experience.22 It is evident that “mind” in Dewey’s formulation does not equate to some kind of metaphysical, fictive entity assumed in place of a material agency, but rather an organisation of experiential phenomena into a global set of integrated and mutually affective co‐ordinates.23 This synthetic view of “mind,” which is not an a priori or normative agent, remains distinct from the Cartesian “theatre of the mind” and rationalist assumptions about the mechanistic operations upon which consciousness, and the experienced world, are founded. In rejecting the “routine and mechanical,” Dewey does not thereby reject a material basis of experience, but rather “locates” experience in the situational or synthetic aspect of materiality—where each situation constitutes a singularity or open possibility within the probabilistic framework of its transverse linguistic contours. The paradigm of “mind” thus extends into an “historical” world view that is not only experiential but experimental. “In the history of man,” Dewey argues, “the individual characteristics of mind were regarded as deviations from the normal, and as dangers against which society had to protect itself. Hence the long rule of custom, the rigid conservatism, and the still existing regime of conformity and intellectual standardisation.” As a consequence, the development of modern science—or of modernity per se—began only when “there was recognised in certain technical fields a power to utilise variations as the starting points of new observations, hypotheses and experiments. The growth of the experimental as distinct 21 22 23 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1934) 272. At the same time, we are presented not only with a conception of thought that is deviational (repetition as non-identical, non-periodic, or what physicists call a strange attractor), but a deviational conception of unity (as distinct from “uniformity”) that devolves upon reciprocal implications of particular and universal, micro and macro, trope and schema—describing what we call a transversal. As with Freud, and later Jacques Derrida, the technē of repetition as generative of signification rests upon a certain iterability—not a phenomenon of repetitional content (“unit”), but its “underwriting” operation. Again we are reminded of the figure of Maxwell’s demon, a mechanism of détournement by which the operations of entropy (uniformity) are interrupted and “re-cycled”: a process analogous to what, in psychoanalysis, is termed “repression,” wherein the preconscious forces a detour in the chain of causal “equivalence.” Consequently, “repression” does not so much “disturb the logos of technology,” as describe the effects of a certain technē, such that this detour is always a techno-logos. Cf. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 365: “only that which can be repeated in its identity can have unity. The unique therefore has no unity, is not a unit.” Cf. also, Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001) xvi: “variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element, the interiority of repletion par excellence.” Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 6-7. [36] from the dogmatic habit of mind is due to the increased ability to utilise variations for constructive ends instead of suppressing them.”24 In more general terms, we can find in Dewey’s conception of “individual characteristics of mind” something analogous to the meaning of singularity as it obtains in terms of recursive yet non‐identical structures— whether in language, cognition, of other (physical) systems—in short, what we have termed synthetic situations. This usage of the term “situation” is itself derived from Dewey’s earlier work in the Essays in Experimental Logic, and we are entitled to interpret the constructivist or utilitarian overtones of the passage cited above as an attempt to account for something like a generative grammar, by which “mind in its individual aspect is shown to be the method of change … in the significances and values attached to things,”25 and thought in its discursive aspect is restored to the open possibility of a venture into the unknown. Prague, August, 2005 24 25 Dewey, Experience and Nature, xiv. Dewey, Experience and Nature, xiii-xiv. [37] Discourse & the Objectless World What is the meaning of discourse? This question may at first appear trivial, or else fraught with possible contradictions—of the type that accompany the experience of turning to a dictionary and seeking a term’s explanation, or rather definition—discourse, discourir, discursus—an experience which situates the definitional or signifying limits of a term by way of synonymy or antonomy. That is, by way of a generalised semantics of difference that, in effect, détournes the procedures of “meaning” along a recessive, or recursive, circuit—from term to terms, situation to situations. Such procedures, we might say, are in themselves affective of discourse—of a running over, or running in many directions—in the inflationary, discursive movement from term to terminus. When we speak of meaning, there remains an assumption of something like an object or series of objects—linguistic signifieds—to which a term’s definition refers and in which meaning inheres. This effect of referential “deferral” is often characterised as a signifying chain: the metaphoric or metonymic translation of “meaning” from a provisional subject term onto a provisional object term, operating across a substitutive gap or division— between like and like or like and unlike (synonymy or antonymy)—according to which sign operations may be characterised as fundamentally liminal. In other words, sign operations are seen to be conditioned by an effect of linguistic—or proto‐linguistic— difference, according to which a term may be said to be well defined or not. And yet, the structures or mechanisms of liminality upon which such operations devolve, remain objectless if not “undefined”—constituted by differences without terms, as Ferdinand de Saussure says—their grammar strictly intransitive. Here, the question of the meaning of discourse can thus be seen as soliciting, “in place” of a term, the paradoxical experience of a liminality without object or terminus. What is the possibility of such an experience or effect? It is necessary to pose this question, because when we ask about meaning we are also asking about the contours of possibility— as an openness towards the adventitious. When we speak of discourse, we are speaking of something momentous—in the sense that it is imbued with an assumption of significance as such, and that this assumption defines a moment or momentum of the signifying relation, as a forethrow of possibility. Consequently, possibility—or possibilitas—has been regarded, by a tradition extending from Nicolas of Cusa to Martin Heidegger, as underwriting the discourses of justice, divinity and becoming (the composite lability and “indifference” of [38] the scales and figure of blind justice; the messianic return of futurity, the “venturing into the unknown” necessitated in structures of belief, the forethrow to a “to come”; and the ontological relation between the advent of being and the event of becoming). Possibility, thus relieved of an object—of any relation to actuality, materialisation or reification—retains the character of a technē: it is neither descriptive of material conditions nor of relations between terms, rather it is conditional, in that it names that which is crucial to any structure whatsoever. And to the extent that all structures are in some way discursive—even the most rigidly determined—then it is the axial or chiasmatic relation between effects of liminality and signifying momentum (or between structural constraint and deviation; suspension and lability; causality and contingency) that defines this crucis as a risk posed against the accession of totality. For discourse, for possibility, to be what it is, it must risk everything in its openness to what structures and underwrites the very concept of the limit—the terminus—as the possibility of discourse itself, and, by logical extension, the possibility of possibility. For it is in the figure of terminus, the divinity of boundaries, that we encounter the aporetic aspect of the unknowable, the mysterious, but also of the otherness of totality. And in so far as discursivity, possibility, condition a certain pre‐disposition towards the other, it is only to the extent that they pose themselves—in advance, as it were—against the impossibility of the limit per se (of a difference that does not also promise the abolition of difference, by way of its “translatability”; even if such an abolition or translation is effectively unthinkable). What we are confronted with here is the unthinkable (if only remotely, formally “impossible”) notion of a totality of experience—a notion that confronts us whenever we approach the question of discourse, language or thought in terms of translation, translatability, or rather translability. The assumptions of language as a series of sign operations—“signifying chains”—likewise leads to the idea that discourse can be viewed, and can perhaps only be viewed, on the basis of various tropes of catachrēsis and parataxis: the incorrect relation of terms or the bringing into relation of terms that do not belong together. And so we might say, in consequence, that language is in a sense cata‐ strophic, in that semantic relations are always vexed, since—in the absence of a universal grammar of signification—all relations are ultimately “differences without terms.” As Saussure argues in his Course in General Linguistics (1916), each “term” retains an arbitrary character in its supposed relation to other terms: the operations of difference are thus indifferent to their purported objects. Hence, whether by metaphor, metonymy, or analogy, the “definitional” movement of signifier to signified always involves a moment of translation, by which discourse solicits a deviation of the possible, by way of an approach upon a categorical impossibility. The implications of this have been tested at least since the advent of Cartesian rationalism and the doctrine that existence and experience are ego‐centred. Along with its exacerbation of the traditional mind‐body dualism, Cartesianism poses a radical view of subjectivity in which thought is not only rendered immaterial, but in which all non‐mental (interioceptive and exterioceptive) experiences can only be defined translationally— between the physical “senses” and the metaphysical “mind”—even as the “phenomenal existence” of these experiences obtains its first cause in the intransitive condition of the cogito or “I think.” This led Immanuel Kant to postulate, in Richard Rorty’s words, that “to change one’s concepts would be to change what one experiences, to change one’s [39] ‘phenomenal world.’”1 For Kant, the givenness of an ego as the condition of experience is redefined in terms of “a priori concepts,” which replace the notion of an “interpreted world” with the notion of a “given world.” Hence, “different a priori concepts would, if there could be such things, give us different worlds.” But even if we accept that thought is never independent of the world—that the situations of thought are in some sense world‐situations—we are still confronted with a certain incompatibility of consciousness, such as what Wittgenstein describes in terms of an all too prevalent “analogical reason,” by which we might imagine someone looking for a “red flower, carrying a red image in his mind.”2 Part of the given/interpreted worlds fallacy resides in assuming a “neutral world” and a corresponding neutral set of concepts, between which consciousness (as a synonym for “thought”) would affect a synthesis or a set of “variations.” Here we find a counterpart to the general problem of translatability— whether between linguistic experiences (different languages; different subjective “experiences of language”) or between different sensory or cognitive states (e.g. synaesthesia), and consequently different world‐states (worlds that correspond to the possibility of their being perceived or conceived as such). In each case, we may say that if thought—language, discourse—appears as translational, it is only in the sense that each of these situations are structurally inherent.3 Much of the opposition to Kant’s view of experience is based upon a rejection of the notion of alternative “conceptual frameworks”—i.e. concepts necessary for the constitution of experience—by which the “alternative experiences” of “alternative worlds” may be translated on the basis of “new a priori concepts.” The translatability of different states is premised upon the idea that meanings can alternate, while at the same time the formal impossibility of translation—“to change one’s concepts would be to change what one experiences, to change one’s ‘phenomenal world’”—suggests that different states are incommensurate with consciousness or subjectivity and so are formally inconceivable. Hence, while we may never reach the limiting case of experience, this does not mean that experience can be defined as a given—even “infinite”—set of alternatives, whose totality would represent “the ideally coherent synthesis of as many views as possible.” And if, like Quine, we are to speak in such situations of “indeterminacy,” this would have nothing to do with the verification of individual terms within a set of “possible alternatives.”4 Rather, indeterminacy is linked to the structure of possibility and its disposition with regard to a terminus. Another way of looking at this is to approach the question of the assumed primacy of consciousness (mind) in relation to experience (sense data). Rather than supposing that a world is somehow interpreted by a mind, or that concepts in the mind shape and predetermine the contours of the world, let us suppose that what is called mind and what is called experience “exist” in a structurally inherent relation, for example of synaesthesia. 1 2 3 4 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism. Essays: 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1982) 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations (New York: Harper, 1958) 3. The notion of given-worlds can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle’s De Interpretatione I.16a, where he argues that: “Just as all men have not the same writing so all men have not the same speech sounds, but mental experiences, of which these are symbols (semeīa prōtos), are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.” W.V. Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” Ontological Relativity and other essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) 26-68. [40] In this way there is no necessity to make claims about “alternative” situations or cognitive states beyond the discursivity of the structures of experience per se. In other words, there can be no alternative or supplementary mode of experience that would add to, or subtract from, experience as such—for example by conceiving a sixth sense, or by removing an existing sense organ (such as the organ of sight)—since in such a case we would be confronted with a radically different, indeed incompatible, mode of experience and not an alternative one. At the same time, discursivity—structural inherence—does not describe a totality: the synaesthetic relation is on the basis of a disclosure of the otherwise imperceptible as a disclosure of the intelligible. The terms of synaesthetic experience (different sense values) do not “add up” into a totality, nor do they represent variations on a given object of apprehension. That is to say, apprehension does not reside in an assumption of decoding objects of experience (or sense data “about” objects)—in terms of, for example, visual objects or tactile objects—nor does apprehension reside in a complementary movement of accumulation or agglutination (of data “around” an object). Rather, the basis of apprehension is in a quasi‐translational synthesis according to which there are no sensory objects to speak of, but instead something like a transversal: a “liminal” architecture that cannot be objectified or translated (i.e. insofar as translation is taken to describe what Jacques Derrida terms an “equation of presence and representation to the truth (homoiosis or adaequatio) about the thing and of the thought about the thing,” etc.).5 The transversal remains the virtual site of any translational movement—as a mechanism, a technē, of translation (and, by implication, of liminality)—and thereby describes a form of instigation or disclosure of the intelligible under the guise of intellection or apprehension. For this reason, and not for lack of a structural resolution of competing terms, it is only by way of a “generalised liminality”—conditioning the synaesthetic per se—that we can arrive at an understanding of consciousness or cognition not as an agent of an a priori determinacy, but as a technē of disclosure: a technē according to which modes of apprehension are, in Julia Kristeva’s description, “shuffled like playing cards, their piecing together revealing recursive determinations, trans‐temporal causalities, and achronic dependencies”; each “jolted by the sudden appearance of other paths, brief flashes, condensed echoes of otherwise interminable chronologies.”6 What is disclosed here is no thing—no object, as it were—but rather the fact that, as John Dewey says, consciousness “always involves a risk.”7 This is the promise of indeterminacy: that, born to language, we remain forever under the constellation of the unknowable, even as we assume for ourselves the task of knowing, of “translating” the one into the other. And, within the discursive structures of our knowledge, it is the inertia or moment of translational risk that we might say carries apprehension beyond itself towards intellection, as the conjunction—in the liminal realm of “objects”—of a scepticism and a method of laying hold of experience. Insofar as it is a function of the possible, discourse does not approximate a relation to, or encounter with, the objects of disclosure; 5 6 7 Jacques Derrida, “Outwork, Prefacing,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 44. Julia Kristeva, “The Novel as Polylogue,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 201. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1934) 272. [41] it affects disclosure—and in so doing affects its objects as translational effects—just as intelligibility can be regarded as measuring its “objects” against constitutive affects. Hence, in as much as we can speak of translation, we are in fact using a metaphor. This requires us to consider what it means, then, to assume a synaesthetic basis for apprehension which is not grounded in assumptions of translatability (or metaphoricity), yet whose operations might still be considered as translational or structurally and reciprocally inherent (such that that to speak of synaesthesia would be to speak of modes of apprehension). Such a notion of inherence also needs to be explained—and it can be done so only by taking into account the irreducibility of difference against the risk posed, under the sign of translation, by the figure of totality. For in synaesthesia, experience is not (cannot be) totalised by way of a movement of synthesis, addition or translation. Part of the difficulty is in giving up the assumption that the senses, or sense organs, have some form of autonomous existence, and that the familiar paradigms of experience are in themselves objective “entities.” And just as we are led to reject the Kantian notion of “a priori concepts,” so too we must reject the dualism that presupposes a translational crux between so‐called sensory events and so‐called mental events, in what amounts to a simple restatement of the old Cartesian mind‐body dualism. The adaequation or equivalence implied by such “translational” dualisms its itself contradictory: the Kantian subject is situated, in the final instance, by an intuitional faculty with regards to an a priori world view, while the Cartesian subject is already “decentred” in the assumption of reflexivity. As Maurice Merlau‐Ponty has observed: “the relation between subject and world are not strictly bilateral: if they were, the certainty of the world would, in Descartes, be immediately given with that of the cogito and Kant would not have talked about the ‘Copernican revolution.’ Analytical reflection starts from our experience of the world and goes back to the subject as to a condition of possibility distinct from that experience, revealing the all‐embracing synthesis as that without which there would be no world.”8 For similar reasons, it makes no sense to say that the brain, as the “seat of the mind,” has evolved in certain ways in order for thought (apprehension, language, cognition) to occur—as though by way of various objective processes of self‐translation, whether in the body or “in the mind.” If an evolutionary process has taken place it can only be that this process is itself bound up with what thought is. Consequently, if we speak of thought (apprehension, language, cognition) in terms of discursivity, this is not simply a metaphor or one alternative “model” among others. Discursivity is rather a “literal” state of affairs, as it were, conditioning the possibility of thought, etcetera—and it is this conditionality, and the contours of possibility delimited by it, that describes—insofar as such a thing is possible—an objectless “locality of thought.” Prague, August, 2005 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) x. [42] Consciousness, or the Assumed Image scribere necesse est, vivere non est If we are led to conclude from the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan that consciousness is a type of screen upon which thought is “projected” unconsciously—and that it is the unconscious, therefore, in which the apparent “agency” of thinking is vested; or that consciousness is merely the “transmissional” medium of thought (thought in its imaginary phase)—then what does it mean to speak of an image? It is in the “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing‐Pad’” (1925) that Freud elaborates a model of apprehension or perception founded upon what Jacques Derrida terms—in his essay on “Freud and the Scene of Writing”—a “metaphorics of the written trace”1 or Aufschreibensystem. Freud’s model—which can be generalised to account, in a certain sense, for the operations and organisation of the psyche around a technē of inscription— links writing to a broadly conceived form of pictorial representation, or hieroglyphics, characterised by a structure of iterability (memory traces) and what Freud terms “repression,” such that this metaphorics of writing always presupposes an image. Freud’s “Mystic Writing‐Pad” or Wunderblock adopts the idea of a commonplace child’s plaything: a plain surface overlaid with a transparent film, such that when marks are made upon the film by a type of stylus, these marks remain visible for as long as the film “adheres” to the surface beneath, but is immediately “erased” once the sheet is separated from it. Notably, while nothing of the marks made by the stylus remains visible once the transparent film has been separated from the surface beneath it, a network of traces is nonetheless retained upon the film itself, and as the apparatus is repeatedly used, the accretion of these traces assumes the complex form of a palimpsest whose structure is rendered increasingly “illegible.” Most importantly, the image of this “mental” writing is located in place of a determinate “point of contact” between the film and the surface beneath (what we might call its tain)—its locality thus being purely relational or virtual— and is “recorded” only in the illegibility of the traces left on the film in which no image as such appears: The Mystic Pad is a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a thin transparent sheet, the top end of which is firmly secured to the slab while its bottom end rests on it without being fixed to it. This transparent sheet is the more interesting part of the little device. It itself consists of two layers, which can be detached from each other except 1 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) 200. [43] at their two ends. The upper layer is a transparent piece of celluloid; the lower layer is made of thin translucent waxed paper. When the apparatus is not in use, the lower surface of the waxed paper adheres lightly to the upper surface of the wax slab. To make use of the Mystic Pad, one writes upon the celluloid portion of the covering‐ sheet which rests on the wax slab. For this purpose no pencil or chalk is necessary, since the writing does not depend on material being deposited on the receptive surface. It is a return to the ancient method of writing on tablets of clay or wax: a pointed stylus scratches the surface, the depressions upon which constitute the “writing.” In the case of the Mystic Pad this scratching is not effected directly, but through the medium of the covering‐sheet. At the points where the stylus touches, it presses the lower surface of the waxed paper on to the wax slab, an the grooves are visible as dark writing upon the otherwise smooth whitish‐grey surface of the celluloid. If one wishes to destroy what had been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering‐sheet from the wax slab … The close contact between the waxed paper and the wax slab at the places which have been scratched (upon which the visibility of the writing depended) is thus brought to an end and it does not recur when the two surfaces come together once more.2 In its suggestion of the accretive form of a palimpsest, the metaphor of the Wunderblock implies “an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces,”3 in which the inscriptive function is literalised as the base register of all subsequent reflexive discourse. Reflexivity here, however, is seen not as a mechanism of consciousness but as constitutive of it, founded upon the (unconscious) operations of memory which—on the basis of Freud’s schematisation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919)—emerge as a form of mechanised, palimpsestic writing; a “synoptic” text which retains the differences between its various layers of inscription at the same time as reducing those differences to a spatio‐ temporal “immediacy,” mediated nevertheless by the spatio‐temporal interruption of inscription and separation (which can be characterised as the discontinuity of what Freud refers to elsewhere as “repression”).4 As a form of universal record in which spatiality and temporality define contiguous signifying relations, the Wunderblock also describes a type of archival machine: “a writing machine of marvellous complexity into which the whole of the psychical apparatus will be projected.”5 It is largely due to the topological nature of the Wunderblock, however, that we speak of the organisation of the psyche in predominantly spatial terms, and the conscious in particular as a kind of surface of perception. Freud himself describes consciousness as “the surface of the mental apparatus; that is, we have ascribed it as a function to a system which is spatially the first one reached by the outside world—and spatially not only in the functional sense but … also in the sense of anatomical dissection.”6 Yet, as regards the organisation of the psyche for which the Wunderblock acts as a metaphor or schematisation, consciousness—if it is to be located—describes this assumption of an image in the 2 3 4 5 6 Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, XXII vols. (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1954) XIX.229-230 Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” 227. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M. Hubback (London: The Hogarth Press, 1922). Cf. “The Unconscious,” The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1986). Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 228. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, 445. [44] mediation of perception, where what is “perceived” is thereby inscribed upon the psychic film in the form of (descriptively unconscious) mnemonic traces, and where the (dynamically unconscious) technē of inscription that underwrites these traces, as it were, gives inscription in the form of an image whose assumption remains thereby “imaginary” and unlocated other than in the illusion of consciousness. This seemingly crude schematisation transforms the apparently static model of the psyche as divided into conscious, pre‐conscious and unconscious, by attributing to it a form of operational “agency” or technē. And as Derrida recognises from the outset of his analysis of Freud, this technē is vested not so much in the unconscious—as though comprising a content—but rather in the operations of what Freud terms “repression,” as a counterpart to the mechanical operations of the various “drives” which, along with “the repressed,” constitute the Freudian unconscious. “Repression,” as Freud says, “neither repels, nor flees, nor excludes an exterior force; it contains an interior representation, laying out within itself a space of repression.” Hence, for Derrida, the metaphor of writing in Freud’s text can thus be seen to represent “the symptomatic form of the return of the repressed.”7 The question that remains is how to reconcile, as it were, a metaphorics of the written trace with the causal assumptions of consciousness founded upon the Cartesian cogito— assumptions that continue to dominate the various cognitive sciences and which ultimately jeopardise any effectively “materialist” understanding of such phenomena as “consciousness” or “thought” (phenomena which, in consequence of Freud’s discovery, can no longer be considered synonymous). Writing in a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss on 6 December 1896, Freud outlines his notion of an iterative, topological signifying mechanism as the basis of psychical organisation, above all “memory”: As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychical mechanism has come about by a process of stratification: the material present in the shape of memory‐traces is from time to time subjected to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—is, as it were, transcribed. Thus what is essentially new in my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is registered in various species of “signs.”8 In “The Ego and the Id” (1923), Freud states that “’Being conscious’ is in the first place a purely descriptive term, resting on perception of the most immediate and certain character”—and it is for this reason that the function of consciousness “expresses the dynamic factor of perception ambiguously.”9 The transitory state of consciousness is linked to an operational condition—being a transmissional phenomenon whose subsequent “intelligibility” devolves upon a technē of inscription (mnemonic traces) which, as we have seen from the example of the Wunderblock, functions in the separation of consciousness from “its” palimpsestic representation. The entire apparatus—as a mechanism of inscription and separation—describes a cognitive function of which consciousness is the assumed, transitory image, or what Derrida terms the symptomatic 7 8 9 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 196-7. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho‐Analysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fleiss, Drafts and Notes: 1887‐1902, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey (London: Imago, 1954) 174. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 440; 444. [45] form of the return of the repressed. Since it is firstly in the dynamics of “separation” and “inscription” that repression as such obtains. Another way to characterise this is in terms of the question “How does a thing become conscious?” According to Freud, thought “is carried out on some material which remains unknown,” and thus describes an operation which remains unconscious, even as its effects may enter into consciousness. This effect of transmission—what Freud terms breaching— is said to occur by way of the preconscious, such that: “The question, ‘How does a thing become conscious?’ would thus be more advantageously stated: ‘How does a thing become preconscious?’ And the answer would be: ‘Through becoming connected with the word‐presentations corresponding to it.’”10 By word‐presentations we mean “mnemonic traces,” those inscriptions left upon the film in the process of perception, to which—by consequence—a certain image corresponds: “These word presentations are residues of memories; they were at one time perceptions, and like all mnemonic residues they can become conscious again.”11 The discourse of consciousness, then, would also be bound up with the particular discursus of this palimpsestic network of traces to which, in its instances of separation, it corresponds. Hence when we speak of an image, here, we do not mean some kind of mental analogue, but rather traces of a previous circuit of repression and “return.” Repression, then, marks a correspondence affected by way of a separation—that is to say, of an inscription—between an image of consciousness and unconscious “thought procedures.” In this sense, the Freudian preconscious describes a transmissional technē (of sign operations, or semiosis), between what has come to be characterised—in the terminology of Lacan—as the Real and its “verisimile” in the form of the Imaginary. And it is for this reason that the metaphor of writing—as descriptive of this technē—assumes the form of a symptom: i.e. a formal organisation of “traces” that mask no revelatory content. The “meaning” of the symptom is in its structure, just as the “meaning” of the image of consciousness is in the structure of its “correspondence”—by way of “motor images of words”—to a tropological, palimpsestic network of traces (metaphor and metonymy). Repression therefore suggests a linguistic, or rather literate, mechanism or technology—in that the structures of consciousness obtain in terms of a “subject of thought” without the “thought procedures” ever becoming present to consciousness. As Freud says: We learn that what becomes conscious … is as a rule only the concrete subject‐matter of thought, and that the relations between the various elements of this subject matter, which is what specially characterises thoughts, cannot be given visual expression.12 This coupling of “repression” with “breaching” (becoming conscious), points to the particular structure of vicissitude which conditions the phenomenon of consciousness and its various affects or images. And insofar as “thought” may be regarded as a complex of sign operations, it is in the vicissitude of what remains operative and what remains inoperative that we might say consciousness obtains. 10 11 12 Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 445. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 445. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 446. [46] If consciousness has a “cause,” then it is arguable that this “cause” resides in the vicissitudes of such binary switchings, as operative/inoperative or, by consequence, possible/impossible. Indeed, the eventual arbitrariness of the binary values that may be interpolated into the structure of vicissitude itself imply that “logical violations” of the type that Freud identifies with “repressed material” (material repressed not because of its “content,” but because of an overwhelming structural incompatability with the prevailing structural logic of consciousness), are ostensibly engines of new thought procedures—in other words, discursive engines—in that they pursue complementary, “operative” functions in proportion to those functions rendered inoperative. The entire Freudian logic of dream‐work or Traumarbeit is based upon the notion that “repressed material” pursues other means of “becoming conscious” by way of a particular détournement or “delayed action” (Nachtrag)—such that a so‐called “conscious thought” is effectively mediated by a “repressed thought,” both therefore being co‐implicated or linked—and in this sense the operations described by repression/breaching are strictly binarised, or complementary. “It is a mistake,” Freud reminds us, “to emphasise only the repulsion which operates from the direction of consciousness upon what is to be repressed; quite as important is the attraction exercised by what is primarily repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection.”13 In “The Topic of the Imaginary” (1953), Lacan elaborates upon the way in which Freud is led to place emphasis on the fact that the repressed, in order to return, makes use of the same chains of association which have served as the vehicle for repression in the first place. Since it is not any repressed “content” that returns but rather its structuration, structure itself becomes tropically vested in the so‐called object of repression (as both metaphor and metonym of the Freudian “thing,” the unconscious “itself”)—as Freud says, “there is nothing unconscious in the latent dream thoughts.”14 What is vested in the so‐called object of repression is nothing other than a structural agency akin to Maxwell’s demon, whose binary function affects a détournement of organisational entropy by way of a mechanism of differentiation. Focusing upon the underlying linguistic complexion of such differential operations, Lacan renders Freud’s schematisation of the psychic apparatus (as Aufschreibensystem) in terms of the linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure, echoing Freud’s own proto‐linguistic conception of dream processes in terms of condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung): That other scene which Freud designated, in relation to dreams, as that of the unconscious, the effects discovered at the level of the materially unstable elements which constitute the chain of language: effects determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, along the two axes of metaphor and metonymy which generate the signified.15 Elsewhere Lacan comes closer to a direct elaboration of the Wunderblock when he identifies the Freudian apparatus of perception with a network of signifiers underwritten by the operations of synchrony and diachrony—in the radical separation of perception and consciousness—this time “in anticipation” of structuralist linguistics: 13 14 15 Freud, “Repression,” The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, 525. Cited in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 12. Jacques Lacan, “The Topic of the Imaginary,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. J. Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 79. [47] Freud deduces from his experience the need to make an absolute separation between perception and consciousness—in order for the traces of perception to pass into memory, they must first be effaced in perception, and reciprocally. He then designates a time when these Wahrnehmungszeichen must be constituted in simultaneity. What is this time if not signifying synchrony? And, of course, Freud says this all the more in that he does not know that he is saying it fifty years before the linguists. But we can immediately give to these Wahrnehmungszeichen their true name of signifiers.16 It is in terms of such structural tropes as metaphor and metonymy—where metonymy is based on contiguity and is, therefore, syntagmatic in nature, while metaphor is based upon a structural adaequation and represents a paradigmatic operation—that the “repressed material” is able, as it were, to pursue its operations in affecting consciousness by other means. Consequently, the structuration of “repressed material” remains dynamic, even as it remains “inoperative,” and can still, as Freud says, “produce effects, even including some which finally reach consciousness.”17 Moreover, it is in the tropic structuration of the repressive apparatus and its détournements that consciousness and thought obtain their relative character of complementarity. For Freud, in the figuration of the dreamwork: At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream‐work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming—the explanation of its particular nature.18 Repression can be seen, then, as contingent upon a prevailing organisational logic of the psyche. This contingent quality of “repression” is clearly implied in the notion of a primary repression [Urverdrängung] which, according to Freud, establishes the tenor of all subsequent “repression” (attraction) on the basis of an instigating movement that is arbitrary and whose significance is uniquely structural. In this way repression, as Gregory Ulmer has pointed out, does not so much “disturb the logos of technology,”19 as delineate the generalised effects of technē, such that the detour of the repressed is always a techno‐ logicus and a technē tō logōn. We might consider primary repression, therefore, as a term describing a radical vicissitude in the representation of psychical structure itself, in place of what might otherwise be termed a structuring principle. Primary repression is thus both objectless and without content—and insofar as it represents, it represents only a form of instigation or solicitation of structure that remains ambivalent to the constitutive elements of any structure in particular. This is what Freud means by saying that repression is exclusionary primarily in terms of structural separation—based upon what we might term a statistical violation that exceeds the elastic margin of error tolerance that defines the limits of “consciousness”— while at the same time qualifying this separation as both radical and complementary. 16 17 18 19 Jacques Lacan, “On the Network of Signifiers,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1998) 45-6. Freud, “The Unconscious,” The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, 142. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977) 650. Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) 145. [48] Radical in the sense that repression, as such, is absolute, since “everything that is repressed must remain unconscious.”20 Complementary in the sense that repression nevertheless describes a set of structural contiguities, even if the elements of this set are structurally incompatible. Such elements remain metaphorically or metonymically linked—that is to say, tropically co‐implicated—but linked solely as functions of in‐compatability, vis‐à‐vis their respective structural logics in terms of the relation conscious/unconscious. And just as these structural effects or functions are rejected by the one and attracted to the other, so too the process operates in the other direction (effects arising from unconscious structures may become conscious and vice versa). This leads us to recognise not only that not everything psychical is consciousness, but that there are no thought processes not in relation—no thought processes, in other words, that are not situational. Hence, also, it makes little sense to speak of any thing either in the conscious or in the unconscious—even an image—rather there are dynamic structures and structural operations: drives, “strange attractors,” perceptory events, procedures of thought. What we call thinking, and what we call an image of consciousness, are in fact transversals—network‐pathways that “correspond” to structural operations just as Freud describes how a “thing” becomes preconscious through becoming connected with the word‐presentations corresponding to it. As Maurice Merleau‐Ponty has argued in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945): “Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them.”21 It is a matter of keeping in mind that neither the Freudian “thing,” nor the “word‐ presentations” corresponding to it, are objects—they operate strictly as situational terms. At the same time, we need to keep in mind that while it cannot be said that there are “word‐presentations” present in the psyche—neither in the unconscious nor the preconscious—nor that there is any thing in the psyche “represented” or “reproduced” by word‐presentations, in the form of a correspondence of referentiality—instead, the “unconscious material” upon which thought‐procedures are said to operate are already tropically structured, as Lacan says, “like a language.”22 The syntax and grammar of “thought”—indifferent to, even if contiguous with, its variant terms—is nevertheless such that we may effectively describe the psychic apparatus as a type of machine made out of words.23 Hence there is “no way to cut beneath language to the thought which language expresses,” as Rorty argues, “no way, as Wittgenstein said, to ‘get between language and its object’”24—supposing, of course, that language has an object (just as “thought” is supposed to have an object), some thing to which it must always refer back for its meaning. But in the absence of such transcendentally supplied meaning, how is it possible to speak of such things as “thought” (or “mind”) unless in terms not of a linguistic or 20 21 22 23 24 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” 142. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) xi. Lacan, “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 20. Cf. Jacques Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 47. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” Consequences of Pragmatism (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982) 99. [49] discursive object but of the mechanisms of a discursive apparatus—in other words, a structural dynamics? According to the schematised view represented by the Wunderblock, the inscription of “mnemonic traces” would thus stand not for an image of consciousness or perception but for a relation of undisclosed events which thus indirectly assume the contours of an agent of inscription—such that this agency “corresponds” not to any thing but to a situation, where a situation defines a structural singularity linked to a generalised structural recursion. What this means is that each perceptory‐mnemonic event remains unique in its particular relation to the network of traces of other events—and is thereby untranslatable—while at the same time being co‐implicated in every other perceptory‐mnemonic (or mnemotechnic) event. This palimpsest‐effect implies that the psychic apparatus is primarily structured around a margin of error or error‐tolerance (the untranslatability, or relative incompatability, of perceptory‐mnemonic events), which programmes the iterability of traces, as the possibility of recursion of otherwise non‐repeating terms. Consequently we must regard the notion of inscription in Freud’s schema (the metaphorics of the written trace) not as an instrument for the transmission, coding or organisation of perception—and by virtue of perception, thought, and the psychic apparatus as a “whole”—even less a metaphor for these things; rather inscription is taken to mean the technē of a generalised discursivity (between structure, signification and what we may term literacy)—what Wittgenstein referred to as operating‐with‐signs. But if we can speak of the psychic apparatus in terms of a technē of inscription at all, it is because of an underwriting complementary relation of the recursive and the singular—which mirrors the relation of the operative/inoperative in the orientation of the repressed and the “attraction” of the unconscious—whose mutually affective relations constitute the psychic apparatus as such. Prague, September, 2005 [50] Towards a Technological‐Poetic Method The term “literature,” presupposing the use of letters, assumes that verbal works of the imagination are transmitted by means of writing and reading. The expression “oral literature” is obviously a contradiction in terms. Yet we live at a time when literacy itself has become so diluted that it can scarcely be evoked as an aesthetic criterion. The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through electrical engineering. A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us—along with its immeasurable riches—snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as an inert acceptance of a fossilised corpus of themes and conventions, but as an organic habit of re‐creating what has been received and is handed on. —Harry Levin, preface to Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales. “We live in an age of science and abundance,” writes Ezra Pound at the beginning of his manual for “studying poetry and good letters,” The ABC of Reading (1934).1 With his attention directed at a certain post‐effect of the transformation of manuscript culture by modern print technology—a transformation whose effects, evinced in the concern to re‐ found a METHOD for reading, span half a millennium—Pound locates a particular technological bias in the organisation and valuation of contemporary modes of literacy. “The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ‘the needs of society,’ or to the conservation of learning.” This technological bias—by which manuscript culture yokes the (manual) reproduction of texts to the act of reading and the “conservation of learning”—subsequently gives way, with the invention of moveable type, to the mechanical reproduction of texts disassociated from any direct mode of literacy, as it had conventionally been understood. As Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan and Donald Theall have pointed out, this transformation was less a consequence of “the needs of society,” as Pound says, than it was a condition of change in the way those needs were recognised. And it is in this conditionality of “the needs of society,” rather than by consequence upon them, that a technological “method” of literacy can be seen to arise.2 In his 1982 study, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word, Ong contends that the invention of moveable type not only radicalised the concept of literacy, as a transformative effect accompanying the move away from manuscript and early print culture, but that it brought about a different mode of consciousness vested in the techics of literacy itself—a technics that more and more, since the time of the Renaissance and the 1 2 Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (London: Routledge, 1934) 3. Cf. Lucien LeFebvre and Henri-Jean Martin, l’Apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1957). [51] later Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe, has come to define a “human condition.” This is what McLuhan, writing in 1962, termed the “Gutenberg effect”— referring to the cultural legacies of William Caxton and the printing press of Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth‐century—as the generalised sign for the invention of “typographic man,” the modern counterpart of homo faber and precursor to the present day, “post‐literate,” homo cyberneticus. “For thousands of years,” Ong recounts, “human beings have been printing designs from various carved surfaces, and since the seventh or eighth century Chinese, Koreans and Japanese have been printing verbal texts, at first from wood blocks engraved in relief. But the crucial development in the global history of printing was the invention of alphabetic letterpress print in fifteenth‐century Europe. Alphabetic writing had broken the word up into spatial equivalents of phonemic units … But the letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur. With alphabetic letterpress it is otherwise. Words are made out of units (types) which pre‐exist as units before the words which they will constitute. Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.”3 Despite the profound consequences print has had in determining the evolution of European, and subsequently global, cultural forms—above all the advent of mechanised reproduction and information technologies—consciousness of these effects has not always evolved contemporaneously with the effects themselves. Indeed, the full implications of the Gutenberg effect waited until the 1950s to begin to be clearly articulated, whether in the theoretical and physical sciences, philosophy, the new “media theory,” or in the arts. Early reactions to the industrialisation of literacy by way of the increasing mechanisation of print technology, often took the form of scepticism or parody, as in Jonathan Swift’s passages dealing with the Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels. One of the implications of the notion of words as things in themselves (as opposed to denoting “things” in the so‐ called real or conceptual worlds) is that the organisation of graphemic units reveals itself, at a certain level, to be arbitrary or even gratuitous—underwritten by nothing but a statistical notion of the permissible and denying any humanistic foundation whatsoever (even if “conditioned” by human outcomes, such as intelligibility and the like). In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift satirises the various misconceptions which arose during the eighteenth century about this “materialist” basis of language, whereby the mechanistics or technology of moveable type was often confused with a reduction of the pragmatic social and semantic dimensions of language, on the one hand, and the elevation of the mechanised word as a new divine logos on the other. Swift’s parody is worth citing at length: We crossed a Walk to the other Part of the Academy, where, as I have already said, the Projectors in speculative Learning resided. The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted Thought never sprung in any other Man’s Head. Every one knew 3 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982) 118. [52] how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down.4 As Pound stresses in the ABC of Reading, it was necessary to discover something like a method for coming to terms with the technologisation of literacy—and it is, to some degree, the continued lack, or avoidance, of such a “method” that causes the palpable absurdities of the Academy of Lagado to preserve themselves in certain areas of knowledge and learning even today, above all in the field of artificial intelligence and its popular reception. There is a residual tendency to confuse the outcomes of so‐called “artificial intelligence” with what we can learn about intelligence from studying the programmability of computers or machines—in other words, what we can learn by looking into the infrastructures (the “nature”) of technology itself, and learning to recognise the implications of technology for the way we view structures of cognition, literacy, or language generally. One of Ong’s key propositions is that it is only by way of the particularisation of print— well in advance of any demonstrative proofs or counter‐proofs of the atomic theory of matter—that any such “technology consciousness” became possible. At least since Aristotle, technology has been set in opposition to the concept of nature, and it is no accident that the co‐implication of technē and physis that follows from the argument of a transformation of consciousness or of “human nature” by way of technology—or which, in other words, situates man’s being as “essentially’ technological—has given rise to a crisis of thought. In his 1953 essay, “Die Frage nach der Technik,”5 Martin Heidegger identifies technology as a “challenge addressed to humanity,” but it is above all as a challenge addressed to philosophy that the technological poses the greatest risks for a way of thinking that seeks to oppose “man” to “mechanisation,” or “mind” to “matter.” We might say that what is at stake here is rather a conception of humanity, where the challenging (Herausforden) resides in our capacity to recognise a human condition which is properly 4 5 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Wordsworth Edition, 1992) III.iv.195f. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993). [53] technological—that is to say, founded upon technē in its most general and yet also fundamental sense—rather than to see in technology a manifestation of a threat of non‐ being, or Angst (the absence of any ego in the machine, and an absence of man reflected by it, as constitutive of a crisis of humanism). Heidegger points back to the pre‐Socratic philosophers, in particular Parmenides and Herakleitos, for a mode of thought more attentive to the terms of such a challenge, yet the very nature of the challenge itself requires that we approach the question of technology not in terms of existing modes of thought, but in terms of the very conditions of thought. It is arguable that, in a certain sense, there is no such thing as pre‐literate man, and that consequently such terms as “post‐literate” are artefactually specific rather than descriptive of a condition. But to say that there is no such thing as pre‐literate man is to go beyond the conception of literacy as a term posed in opposition to “orality” and “oral culture” and identify in it the meaning that Ludwig Wittgenstein assigns to thought itself—which is, “operating with signs.” To operate with signs not only presupposes a capacity to manipulate or even to recognise signs, but to conceive of signs as such. This is indeed a mode of literacy—is in fact the mode of literacy—and it is in the technics of operating, recognising, conceiving that language—and the ostensible meaning of language—obtain. For this reason it makes sense to treat literacy and technology (technē/logos) as effectively synonymous terms insofar as they both treat of a certain materiality or literality of “reading” and “operating with signs.” As André Leroi‐Gouhran’s studies of pre‐hominid “man” in Le Geste et la parole (1964) suggest, the technological view of man does not belong to any stage of post‐evolution: man begins with technology, with the forms of literacy implied by any mode of technology whatsoever. Hence the stone flint and the cerebral cortex co‐evolved in a process of reflexive dependency and development.6 This point is taken up by McLuhan throughout the body of his work, and resolves itself into the assertion that the technological evolution of man tends towards rationality only insofar as its medium tends towards a particular mode of literacy. According to McLuhan, then: only phonetically literate man lives in a “rational” or “pictorial” space. The discovery or invention of such a space that is uniform, continuous and connected was an environmental effect of the phonetic alphabet in the sensory life of ancient Greece. This form of rational or pictorial space is an environment that results from no other form of writing, Hebraic, Arabic, or Chinese.7 This discovery or invention can be said to constitute a “method,” insofar as it constitutes a change of sensory mode, but also to the extent that it can be said to affect itself by way of a tactical “reflexivity” by means of which it is precisely the screening of the segmentation‐ effect of analytic or rational space that gives rise to the procedural illusion of uniformity, continuity and connectivity. McLuhan’s conclusion is that “the extensions of man”— meaning technology in its restricted sense, as prosthesis—“with their ensuing 6 7 André Leroi-Gouhran, Le geste et la parole: Technique et langage (Paris, Albin Michel, 1964). Cf. Bernard Stiegler, La Technique et le temps 1: La Faut d’Épiméthée (Paris: Galilée 1994); trans. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 49. I am indebted for this reference to Arthur Bradley, “No Future? Bernard Stiegler’s Politics of Memory.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1997) 7. [54] environments … are the principle area of manifestation of the evolutionary process.”8 This mediumistic view is at odds with the implications of McLuhan’s argument elsewhere— suffice it to say that what is presented here as “ensuing” takes the form of an after‐effect, being in itself in fact constitutive of a general technological condition of which man himself may be said to be the extension. If Heidegger’s “return” to the transitional work of the pre‐Socratic philosophers can be considered in part a search for such a method vis‐à‐vis accounting for the technological condition of man (as Dasein) as it emerged within philosophical consciousness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then it is likewise a transitional turn that orientates the social anthropology of Ong and McLuhan in their characterisation of typographic man—even if this characterisation remains developmental. The significance of Ong’s and McLuhan’s work resides, for the most part, in identifying within a developmental phase of western society a technological transformation whose structures and organisation are subsequently generalisable. The schematisation of literacy’s evolution by way of print media in Literacy and Orality can thus be read, retrospectively, as a measure of a certain technological literacy—the search for a method of reading and of “coming to terms” with humanity’s technological condition and technological situatedness. In this way, the effect of the advent of moveable type, in Ong’s account, is not that it radicalises this condition but rather that it radicalises a general awareness of this condition, and that—by way almost solely of its inertia (the inertia of industrialisation in Western Europe)—it demanded to be read. Ong’s characterisation of the radical nature of print media’s impact upon the human idea is contiguous with Leroi‐Gouhran’s identification of the impact of tool‐use (of “conceiving” of tools) on the evolution of the cerebral cortex. The human idea is rooted in technology, and insofar as we may point towards punctual moments in the evolution of that idea—moments that could be called transformational or determinate—this would not describe a departure from a prior condition or sequence of conditions, but rather a reiteration of what—in extremis—it “means” not to be human, but to conceive of the human idea. Hence, what is at stake for Ong is not the technological form of print media, but a certain consciousness implicit to its advent—above all in the form of alphabetic letterpress—a consciousness itself which is heavily mediated even, or especially, where it appears most insistent: Like the alphabet, alphabetic letterpress was a nonce invention. The Chinese had had moveable type, but no alphabet, only characters, basically pictographic. Before the mid‐1400s the Koreans and Uigur Turks had both the alphabet and moveable type, but the moveable type bore not separate letters but whole words. Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry, but one which produced the printed book.9 8 9 McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, 19. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 118-9. [55] And yet, while books have been manufactured in this way since the fifteenth century— utilising a technological principle that is implicit, and not merely incipient, to mechanised manufacture as a whole (giving rise, among other things, to the evolution of the Renaissance curanto into the nineteenth century’s mass circulation daily newspaper, and ultimately in the twentieth century to wireless digital communications and hypermedia)— it has only been relatively recently that the profound significance of the Gutenberg effect has been realised. That is, only since the latter half of the nineteenth century has the re‐ abstraction of language into material “units” accomplished anything like a similar revolution in the way we think as it had in the way we manufacture utilities. It was only in 1945, when the science administrator Vannevar Bush published an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “As We May Think,” that what had been called the scientific method began to be more generally applied to the organisation of information.10 During WWII and earlier, mathematicians like Alan Turing and John von Neumann had theorised about the electro‐mechanisation of codes, programmes and retrievable data— Turing taking the key step in recognising the significance of binary coding and of electronic computation (the idea of an electronic brain). Earlier pioneers of mechanical computing, like Charles Babbage and Ada Byron, had developed ways of translating commands into binary machine code, and affecting a typology of machine “literacy,” but it was only with the advent of ostensibly textual machines that the legacy of moveable—re‐ combinable—alphanumeric “type” came into its own. Yet before there were computerised text machines, there were what we might call literary machines. These machines were rather a “proto‐methodology”—like Ong’s production line—for generating sign structures whose basic, standardised “unit” would no longer be the book (as it nevertheless remains in Ong’s schema), not even the word or any lexical figure as such, but a materiality of textual relations based upon the “intelligible” combination and re‐combination of a set of variables: the technē of writing/of literacy itself.11 It is partly for this reason that Pound identified the first “definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism” with the work of the proto‐ sinologist Ernest Fenolosa, specifically his controversial “Essay on the Chinese Written Character.” In Fenolosa, Pound uncovered a method for generalising the technics of graphemic (hieroglyphic) organisation into a structural technology on the basis of which all language—but primarily the abstract constructions of metaphor—might be understood anew: Fenollosa’s essay was perhaps too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking. The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows: 10 11 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-8. The question remains, how does the mechanism of combination account for intelligibility? What guarantees that certain combinations will correspond to the intelligible, while others—the vast majority—do not? [56] In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remote abstraction.12 Pound’s methodological concerns—removed from any concern for the veracity of Fenolosa’s claims—were effectively objectivist or materialist, although still couched in the language of the “image.” Writing contemporaneously with Wittgenstein, Pound argued against metaphysical abstraction in favour of a kind of pragmatism: “By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasises the method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry,’ as distinct from that of ‘philosophic discussion,’ and this is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideographic and abbreviated picture writing.” Focusing on the method of superposition or “assemblage” of graphic marks in the construction of complex metaphors—what is in fact a narrative technē linking together the various parts into a signifying whole—Pound seeks to arrest thought in its movement away from the material towards the abstract and thereby affect a “poetic” consciousness of language in its particularity. What for Ong is located in the transitional thought of moveable alphanumeric type is thus for Pound located in the poetic economy of hieroglyphic assemblage—an economy which McLuhan later identifies in the structural logic of newspaper typography and telemedia. In The ABC of Reading, Pound offers the example of a series of pictorially related figures for “man,” “tree” and “sunrise,” to demonstrate how the contiguity of these figures extends their function beyond mere mimeticism (a picture of a “man,” “tree” or “sunrise”) to a structural discursivity vested in the possible architectonic relation of parts to whole, rather than in external representation—a structural conception of signification that is first developed explicitly in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Général. In Pound’s example, the superposition of the sign for “tree” and the sign for “sun” renders a pictorial abbreviation of the “image” of the sun tangled in the tree’s branches, as at sunrise, demonstrating how metaphoric superposition can provide the discursive basis for metonymic association between this abbreviation and—in this case—a concept of directionality, “East”:  tree à sun i sun tangled in the tree’s branches, as at sunrise, meaning now the East. Similarly, Pound notes that the colour red, for example, is denoted by combining the signs for “rose,” “cherry,” “iron rust” and “flamingo”—operating by way of metonymic extension of the abbreviated pictographs’ metaphoric functions—wherein “red” signifies not only the presumed colour but also a set of structural narratives brought into a relation of equivalence across contiguity. In either case, the issue here may be one of an allegory of 12 Pound, The ABC of Reading, 3-4. [57] language itself, described by a certain “ideographic summation,” or of what McLuhan identifies in terms of a “hieroglyphic” function, as the basic economy by means of which so‐called natural language communicates as technē. For Fenollosa, the hieroglyphic function involves, in this sense, a relation of graphic traits that are “something more than arbitrary symbols, that are based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature.”13 Evolving a similar notion of the metonymic and metaphoric structure as the underwriting economy of dream narratives, Sigmund Freud, in Die Traumdeutung (1900), proposes that: “If we reflect that the means of representation in dreams are principally visual images [Bilden] and not [spoken] words, we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with a [verbal] language. In fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictorial script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs.”14 Freud’s conception of the psyche as structured like a textual apparatus or Aufschreibensystem, extended the logic of “the hieroglyphic graphē” to encompass the overall schematic organisation of the psychic apparatus and not only “individual” mnemonic traces. In this way there are only ever relations, networks of traces, describing something like a palimpsest in which sense is distributed (differentially) across an otherwise uniform field. Like Swift’s random text generator, Gutenberg’s press and the principle of hieroglyphic summation, “meaning” resides, for Freud, not in a prior claim to unique significance, but in differential or probabilistic relations across a uniform field of possibility.15 In “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press” (1953) and later in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan localised these structural effects in the typographical logic of the mass circulation newspaper, as the dominant form at the end of the nineteenth century of the extension of the mechanical‐pictorial arts. For McLuhan, the newspaper’s abrupt juxtaposition of events in “picturesque perspective,” but above all the relativising of informational arrangement by way of disjunctive typographical conventions, brought to the fore the implications of moveable type for a novel way of perceiving space and time. And insofar as modern print media could be seen to avail itself of a poetic “method,” it is above all in the late work of Stéphane Mallarmé that McLuhan identifies such a method as first being realised. It was Mallarmé who “formulated the lessons of the press as a guide for the new 13 14 15 Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, XXII vols. (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1954) XIII.177. Jacques Derrida has pointed out, in Of Grammatology, that the logic of the hieroglyph, despite, or precisely because of its economy of summarisation, assumes to a certain extent the logic of the symbol, which implies “an immediate relationship with the logos in general.” Moreover, “the hieroglyphic graphē is already allegorical,” presupposing an identity, and thus an ideality, whose formal articulation it is considered to mimic, or mime. At the same time, the hieroglyph as non-phonetic writing “breaks the noun apart. It describes relations, not appellations.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976) 15; 237; 9; 26. Mathematicians, linguists and historians of language systems often point out the probabilistic and serial nature of written and verbal sign-clusters. Like all other self-repeating and differential patterns, language involves a seemingly infinite permutability, within certain finite but otherwise varying limits of signifiability, of an even more finite number of in-dividual terms. The 20 volumes and 21,728 pages of the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition) represent an exemplary, but far from exhaustive, selection of intelligible outcomes of the combination and permutation of the 26 letters of the English alphabet. The combination and permutation of these terms themselves involves several further variables—punctuation marks, paperspaces, etcetera—which, while barely increasing the overall number of fundamental linguistic particles, increases the number of possible series containing those particles exponentially. [58] impersonal poetry of suggestion and implication. He saw that the scale of modern reportage and of the mechanical multiplication of messages made personal rhetoric impossible. Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things and events.”16 Mallarmé’s particular interest in the typographical logic of the press can be traced back at least to Le Livre and the conception outlined there of the “ideal book.” This was to be a type of Signatura Rerum, an “open totality” which would depend for its meaning not upon the revelation of a divine logos, but upon the communication of material elements—the “meaning of format”—posed against the “artificial unity that used to be based on the rectilinear measurements of the book.” Necessarily, this presupposed a movement away from a symbolic function of language, towards a poetics of structure, in which the closed totality of the book would give way to “hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships.”17 But it is Mallarmé’s last work, Un coup de dés (jamais n’abolira le hazard), completed just before his death and published in the journal Cosmopolis in 1897, which—according to McLuhan—“illustrates the road he took in the exploitation of all things as gestures of the mind, magically adjusted to the secret powers of being. As a vacuum tube is used to shape and control vast reservoirs of electric power, the artist can manipulate the low current of casual words, rhythms, and resonances to evoke the primal harmonies of existence …”18 That these harmonies are the resonances of a “primal” technological condition, rather than a mystical (or rather metaphysical) one, is exemplified in Un coup de dés in the figuration of chance—where chance itself assumes the role, as it were, of the “master” in the divine game—and in the evocation of a “simultaneous vision of the page.” In the words of Cuban poet Octavio Armand: The poem seems to evoke the theology and science of distant centuries and to anticipate twentieth‐century physics. On the one hand it is impossible not to feel the ancient music of the spheres in the conjunction of musical score and star chart embodied in the poem. On the other hand, the idea of spacing reading so as to accelerate or diminish movement … links the notions of space and time so closely that it fuses them, creating a spacetime for poetry through the simultaneous vision of the page. Finally, Un coup de dés places thought in an orbit very close to Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. Thought fits, or rather falls, in the cage of chance; it is impossible to escape chance, despite an heroic effort to place a limit on infinity. The fundamental phrase, which is the title, “A throw of dice will never abolish chance,” continues until the very last line, “All thought is a roll of dice.” Typography underscores the idea that in essence we are reading a single, irrevocable, interminable, abysmal phrase. Scattered throughout the poem—on its only page—and mounted in the largest type used, the title is foregrounded continuously. The last verse, in the smallest type, occupies the background. This is doubly true in both instances: because of the order of reading and because of the spatial expansion or contraction implicit in working with different types. The throw of dice ends in another throw of dice that is the same one and the same as always. Dice, words, ideas, types run across the page until they are lost in 16 17 18 Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press,” The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, ed. Eugene McNamara (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1969) 11. Cf. Donald Theall, James Joyce’s Techno‐Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Cited in Le “Livre” de Mallarmé, ed. Jacques Scherer (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) 32. McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press,” 11. [59] the mind. Poem of blank spaces, music of silences. We see, read, hear the forms of absence. Verbal phrase and musical phrase tend towards extreme purity: they expand in silence and they express it. … The idea empties in an abyss of infinite possibilities, as does the poem. Poem? Drawing? Score? The poem seems to embody the uncertainty of the throw of dice. It is a genre of genres. Un coup de dés that combines and generates genres.19 Mallarmé’s lingua blanca, as an exploration of typographics and syntactical recombination, anticipates the later, more radical atomisation—or etymisation—of language in Velimir Khlebnikov’s zaum poetics and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The materiality of spacing and interval in Mallarmé’s text—wherein, as Hugh Kenner has said, “words do battle with the ghosts of absent words”—radicalises the effect of writing as a form of “field phenomenon” or constellation‐effect: a flattening out of depth‐of‐field in the simultaneous vision of the page and the typographics of visual intensity, such that the mimēsis of linear evolution of a meaning is broken apart, replaced by a generalised transversality—wherein, as Mallarmé writes, “NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE BUT THE PLACE EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION.”20 Mallarmé’s prototypical “field composition” operates between the static view of the text as inert—a “two‐dimensional” image of a constellation (operating parallel to the field of apprehension, as it were)—and the kinetics of a multidimensional constellation‐effect of signifying intensities across varying spatio‐temporal magnitudes (operating, like Pound’s Chinese hieroglyphs, both along a perpendicular axis of lexical and sublexical organisation, and a parallel axis of syntactic organisation). Khlebnikov made similar claims for the dynamism of textual structure in his 1919 commentaries “On Poetry” and “On Contemporary Poetry,” in terms of subliminal verbal patterning, assemblage, cinematic‐poetic structures and schemata of movement based upon serial (lexical, phonological) combination—insisting, among other things, that even “a misprint can be an artistically valid distortion of a word.”21 Like Joyce, and later Raymond Roussel (Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres) and Francis Ponge (La fabrique du pré), Khlebnikov recognised that “a complex verbal design may be inherent … irrespective of … apprehension and volition.”22 In methodological terms, the implications of Mallarmé’s “simultaneous vision of the page” and Joyce’s “abnihilisation of the etym” for the systematic mechanisation of literate technologies only began to be realised in the 1960s, with the advent of such things as computer‐based hypertext. The term “hypertext” was first coined in the 1960s by Theodor 19 20 21 22 Octavio Armand, Refractions, trans. Carol Maier (New York: Lumen, 1994) 187. A constellation may be thought of as a virtual in which disparate events are said to have been “brought into communication” in time and space—a montage effect by which communication is underwritten and made possible by the absence of any measure of a common, objective present, or “degree zero.” In this sense there are no degrees or planes of a revelation of structural intention, only degrees or planes of constellation. There exists no network or system of signification to render constellation meaningful in and of itself, merely the confabulated appearance of unicity, of a fixed circuit of spatial and temporal variances (a primum mobile)—a schematised, contingent present from which “all other” orientations of time and space take their measure according to the relativity of a generalised anamorphosis. As such, the constellation has nothing to do with the “reality” of its constituting elements or events. The significance of each of these devolves solely upon the “reality” of the constellation itself as a mode of perception. The fact of the constellation, however, is not a virtuality. Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” Language in Literature, ed. Krystina Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987) 23. Jakobson, “Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry,” Language in Literature, 251. [60] Nelson to describe a form of “non‐sequential writing”—adapting the syntactic and semantic structures of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés to the idea of electronically, or rather digitally, interlinked units of text. Nelson’s hypertext—and the larger Xanadu project which Nelson began to elaborate from 1960 onwards as a precursor to the World Wide Web (as conceived in March 1989 by Tim Berners‐Lee)—devolves upon a “method” of literacy implied by any mode of technology whatsoever. Hypertext is not restricted in its meaning to “electronic writing” but is instead a term generalised to cover the whole gamut of interlinked and mutually affective communication “systems” or “technologies.” By realising the radical implications of Turing’s binary computing engines in the “materialisation” of language (codes) as bits of information—that is, by recognising the significance of the shift from analogical modes of language to digital modes—Nelson developed a model of literacy which encompasses both the micro‐scale of sublexical or pre‐linguistic elements and the macro‐scale or “open‐totality” of the textual chaosmos. By generalising the concept of literacy in this way, Nelson’s “hypertext” provided something of a realisation of Turing’s dream of an “electronic brain”—not in the sense that hypertext approximates or mimics intelligence by way of literate technologies, but in the sense in which it situates the idea of intelligence (cognition) on a basis of a generalised technē of literacy. As in Mallarmé’s “poem,” the material, probabilistic structures of signification—that is to say, of intelligibility—require either that all thought is a role of dice or that “Every Thought sends forth one Toss of the Dice.” But unlike Swift’s random text generator, the figure of chance evoked here in the “roll of dice” is linked to a stochastic or combinatorial mechanism—the interrelation of possible outcomes bounded by finite probability (such as we find in moveable alphanumeric type)—where what is foregrounded is not the “content” of a procedural outcome, but the structural relations underwriting any outcome whatsoever. It is important to distinguish, therefore, between the meaning of chance as a structural determinant of possibility in its strict sense, and “mere chance” (as the removal of constraint and diminution of agency). For Mallarmé, the proper meaning of chance resides in the calculus of constraint, and in this sense its “deviations” from so‐called predictability remain rule‐governed—indeed, the deviational or discursive force that can be attributed to chance devolves solely upon an exacerbation of constraint to the point of affecting a crisis in the structure of determination—hence “A THOW OF DICE NEVER WILL ABOLISH CHANCE … NOT EVEN WHEN CAST IN ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES.” Chance, for Mallarmé, remains a condition that a calculus of statistical outcomes cannot exhaust but only ever affirm as a kind of inescapable and encompassing destiny. As Arthur Symons has argued: “Mallarmé was concerned that nothing in the poem [Un coup de dés] be the effect of mere chance, that the articulation of every part with every other part should be complete, each part implying every other part, and that the meaning of the poem should be inseparable from its formal structure.”23 While emphasising the formal, integrational aspect of Mallarmé’s poem, we should not lose sight of its non‐totalising architectonics—the structural vicissitudes that not only draw determinism on to a crisis in its failure to contain the poem’s signifying force, its chance, but which underwrite the poem’s dynamism. This would be the proper meaning of the term poetic method that we find in Pound and McLuhan, and which points 23 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1919 [1899]) 108. [61] not towards some form of mechanical application—such as a technologisation of literacy— but to a way of knowing about the technological condition of literacy. Method is thus a form of discursivity appropriate to the structuration of what literacy is, following from its etymology as methodos or meta‐horos: literally, the path of a change of condition. Prague, September 2005 [62] Possibility & Phenomena What does it mean when we speak of the materiality of language? Let us firstly suppose a literal understanding of this question. An understanding that commences with the idea of literality in its plainest sense and which draws us towards the very fabric of language, the letter, the sign, the gesture, the graphic trait or the verbal utterance—its very matter, its material, but also its mechanisms—that is to say, towards a particular programmatics or procedure of discourse and the fabrication of what we call “meaning.” In posing this question we run a certain risk of reduction to something like a “first principle”: that, at an initial point, a transformation must have occurred—a transformation of a type that would sublimate matter into sense, into the logos of meaning—as though materiality and language were to represent two sides of an aporetic divide. How is such a risk to be overcome or at least neutralised? And what would it mean, in any case, to speak of an aporetic divide between “materiality” and “language”? For language to “occur,” its possibility can only be regarded as being implicit to its material conditions. This usage, “material conditions,” needs to be recognised as entirely other to the concept of “precondition,” by which we would suppose the occurrence of language to be epiphenomenal or metaphysical, or else an addition to the real. This would, in part, be merely a restatement of the mimetic fallacy, that language “represents” something akin to inspired matter—the technē of gesture, writing or speech animated by the “logos” of truth; just as the body is supposedly animated by spirit or mind. The idea of a “precondition” of language essentially subscribes to a demoniacal view of the world, in which an external agency oversees and arbitrates the very possibility of language by setting out the rules of the game and pulling all the strings. And it is for this reason that the history of language, and in particular writing, has so often been posed as issuing from the false universals of myth.1 In contrast to this demoniacal view, what is meant by “condition” here is the sense in which the possibility of language—and indeed possibility in general—is vested, not in some transcendentalised motivating force, but solely in materiality, where materiality is understood to designate the structural underpinnings of what pertains in the world. Just as physical structures are defined by micro‐scale quantum effects or macro‐scale effects of relativity, so too we may speak of a generalised materiality in terms not of “content,” as it were, but of structural states or situations. This would mean that the mechanisms of structure—or what we call technē—are to be regarded as implicit to a conception of 1 Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. III (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953) 274c, et passim. [63] matter, and not descriptive of how matter interacts or is purportedly made to interact. There can be, in fact, no effective distinction between materiality in this sense and its derivation from, and association with, such terms as prāgmata and technē—and it is worth keeping in mind that prāgma in the Greek philosophical tradition (from which the term “pragmatism” likewise derives) was taken to refer not only to a thing (res), matter, circumstance or fact, but also to that which has been done, a deed, or act, as well as to anything necessary or expedient. This fortuitous encounter between matter, circumstance, action and necessity requires us, nonetheless, to account for the sense that something, in language, is thereby undertaken—mirroring the design or intention of something like an ego. The “question of language” in this way is also a question of agency—of what may be imputed in the apparent design of sense (its ἰδέα ἐνέργεια as Aristotle says; the presencing of what presents itself: or φύσει ὄντα; that which produces itself by arising out of itself, as the complementary counterpart of τέχνῃ ὄντα)? To what, we might ask, is the necessity, circumstance, action or indeed “matter” of language due? As though there might be something analogous to Maxwell’s demon operating behind or even within language, in a purely material relation to “matter” that nevertheless remains qualitative (without “preconditions” it nevertheless makes choices)? How does one speak, therefore, of the materiality of language, beyond recourse to a geometry of thought, of reason, of symbolic logic and divine logos? As in Blake: “What immortal hand or eye dare frame this fearful symmetry?” It will been necessary, from the beginning, to have posed our question in terms of the meaning of a condition of possibility—whereby the “pre‐” of any precondition subjecting the idea of language to the agency of a prior intentionality will itself be submitted to the material determination of the possible as such. This would be what Nicholas Rescher calls “the modus operandi of possibility.”2 Rescher’s theory—“the formal systematisation of certain fundamental notions in metaphysics,” namely “the ontology and epistemology of possibility”—is pertinent to our question for, among other reasons, its insistence upon a conceptual basis of possibility, as opposed to a materialist basis, while nevertheless providing a compelling argument to the contrary. This has, in part, to do with the ambiguity of the term “conceptual,” and the vicissitudes to which this term has necessarily been subjected in the wake of Freud’s investigations into the structure of the psyche and the “discovery” of the unconscious. If, as does Freud, we assume for thought a material basis in the unconscious—or in the unconscious operations of primary perception, memory and cognition—then the meaning of “conceptual” assumes a tenor that, while still incompatible with the sense of “objective” (as in, autonomous of any semantic context other than its own facticity), nevertheless can be easily reconciled to the sense of “material” that we have begun to elaborate above. One reason for this is that when Rescher uses the term “conceptual” he already implies a relation to a certain technē—in the sense that possibilia are made. But what does this mean? According to Rescher, the metaphysics of possibility describes the conditions of material, probabilistic outcomes in the world—or actualities (which Rescher considers to be a “sector” of the possible). The sense in which possibility is “quantifiable,” as possibilia, 2 Nicholas Rescher, A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Account of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Pittsburgh: University Of Pittsburgh Press, 1975) xi. [64] implies that world states are affected as possibilities, and hence that possibility—in a material sense—is affective. This is not Rescher’s argument, nevertheless it is implied in such statements as “we must face the implications of a recognition of the contingency of the real.”3 This contingency of the real is linked to a certain necessity of possibility as a condition of the real, and so possibility can be regarded as immanent to the world (viz. philogenetic schemata) in an equivalent sense to its being, in Rescher’s theory, immanent to a world‐view (viz. conceptual or signifying schemata). It is worth quoting Rescher on this point: Because the sphere of altogether mind‐independent reality includes only the actual—and no “unrealised possibilities” can exist within it—it does not follow that what belongs to this sphere belongs to it of necessity. To claim this would be to confuse the necessity of consequence with absolute necessity, because being a consequence of the ex hypothesi actual with a necessity relativised to this actuality is certainly not tantamount to necessity pure and simple. To say that the conception of alternative possibilities is mind‐dependent is not to say that these possibilities are unreal …4 This is earlier qualified by the argument that “the only possibilities for us are those which can be projected in terms of our conceptual scheme”; “our assumptive prospects are limited by the horizons of our conceptual framework”; according to which we might venture to say that, possibility can thus be thought of as situational, on the basis of what Rescher terms an “assumptive conceptualisation construed open‐endedly across‐the‐ board.”5 The relation of possibility to necessity, we come to realise, is vested not in the relativised schema of the actual, but in the assumption of a subject—that is to say, in the assumption of a conceptual schema. This subject, on the one hand, is said to constitute a “reality‐orientated conceptual scheme”—while on the other hand, it describes an aporia of the actual; an aporia that can be approached only by means of “mentalesque acts of assumption and supposition.”6 This subject is of course an hypothesis, whose function is to mediate the relation of the necessary to the possible—in the same way that we might speak of a mediation of meaning and language or signification. But this subject is not merely an axis of ambiguity or “conceptual” vicissitude, rather it describes what we might call a ratio of possibility and the material conditions of what is meant by the term actual: a ratio according to which we can approach the thought of “matter, circumstance, action and necessity” in terms of a signifying condition, or else a condition of language per se, as the meaning of possibility. According to Rescher, possibility itself can be defined schematically in the following terms: 1. dispositional possibilities inherent in the operational potentialities of the real, 2. “merely counterfactual” possibilities involving the hypothetical variation of perfectly real things, and 3 4 5 6 Rescher, A Theory of Possibility, 217. Rescher, A Theory of Possibility, 218. Rescher, A Theory of Possibility, 214-5. Rescher, A Theory of Possibility, 202. [65] 3. purely hypothetical possibilities involving altogether fictional things and states of affairs.7 The tropic relation of these categories (“category 1 is fundamental, … all the variant forms of possibility are, in the final analysis, inherent in the functional potentialities of the real through the mediation of the dispositional capabilities of minds”), coupled with the contiguity of possibility and probability in the actualisation of the real, reveals a curious filiation between “disposition,” “counter‐factual” and “pure hypothesis” which cannot be accounted for in strictly analytical terms—even as the finality or aporia of analysis as such. One of the difficulties here derives from Rescher’s insistence that “objective states of concrete affairs must be categorical, they cannot be hypothetical (or … disjunctive)” and yet, as we have seen, the very disposition of the conceptual subject will have required that possibility—its own possibility above all others—be precisely disjunctive, since the conceptual schema represented by it can designate neither a possibility nor an actuality, but the hypothetical relation of the one to the other. This is what, in psychoanalysis, is meant by the symptomatic character of the subject, linked to necessity in the same way in which the categorical or “factual” is linked to the aporia of the signified or the verifiability of first causes. Let us not forget that it is Rescher himself who alerts us to the contingency of the real, a contingency founded upon the conceptualist notion of mentalistic acts: cognition, thought, language—and as Maurice Merlau‐Ponty warns, “no language detaches itself entirely from the precariousness of the mute forms of expression, nor reabsorbs its own contingency, nor consumes itself to make the things themselves appear.”8 Further, if we locate the agency of the “conceptual scheme” in the real—as the realm of the actual—then the subject, just as it is for Freud and Lacan, is effectively no more than an hypothesis, and so‐called “objective” states of “concrete affairs” (prāgmata) are no longer “categorical” except in the sense that their operations are ostensibly statistical and therefore mechanistic. A certain possibility is thereby “reified” in the phenomenon of mentalistic faculties constitutive of a “conceptual scheme” in whose own mechanism of reflexivity the “birth of meaning,” as Merleau‐Ponty says, “is never finalised,”9 and which belies moreover the technical, materialist basis of any “ontology and epistemology of possibility.” How then, to rephrase our original question, are we to speak of the possibility of language—where language is not linked to possibility as a vehicle of expression (concept, thought or “mental act”), but conditionally—such that we might understand the “materiality of language” as possibility vested in the real or the “actual”? That is to say, as a constitutive technē of possibility. If this is to be the case, then—in distinction to Plato’s insistence upon either physis or technē (ἢ φύσει ἢ τέχνῃ)—what we call a technē of possibility would describe a mutual inherence of the so‐called “conceptual” and “objective,” whereby we define inherence to mean a logic within contingency. This logic within contingency applies not only to the “contingency of the real” but to the system of morphogenetic pathways descriptive of the operations of possibility—e.g. a schematic contingency of signification (language, thought, 7 8 9 Rescher, A Theory of Possibility, 203. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 84ff. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, 52. [66] cognition)—where possibility would remain contiguous with a calculus of structural vicissitude. And if the contingency of the real, as we have already suggested, is inherent to the necessity of possibility as a condition of the real, then possibility can also be regarded as immanent to the world (philogenetic schemata) in a contiguous sense to its being, in Rescher’s theory, immanent to a world‐view (conceptual schemata). This vicissitude of equivalence and contiguity in the relation of these schemata implies something like a situational agency—an agency or mechanism (technē) in which, through which or by which a relational, morphogenetic schema obtains in the form of an “embodied intention,” but for which intention remains tropological, an “actualisation procedure” for a purely probabilistic hypothesis. That is to say, the co‐implication of the so‐called objective in the conceptual schema, and vice versa, requires us to account for how possibility affects itself “in the world,” just as one might say “in the mind,” in accordance with determined yet unpredictable outcomes of the type we associate with the structure of matter (molecular, genetic, and so on). Insofar as the “real” constitutes an object, it does so as the “object” of a probabilistic hypothesis, that is to say an “embodied intention”—such as we see in the otherwise nonsensical string of three billion DNA “letters” that comprise the human genome—where intention, as a conceptual schema, designates nothing other than the projective movement or inertia of possibility as such (e.g. from DNA strand to human “outcome”). In Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenological interpretation, we find a counterpart to Rescher’s schematised view in the orientation of language vis‐à‐vis what we might call the phenomenality of the possible. For Merleau‐Ponty this orientation is mediated by an axial relation of synchrony and diachrony—specifically in terms of Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of parole and langue, but equally by implication Roman Jakobson’s paradigmatic‐ syntagmatic schema of metaphor and metonymy,10 or for that matter Rescher’s conceptual and objective schemata. According to Merleau‐Ponty, the conceptual (subjective) schema is determinate of the actualisation of possibility only by virtue of a degree of fortuitousness, whereby—for the subject—the figure of possibility assumes an image, which is the image of a cogito or of thought reflecting upon itself. “At first,” Merleau‐Ponty argues, “the ‘subjective’ point of view envelops the ‘objective’ point of view; synchrony envelops diachrony.” This takes the form of ”a series of fortuitous linguistic facts brought out by the objective perspective” that has been “incorporated in a language which was at every moment a system endowed with an inner logic.” This inner logic—a logic within contingency—then assumes a complementary function that appears to describe a counter‐movement: In another connection, diachrony envelops synchrony. If language allows random elements … the system of synchrony must at every moment allow fissures where brute events can insert themselves.11 10 11 Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987) 109. Cf. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) 58ff. Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” 86. [67] The axial relation of randomness to “embodied intention” acquires for Merleau‐Ponty the additional sense of “language as a moving equilibrium”—a discursive apparatus of inertia, entropy and negentropy or re‐differentiation (Maxwell’s demon) such that “possibility” can here be thought in terms of a structural recursion or détournement in the finitude or finality of the so‐called actual. “We must understand,” therefore, “that since synchrony is only a cross‐section of diachrony, the system realised in it never exists wholly in act but always involves latent or incubating change.”12 Interpolating into Merleau‐Ponty’s text, by way of our analysis of Rescher, we might go further and suggest that in this synchronic‐diachronic axis we encounter an expression of structural complementarity such that, in addition to a contiguous or cross‐sectional relation, each figure (synchrony, diachrony) turns—or articulates a détournement—towards the other, i.e. towards the complement and its complementary event‐state. That this turn is also a recursion leads us to attribute to possibility a serial structure “detached,” as it were, from any actualising event—since, while the complementarily‐inherent situation of its terms may be said to be a priori relational, it is nonetheless characterised by a movement of differentiation and détournement that might otherwise be thought in terms of a clinamen, a swerving or turning away from actualisation in the very event of a becoming‐actual. It is by means of this clinamen that the possible marks out an itinerary between closure and recursive delimitation: such that even if, as the Stoics had argued, whether large or small the possibilities available in the world are finite and therefore the field of possibility is closed, this closure is itself nonetheless programmed by the structural limits of a recursion that opens out towards a virtual infinity. Being not an object, but a set of structural relations, it makes no sense to speak of an empirical limit to possibility in the way that Wittgenstein speaks of the empirical finitude of the number of “objects” in the world, and hence too of propositions—depending, of course, on how we choose to define object, world or proposition.13 In this way possibility preserves itself as precisely that which cannot be said to belong to one schema or another, conceptual‐objective, but which is the condition for any affective schema whatsoever—that is to say, for anything like an agency or embodied intention. If then we are to speak of the “materiality of language”—in the literalised sense of matter, circumstance, action and necessity—we must ask how action, agency and actuality coalesce in the figure or trope of possibility as a mechanism of latent or incubating change. That is to say, as a mechanism of structural vicissitude. And if possibility is never “composed of” absolutely univocal meanings, this is doubly true of any conceptual schema realised by way of a supposed “actuality”—a realisation in which meaning is only said to inhere to the extent that it is “applied” to the real—since this actuality, situated by way of a mediating agency whose procedures remain indifferent to it, is merely a residual aspect of the possible. Yet can we speak, therefore, of possibility “itself” constituting an agency whose materiality in turn would determine the affectivity of meaning as something applied to the real—that is, contiguous with it, in the recursion of the possible whose uncertain aspect it is? Prague, October, 2005 12 13 Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” 87. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. C.K. Ogden, intro. Bertram Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922) 5.5561. [68] Affective Intelligence & the Human Hypothesis* What would it mean if machines could think? In Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction version of the then‐future and now recent‐past, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL—an Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer possessing a highly advanced “artificial intelligence”—murders the human crew of a spaceship on a mission to Jupiter, a mission somehow linked to the discovery, on the Earth’s moon, of a form of cosmic (and only nominally artificial) intelligence—advanced beyond human understanding—in the shape of a sinister black monolith. While the film’s premise remains somewhat exotic, it nevertheless raises important questions about so‐ called artificial, cosmic and human intelligence, and it does so both in metaphysical and concrete terms, the latter to do primarily with the idea of computability and machines. In consultation with scientists in universities, industry, and at NASA, Clark and Kubrick sought to design their fictional scenario so as to be both plausible and visionary: ”Every detail,” we are told, “from the design of the spaceship, the timing of the mission and the technical lingo to the typography on the computer screens and the space stewardesses’ hats … was carefully considered in light of the then‐current technology and informed predictions.”1 Since that time, several of the characteristics of the HAL 9000 computer have found there way into scientific experimentation and practical application in areas such as the development of chess‐playing software, optics, text to speech synthesis, speech recognition, artificial language acquisition, and automatic speech reading. Nevertheless, agreement on the meaning of general intelligence, let alone the idea of “artificial intelligence,” remains as much a part of the future today as it was at the time of HAL’s conception. The historical inspiration for HAL and the vast main‐frame machines that dominated computing up until the advent of microprocessors and the software revolution in the 1970s, was the Bletchley Park COLOSSUS—Britain’s secret code‐breaking machine designed and built by Alan Turing along with a team of mathematicians and engineers for the purpose of deciphering the war‐time transmissions of the German ENIGMA encryption machines. And while Turing by the 1950s was already envisaging the possibility of constructing an “electronic brain,” along similar lines to the COLLOSUS, by the time 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, computing intelligence had only progressed to the point where programmes like Tom Evans’s ANALOGY were able to * 1 Parts of this text previously appeared in the journal Ctheory, “1000 Days of Theory” (November, 2005): www.ctheory.net. David G. Stork, “The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001,”HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, ed. D.G. Stork (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) 2. [69] calculate such things as automated analogies (“figure A is to figure B as C is to …”), while other programmes like ELIZA sought, in a curious reprise of the “Turing test,” to mimic a Rogerian therapist: “In limited dialogues it convinced naïve users that they were conversing with a real person.”2 In Kubrick’s film, the omnipresent HAL not only evinces language comprehension and an otherwise high degree of computative ability, it is also accorded proficiency at both acoustic speech recognition and speech reading, as well as quasi‐human capacities of visual recognition (or what very tentatively might be called “perception”), emotional response, and general intelligence. In short HAL is accorded literacy in the sense of being able to analyse and “produce” images of both its external and “cognitive” worlds. But HAL is, of course, barely an hypothesis. As computer scientists like Marvin Minsky and Murray Campbell have demonstrated, the actual science of constructing an HAL 9000 computer remains “science fiction” due, in large part, to the lack of an effective understanding of what it is that constitutes general intelligence—or indeed, any agreement on what it means when we speak of “intelligence.” The field of “artificial intelligence” (AI), founded at the now famous Dartmouth conference in 1956 by Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and others,3 has in certain important respects progressed little beyond the foundational hypothesis of “machine intelligence” initially conceived of by Turing as a type of binary calculator in the 1930s and whose design logic underlay the prototype of one of the first “actual” computers—the ACE, or Automatic Computing Engine—built at the National Physics Laboratory in London shortly after WWII. In a well‐known article entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), Turing considered the question of what it would mean for a machine to be intelligent in terms, not of something that might be called machine intelligence or which might be investigated—as an object of knowledge—by way of empirical science, but of what it means when we ask questions about intelligence as such and pose these questions in terms of the human‐machine problem. In this sense, Turing was reformulating the challenge to physics posed by Niels Bohr in terms of the “problem” of the observer in relation to observed physical (even virtual) systems. “I propose,” writes Turing, “to consider the question ‘Can machines think?’” But this reconsideration, Turing explains, “should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think.’”4 In order to arrive at such definitions, Turing proposed what he termed “the imitation game,” otherwise known as the Turing test, which sets out criteria for determining if a computer programme may in some way be perceived as having “intelligence.” According to Turing, “the new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game.’ It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end 2 3 4 Stork, “The Best-Informed Dream,” 9. Cf. John McCarthy, et al., Dartmouth AI Project Proposal, 31 August, 1955: “The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.” Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind LIX.236 (1950): 433-460. [70] of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A.’ The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.” In order to complicate matters, it is the role of the male respondent to deceive the interrogator, while it is the woman’s role to convince. The premise of the game is that “a successful imitation of a woman’s responses by a man would not prove anything. Gender depended on facts which were not reducible to sequences of symbols.” Turing wished to argue instead that “such an imitation principle did apply to ‘thinking’ or ‘intelligence.’ If a computer, on the basis of its written replies to questions, could not be distinguished from a human respondent, then ‘fair play’ would oblige one to say that it must be thinking.”5 Consequently, where the initial “imitation game” devolved upon a determination of gender‐symbolisation, the Turing Test involves a situation in which “a machine takes the place of (A) in this game”—such that a human being and a digital computer are interrogated under conditions where the interrogator does not know which is which, the communication being entirely by means of electronic text messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish between the human and the computer on the basis of their relative responses, any more than in the game involving the male and female respondents, then it would not be unreasonable to consider the computer as being “intelligent.” In other words, according to Turing’s proposition, a computer‐ respondent is “intelligent” if the human subject is able to be convinced that its respondent is, like the interrogator, also a human being, and not a machine. The negative definition here proceeds on the basis that neither machine nor human, within the parameters of the game, can clearly be distinguished from the other on the basis of assumptions about intelligence and behaviour. As a consequence, Turing effectively locates “intelligence” as a relativistic interface phenomenon, rooted in the simulation of any given criteria of intelligence measured by the effectiveness of the dialogic illusion—something which has profound implications for how we may then proceed to define “machine,” “thought,” or even “intelligence.” In Turing’s view, it is not so much machines themselves but the states of machines that can be regarded as analogous to “states of mind.” Such states, it was argued, could be mechanically explained in terms of computational processes performed on symbols, including the symbolic representations of discrete states. In other words, Turing’s definition of intelligence is an operational one: “The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”6 One of the many implications of Turing’s “test” hypothesis is that intelligence, as something determinate, is regarded as existing (only) insofar as it is recognisable—per se—or insofar as we attach a form of belief to it—in precisely the same way as we attach belief to meaning or to semantic structures. The two—intelligence and meaning—are, for Turing, co‐implicated the moment we step beyond “computability” into the speculative realm of universal intelligence, where computability requires there to be an act of recognition (something cannot be computable or incomputable if it cannot first be 5 6 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983) 415. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 460. [71] formulated as a problem). Hence, for Turing, universal intelligence as a concept simply has no meaning other than in terms of a simulation of existing (possible) intellectional attributes. Therefore, if a machine is capable of simulating the attributes of what we establish intelligence to be—either for us or in general—then, for all intents and purposes, the machine is “intelligent.” Or to put it another way, the strictures of verification which we might otherwise wish to apply to an object of scientific enquiry can only extend as far as our method of verification—which, as Turing’s hypothesis points out, is both extremely rudimentary and indeterminately complex. In a sense, we should be surprised if the Turing test did not elicit signs of intelligence in this way. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that—above all—Turing’s scenario only pertains to the testing of (an absent, hidden or hypostatised) intelligence, and not yet to what we might assume to be the deduced procedures of intelligence (as we might say “procedures of thought”), assuming that there is such a thing, or to the promise of interactivity. That is to say, intelligence according to this or any other test hypothesis remains interpretive in essence. And just as laboratory chimpanzees and school children learn to ape various procedures and methodologies for passing the minimal requirements, or meeting the minimal expectations of their examiners on a routine basis (“the child‐ programme and the education process”), then the “simulated” intelligence of a machine will not, in effect, have differed at all from the affective intelligence we commonly encounter in any test scenario. As we know from the historical effort to determine and justify what are blithely referred to as intelligence quotients, how one tests overwhelmingly determines the profile or type of results one obtains. Taken another way, the Turing test might be considered as a reformulation of Wittgenstein’s dictum that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.”7 In this case, the limits of my capacity to imagine, test or recognise “intelligence” marks the limits of what intelligence must effectively mean for me. In other words, an idea of intelligence can only extend as far as the horizon of intellection to which it is attached. Put simply, Turing’s hypothesis denies that there is any such “thing”—in an objective, verifiable sense—that can be called intelligence, which is not already determined by ideas of language, limit and world, for example. And let us not forget, in Turing’s scenario the machine is programmed to respond in a manner that can, at least in principle, be subjected to the analyst’s judgement—such that the problem can always be restated as: if nothing responds to my questions, does it mean there’s nothing there? Henceforth we might say that the analyst here represents a “colophon of doubt,” as Jacques Lacan says, and in the suspension of judgement corresponding to the test’s suspension of verifiability we may identify something like a crisis in subjectivity—that is to say, of a Cartesian subjectivity, in which experience is reduced to a single point of “inaugural certainty” vis‐à‐vis an implied intelligence of the order of cogito ergo sum. “Descartes tells us,” we are reminded by Lacan, that “By virtue of the fact that I doubt, I am sure that I think, and … by virtue of thinking, I am.”8 7 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. C.K. Ogden, intro. Bertram Russell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922) 5.6. Jacques Lacan, “Of the Subject of Certainty,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1998) 35. Cf. Jacques Lacan, “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or On the Nature of Language,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954‐1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 294‐308. [72] This leads us to another dilemma identified in Turing’s hypothesis, and this has to do with a dependence upon the binary organisation of true/false postulates and the assumption that statements can describe or communicate truth‐values. Implicated in the game of identifying truth and falsehood (by way of the mediated “virtuality” of an interlocutor whose truth/falsehood claims are “intentionalised” in order to be misleading, arbitrary, beguiling and so on) is the assumed possibility of identifying intelligence or unintelligence as such, an activity that ultimately comes to rest upon a notion of “plausibility,” the structure of “attestation” and the “game of witness,” as an extension of, or counterpart to, the play of counter‐interrogation. Increasingly it is in terms of what we might call the inhibitory reflex—or the structural detour that Freud calls “repression”—that the implications of intelligence here can be regarded as “manifesting” themselves even, or precisely, where they appear to be most dissimulated, rather than as the (inaccessible) object of verification, judgement or attestation. What Turing’s test teaches us, or should teach us, is that it is not in the content of the messages transmitted between the analyst‐ interrogator and the so‐called test subjects (A and B; X or Y) that constitute a measure of intelligence—but the procedural logic of the test itself (as a conjectural science of the subject). In other words, the binary vicissitude, the détournement of verifiability, and the artifice of intellection, which—in accordance with this logic—always assumes the form of a rebus or symptom. The mirroring‐effect of Turing’s test—by relocating the analyst as the subject in a Pavlovian experiment of conditioned responses—suggests that this symptom already points towards a general rupture in the epistemological field: the rupture or gap implied by the Freudian unconscious (the gap, as Lacan reminds us, in which the “subject” is constituted as subject). To a certain extent, and rather despite himself, Turing develops the implications of this point in an earlier investigation of machine intelligence, characterised by an hypothesis about metonymic recursion: a process of self‐substitution and what we might call inflationary or excessive “containment.” This hypothesis is called the Turing machine. In a 1936 article entitled “On Computable Numbers,” Turing proposed an hypothetical universal calculating machine (or universal Turing machine) capable, in principle, of imitating any and all other calculating machines, including all other “Turing machines.”9 That is to say, the theoretical apparatus called a universal Turing machine is conceived as being capable of “simulating” all possible Turing machines by means of a programmatics in which computing is linked to a general recursiveness (known as the Church‐Turing thesis): although today the Turing machine hypothesis has been extended into discussions of stochastic and quantum computing and computability. Being simulatory, the universal Turing machine can be said to function on the basis of a certain illusionism, and it is the possibility of such an illusionary interface between the universal machine and “all other possible machines” (whether Turing, stochastic or quantum “machines”) that provides for an understanding of what is termed intelligibility. For Turing, intelligence, as an effect of recursivity, is linked to symbolisation—or representability—and it is a key feature of the Turing machine that it is both capable of producing symbols and of scanning, or reading, and analysing them. In other words, the 9 Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2.42 (1936): 230-265. [73] Turing machine operates on the basis of a type of literate technology, capable of not only affecting but of also producing “interpretations.” In Turing’s original proposal, the machine’s function is hypothesised according to a strict set of procedures, of writing, reading—and erasing—binary “marks” (1 or a blank) on a strip of ticker tape. The “markings” on the ticker tape are used to instruct the scanner to either remain stationary or to move left or right, and to inscribe new marks (or erase existing ones)—with the scanner moving left or right only one mark (or set of marks) at a time and then halting. At the end of each movement, the machine enters a different configuration, depending upon the “set of instructions” encoded in the marks on the ticker tape. In this way, the machine is said to effect “acts of recognition.” But to speak of acts of recognition presupposes an act of representation, by which the machine is somehow able to represent to itself—is able to represent itself or take itself into account—in order that recognition not remain a “merely figurative” term. In other words, this recognition—if it is to be a basis of “intelligence”—needs to be literalised, in the sense that the machine is able to take into account—and to account for—the process of recognition itself (scanning, inscription, erasure). Yet how can we make sense of such a demand? We might say that, in the process of inscription and erasure (and in the binary relation of these procedures), the machine effects to produce what can be called an image. This image is at once distinct from the calculus represented by the individual marks left on the ticker tape, and affective of a calculus of recognition (apprehension, intellection) that already resembles a primitive form of “cognitive mapping.” Further, the machine’s capacity to produce images is limited only by the material conditions upon which its machinery depends, and its process of discursive production continues without concern or need of a “subject.” Yet although the machine at every point affects the conditions of recognition, we cannot say that there is an “ego” in the machine—something hidden inside the automaton, like the dwarf in Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess‐playing “Turk” (1769)— which could magically explain away a phenomenon we risk calling intelligence. In the absence of an ego by which it might be “raised to consciousness,” this image remains barely a figure—a moment of inertia between material “states” (of inscription/erasure) whose qualitative difference it remains as the only legible sign. The question here, however, is not at what point or in what pseudo‐subjective configuration inertia can be “made to” signify—in the form of an image or the difference of inscription and erasure—but rather what it means to speak of a mechanism of apprehension at all in the absence of an ego, or more precisely of a determinate subjectivity, and what it consequently means to speak of a mechanism “productive “ of images. That is to say, of potential “signs.” For it is clear that this machine is not merely an agent of transmission, but also of a certain metaphoros or translatio. For the image, after all, bears no relation to any assumed object as an object of apprehension, or of intellection. The image itself is a “virtual,” and in its virtuality resides the meaning of what Turing refers to as an act of recognition. Science, whose arbitration, if not agency, is always evoked at moments like these, provides us with various explanatory models for mechanical forms of recognition, if not (yet) for intelligence as such. Yet science, too, as Turing’s test and Kubrick’s HAL for different reasons imply, is to a certain extent vested in what, without risk of provocation, [74] we may call the “imaginary.” The meaning of such things as intelligence, or perception even, remains something that science must firstly evoke before it is able to invoked it as a paradigm or principle—that is to say, as a scientific principle. We always run the risk, as science fiction consistently reveals, of becoming fascinated by “scientific” affects in place of an actual understanding of the terms of the problem at hand—a fascination which is, at root, a blindness already at work within the epistemology of scientific discourse itself. And it is on this level—the level of the limits of scientific method, that Turing’s test remains somehow controversial, and not in the claims it makes, or is made to make, for a “definition” of intelligence. Even today, when we are surrounded by a new species of automata, from robots to RNAi—the seemingly ubiquitous legacy of HAL, we might say—there is no reason for supposing that this progeny of ours sees in us what we ourselves might wish to see, so to speak, by way of it. An image, that is, of our own idea of invention, the very technē of reason, both recognisable and, in a sense, affecting an act of recognition. An image, that is to say, of its true paternity, in the very image of reason itself. But this would already be to erase the meaning of recognition presupposed in what is commonly understood by the term “intelligence,” and indeed by what is meant by reason, or an image—since recognition of this order is merely analogical, and belongs to the thinking of man as presumptive artifex maximus. Even if, on a certain practical level, we are able to speak today of advanced mechanised or digital optics, imaging systems, infrared tracking, emotion detection and so on—such technics as provide us with quantitative means of describing such things as “pattern recognition” and other more or less comprehensive forms of technical literacy, if not of technical comprehension—we are still unable to do more than locate intelligence in terms of a structural affectivity. While the pervasiveness of such things as systems of surveillance render the more or less uncritical notion that machines are able to see or even perceive increasingly commonplace—by seeing and perceiving we in fact mean the operations of computing programmes in translating optical phenomena into analysable digital code or information (edge and motion detection, face tracking, scene analysis, and so on). Hence one speaks of image “recognition,” or “scanning,” or “computer literacy.” But this impression that machines perceive in an analogous manner to human beings, for instance, leads—among many other things—to notions as that machines are also capable of “making decisions” based on these perceptions: decisions which are in fact based on operations whose appearance is otherwise analytical but which we know to be “determined” in advance by structural protocols. That is to say, based upon affectiveness just as the idea of recognition remains largely based upon a pathetic fallacy: the wish that our inventions will come, like Frankenstein’s “monster,” not only to see like us, but to see something in us. Could this be the meaning of intelligence? In truth, there is little reason not to accept that a machine, as analytically affective in a manner that is situationally dependent, may be capable of “recognising” what are called pattern formations and, as in chess computers like IBM’s Deep Blue, being able to transpose the unfamiliar into a recombination of “familiar” scenarios already stored in a database or “electronic memory.” Its capacity to do so would presumably be limited only by the nature of any given programme and the empirical (genetic) limitations set down by its particular manufacture. By adding new scenarios or configurations of scenarios to its [75] database the machine may thus said to “learn.” Its operations might then be considered as becoming more subtle and complex in more than merely a statistical sense. It may even be said to “invent” scenarios of its own, so as to effect a type of experimentality: to take itself, as we say, into account, or to function auto‐poietically. And yet at precisely this point, the machine’s operations become increasingly imaginary, as both the aporia and interval of an inscription‐erasure whose binary coordinates are taken as describing a ratio of thought. Be this as it may, each of these operations, framed by algorithms and computing protocols (case‐based, rule‐based, or connectionist), remain materially quantitative. To speak, with regards to the machine, of “qualitative judgement” is to metaphorise a set of heuristic, quantitative relations. But what is qualitative judgement? In the Turing test hypothesis, where is the qualitative judgement about intelligence located? Is it the analyst, for example, who makes the judgement or is it the analyst (the very condition of the analyst as the possessor of agency, instrumental intelligence, and therefore—why not?— humanity) who becomes a subject of being‐judged, or rather of being placed in question (not by an ego, but simply by a conspiracy of protocols)? And if it is impossible to speak to the intelligence question in any qualitative sense, is it even possible to know which one of the variables in the test equation represents the machine, and which the human, or to know the difference? And so we move imperceptibly from a machine hypothesis to a human one. Indeed, it would be to overlook the glaringly obvious not to realise that Turing’s hypothesis is itself a kind of machine, and that it is an actual machine and not simply a science fiction, whose operations do not simply pose the question of whether or not a machine can be intelligent, so much as they put intelligence itself into question, and with it the very meaning of what we call man. Prague, October, 2005 [76] Language & the Cybernetic Mind Cybernetics, the science of systems of control and communications in animals and machines, is founded—as the etymology of the term readily implies—upon a concept of navigation, of steering a path through shifting terrains, of reading the signs. In the cybernetic view, everything in the world of experience is relational, and terms like mind, language and meaning are taken as fundamentally descriptive of the underlying structural dynamics by which our experience of the world is realised. This view, which is discursive in essence, thus defines the “real”—or phenomena (percepts, events, data, injunctions, descriptions, etc.)—as series of integrated, recursive, differential “systems.” It is one of the basic premises of cybernetics, however, that when we speak of systems we are in fact using a metaphor for what remains, in effect, a type of epistemology (and that different systems represent differing, and often incompatible, epistemologies) such that at no point are descriptions of the real exempt from the self‐validating character of all epistemologies. The concern of cybernetics, then, is not with the presumed substance of any particular “system,” but with the structurality of systems in general, and above all the structurality of differential relations between and across systems—which is also to say, between and across different epistemologies. 1 In a lecture presented in August 1968 to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, Gregory Bateson traced the modern conception of cybernetics back to the “Copernican Revolution” of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (1809) and the founding of comparative psychology.1 Lamarck’s signal achievement, according to Bateson, had been in overturning the order of the great chain of being (organised downwards from cosmic “mind” to “base matter”) such that mind itself suddenly became regarded as something requiring explanation in terms of material processes—in other words, that matter is integral to what mind is—and that “mental processes must always have physical representation.” Hence, “the complexity of the nervous system,” for example, is said to be “related to the complexity of mind,”2 the latter thus seen to be “conditioned” by the former. 1 2 Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind (St Albins: Paladin, 1973) 402-14. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” 403-4. [77] Whatever the limitations of Lamarck’s evolutionary principles (based upon environmental adaptation and inherited characteristics), the implications of this overturning of the existing causal schema continues to place in question such epistemological dichotomies as mind‐body and the assumptions of unilateral causation— and this applies equally to the Aristotelean vitalism that had, in one form or another, characterised the notion of a cosmic mind “by endowing living systems with a non‐ material purposeful driving component that attained expression through the realisation of their forms.”3 Based upon material heterogeneity, the Lamarckian concept of mind thus suggests a “pattern of relationships”—from the complex to the trivial—as both structuring and determinate of the “mental” nature of substance. This prompts Bateson to ask, what sort of complexity entails mind? One of the consequences of Lamarck’s epistemology of living systems is that, rather than considering the world and its constituents as being organised according to a hypotactic code of descent from the highest to the lowest, mind to matter, we are led to consider “world” as describing sets of complex systems of a general kind, tending towards specific states that remain, nonetheless, in structural communication within and across global environments (in modal logic, we might speak of “possible worlds”). Meanwhile, the advent in the twentieth century of cybernetics, systems theory, and information theory, has provided us with a formal basis for supposing that wherever we encounter a certain degree or type of complexity, “we are dealing with mental phenomena,” as Bateson says. “It’s as materialistic as that.”4 On this basis the interaction and co‐implication of such “complex systems” are said to posses characteristics of mind—that is to say, they are “descriptive” of a mental schema— the complexity of which nonetheless devolves upon the basis of certain elementary operations. These operations may be understood in terms of relations across difference, whose basic unit is “a difference which makes a difference.”5 In quantitative terms, the fundamental conventional unit of difference is the binary, such as we find in probability theory or in the inscriptions of electrical charge—designated by zeroes and ones— characteristic of electronic digital computing. For Bateson, the quantitative value of zero is in itself productive of what we might call structural meanings or implications, not only in that it orientates the ratio of binary terms around a gradient of values (zero to 1, for example)—or that, as for Frege, it underwrites the very concept of number as an n+1 series characterised, in the first place, by the numerical value of the set of no elements, being 1 (such that we might say 1 always operates in the place of zero)—but that, through the instigation of causal‐difference, it “functions” as the degree zero of change: “Zero is different from one, and because zero is different from one, zero can be a cause of the psychological world, the world of communication.”6 By emphasising the structurally “substantive” value of zero within the binary configuration, Bateson attempts to demonstrate that potentiality and readiness for change (i.e. “difference which occurs across time”) is already built into any system, and that consequently there are no homogenous systems. In this way, to speak of a “zero” of 3 4 5 6 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (Boston: Reidal, 1979) 74. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” 404. Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 428. Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference,” 427. [78] difference or of change would be to speak of a certain proto‐potentiality, just as to speak of a “system” is to speak not of a closed entity but of networks of communication (a term that yet requires definition). It is for this reason that the binary relation does not describe a closed dichotomy but what we might call a tropic or discursive mechanism, wherein each value is co‐implicated or subtended, in a perpetual state of turning towards the other. The example most often employed in cybernetics to illustrate this tropism is that of the “self‐correcting mechanism.” A self‐correcting mechanism is what, within an organised “system,” always assumes—with regard to both dissipation (uniformity) and deviation from the norm—the form of a counter‐tendency within a binary circuit, such that its switching operations (vacillation) are self‐perpetuating (and hence self‐validating) within the limits described by the law of entropy. That is to say, its operations always assume the form of a structural vicissitude or ambivalence. Such examples assume their full sense of novelty, however, only in consequence of Lamarck’s reversioning of the mind‐body dualism that had characterised Cartesian mechanistics and its Platonic antecedents. It is in this context that Bateson cites an example of a like reversioning of mechanistics in the cybernetic mode, drawn from an essay sent by Russel Wallace to Charles Darwin in the mid‐nineteenth century, in which Wallace announced his own discovery of natural selection contemporaneous with (but independent of) Darwin’s. In describing the “struggle for existence,” Wallace employed a machine analogy based upon the binary principles we have outlined above: The action of this principle [struggle for existence] is exactly like that of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident’ and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure to follow.7 As Bateson points out, self‐correcting systems are basically conservative of something—in structural terms they seek to conserve difference against the encroachments of entropy or static inertia. Difference here stands for what might be termed a dynamic interval, and it is important to keep in mind that when cyberneticists speak of a “status quo,” what is intended is a form of dynamic equilibrium or constant lability. Without difference in this sense, there can be no balance, only uniformity—and with uniformity there is only stasis. This is what distinguishes the concept of self‐regulating mechanisms from such things as the laissez‐faire conception of market economics, which claims a virtue in the abolition of structural constraint. According to the cybernetic view, however, the abolition of constraint results merely in the reduction of dynamism, and the rigidification of the system under the effects of entropy, homogeneity or monopolism. The conjurations of Maxwell’s demon—a miraculous and entirely hypothetical factotum—is in many ways analogous to the caprice of wanting an unregulated system and preserving a structural dynamism at the same time, by smuggling regulation in by the back door, but only to the point that it maintains the appearance of a heterogeneous system. In Maxwell’s demon we find a counterpart to the “governor” employed in mechanistics (e.g. a homeostat mechanism) which assumes the role of regulating agent within the 7 Cited in Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” 404. [79] system to which it itself belongs. The integration of the governing agent as part of the system over which it governs, so to speak, describes a structural recursion reminiscent of those set‐theory paradoxes of Whitehead, Russell and Frege—and it is this structural recursion that, above and beyond any simplistic conception of “agency,” can be said to be productive of differences in the manner of a perpetual, metonymic forethrow—or of what is called auto‐poiesis. In their 1979 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coin the phrase “autopoietic machines” to describe a similar process of mechanised self‐regulation and autoproduction. In cybernetics the term autopoietic refers to machines organised as a network of processes of production and transformation, which thereby maintain “constant, or within a limited range of values, some of their variables.” This network gives rise to components which, through their interactions and transformations, regenerate and in turn realise the network of processes that produced them—processes analogous to the syntagmantic and paradigmatic operations of metonymy and metaphor, for example. At the same time these components constitute the network itself as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the “topological domain of its realisation.”8 In other words, the components of autopoietic machines generate recursively, by means of their interaction, the “same” network of processes by which they themselves are produced. If we think of this in tropological or linguistic terms, and consider the way in which metonymy describes a form of contiguity, across metaphoric equivalence, then it would be possible to arrive at a similarly auto‐poietic (or techno‐poietic) conception of agency founded upon a radically binary system of both and neither—in other words, of a perpetual switching mechanism or tropos operating between moments of differentiality— where this “and” is taken to stand for both a topological ambivalence and a tropological equilibrium. Bateson frames a similar argument for Wallace’s analogy of the steam engine: As in the engine with the governor, the fuel supply is changed to conserve—to keep constant—the speed of the flywheel, so always in such systems changes occur to conserve the truth of some descriptive statement, some component of the status quo.9 Another way of thinking about this is to consider the notion of self‐correction, in its relation to a status quo, as “complementary”—whereby a tendency to conservation both motivates and underwrites a mechanism of change and re‐adjustment. This is what is meant by Varela and Maturana’s insistence that variability, linked to recursion, assumes the tenor of a structural constancy: in structural terms, constancy is always mediated by recursion or feedback, defined by a complementary relation of perturbation and compensation. Such a complementarity could be said to define the necessary orientation of any cybernetic “method”—where method is bound not to a fixed epistemology or “system of knowledge,” but rather to a “system of change.” In Bateson’s view, we can approach this entire system of complex interrelations— topological‐tropological—as devolving upon a binary or complementarity‐mechanism which is radical in the sense that it is also elementary. Complementarity according to cybernetics not only involves the global, systemic schema with its so‐called elementa—the 8 9 Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 78-9. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” 405. [80] co‐implication of macro‐scale and micro‐scale—but involves between and across any such (provisional) hypotactic divisions a perpetual, recursive adjustment, so that whenever we are tempted to attribute agency to the structural organisation of a system “as a whole,” or “in part,” we are not speaking of a unilateral or causal intention, but of what Bateson terms a “mental characteristic” expressed in the operations precisely of its most elementary states. Hence: “The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference travelling in a circuit is the elementary idea.”10 Whether in the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, the molecule, the cell, the body‐environment, the global ecosystem or the universal cosmology, a transformational matrix is at work in the evolution of “organised systems.” And if we are to pose the question of what it is that constitutes an organised system, the answer that cybernetics provides is one of a generalised discursivity—between “matter” and the characteristics of “mind,” or between bio‐energetics and bio‐informatics—such that the epistemology of organised systems is always conditioned by its own discursive structures, being vested first and foremost within the dynamics of structure itself and the tendency towards systematicity. 2 In his 1962 study of totemic and other symbolic structures in pre‐literate society, La Pensée Sauvage—a book dedicated to the memory of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty—anthropoligist Claude Lévi‐Strauss similarly examined the transformative relationship between so‐called “primitive” structures of thought or belief and affective social structures, centred upon the logic of totemic classification.11 The particular logic of totemism reveals, for Lévi‐Strauss, a pervasively analogical but also discursive relation between individual and collective epistemologies, so as to describe systems of transformation whose “classificatory schemes … allow the natural and social universe to be grasped as an organised whole.”12 Lévi‐ Strauss’s approach can be considered a broadly cybernetic one, mediated by way of the structural linguistic “turn” associated with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and the earlier semiotics of C.S. Peirce (but also John Locke, Jean‐Henri Lambert and Bernard Bolzano).13 Also underwriting Lévi‐Strauss project are the “anthro‐textual” works of J.G. Frazer and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, and important relations between the linguistic and psychoanalytic conceptions of symbolisation find their echoes in what we might call the anthro‐technical aspect of Lévi‐Strauss’s structuralism. That is to say, in the preoccupation with transformation and “dynamic systems” in the contiguous structural logics of myth, ritual and totemic classification, above all in the transverse relations of universalisation and particularisation as they pertain to the supposedly extraneous 10 11 12 13 Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference,” 433. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968). Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 135. Cf. the final chapter of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understaning (1690), which proposes a “Doctrine of Signs” or sēmeiōtikē, treating of words as instruments of cognition. A theory of “semiotic” is later carried over in Lambert’s Neues Organon (1769) and Bolzano’s Theory of Science (1837). [81] (material) details Lévi‐Strauss identifies as having been left over from “psychological or historical processes.” Like Bateson, Lévi‐Strauss is concerned with how dynamic systems function recursively, both in terms of the logic of self‐regulation and heterogeneity of “content,” and how such technics can be regarded as productive of semantic structures. Elsewhere Lévi‐Strauss discusses how recursiveness and repetition describe a type of periodicity in the semantic organisation of myth (whereby the “function of repetition is to render the structure of myth apparent”)14—something which is largely evolved from Freud’s and Frazer’s research into the early (psychic) history of man and “the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life”15—and which for Lévi‐Strauss assumes its basic expression in the figure of the “Totemic Operator.” In a seminar partly devoted to Lévi‐Strauss’s Pensée Sauvage, from 1964, Jacques Lacan elaborates upon the totemic function as a signifying network: Before any experience, before any individual deduction, even before those collective experiences that may be related only to social needs are inscribed in it, something organises this field, inscribes its initial lines of force. This is the function that Lévi‐Strauss shows us to be the truth of the totemic function, and which reduces its appearances—the primary classificatory function. Consequently, Before strictly human relations are established, certain relations have already been determined. They take from whatever nature may offer as supports, supports that are arranged in themes of opposition. Nature provides—and I must use the word—signifiers, and these signifiers organise human relations in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.16 As with Bateson’s binary circuit, and Wallace’s “governor,” the Totemic Operator represents a “conceptual apparatus which filters unity through multiplicity, multiplicity through unity; diversity through identity, identity through diversity.”17 The principle of the Totemic Operator is explained in terms of binary opposition and associative series of terms (schemata) along a diachronic‐synchronic axis whose relations are defined by “syntactic” procedures of transmission: Starting from a binary opposition, which affords the simplest possible example of a system, this construction proceeds by the aggregation, at each end of its two poles, of new terms, chosen because they stand in relations of opposition, correlation, or analogy to it. It does not follow, however, from this that the relations in question have to be homogenous. Each “local logic” exists in its own right. It consists in the intelligibility of relations between two 14 15 16 17 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G. Schoepf (New York: Doubleday, 1967) 226. J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, abridged edition (London: Macmillan, 1924) 2. Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1998) 20. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 152-3. [82] The “Totemic Operator” immediately associated terms and this is not necessarily of the same type for every link in the semantic chain.18 This apparatus is likened both to the “relative inertia” of a system, “that is, its greater or lesser receptiveness to unmotivated factors,”19 and to differential characteristics of mind. Lévi‐Strauss refers here to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) and the concept of the arbitrariness of the sign, as well as to a certain self‐regulation of cognitive structures that, in spite of an underwriting arbitrariness, conspires to produce “meanings.” In this way, Lévi‐Strauss’s notion of a Totemic Operator seeks to supply the absence of an explicit figure of (material) agency in Saussure’s general linguistics, and serves to reconcile—as it were—a structuralist or cyberneticist account of language with the Freudian unconscious and the operations of “repression” (the self‐regulating mechanism of the Freudian “homeostat organ”), by which the so‐called irrational is never divorced from a structuring rationale. Hence: If the irrational principle of the arbitrariness of the sign were applied without restriction, it “would lead to the worst sort of complication … But the mind contrives to introduce a principle of order and regularity into certain parts of the mass of signs, and this is the role of relative motivation.” In this sense we might say that some languages are more lexicological and others more grammatical: “Not because ‘lexical’ and ‘arbitrary’ on the one hand and ‘grammar’ and ‘relative motivation’ on the other, are always synonymous, but because they 18 19 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 161. Cf. the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 162. [83] have a common principle. The two extremes are like poles between which the system moves, two opposing currents which share the movement of language: the tendency to use the lexicological instrument (the unmotivated sign) and the preference given to the grammatical instrument (structural rules)” (Saussure, pp. 133‐4).20 In Saussure’s syntagmatic and associative relations (grammatical‐lexicological), Lévi‐ Strauss identifies a way of considering the relation of individual to species as ostensibly discursive—that is to say, dynamically structured like a language—giving rise to the “notion of a species considered as a logical operator.”21 This tropic operation is given by way of a recursive, schematic apparatus—the “Totemic Operator” as such—whose structural complementarity of homological and contiguous relations (metaphor‐ metonymy; synchronic‐diachronic) is reminiscent of Bateson’s cybernetic conception of mind in which complex systems reach their “consummation,” but which is perhaps most directly implicated in the phenomenology of Merleau‐Ponty. 3 The Structure of Behaviour (1937), Merleau‐Ponty’s first major publication, can be described as an initial step in a project of rethinking the Kantian categorical attitude by way of the concrete, or rather material, in order to resolve the epistemological dichotomies of mind‐ body, behaviour‐structure, subject‐object, pensée‐parole, and so on. And while Merleau‐ Ponty’s work deals with a very broad conception of body, in its political, social, psychological and phenomenological dimensions, it is above all in terms of the textual or semantic condition of the material body that Merleau‐Ponty brings together the implications of cybernetics and structuralism to arrive at a precise understanding of the materiality of language, and hence of what Bateson and Lévi‐Strauss call “mind.” One of the problems to which Merleau‐Ponty is most attentive is that of method, or rather methodology, which has always hinged upon the nature of the subject‐object relation—that is to say, the relationship of analytic discourse to its objects—and which, even in the structuralist anthropology of Lévi‐Strauss, is preserved in the analysis of this relation itself—in asking such questions as “what are its variables and what is the nature of their interaction?” As Bateson had earlier pointed out, the logic of structural recursion does not end with the observer of a system or with a method of analysis—the general discursivity of systems find their complement, in a sense, within the “system” of analytical discourse—and this requires that a cybernetic conception of such things as “mind,” for example, always remain in a sense provisional. Likewise, Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenological conception of “body”—or of the body proper (the body in its dialectical, non‐causal relationship with its environment or given world)—remains un‐ objectified and provisional insofar as this body represents a “knot of living meanings.”22 As with Lévi‐Strauss’s “Totemic Operator,” the figure of the body for Merleau‐Ponty is suggestive of an integrational, discursive apparatus, in which corporeality designates a 20 21 22 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 156. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1916). Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 163. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962) 177. [84] radical materiality underwriting the “fact of language.” This body is not only a type of text, or a condition of textuality (a network of gestures or proto‐writing), but a transversal between possible signs and sign operations—technē and poiēsis—as a circuit of bringing‐ forth: I turn towards the word just as my hand moves towards the spot on my body that is pinched, the word occupies a certain place in my linguistic world, it is part of my equipment, my sole means of representing it to myself is to pronounce it, as the artists has only one way of representing for himself the work he is fashioning: he must fashion it.23 The body thus “converts a certain motor essence into a vociferation, it transmits the articulatory style of a word in auditory phenomena,” just as the “surface” of the body transmits the articulatory style of a language in tactile, visual or olfactory phenomena.24 This process is also reversible, and it assumes a certain complexity devolving upon the most elemental physical procedures, such that its local interactions enter into a global signifying relation. Moreover, the body—as the tropic operator of these transmissions— does not thereby assume the aspect of some privileged relation to its various systems, or to “other” systems, since the body “itself” is structured recursively, neither object or subject but an integral of complementarity, of heterogeneity, of discursus. The apparent agency that inhabits this body and determines its relation to language, to parts of itself, or to a world by way of “equipment,” is not some alien presence inhabiting a corporeal disguise as the Cartesian mind is said to inhabit the phenomenal body. The “I” that turns towards the word is precisely the tropic axis that figures at every level of the totemic operation, from the elemental to the universal, the radically binary to the radically complex. Like the ones and zeros of Bateson’s cybernetic apparatus, this “I” is inscriptive of a moment of ambivalence or structural vicissitude that constantly turns back towards itself by turning away (towards its representation, as it were, in the fabrication of the word: a double turn that hence gives the “I” in advance of itself as the qualitative value of a zero in relation to all value as such). Hence, this “I” can be said to be a sign productive of signs by which, in turn, it itself is produced. This leads us to what might be termed a broadly semiotic conception of agency based upon the serial vicissitudes of what is meant by the term sign.25 But it is insofar as we speak of agency as a sign productive of signs in the sense of an auto‐ poiesis—and not of an unilateral, causal intention—that we can subsequently speak of sign operations as describing a characteristic of mind, by which the recursive structuration of what Merleau‐Ponty calls “the body proper” (as the corporeality of language conceived both universally and in particular) resolves the Cartesian dichotomy in broadly cybernetic terms. And just as the hand is related to the body by way of a metonymic figuration (it is 23 24 25 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 210. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 211. It is worth recalling here the initial definition of the sign proposed by Peirce in his essay “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” (1893-1910), in which he states: “Signs are divisible into three trichotomies; first, according as the sign in itself is a mere quality, is an actual existent, or is a general law; secondly, according as the relation of the sign to its objects consists in the sign’s having some character in itself, or in some existential relation to that object, or in relation to an interpretant; thirdly, according as its interpretant represents it as a sign of possibility or as a sign of fact or a sign of reason.” The Philosophical Writings of C.S. Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955) 101, emphasis added. [85] both a part of the body and yet perceived as autonomous with regards to it; an embodied intention whose relation to the body‐object is both contiguous and formally equivalent)— that is to say, intransitively, as in “the hand that writes,” consonant with “the mind that thinks,” or (as Wittgenstein would have it) the hand that thinks—so too this “I” is related to the universal schematic of the Lévi‐Straussian “Totemic Operator,” as a tropic apparatus (the “complete, total locus of the network of signifiers”)26 in which agency is generalised from individual to species and vice versa, and according to which the sign, generalised across the body of all possible language (lexicological, grammatical), inscribes la pensée dans la parole. Prague, October, 2005 26 Lacan, “Of the Network of Signifiers,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 42. [86] From Materiality To System Why is there structure rather than chaos? Such questions bring into view a certain habit of reason which has accustomed us to regard the world in terms of a conceptual division—between the inert and the animate, matter and mind, substance and form—indeed, to regard it as something like a Byzantine vista of categories, types, and classes, whose bifurcations and taxonomies appear, from moment to moment, as seemingly real and incontravertable as the “great chain of being” on the eve of the Lamarckian revolution, while any perceived ambivalence to such rigid denomination has routinely been suppressed “for the sake of meaning.” As various commentators have noted, “humans seem equipped by the structure of the brain to perceive patterns, and the trick has survival value, but this does not prove that all the patterns we perceive are really there,”1 nor does it prove that those inimical to particular modes of theorisation do not, therefore, exist. Categories, types and classes are themselves derived statistical descriptions of stochastic processes whose “emergent” regularities or patterns have too often been mistaken for an order of things or immutable schema. Their symmetry has, up until recent times, defined the limiting epistemological criteria both of philosophical and scientific discourse, whose character (dialectic, dualistic, oppositional) can more properly be described as metaphorical or analogical. While a great deal has been written about dialectics, dualism and binary opposition, there still remains the task of accounting for the inaugurating metaphoricity that can be said to condition each of these modes of thought. By metaphoricity it is meant a certain “mechanism” of equivalence, vested in an otherwise arbitrary relation invoked between “unlike” and “uncommunicating” terms (species or genus, as Aristotle says in the Poetics), and therefore formally paratactic or discontinuous. This mechanism may be said to be founded upon a predisposition of metaphor towards a delineation of its objects in terms of structural equivalence and inequivalence (and only consequently semantic equivalence). That is to say, along an axis of suppressed ambivalence. The ambivalent quality of this axis comes more clearly into view once we recognise its ostensibly arbitrary function in defining an “oppositional” relationship between paired terms, and a “homological” one between terms arranged on either side of it. Such ambivalence, in light of the metaphorical schema organised around it, acquires the appearance of something like a metonymic recursion, in that it describes a certain asymmetrical relation across contiguity. The so‐ 1 William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth‐Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 350. [87] called oppositional terms are thus either mutually determinate or partial—meaning that the one inclines to an “excluded” or “detached” characteristic of the other. It is precisely in the co‐implied structures of metaphor and metonymy—of implication and co‐implication—that we encounter ambivalence as an engine of possibility, by means of which supposedly inert matter assumes the characteristic of a sign, such that—for example—we may consider signification not as a process that is retrospectively projected upon the universe—i.e. as a rationalistic mirror‐fantasy—or “modelled” in our own image (vis‐à‐vis the symmetry or synonymy of likeness), but rather as a process that necessarily accompanies the most elementary material relations which, posed as “oppositional,” “correlative,” or “complementary,” imply some aspect of formal communication. Such communication, however, must be distinguished from the assumptions of “analogical” correspondence (similarity, likeness, resemblance), so that when we speak of possibility we mean something contingent upon ostensibly material and probabilistic constraints, but which also exceeds and envelopes those constraints (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche); indeed, which would in fact constitute their very condition. Consequently, our initial question may be reformulated as: How is it, that even at the most basic level, matter appears to be bound up with the very nature of structure, of structurality and of structure’s immanent possibility? This question, or series of questions, has given rise within the study of sign systems to analogous questions which, on the surface at least, approach the problem from the opposite direction, in terms such as: “Can the essence of life—or, at least, our concept of life—be understood in a semiotic framework?”2 On the one hand, a base, inert materiality; while on the other, life‐processes, dynamic systems, or mechanisms of reflection; posed against an axis of structuration which, both nominally and yet in some sense equally “essentially,” is therefore also an axis of signification, or of what we might call “sign operations” or semiosis. This apparent opposition—sketched here in a merely provisional, though also conventional, outline—is itself a characteristic of a certain axial mode of thinking (symmetrical, asymmetrical) which, even if not in purely “value” terms, obtains its impetus by arranging its objects across a differential gradient—according to which certain tendencies are schematised in relational or transferential terms (as a movement, for example, from materiality to systematicity) describing what we might call a formal immanence. To tend, however, will have always implied a movement of continuity versus discontinuity; such as is implied in a system of arbitrarily defined difference, for example, or as represented in the paratactic structures of metaphor and metonymy, and which is effectively masked by the assumption—retrospectively supplied—of a latent similarity, synonymy or formal “symmetry.” This quasi‐progressivist notion, with its neo‐Platonistic undertones of an “en tēi physei” (the immanence attributed to paradeigmata as the “future forms of things” latent within any process of structuration, including the naturalisation of forms into species in Aristotle’s schema)—or equally of a transmutation of base matter into something like a consciousness (however necessarily conjectural its character)—ought not, however, to be perceived as merely a doctrinal or ideological caprice. Insofar as we may say that “binary structures” obtain within material relations—that materiality tends to 2 Andres Lure, “Understanding Life: Trans‐semiotic Analogies,” Sign Systems Studies 30.1 (2002) 315. [88] structurality—or that material relations are themselves fundamentally axial or “ambivalent,” only presupposes an opposition or value‐relation on the basis of a “signifying” function (and not of a “representation” or “model‐image” as such), and it would therefore seem that the overriding concern to which our initial questions refer is how we are to “locate” a signifying function within, or across, an “originary” binary relation, in place of any semantic schematisation or assumption of a general metaphysics (that there exists a more essential language beyond or beneath language; a voice beyond the voice: nature, god, reason, etc.). That is to say, a signifying function in advance of any assumption of meaning other than the fact of this relation itself. But is such a thing possible? 1 In Global Semiotics (2001), Thomas Sebeok attempts to frame this problem in terms of a globaliseld view of material structures that, to a limited extent, re‐echoes Gregory Bateson’s ecologies of mind and parallel’s Yuri Lotman’s theory of semiospheres, in attempting to “extend” semiotic concepts into the vitalistic or biological realm. The logical implications of Sebeok’s thesis, however, can be seen as countering Sebeok’s own assumption that a discourse of biosemiotics can only be founded upon a metaphorical approximation of sign structures to living systems. The structural logic of biosemiotic systems nevertheless directly implies structural logics characteristic of non‐organic “dynamic systems” (or what might equally be termed dissipative systems, according to which entropy would describe a common characteristic of both so‐called life systems and non‐organic dynamic systems) and thus points us towards a “literalised” understanding of semiotics in its global implications. One of these implications being that, founded upon a purely material basis, semiosis, or sign operations, ultimately presuppose what we call a phenomenon of consciousness, and hence of agency—and consequently that agency must be vested first and foremost in the very materiality of structure, and thus also be considered immanent to it, rather than representing a quality externally derived or somehow instantiated by way of external processes—i.e. applied to it—or derived from some autonomous model‐image. Likewise, the concept of dynamic sign systems, organised around an “axis of ambiguity” or structural recursion, cannot simply be reduced to an externally supplied impetus (vis‐à‐vis Newton’s law). As with physical systems, the recursive mechanisms to which we assign the term agency remain ambiguous with regard to the distinction, for example, between “energy” and “matter” (energeīa and prāgmata), even if such mechanisms remain subject to the tendency of all closed systems to dissipate. It remains that the “communication” of the energy‐matter relation (or ratio) requires a prior structural possibility, such that we can speak of a system as such and not merely of an “isolated effect.” Interpreting along similar but restricted lines, according to the limited case‐model of biosemiotics, Sebeok postulates that “two cardinal and reciprocal axioms of semiotics” must therefore be: (1 a) The criterial mark of all life is semiosis; and (1 b) Semiosis presupposes life … Further semiosic unfoldings—such as the genesis of ordered oppositions like self/other, [89] inside/outside, and so forth—derive from, or are corollaries of, the above pair of universal laws.3 Drawing upon the biological theories of Jakob von Uexküll, the life‐world is described by Sebeok as a type of biotext, not simply in the sense that living systems are affective of signification, but rather that they devolve—as systems—upon a processual network of sign operations. “The aim of biosemiotics,” Seboek argues, is therefore “to extend the notions of general semiotics to encompass the study of semiosis and modelling in all species. The premise which guides biosemiotics is, in fact, that the forms produced by a specific species are constrained by the modelling system(s) which has evolved from its anatomical constitution. The aim of biosemiotics is to study not only the species belonging to one of the five kingdoms, Monera, Protocista, Animalia, Plantae, and Fungi, but also their hierarchically developed component parts, beginning with the cell, the minimal semiosic unit … In a phrase, the target of biosemiotics is the semiosic behaviour of all living things.”4 Once again the concept of structural agency emerges here as an instrumental action in the tendency from “anatomical constraint” to “modelling system” to “semiosis.” The question remains as to how it is possible to abstract semiosis from this evolutionary process? Equally, if semiosis is to be conditioned by an effect or phenomenon of agency, how is an assumption of agency to take place other than as an evolution within and as this functional, constitutive anatomy—i.e. describing “emergent” regularities—such that its “constraints” remain immanent, rather than as an autonomous set of codes or paradeigmata upon which a semiotic condition may be modelled or according to which its “form” may be said to be determined. Distinguishing between latency and immanence, the complementarity of constraint and structurality (“anatomic constitution”) are what define semiosis as the very condition and possibility of agency, and not vice versa as the organicist argument would suggest. 2 If we are to speak of agency as a non‐linear, “causal circuit” of material constraints upon which “cognitive action” devolves—vis‐à‐vis the trope of semiosis—and not the contrary, then it is a matter of re‐orientating Sebeok’s biosemiotic model towards a properly global semiotics founded upon a concept of discursive materiality, in its literal and no longer “metaphorical” sense. This requires that we examine the implications of C.S. Peirce’s contention that the universe as such is characterised (though not exclusively) by sign operations, and Margaret Mead’s re‐definition of semiotics in 1962 as “patterned communication in all its modalities.” This would require that we firstly arrive at an understanding of what such concepts as “universal,” “sign operation” and “communication” might require by way of reformulation if we are to pose them in strictly material terms—that is to say, in terms independent of assumptions of human agency or 3 4 Thomas Sebeok, Global Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 10‐11. Thomas Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modelling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000) 15. [90] of biological vitalism (zoösemiotics, anthroposemiotics and phytosemiotics). And this would mean accounting for the operations of signs as such—an accounting which would necessarily draw into question Sebeok’s insistence that Saussure’s “linguistic paradigm” represents a distortion of natural signifying. John Deely has paraphrased Sebeok’s argument as being founded upon a distinction “between language, as having in itself nothing to do with communication but which, through exaption, gives rise to linguistic communication as species‐specifically human, and communication, which is a universal phenomenon of nature.”5 In this way Sebeok is seen to reject the notion that animal species other than humans may be possessed of language, or at least of “linguistic communication.” Yet insofar as communication presupposes something other than random, singular events of “transmission”—although this in itself would require elaborate definition—the question remains as to what “linguistic communication” could entail in distinction from communication in its universal sense, since any form of structuration or sign operation must be given to require, for example, some type of syntactic and broadly signifying “function,” and that such functions must be generalisable (as a function of the possible) across an arbitrarily defined field of potential “signs.” And if “universal” conditions are to obtain vis‐à‐vis communication, from where do such conditions arise if they are not also to be attributed to “linguistic communication,” on the one hand, and to the material states of dynamic (non‐ life) systems on the other? Indeed, the opposition here between “communication, which is a universal phenomenon of nature” and “linguistic communication,” reveals itself to be nothing other than a restatement of the nature‐artifice (physis‐technē) dualism that has reasserted itself at different points in the history of Western thought, and which more recently has manifested itself in terms of natural and artificial languages, and natural and artificial intelligence. As a sub‐class of communication, “linguistic communication” is presented as a mere “species‐specifically human” prosthesis. In other words, a supplementary mode or model of communication, vested in a formal definition of language as artefactual (the specifically human techniques or technologies of speech and writing, for example, as opposed to a species‐aspecific “semiosis”). The distinction is based in part upon the assumption of agency, such that “language” is defined as a particular use to which the phenomenon of communication is put: that it is a utility, an addition or extension, and thus bears no relation to (“has nothing to do with”) the underwriting conditions of communication in its universal aspect. But as Michel Foucault, among others, has argued, the very idea of communication has always implied a suspicion that language “exceeds its merely verbal form in some way, and there are indeed other things in the world which speak and which are not language. After all, it could be that nature, the sea, the rustling of trees, animals, faces, masks, crossed swords, all of these speak; perhaps there is language that articulates itself in a manner that is not verbal. This would be, if you like, very roughly, the Greek’s sēmainon.”6 The question immediately arises as to how language, as a prosthesis of communication, is possible if its operations are not somehow vested already in those of communication as 5 6 John Deely, Sebeok Memorial Lecture, International Association for Semiotic Studies 2004 World Congress, Lyon. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954‐1984. Volume 2: Aesthetics,Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998) 270. [91] such. By implication, this question extends also to the limiting claims of biosemiotics that communication be viewed as “a universal phenomenon of nature” solely to the extent that it relates to the operations of life‐systems. Simplifying, this question becomes: upon what are the operations of life‐systems founded if not upon a general condition of materiality, upon which the possibility of sign operations must also devolve? In other words, are not the assumptions about “nature” and natural communication in fact already presupposed in a generalised technē—what we might go so far as to characterise as the very technē of possibility itself—as a function not of derivation from “anatomical constraints” (or “modelling systems,” which by definition already function semio‐mimetically), but of an architectonics of constraint (material, probabilistic), which thereby is regarded as programming the general semiotic apparatus? If so, the “basic unit” of semiotic systems cannot, contrary to Sebeok’s insistence, be meaningfully defined (analogically or otherwise) in terms of the biological “cell,” which in itself—even as the ultimate element of organic structures—is already a complex of micro‐ and macro‐scale molecular events. The “agency” (or bio‐technics) of cell division or propagation is already prefigured in the “agency” of dynamic systems contained within it, and indeed sustaining and superseding it—whether these involve enzymic transcriptions or atomic states. If we assume a literal significance to Peirce’s threefold condition of semiosis (that any sign operation presupposes a relation of two elements to a third element),7 then we may posit the “basic unit” of semiotics as any mediated binary relation— i.e. satisfying the minimal conditions for a dynamic system. Negatively defined, semiosis is thus a measure of entropy, insofar as it implies even the most rudimentary and minimal of system dynamics—as in Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference.”8 Hence, in place of the limiting sense of semiosis presupposing “life,” it is necessary to posit a more general notion of semiosis—one properly consistent with the logic of a “communication, which is a universal phenomenon”—describing material, and fundamentally technical, processes of transmission, propagation and dissipation. 3 The dilation of materiality in the “figure” of communication, language or sign systems, brings into view a fundamental incongruity in the logic of biosemiotics in the assumption of a life‐principle or biological agency as the determining condition of semiosis. Sebeok’s two “cardinal and reciprocal axioms of semiotics” reflect the tendency of a closed semiotic system towards what we might call the vertigo of self‐representation, according to which semiosis is “constrained” by its own “modelling system,” thus succumbing to a reductio ad infinitum. Moreover, the arbitrary distinction between the sign‐mechanics of organic systems and the signifying possibility of material relations per se, implies a logic of exceptions whereby biosemiotics merely re‐inscribes a certain analogical privilege—i.e. that the figure of agency must in all accounts remain distinguishable from the “condition” 7 8 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” Philosophical Writings, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955) 99‐100. Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance and Difference,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind (St Albins: Paladin, 1973) 428. [92] of base matter, as in fact the determining limit of that class of entity that culminates in man. The genesis of “ordered oppositions” underwriting Sebeok’s claim to certain “universal laws” of semiotics is thus not universal at all but based upon a foundation of behavioural and bio‐mimetic assumptions. By behavioural and bio‐mimetic it is above all meant analogical, in the sense that the genesis of “ordered oppositions” is said to resemble the formal structurality innate to semiotic systems as such. Hence, that the discourse of semiotics is effectively modelled upon the organisation of its primary objects, thereby acquiring an aura of scientific validity. Such claims to validation, however, belie a particular asymmetry in the relation between biosemiotics and its object, on the one hand, and the general discursiveness of sign structures on the other. An asymmetry, moreover, reflected in the very discourse of biosemiotics which both characterises the very impetus of semiosis defined within that discourse, but also—and of necessity—points beyond its limiting criteria towards a general condition of semiosis (implied by Lotman’s semiosphere); one which is radically non‐analogical, but which describes the prior possibility of analogical structures; one which is not representable within the discourse of biosemiotics, but which rather describes an horizon of representability. In this we may recognise a fundamental dependency upon a technē of metaphoric substitution and metonymic forethrow, or of what we call “equivalence across contiguity.” Re‐echoing Claude Lévi‐Strauss’s studies in structural anthropology, Lotman (like Sebeok) derives a logic of “ordered opposition” on an analogical rather than properly structural or material basis, founded upon culturally (or “ideologically”) articulated assumptions about signifiability. This points to both an explicit and hidden anthropomorphism within the discourse of biosemiotics, which—despite its universalism—posits the “asymmetry” of semiotic systems (what we might call their dynamic gradient) in species‐specific—and hence analogical—terms. According to Lotman: The asymmetry of the human body is the anthropological basis for its semioticisation: the semiotics of right and left are found just as universal in all human cultures as the opposition top and bottom. And the fundamental asymmetry of male and female, living and dead, are just as widespread. The living/dead opposition involves the opposition of something moving, warm, breathing, to something immobile, cold, not breathing (the belief that cold and death are synonyms is supported by an enormous number of texts from different cultures, and just as common is the identification of death with turning to stone …9 This preoccupation with the “orientational” logic of ordered opposition—or of oppositional pairs (or binaries)—founded here upon a process of textual induction with its appeals to cultural and empirical facticity, belies a systematic dependence upon an oppositional logic that is purely formal, normative, and metaphysically “grounded.” It is in accordance with such a logic that we encounter the continuing distinction between such terms as animate‐inanimate, nature‐artifice, body‐mind, sensible‐intelligible, and so on, not to speak of the endless series of cognate oppositions between purely qualitative terms, 9 Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) 133. [93] defining a network of associated values from which the discourse of biosemiotics is in no way exempt. 4 Disagreement with this tendency to a limited, doctrinal approach to semiotic phenomena, has provoked a number of corrective hypotheses. One such is represented by the emergent discourse of neurosemiotics, which focuses upon the material, neurological conditions of what we call communication, affected not on biologically causal grounds, but rather in terms of a general state of probabilistic intermediation. According to this view: If we understand semiosis to be an organising principle of all manner of sign‐exchange, then the operational processes enabling signification from receptor cell to interneuron to effector cell and the processes enabling signification across the meta‐systems of biological organisation (cell, pathway, network, organ, system, body proper) and across levels of awareness (network signification, body signification, mental signification) reveal themselves as systemic parts in a lawful, interactive continuum—a view of mind and body that allows us to transcend the intransigent dualism of contemporary neuroscience …10 In contrast to the analogical “modelling systems” characteristic of Sebeok’s “global semiotics,” the enquiry into semiosis as an “organising principle of all manner of sign‐ exchange”—but above all concerned with the “principles by which the emergence of mental representation from neuronal electro‐chemical signal transduction is even possible”11—points to the necessity of a fundamentally material understanding of the mechanisms of reflexivity, representability, and mechanical agency as a basis for defining cognitive processes (or, equally, “organic” processes). The mediational aspect of all signifying structures—with its analogies to mind, consciousness or thought—has tended to become obscured in the investigation of what might be called signifying materiality and those processes by which, to reformulate Donald Favareau’s expression, the apparent “emergence” of sign structures from base matter is deemed possible. The problem here, however, is not to do with the “advent” of semiosis, but with its possibility in the first place. In other words, how it is that what we call “base matter” appears to be already inscribed within a field of signifying possibility— in which semiotic system‐effects are determined probabilistically—according to a transverse relation between local events and global states, and vice‐versa (where “system” implies a continuity effect underwritten by networks of micro‐macro dis‐continuity)? Such transverse relations or “non‐linear circuits” (as between and across Favareau’s “meta‐ systems”) affect a refiguration of what we have already referred to as an axis of ambivalence: an axial relation that obtains across all scales of (semio‐technical) (inter)relation—micro‐medio‐macro—and within the mediated structure of any binary (ternary, quaternary, …) relations whatsoever. And insofar as this transverse relation 10 11 Donald Favareau, “Beyond Self and Other: On the Neurosemiotic Emergence of Intersubjectivity,” Sign Systems Studies 30.1 (2002): 80. Favareau, “Beyond Self and Other,” 66. [94] assumes the function within any structure of an “organising principle,” then it is to this relation that we must firstly attribute the mechanical, “reflexive” function of agency. As with Lévi‐Strauss’s “Totemic Operator”12—which describes the underwriting mechanism of totemic classification in so‐called primitive societies (a generalised network of transverse relations between subject‐object, species‐genera, concept and representation, etc.)—transversality implies a broadly cybernetic conception of signifying structures, which posits the relativised organisation and interrelational event‐states of “sign constellations” as a form of global agency. In other words, agency is thus situated not as an epiphenomenon of neuro‐biological or other analogous processes, but a mechanism inherent to structuration that both “constitutes” and operates the relations in a network of potential signs, constellated around an axis of ambivalence that is also an “horizon” of signifying possibility. Such constellational functions have been referred to by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi as “dynamic functional clusters,”13 and have been described in terms of recursive or dynamic systems generally, including the dissipative electrochemical activity of intercommunicating neurons in the human brain. Transversality has for a long time characterised investigations into some branches of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, as well as information technology, systems theory and hypertext. As a “means” of describing cognitive event‐states, the virtue of transversality lies in the necessity of accounting for the materiality of any “phenomenon of consciousness” based upon a structural understanding of how the “signs” of the neuronal semiosphere relate to each other as well as to signs “apprehended” in the otherwise external world; i.e. between so‐ called “mental events” and “experienced events.” The statistically overwhelming character of interactional possibilities represented by the transverse structures of neurological activity, with its assumed mind‐orientated teleologies, suggests stochastically patterned “emergent” regularities which in turn point towards a generalised probability, affective of complex structural dynamics, and hence of the “anatomical constraints,” upon which semiosis is said to be “modelled.” In other words, it is precisely the “semiotic effect” of transversality upon which the assumed paradigmatic model‐image of semiosis devolves: not as a first principle revealed through a process of derivation, but as the recursion of an archē‐technics or ambivalence at the “origin” of the phenomenon of consciousness. The number of possible interactive connections between neurons in a human brain is estimated to exceed 1079: “Of these interactional possibilities,” Favareau points out, “the ratio between the statistically average 1 million motor neurons, 10 million sensory neurons, and 100 billion interneurons is a mediation‐heavy 1:100,000:10.”14 It is not a matter, however, of viewing this ratio as marking an empirical limit to, for example, a reduction to an “object‐state” of the neural network (as though it were a cause in its own right), but rather of recognising that the ratio of interactional possibilities is instead a characteristic of a generalisable event‐state that necessarily remains in no way “ontologically ‘fixed.’”15 For Floyd Merrell, the transverse relation multiplied across the 12 13 14 15 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968) 152‐3. Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Favareau, “Beyond Self and Other,” 64. Favareau, “Beyond Self and Other,” 81. [95] constellation of neurological micro‐ and macro‐events, may be “represented” in the ambivalent figure of a significatory vortex, as a metaphor of agency or “dynamic mediation” inscribing a probabilistic network of sign operations whose structure may be broadly defined as semio‐textual. “The ‘vortex,’” Merrell suggests, “is the composite of all unactualised signs. It is, so to speak, the ‘emptiness,’ the sheer possibility of anything and everything.”16 The universal characteristic of possibility alluded to here simultaneously inscribes itself as a “zero‐dimensionality,” whereby the “vortex” mediates any relation whatsoever, as the figure of an archē‐technics in advance of all signifying relations. But the dynamic interval represented by this “zero dimensionality” can also be regarded as a gradient of dissipation, or entropic spiral, in the sense that the vortex describes an engine of possibilities—i.e. it constitutes a mechanism of systemic ambivalence. This zero dimensionality “generalises” the axial relation outlined previously, with regard to the quasi‐unicity of binary sign structures. As the locus of a differential interstice, it is taken to represent an “‘emptiness’ giving rise to the emergence of the sign, of all signs, of all that is becoming”17—approximating one aspect of what, elsewhere, we have already termed vortext (as a generalised technē of semiosis). This complex of discursive relations—here between ambivalence, interstice, constellation, transversal, vortex—may be said to describe a generalised movement of “equivalence across contiguity” of the type S=P (subject, predicate), or S/s (according to the Saussurean algorithm of the signifier/signified relation), whereby the advent of semiosis remains both topical and above all tropic (metaphor, metonymy)—a movement of periodicity across a non‐periodic interval. As Norbert Wiener notes, recursive phenomena are “characterised by an invariance with respect to a shift of origin in time,”18 and in this sense, any properly “binary relation” whatsoever may be said to be affective of “communication” (with‐out correspondence). Only in this way can the semiosphere “be regarded as a generator of information”19 (i.e. rather than as a mere epiphenomenon; of semiotic “paradeigmata,” for example)—congruent on the macro‐scale with the micro‐ scale operations of a sign generative of signs; Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference”—wherein material effects of transmission accede to systematisation on the basis of a generalised technē of possibility, or techno‐genesis, rather than describing a mere formalism from which “consequences” and “predictions” of various kinds might be deduced. Moreover, it is necessary to recognise that such mechanistic configurations and processes—including all forms of transduction, mediation or “communication” (as a phenomenon of ambivalence)—are therefore conditional for any assumption of semiotic possibility tending towards an event‐state of semiosis. Prague, January, 2006 16 17 18 19 Floyd Merrell, “Lotman’s Semiosphere, Peirce’s Categories, and Cultural Forms of Life,” Sign Systems Studies 29.2 (2001): 394. Merrell, “Lotman’s Semiosphere,” 395. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1961) viii‐ix. Lotman, Universe of the Mind, 127. [96] Constellations We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation. Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot throw off. —Nietzsche, The Will to Power Language operates between literal and metaphorical significations. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed in, in the unresolved or partially unresolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated … becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short, a paradox. Congruity could be disrupted by a metaphorical complexity within a literal system. Literal usage becomes incantatory when all metaphors are suppressed. Here language is built, not written. —Robert Smithson, Artist’s Statement accompanying the exhibition of “A Heap of Language” (1966), Whitney Museum, 23 June‐25 October, 2005. That we believe ourselves to experience the world as a conscious continuum shaped by causally defined events, and as authors of our own actions, does not require or even imply that the means of experience (or experience itself) should equally be constituted in these terms. There is no reason to suppose that even the “experience of consciousness” should be founded upon a conscious agency within the apparatus or phenomenon of experience. It is only when we abandon such expectations that the proposition of a materially defined “consciousness,” of unconscious agency or signifying materiality, permit themselves to be thought. Moreover, in abandoning the assumptions of a rationalist point of view, the contours of the experiential world cease to appear continuous or organised around the presence of a centring ego, and are instead seen as describing what we might call a constellation‐effect. A constellation‐effect is an effect of relativity. From any given situation, the constellation—any perceived cluster or combination of terms—assumes a certain veracity or facticity within an experiential, or signifying, schema. Yet this facticity is always provisional and subject to probability: from any other situation, a quantifiably different constellation may obtain, even as the constellation‐effect remains constant. We might therefore consider a constellation‐effect as delineating a notional field within which the idea of constellation, coupled with the idea of an agent of perception, is figured according to a discursive process and system of sign operations. A basic feature of constellations is the way in which otherwise unrelated terms are brought into signifying relation by way of an arbitrarily “imposed” schema. This schema is, of course, not imposed in any functional sense, but is rather a perceptual schema— [97] meaning a representation of a “set of relations” (between or across terms) within a notional field. Such a perceptual schema therefore assumes the complexion of an anamorphosis—but an anamorphosis without derivation, since there cannot be supposed to be any actual prior set of relations that has been perverted or distorted by way of its “perception,” and which could be reconstituted by discovering the one true point of perspective. A constellation is, in this sense, itself a singularity, rather than a unicum or something masking a unicum: an equivalence across contiguity, not an identity. And insofar as a constellation appears to refer to an external state of affairs for its facticity, or the objectivity of its terms, this referential “tendency” must also be taken into account as a determining feature of the constellation‐effect itself. The co‐relational and co‐referential axes of any constellation (the virtuality and facticity of relations among terms; the virtuality and facticity of reference vis‐à‐vis a “perceptual” schema and an “objective” schema) may otherwise be treated as aspects of a signifying system or a “process” of signification, analogous to the complementary structures of metaphor and metonymy. That is to say, between concurrence or relations of equivalence (i.e. with absent terms or situations) and concatenation or relations of contiguity (i.e. to co‐ present terms). And insofar as we may speak of a structuring agency, this would be nothing other than a mechanism of recursion operating between these generalised axes— the one implicated in and underwriting the other—so that what is called a constellation might also be thought of as an effect of a constant vicissitude. If we recognise the broadly syntactic and schematic nature of these relations, as underwriting a “semantic” system, we will also recognise the constellation‐effect as fundamentally textual or hypertextual, or indeed what we might already term vortextual. And despite its appearance as describing a condition of stasis, or inertia, in which each of its signifying terms is closed in a fixed relation to every other term, the provisional nature of any constellation requires us to account for certain structuring “processes”—even, or especially, where such processes appear to be invisible or contained within an act of perception. For perception in this sense is never separate from the technics of “interpretation” or “recognition”—that is to say, of the constellation‐effect of literacy— where literacy presupposes a system of sign operations, of a “textual apparatus” or mechanism. 1 In “How the Piano Came to be Prepared” (1972), composer John Cage writes: “Instead of the possibility of repetition, we are faced in life with the unique qualities and characteristics of each occasion.”1 Investigating the differential mechanics of recursive and “chance” compositional procedures, Cage’s work assumes a position on the “breach of signification,” between materiality and semantics, or between the finite, probabilistic nature of the permutation and recombination of “marks on the page,” for example—or of what we might call stochastic amplitude and frequency modulation—and the unique 1 John Cage, “How the Piano came to be Prepared,” Empty Words: Writings 1973-78 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1979) 8. [98] semantic content that is imparted to the virtually infinite series of “repetitions” affected within these constraints. Focusing upon the structurality of sign operations—whether in written or verbal language, music, gesture, or any other constellation of signifying forms—Cage’s work has tended to foreground such things as duration and dynamics (syncopation, rhythm, cadence) rather than classical notions of harmony (or consonantia). In‐determinacy thus assumes the “harmonic function” in Cage’s elaboration of structure, process and situation—i.e. as what relates compositional method with the underwriting conditions of composition (that is to say, of the mechanics of structuration: of any structure whatsoever). For Cage, structure in this sense is locatable not in terms of symmetrical relations, formal predictability, logical development and unity (or closure), but in material terms linked to the mechanisms of probability, indeterminacy, and transverse micro‐macrocosmic relations that generate their own logics and their own semantic contours. One of Cage’s notable explorations of these effects takes place through an encounter with the writing of James Joyce, in a work entitled Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake. Cage’s Roaratorio was originally conceived as a radio drama, and was first produced for the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris in 1979. The title itself derives from a passage in Finnegans Wake—“this longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios”2—as does the content and key aspects of the composition’s formal method.3 The idea for the Roaratorio began when Cage was invited to provide musical accompaniment to another project based upon Joyce’s text, which he had begun in 1976 as a contribution to an issue of TriQuarterly, entitled “7 out of 23,” and which later evolved into the book Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake. Cage himself already had a long history of involvement with Joyce’s text, beginning with the adaptation of part of Finnegans Wake (556.1‐22) in 1942 for the song lyric “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” originally composed “for voice and closed piano,” and in the mid‐1960s Marshall McLuhan had suggested that he “make a musical work based on the Wake’s Ten Thunderclaps. He said that the Thunderclaps were, in fact, a history of technology.”4 For the later project, however, Cage turned to a combination of mechanical means to select and combine elements of Joyce’s text, initially subjecting the Wake to a series of chance operations determined by a computer programme called Mesolist (based on the I‐Ching), which ultimately produced “a 41‐page mesostic text, using the string JAMES JOYCE.”5 In Cage’s lexicon, a mesostic is a type of hermetic, “found” acrostic poem, which emerges in the form of textual fragments constellated around the capitalised proper name of the author (or any other arbitrarily determined string or set of terms). Cage describes his methodology for “writing through” Joyce’s text as follows: I would look for a word with a J in it that didn’t have an A because the A belongs on the second line for JAMES. And then a word with A that didn’t have an M, and an M that 2 3 4 5 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1958) 41.28. Subsequent references follow the established convention of FW followed by page and line number. Marjorie Perloff, “John Cage’s Dublin, Lyn Hejinian’s Leningrad: Poetic Cities as Cyberspaces.” Classical, Renaissance, and Postmodern Acts of the Imagination: Essays Commemorating O.B. Hardison, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) 61. John Cage, “Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake,” Empty Words, 133. Perloff, “John Cage’s Dublin,” 61-2. [99] didn’t have an E, and an E that didn’t have an S and in this way I made a path through the entire book …6 Working through Finnegans Wake, Cage uncovered 862 instances in which Joyce had “signed” his text in this way, collecting them in a single volume under the title Writing through Finnegans Wake. But after pressure from his editor, Cage produced another reading using addition constraints, this time entitled Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake, the published outcome of which offers something like a schematic rendering of the transverse segmentations of hypertext. The idea of mesostics is interesting for a consideration of hypertext for many reasons, not least because it mimics, to a greater or lesser extent, the structural schema of Joyce’s own “hypertext,” while at the same time critiquing of the mystical idea of revelation through divine logos or authorial signature effect. Comparable procedures are at work in Roaratorio: Jiccup the fAther Most hEaven Skysign Judges Or deuteronomY watsCh futurE7 If Cage’s mesostics affect a retrospective illusion of affinity to “Joyce,” as it were, this is merely by way of an act of assumption of a commonality, of a “discourse” whose lineaments assume an inherence in the object to which it seemingly refers. In this sense “JAMES JOYCE” becomes nothing more than a schematic figure, buoyed up by the illusion that each summons within itself a semantic inherence which is in fact the outcome of an increasingly fortuitous encounter between otherwise disparate material elements. Indeed, Cage’s Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake emphasises the otherwise gratuitous relationship between the coincidence of material elements and the idea of semantic contiguity. And insofar as Cage and Joyce both suggest that all writing is schematic, this is in the sense that coincidence can provide a semantic framework while at the same time remaining “indifferent” to any a priori claim to semantic organisation. For Cage, this is most clearly affected in the figure of the mock “skeleton key,” JAMES JOYCE, which is reduced to a “primary non‐reflectional” object the moment it ceases to designate anything beyond a “mere” structural conceit. The significance of this should not be overlooked, and its implications bear not only upon Cage’s “writing after Joyce,” but upon the entire infrastructure of Joyce’s text also. 6 7 John Cage, Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake (New York: Printed Editions, 1978) 1ff. John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, ed. Klaus Schöning (Königstein: Atheneum, 1985) 29. [100] Cage’s use of the mesostic form is also revealing of the way in which schematic readings of texts ultimately display a certain arbitrariness in regards to apparent first principles. It also demonstrates what Gregory Bateson describes as “metameric differentiation” and the formal relations that obtain between linguistic (lexical, syntactic, grammatical) and non‐linguistic phenomena.8 As Bateson points out, grammar and analogous structures are themselves products of discursive (organisational) processes.9 Like Cage, and the later work of Georges Perec and the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo), Bateson was interested in the way in which “generative” constraints, such as mesostic strings or acrostics, underwrite and organise semantic systems in a pro‐ grammatic and probabilistic fashion. Anticipating a key aspect of hypertext, Bateson states that: “In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject to constraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such constraints, the pathways of change would be governed only by equality of probability.” At the same time: “Probability, being a ratio between quantities which have similar dimensions, is itself a zero of dimension.”10 In 1979 the 41‐page text of Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake became the foundation for Roaratorio, which was composed as a sixty minute soundscape, directed by references to place‐names in Joyce’s text. As Cage recalled: “places mentioned in the Wake are identified in Louis Mink’s book A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer … And so a sound coming from Nagasaki, or from Canberra in Australia, or from a town in Ireland or a street in Dublin—could be identified by page and line and then put into this hour, where it belonged in relation to the page and line of Finnegans Wake.”11 Cage and his assistants then went to many of those places and recorded the sounds they found there, and obtained a number of other recordings by contacting radio stations around the world. Cage then made a recording of himself reading various passages from the Wake. A third set of tapes was made of Irish music. Finally, he made a sound collage from all of these source tapes, divided into four parts, with each part representing a book of the Wake. The 64 tracks of Cage’s Roaratorio, while not founded on a critical inquiry into Joyce’s text, nevertheless demonstrate how readings of Finnegans Wake often give rise to discourses of comparable complexity to the Wake itself, such as the “complex branching and interconnected chains of causation” described in cybernetics.12 Comparable notions of complexity also provide the thematic basis for much of contemporary hypertext theory, with its recurring themes of simultaneity, repetition, bifurcation, radical symmetry and so on. While completing Roaratorio Cage became involved in another radio project. In 1982 Cologne’s West German radio commissioned a work entitled An Alphabet, comprised of a textual collage of the voices of three central “characters”—James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp and Erik Satie—along with dialogue fragments from 14 others (including Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, Thorstein Weblen, Henry David Thoreau, and the Vocoder— an electronic voice synthesiser). Explaining his compositional techniques and the overall rational of An Alphabet, Cage wrote: “It is possible to imagine that the artists whose work we live with constitute an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.” However we 8 9 10 11 12 Gregory Bateson, “A Re-examination of ‘Bateson’s Rule,’” Steps to an Ecology of Mind (St Albins: Paladin, 1973) 349. Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 375. Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” 375, 378. Cage, Roaratorio, 89. Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” 379. [101] choose to understand the word “spell” in this context, it is clear that for Cage the very idea of alphabeticisation—of a matrix of literacy operating between coincidence and coherence—characterises the life‐world in which one “lives with” and “writes through,” as much as one is “spelled.” On the one hand, we seek the immanence of the whole in the part, on the other the recognition that “events do not cohere; at most certain sets of them happen more or less frequently than other sets; the only intelligible difference is one of frequency of coincidence.”13 2 The ideas of constellation, repetition, generative constraint and probability bring into focus a fundamental characteristic of hypertext—that of the transversal. Transversality might be thought of as a particular kind of punctuation or puncturing (bifurcations, ruptures, discontinuities, cancellations)—a form of mechanical copula between instances of repetition and difference in the matrical organisation of sign systems—suggestive of a “network” or what Hélène Cixous has referred to as “a metonymic chain where the other place always has its other place.”14 Like Cage’s mapping of mesostic co‐ordinates onto a Joycean “model,” hypertextual transversality can also be envisaged in terms of a textual surface that appears to preserve strata of differing, and apparently discrete, textual events, which are linked—on the basis of a certain probability quotient—by structures of contiguity and equivalence. In the introduction to Empty Words (1974‐5), Cage suggests that we can think of this relation in terms of a language or scription “free” of syntax: “James Joyce=new words; old syntax. Ancient Chinese? Full words: words free of specific function. Noun is verb is adjective, adverb … letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences.”15 Cage’s reference to “ancient Chinese” recalls the accretive aspect of hieroglyphics (layering of marks) that so much fascinated Ezra Pound in his work on Ernest Fenollosa. The hieroglyph functions as a type of palimpsest, but one in which all the constellated “fragments” are read simultaneously, while at the same time preserving the trace of other, associative or paradigmatic significations. What this hieroglyphic function reveals for Cage is the way in which the syntax of transversality obtains on a strictly material plane and is thus determinate of any subsequent “semantic content.” By transposing the pictorial element of hieroglyphics onto the graphemic aspect of the English alphabet, Cage (through Joyce) was able to arrive at a “technique” of literacy—reading/writing—which is both generative and mechanistic, underwritten not by any concept of agency external to language, but by those probabilistic structures inherent to it. In this way language ceases to be something described by probability, and instead becomes viewed as a “fact which corresponds to the idea of probability.” As C.S. Peirce argues, “probability is a continuous quantity”—that is, a set of 13 14 15 John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (New York: Dover, 1916) 116. For Cage, as for Joyce, writing is, as MerleauPonty says: “pregnant with a meaning which can be read in the very texture of the linguistic gesture.” Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 89. Hélène Cixous, “Joyce: The (r)use of writing,” trans. Judith Still, Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 23. Cage, Empty Words, 11. [102] material relations upon which semantic values are “inferred”—such that “the idea of probability essentially belongs to a kind of inference which is repeated indefinitely.”16 The relation of probability to “generative constraint”—as the expression of material agency underwriting language—is one which can be traced back to the earliest forms of writing, the so‐called calculi of Mesopotamia, which evolved as a form of accountancy or enumeration: in short, a calculus. Just as with the inventions of calendrial time, the notion of an enumerative literacy can be considered as giving form to an entire field of semantic experience—not by way of description, but as a condition of possibility. And it is by means of this prior possibility that the probabilistic function of language obtains, as more than simply a play of numbers. This is perhaps what Peirce meant by saying that “the general problem of probabilities is, from a given state of facts, to determine the numerical probability of a possible fact.”17 In “Art as Technique” (1917), Victor Shklovsky discusses a phenomenon of probability in everyday experience—which he describes in terms of “habitualisation”—as a phenomenon of language. In paradigmatic terms closely resembling those proposed by Sigmund Freud in Die Traumdeutung, Shklovsky defines a mechanism of probability and redundancy, in which linguistic displacement and condensation (metaphor and metonymy) organise the semantic content of a particular word or sentence. “In this process,” Shklovsky argues, “ideally realised in algebra, things are replaced by symbols.”18 Alexander Pogodin provides the basis of this observation in an anecdote about a boy considering the sentence “Les montaignes de la Suisse sont belles” in the form of an acrostic: L m d l S s b.19 Separated from the context of the initial sentence, these letters enter into different relations, with one another and with other possible combinations of words or phrases, as a matrix of signification in which the materiality of the letters’ “symbolic” function reveals a semantic complexion. According to Shklovsky: This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this “algebraic” method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognise them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. Similarly, “the process of ‘algebrisation,’ the over‐automaticisation of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature—a number, for example—or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”20 This is what Shklovsky means by the “unconsciously automatic,” which beyond an empirical formulation can be read as describing a condition of language which is ostensibly, and without being primarily linked to perception, 16 17 18 19 20 C.S Peirce, “On the Doctrine of Chances, with Later Reflections,” Philsophical Writings, ed. Justus Büchler (New York: Dover, 1955) 157-60. Peirce, “On the Doctrine of Chances,” 157. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” trans. L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis. Modern Literary Theory, eds. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. (London: Edward Arnold, 1990) 18. Alexander Pogodin, Language as Art (Moscow: Kharkov, 1913) 42. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 18. [103] “technological.” The technics of algebraic or acrostic convergence points beyond the specificity of Pogodin’s example to a generalised entelechy across the “totality” of discourse. One of the implications of this is not simply that the “object” supposedly designated by particular terms fades, but that the conditional nature of the object’s relation in language, as constitutive of an ontological condition, itself expires in this automaticisation. If we consider Shklovsky’s “object” as representing what Peirce calls a “possible fact,” and recognising the phenomenon of automaticisation as devolving upon a mechanics of probability, then this relation may be given formal expression as a “signifying materiality.” That is to say—as with the hieroglyphic calculus—the generative capacity of arbitrarily related “objects” to catalyse any set of unrelated “associations” into a discourse. For Peirce, this capacity is effectively linked to the concept of number, or of addition, whose fundamental expression is the binary relation of zero and one, nothing and something, or something “more” or “other than”—which also describes the basic notation of probability (0‐1), just as it describes the differential condition of signification mapped out by Shklovsky and Ferdinand de Saussure, in which “values remain entirely relative.”21 Language, therefore, could be called “the domain of articulations” whereby “combination produces a form, not a substance.”22 Addition in this sense equally implies “divisibility,” and it is on this basis that probability is conceived by Peirce as describing a recursive movement (or ambivalence) across binary opposition. Hence: There are two conceivable certainties with reference to any hypothesis, the certainty of its truth and the certainty of its falsity. The numbers one and zero are appropriated, in this calculus, to marking these extremes of knowledge; while fractions having values intermediate between them indicated, as we may vaguely say, the degrees in which evidence leans towards one or the other … This is the same as to inquire how much the given facts are worth, considered as evidence to prove the possible fact. Thus the problem of probability is simply the general problem of logic.23 Textual automation, based upon signifying materiality, can be seen as underwriting the entire discursive infrastructure of the later work of Joyce, Ulysses (1922) or Finnegans Wake (1941)—from grammar and syntax, to latent semantic features and so on (i.e. the general problem of a certain “logic”). Anticipating Cage’s mesostic strings, and echoing Shklovsky, Pogodin and Saussure’s anagrammatical abbreviations, one prominent features of the Joyce’s last completed text is the formal articulation of the variance and invariance of structuring “codes” represented, among others, by the trigrammatic figures ALP and HCE (nominally “Anna Livia Plurabelle” and “Humphrey Chimpdon Earwicker”). As Umberto Eco notes in his Theory of Semiotics, vis‐à‐vis code and combinatorial rules, “a code is usually conceived not only as a correlational rule but also as 21 22 23 Cf. Saussure’s “Anagrammes” in Jean Starobinski, Les Mots sous les mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See also, Julia Kristeva, “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes,” Tel Quel (Spring 1967). For Kristeva, the term “paragramme” refers “not merely to changing letters … but to the infinite possibilities of a text as an open network of indical connections.” Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) 112-3. Peirce, “On the Doctrine of Chances,” 157. [104] a set of combinational ones.”24 In this way the hypotactic structures associated with linear coding/decoding processes are crossed through by transverse structures of recursion and polyvalency.25 It is in such a light that the trigrammatic figures of the Wake are seen to represent certain probabilistic co‐ordinates of lexical and sublexical combination or permutation in Joyce’s text—anagram, acrostic, acronym—describing both a constellation‐ effect and what is referred to as a structural “grammar” or, in cybernetics, a set of “constraints.” In his essay “Cybernetic Explanation,” Bateson defines constraint negatively, as a principle of exclusion: “An event or object such as the letter K in a given position in the text of a message might have been any other of the limited set of twenty‐six letters in the English language. The actual letter excludes (i.e., eliminates by constraint) twenty‐five alternatives.”26 Such constraint is therefore a measure of probability—which is to say, of “stochastic” procedures or processes—linked to the possibility of signification: i.e. of any particular set of relations between non‐excluded terms being meaningful, within the limits of any definition of “meaningful” that are able to be established for any particular discourse. Consequently, the constellation‐effect underwritten by means of such generative constraints is itself considered as discursive, without, however, describing an horizon of derivation by which it might be characterised as “predicated” upon a prior code. Insofar as we treat the trigramatic figures HCE and ALP as generative—or as a matrix of significations—the “hierarchical” relation that may be attributed to sequential coding/decoding processes and their outcomes—sign‐vehicles, denotations and connotations, energeīa and ergon—is never anything but provisional, or rather virtual. Their hypotactic organisation is one of constant recursion rather than stasis; their “taxes” defining relations with and within a field of generative constraint that is constituted by nothing that could be situated as a telos or an object. This has led hermeneutic theorists like Algirdas Greimas to insist that “the lexeme is the place both of manifestation and intersection of semes,” whose signifying potential derives from different semantic categories and systems, thereby establishing between them “hierarchical relations, that is to say, hypotactic relations” where no previous relations obtained.27 Attempting to account for this shift from lexeme to sememe in the generative constellation of texts, Eco argues for the necessity of distinguishing “different readings of the sememe as encyclopaedia item and determine the assignment of many denotations and connotations.” Not as “matters of empirical and ad hoc knowledge of referents but rather pieces of coded information, in other words semantic units” that “perform a switching function.”28 And here resides one of the challenges of Joyce’s text: How do we situate the probabilistic limits of meaning or signification? How do we determine qualitatively the effect or object of constraint? Moreover, where do we locate the agency of 24 25 26 27 28 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) 90. Cf. Peter Roget, Original Introduction to Roget’s Thesaurus, ed. D.C. Browning (London: J.M Dent, 1952) 563: “It must necessarily happen in every system of classification … that ideas and expressions arranged under one class must include also ideas related to another class.” Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” 378. Algirdas Greimas, Sémantique structural (Paris: Larousse, 1966) 38. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 105. [105] constraint (its “switching mechanism”) vis‐à‐vis the assumption of a system of signifiers in the first place? In initially thematic terms, Finnegans Wake poses such questions with regard to novelistic convention—plot and character—while at the same time demonstrating how the teleological assumptions of plot, and the assumptions of identity that underwrite the idea of character, allow us to generalise the problem across the field of language. Beginning with the “exemplary” figures of ALP and HCE, Joyce sets in play a textual apparatus by means of which the general, grammatological condition of language as a set or series of constraints is revealed in the normativity of its “causal circuits”: Now … concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen (we are back in the presurnames prodromarith period, of course just when enos chalked halltraps) … Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise. [FW 30.01‐15] An analysis of this passage might suggest that the relation of naming to history (“the presurnames prodromarith period”), and their common orientation about a point of mythical discontinuity (“prefall”), points to an antecedence or prodromos in speculative pre‐history: “Eat early earthapple. Coax Cobra to chatters. Hail, Heva, we hear!” (271.22‐ 26). Hence the “semantic compression” of the passage is affected also in the grammatical or “syntactic” organisation of lexical and sublexical elements. In the reversal and threefold multiplication of the acrostic pattern HCE, “identity” becomes linked to a concept of symptomatology (prodrome), the thematics of the fall (Eden, Babel), and to a certain teleonomic organisation of language. Elsewhere Joyce links this anagrammatical and acrostic articulation of identity and variation to the Viconian notion of ricorsi storici or epochal recycling: Hail him heathen, heal him holystone! Courser, Recorser, Changechild …………….? Eld as endall, earth …………….? [481.1‐3] As figures of constraint, ALP and HCE describe a nominal probability of any sequence of terms in the Wake being related, structured around the constellation‐effect described through the repetition and permutation of these triadic figures. The opening passage of the Wake, ending with a reference to “Howth Castle and Environs” is in this way brought into communication with a passage about filiation, “Haveth Childers Everywhere,” and the generalised cognomen of the text’s assumed protagonist, “Here Comes Everyone.” As the coherence of these constraints is tested, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine the limits of the stochastic structures underlying such associative networks. We find, for example, on page 293, the letters ALP denoting the geometrical co‐ordinates of the following diagram (described as a “vicociclometer”), where “A is for Anna like L is for Liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to the lost, Loulou!” (293.18‐23): [106] This diagrammatic transposition of the figure “ALP” draws our attention not only to the purely normative function of these three letters representing an algebrisation or algorithm of textual relations—i.e. a structuring “grammar” of sign operations—and hence something like a syntax, but also to the fundamentally normative character of the letters themselves, posed—between linguistic, algebraic, geometrical functions—at the very limits of signification. Joyce makes this more explicit elsewhere in the Wake with reference to certain quasi‐linguistic figures—or sigla—denominated as the “doodles family” (299.F4): While these sigla appear (often in sublimated form) in the published version of Finnegans Wake, they are more regularly encountered in Joyce’s notebooks, now located at Buffalo, particularly the notebook known as VI.B.8. Roland McHugh records, for example, the appearance of the , siglum on page 147 of this notebook along with its corresponding page and line reference in the Wake (viz. “Miss Horizon, justso all our fannacies dainted her, on the curve of the camber, unsheathing a showlaced limbaloft to the great consternations”): VI.B.8.147: , girl lying on causeway lacin with one leg heavenward, lacing her shoe (340.28‐30)29 In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (24 March 1924), Joyce wrote: “In making notes I used signs for the chief characters,” on the reverse of which the , siglum appears among a list of other sigla, this time standing for the figure of Isolde, the inverse of Tristan (-). Elsewhere, at VI.B.11.105, , is given as “mirror of mirror” (while Isolde, “Issy” or “Isis” appears under the double aspect of + and *)—each of these characteristics determined, or at least associated, on the basis of certain material features of the sigla themselves and of the pattern of their “transformations.” Studies into the Wake’s paronomasia have long seen Joyce’s phonic and graphic puns and portmanteau words as examples of lexemes or other sublexical units bearing “autonomous” significations beyond conventional linguistic functions.30 An example of this is how the “E” of HCE is tipped over to signify “a village inn” (119.27), or how the % siglum associated with ALP is suggested to signify “an upside down bridge” (119.28), the Liffey “delta,” and the equilateral triangle of transcendental mystery: 29 30 Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Jones Hopkins University Press, 1980) 133. See Louis Armand, Technē: James Joyce, Hypertext and Technology (Prague: Karolinum/Charles University Press, 2003). [107] all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initial majiscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffling chrismon trilithon sign !, finally called after some hecitency Hec, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller %, fontly called following a certain change of state of grace of nature alp or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside the consort. [119.16‐22] Petr Škrabánek has demonstrated, in a short article entitled “The Turning of the ",” that the transformational process—or “change of state”—which seems to assign a material, non‐linguistic function to the Wake’s sigla, can also give rise to other translational processes of ideographic summation or literalisation through their material “resemblance” to other signifying “scriptsigns.”31 Hence the E of HCE is refigured as “Hec” or !, and— through a cycle of further transpositions as ", $ and #—describes the familiar figures of the Snellen “Distance Visual Acuity Test” and the Russian Cyrillic “Sheem,” ШЗЕМ (cf. 188.05; 580.18), as well as the Persian Cuneiform , the Sino‐Japanese character for “mountain,” [, and the Hebrew “shin” ‫ש‬. Distance Visual Acuity Test (E Game) Such transformations are neither as exotic or unlikely as may at first appear, and if they do indeed stretch the limits of signifying plausibility, then this should alert us to the problem of determining what indeed is plausible in signifying terms, and how it is that we may situate the point of differentiation between the potentially meaningful and the purely gratuitous, or between the potentially linguistic sign and the assumed material non‐sign. That is to say, how it is that we situate the boundaries of literacy. An interesting example of such translational processes of ideographic summation—as describing certain “boundaries of literacy”—can be found in the entry under H, the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, in Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon, where we find an account of the evolution of that character in certain ways consonant with Joyce’s renderings of the Wakean sigla: The uncial form of Eta (H) was a double ε (E$) and probably it was pronounced as a long ε … The old alphabet had only one sign (E) for the ε sound, till the long vowels η and ω were 31 Petr Škrbánek, Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake, eds. Louis Armand and Ondřej Pilný (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2002) 83-4. [108] introduced from the Samian Alphabet in the archonship of Euclides, BC 403. The sign H, before it was taken to represent the double ε, was used for the siritus asper, as ΗΟΣ for ὅς (which remains in the Latin H). When H was taken to represent ē, it was at the same time cut in two, so that ├ represented the spiritus asper, ┤the spiritus lenis; whence came the present signs for the breathings.32 In the section of La Pensée sauvage entitled “The Individual as a Species,” Claude Lévi‐ Strauss identifies the limit of the signifying function not so much in terms of linguistic particles as in what we might call particularisation, arguing that proper names (including the proper names of letters or characters, for example) “always exist on the margin of classification”: “In every system, therefore, proper names represent the quanta of signification below which one no longer does anything but point.”33 The gesture of pointing as degree zero (or “entropic point”) of signification, below the level of the proper name, nevertheless assumes a structure of signifying possibility that, as in Finnegans Wake, antecedes any supposed base quanta of signification—so that the margin or classification described by proper names finds its iteration at every level of the signifying relation, and not simply as a “special case.” Hence the naming function recurs in Joyce’s various anagrammatical figures as well as in other abbreviated, typographical forms, but also in terms of larger‐scale schematic figures or motifs. Nevertheless, Lévi‐Strauss puts forward a credible argument against Peirce and Bertram Russell in defining proper names as indices modelled upon demonstrative pronouns. In doing so Lévi‐Strauss distinguishes signification from pointing, or what Joyce terms “pointopointing,” which would otherwise be considered as transferring the signifying function to the proximate relation of the “thing in itself.” Underlying this concept of proper nouns is a particular nominalism in the distinction between signifying function and materiality, on the one hand, and between the specific and generic, particular and universal, on the other. These ostensibly metaphoric and metonymic relations describe a type of hypertextual grid against which the “normative letters” HCE can be thought of as describing an indexical discontinuity or contiguity. As such the signifying “value” of each term is multiplied across an equivalent denominational space, within which differing vectors or semantic “pointers” appear to intersect or communicate. This in turn suggests what we might call a hypertextual edifice, in which each letter or combination of letters in this “grouptriad” (FW 167.04) would be capable of virtually infinite subscriptions across the entire field of language without any one subscription assuming the unique role of an indexical value. Joyce locates this aspect of signifying materiality within the materiality of language (and cognition) itself: “But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational sense” (FW 19.35‐20.01). Identity is conceived not in terms of an autonomous singularity, nor even as a moment of transition, but rather as a matrix, contingent upon the relations between all of its parts. Such a concept suggests a type of a cybernetic programme in which formal and semantic functions operate on communicating planes of significance, characterised by virtually infinite permutations and combinations which gain increasing complexity, tending ultimately towards a formal 32 33 Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992) 346. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968) 215. [109] entropy as the underlying logic of pattern recognition approaches randomness and identity becomes a matter of pure normativity. 3 Joyce’s interest in recursion was informed by a number of early efforts at “structural” and “typological” analysis, from the work of Aristotle and Quintilian to Giambattista Vico’s Principi di Scienza Nuova and Leibniz’s Monadology, Hegel’s Phänomenologie and Marx’s Kapital, but also including such work as including George Polti’s The Thirty‐Six Dramatic Situations.34 Whilst living in Trieste, Joyce is known to have owned a copy of this text, which attempts to enumerate a finite number of dramatic “situations” as comprising a matrix for narrative discourse as a whole. According to Polti, all situations in any story or drama are supposed to fall into one of the following categories: 1. Supplication; 2. Deliverance; 3. Crime Pursued by Vengeance, 4. Vengeance Taken for Kindred Upon Kindred; 5. Pursuit; 6 Disaster; 7. Falling Prey to Cruelty or Misfortune; 8. Revolt; 9. Daring Enterprise; 10. Abduction; 11. The Enigma; 12. Obtaining; 13. Enmity of Kinsmen; 14. Rivalry of Kinsmen; 15. Murderous Adultery; 16. Madness; 17. Fatal Imprudence; 18. Involuntary Crimes of Love; 19. Slaying of a Kinsman Unrecognised; 20. Self‐Sacrifice for an Ideal; 21. Self‐Sacrifice for Kindred; 22. All Sacrificed for Passion; 23. Necessity of Sacrificing Loved Ones; 24. Rivalry of Superior and Inferior; 25. Adultery; 26. Crimes of Love; 27. Discovery of the Dishonour of a Loved One; 28. Obstacles to Love; 29. An Enemy Loved; 30. Ambition; 31. Conflict With a God; 32. Mistaken Jealousy; 33. Erroneous Judgement; 34. Remorse; 35. Recovery of a Lost One; 36. Loss of Loved Ones. Georges Borach quotes Joyce himself as saying, in 1917: “There are indeed hardly more than a dozen original themes in world literature. Then there is an enormous number of combinations of these themes.”35 Joyce also made allusion to Peter Roget’s 1000 categories of meaning, organised according to an overall arrangement of “6 primary Classes of Categories” whose subdivisions remain interlinked, ambivalent, transverse: a system of classification that détournes the very idea of classification and hence moves from the purely typological to the tropological. In the Introduction to the original 1852 publication of the Thesaurus, Roget outlines the primary “Classes of Categories” as so: 1. The first of these classes comprehends ideas derived from the more general and ABSTRACT RELATIONS among things, such as Existence, Resemblance, Quantity, Order, Number, Time, Power. 2. The second class refers to SPACE and its various relations, including Motion, or change of place. 3. The third class includes all ideas that relate to the MATERIAL WORLD; namely, the Properties of Matter, such as Solidity, Fluidity, Heat, Sound, Light and the Phenomena they present, as well as the simple Perceptions to which they give rise. 34 35 George Polti, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (New York: The Writer Inc., 1916). Cited in Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of Joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); rpr. from Georges Borach, “Conversations with Joyce,” College English XV (March 1954) 325327. [110] 4. The fourth class embraces all ideas of phenomena relating to the INTELLECT and its operations, comprising the Acquisition, the Retention, and the Communication of Ideas. 5. The fifth class includes the ideas derived from the exercise of VOLITION, embracing the phenomena and results of our Voluntary and Active Powers, such as Choice, Intention, Utility, Action, Antagonism, Authority, Compact, Property, etc. 6. The sixth and last class comprehends all ideas derived from the operation of our Sentient and Moral Powers, including our Feelings, Emotions, Passions, and Moral and Religious Sentiments. Roget’s overall project is described as a “desideratum”—a collection of words contained in a language and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged “according to the ideas which they express”—whose model of verbal classification is intended to mirror those of the natural sciences and natural history. In many respects, this project is a direct continuation of Bishop Watkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), attempting, as it does, a “scheme of analysis of the things or notions to which names were to be assigned,” and whose object—like Vico’s—was the formation of a system of symbols which might serve as a universal language. Indeed, it has been argued that the real import of Vico in Finnegans Wake, for example, derives from his anticipation of the concept of the thesaurus. In the Scienza Nuova (1744), Vico argues that: There must in the nature of human institutions be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things have diverse aspects. A proof of this is afforded by proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern. This common mental language is proper to our Science, by whose light linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead.36 Like an elaborate fugue form, such models suggest a matrix of possibility within textual constraints, based upon an otherwise arbitrary number of archē‐forms or codes. Fugue form, matrix, programme, game board, grid: each implies a structural template and algorithms of translation or transposition, the mapping of propositions in a topological space whose relations are fundamentally textual. Such concerns with structural organisation also represent a major preoccupation of George Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), with its vast array of compositional devices and its thematic concern with the encyclopaedic and systematic. Like Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, La Vie mode d’emploi explores mechanisms of structuration across the micro‐ and macro‐scales of trope and schema: from mechanisms for sublexical combination and recombination, to apparatuses for the elaboration of entire narratives—of which La Vie mode d’emploi is itself the primary example. Recalling the various schemata attributed to Joyce for establishing the Homeric parallels in Ulysses—and for mapping the text according to its various themes, techniques, temporal and spatial co‐ordinates, dominant 36 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Bergin and Max Frisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) XXII.161-162. [111] symbols, anatomical associations, and so on37—the published “keys” of the compositional devices employed in the writing of La Vie mode d’emploi not only suggest a matrix, programme, game board or grid, but in fact operate precisely on these terms. David Bellos, in his biography of the author, outlines a number of the compositional devices employed by Perec, foremost of which is the Graeco‐Latin bi‐square (otherwise known as the Euler Square). The principle of the bi‐square was first explained to Perec by the mathematician Claude Berge in 1967, and can be explained by the following example given by Bellos: A0 B1 C2 D3 E4 E1 A2 B3 C4 D0 D2 E3 A4 B0 C1 C3 D4 E0 A1 B2 B4 C0 D1 E2 A3 This represents a bi‐square of order 5, “each of whose twenty‐five locations is occupied by a pair of elements—hence the term bi‐square. It is also a ‘magic square,’ so‐called because no number‐letter combination occurs more than once in the square as a whole, and each of the numbers and each of the letters occurs once, and only once, along each row of the square and down each of its columns.”38 Moreover, “the bi‐square distributes all the possible combinations of the 2 x 5 elements used,” here represented by alphabetical or numerical designators, providing unique situations for each combination without the active intervention of an external structuring agency. In his “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” Claude Shannon identifies a similar principle to that of the bi‐square in the generation of fractional ciphers. In these, each letter of a mixed 25 letter alphabet (with I doubling for J) is “translated into two‐digit quinary numbers” using the following table: 0 1 2 3 4 0 1 2 3 4 L Z Q C P A G N O U R D M I F K Y H V S X B T E W Thus “B becomes 41.”39 Perec was quick to realise the potential of such devices in the transcription and distribution of any set of terms whatsoever. If, for example, each of the letters in the bi‐square “stands for a character, and each of the numbers for a property, or an action, or a place, then you can have twenty‐five different stories made from a very simple set of ingredients”—effectively restating the argument of Polti’s Thirty‐Six Dramatic Situations. By the same token, whatever can be combined in this was can also be analysed in the same or a similar manner, such as by applying the logic of fractional ciphers to 37 38 39 Cf. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) 38. David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993) 393-4. Cf. Georges Perec, “The Apartment Building,” Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin, 1997) 40. Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” 669. [112] “decrypt” what had previously been “encrypted.” This becomes a consistent feature of Perec’s texts in which dialectical or chiasmatic inversions proliferate, and where the text itself appears to be articulated around a structural hinge; a point of reversibility or “point of entropy.” The play between reversibility and the inertia of irreversibility is particularised in, among others, Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood, where the letters W and M assume—as we have seen in Joyce—a “literalising” function in describing a tropology of material relations (W as said to be the inverse of M, while W itself already names a doubled relation to the letter V—in French—or U—in English—where both U and V also represent a process of historical orthographic transposition and “ambivalence” that dates back to the origins of the Latin alphabet), reiterated also in Shannon’s application of the bi‐square technique—in which M become 22 and W, 44 (the one being the “double” of the other). For the overall plan of La Vie mode d’emploi, Perec chose to make use of a similar bi‐ square principle; not of order 5, but of 10—a configuration only demonstrated to be possible in 1959 by a group of mathematicians working in the United States (Bose, Parker and Shirkhande)40—in order to yield a work of 100 chapters (in fact, the final text comprises 99 chapters, the missing chapter doubling as a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle). As with the schemata for Ulysses, Perec then produced lists of characters and attributes distributed over a set of spatio‐temporal co‐ordinates. To facilitate this process, Perec mapped the 100 co‐ordinate grid‐spaces described by the bi‐square of ten onto “a Steinbergian apartment house with its façade removed.” The objective was then to generate a narrative that would combine all the predefined elements across the “one hundred grid locations, or spaces, or rooms, in order”—“describing the rooms thus unveiled and the activities unfolding in them,” as Perec says, “in accordance with formal procedures.”41 46 57 68 70 81 02 13 24 35 99 71 94 37 65 12 40 29 06 88 53 93 26 54 01 38 19 85 77 60 42 15 43 80 27 09 74 66 58 92 31 32 78 16 89 63 55 47 91 04 20 67 05 79 52 44 36 90 83 21 18 84 69 41 33 25 98 72 10 56 07 59 30 22 14 97 61 08 45 73 86 28 11 03 96 50 87 34 62 49 75 00 82 95 48 76 23 51 39 17 64 One of the proofs offered by Bose, Parker and Shirkhande in refutation of Euler’s Conjecture But whilst Perec had discovered formal procedures for the distribution of textual elements, he had yet to discover a satisfactory one for ordering the narrative arrangement 40 41 R.C. Bose, S.S. Shrikhande, and E.T. Parker, “Further Results on the Construction of Mutually Orthogonal Latin Squares and the Falsity of Euler’s Conjecture,” Canadian Journal of Mathematics 12 (1960): 189. Perec, Species of Spaces, 40. [113] across this distribution. The solution came in the form of a chess puzzle known as the knight’s tour, which involves plotting the movements of a knight as it moves around a chessboard so as to land on each and every square only once. By transposing the knight’s movements onto an oversized 10 x 10 board, Perec discovered a way of “mechanically” establishing the order in which the narrative of La Vie mode d’emploi—itself determined by the combinatorial mechanics of the bi‐square—would “unfold” transversely. Perec’s solution to this knight’s tour puzzle was as follows (beginning on square 6,6): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 59 84 15 10 57 48 7 52 45 54 2 98 11 58 83 16 9 46 55 6 51 3 85 60 97 14 47 56 49 8 53 44 4 12 99 82 87 96 17 28 43 50 5 5 61 86 13 18 27 80 95 4 41 30 6 100 71 26 81 88 n 42 29 94 3 7 25 62 89 70 19 36 79 2 31 40 8 72 65 20 23 90 69 34 37 78 93 9 63 24 67 74 35 22 91 76 39 32 0 66 73 64 21 68 75 38 33 92 77 An orthogonal bi‐square could now be mapped directly onto the cut‐away apartment building, and consequently Perec chose to superimpose twenty‐one different bi‐squares (each comprising two lists of ten elements) resulting in forty‐two separate lists with 420 characteristics to be distributed across the open grid‐space, forty‐two to each box (“and never the same forty‐two twice”).42 Perec’s combinatorial procedures, like Joyce’s, also extended to the sublexical, although where in Finnegans Wake sublexical combination becomes a general semantic procedure, in La Vie mode d’emploi it remains primarily topical—as in the satirical treatment of phonological conventions in the rendering of the name of the character Cinoc. Cinoc— whose name, we subsequently discover, derives from Kleinhof—presents the inhabitants of Perec’s fictional apartment building with the problem of how his name ought to be pronounced.43 Obviously the concierge didn’t dare address him as “Nutcase” by pronouncing the name “Sinok.” She questioned Valène, who suggested “Cinosh,” Winckler, who was for “Chinoch,” Morellet, who inclined towards “Sinots,” Mademoiselle Crespi, who proposed “Chinoss,” François Gratiolet, who prescribed “Tsinoc,” and finally Monsieur Echard, as a librarian well versed in recondite spellings and the appropriate ways of uttering them, demonstrated that, leaving aside any potential transformation of the intervocalic “n” into a “gn” or “nj” sound, and assuming once and for all, on principle, that the “i” was pronounced “i” and the “o,” “o,” there were then four ways of saying the initial “c”: “s,” “ts,” “sh” and 42 43 Bellos, Georges Perec, 514-5. Georges Perec, Life a User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1987) 286-7. [114] “ch,” and five ways of pronouncing the final: “s,” “k,” “ch,” “sh” and “ts,” and that, as a result, depending on the presence or absence of one or another diacritical sign or accent and according to the phonetic particularities of one or another language or dialect, there was a case for choosing from among the following twenty pronunciations: SINOS SINOK SINOCH SINOSH SINOTS TSINOS TSINOK TSINOCH TSINOSH TSINOTS SHINOS SHINOK SHINOCH SHINOSH SHINOTS CHINOS CHINOK CHINOCH CHINOSH CHINOTS When we consider how Kleinhof becomes Cinoc, or how “Howth Castle and Environs” becomes associated with “Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,” “Hear Comes Everyone,” or simply HCE, we are led to the necessity of accounting for such recursivity (and the specific effect of commutation and substitution of elements) in strictly material terms—such as the (arbitrary, schematic, mechanical) relation of contiguity and equivalence of individual phonemes or graphemes.44 Perec’s schematisation may equally be mapped onto a general model of homology such as that described by Saussure vis‐à‐vis the assumed syntagmatic and systemic (associational or paradigmatic) axes of language, wherein we may observe a structural syntax underwriting a broadly semantic organisation from micro‐scale effects— phonemic combination and permutation—to macro‐scale effects of a generalised discourse. Between sublexical organisation and narrative schemata, the phenomenon of structural recursion suggests what we have already referred to as a system of hypertextual linkage. Again in La Vie mode d’emploi, Perec describes a situation in which one of his protagonists, Winckler, contemplates various indexical structures for the organisation of a series of images based upon the use of “labels”: He wanted, so he said, to sort the labels into order, but he found it was very difficult: of course, there was chronological order, but he found it poor, even poorer than alphabetical order. He had tried by contents, then by country, but that didn’t satisfy him. What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else: for example, they could have some detail in common, a mountain or volcano, an illuminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of a groom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface, or similar slogans (“Pearl of the Ocean,” “Diamond of the Coast”), or a relationship based not on similarity but opposition or a fragile, almost arbitrary association: a minute village by an Italian lake followed by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, skiers followed by swimmers, fireworks by candlelit dinner, railway by aeroplane, baccarat table by chemin de fer, etc.45 At a certain point, Winckler comes to realise the radically arbitrary nature of his typological project, which comes to stand for the project of typology generally. At each point the contiguity of successive “terms” in the series gives way to association and equivalence, so that the series itself is constantly in a state of possible reconfiguration and dissolution. The narrative that is always on the verge of taking form across the 44 45 Cf. Roland Barthes, “Syntagm and System,” Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wand, 1967) 58ff. Perec, Life a User’s Manual, 31-2. [115] relationship of any two terms, is thus constantly détourned and typology cedes to what we might call tropology. Such a scenario poses obvious difficulties for the schematisation or systematisation of “reference” in ways that ought to alert us to the fact that reference is not the determination of any system in particular, but of a tendency to systematisation that remains on a plane of possibility rather than of actualisation. As Perec’s character observes, “It’s not just hard … above all it’s useless: if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they’ll have at least three things in common.” Joyce similarly undertook to radicalise narratology—as a metonymic amplification of lexicographical effects—by projecting Polti’s schematic model through a complex of rhetorical and semantic matrices, whose basic units were thus rendered in terms of a linguistic atomism. By subjecting a schematic model of narrativity to the tropic function of sublexical particles, Joyce arrived at a mode of hypertextuality whose form, on one level, is thus situated between acrostics and geometrical figuration: “the median, hce che ech, intersecting at royde angles and parilegs of a given obtuse one biscuits both the arcs that are in curvechord behind” (FW 283.32‐284.04). The repetition of the co‐ordinate figure HCE, in this case, brings about transverse communications between otherwise non‐ communicating textual elements, “causing” them to converge—with varying probabilities—in a broadly topological relation. The acrostic organisation of these co‐ ordinates likewise suggests a form of semantic apparatus, directed at the level of individual lexemes or sublexical grid‐points (Polti’s Thirty‐Six Dramatic Situations as a bi‐ square of order 6 mapping the coordinate functions of the letters HCEAL and P against their assumed thematic or narratological function). 4 The co‐ordinate processes of mapping and “metonymic amplification” vis‐à‐vis the metrical grid‐structures of Perec, Joyce and Cage, are further suggestive of what we might call a dynamics of topological wrapping—a folding, introversion, of tropical “spiration” that would describe the particular recursive agency at work in the generation of textual relations: what we might call its technē. Regarded as generative, the metrical grid affects simultaneous states of contiguity and equivalence, diachrony and synchrony, metonymy and metaphor, described by a system of (binary or ternary) co‐ordinates by which a “figure” of agency is constellated. This figure, needless to say, is no‐thing, but a general condition of complementarity—a “both and yet neither” by which signification is said to operate in the manner of a switching mechanism or gyro, within a differential field of mutual attractions and repulsions, metaphor switching into metonymy, synchrony into diachrony, syntagm into paradigm, equivalence across contiguity, etc.—thereby affecting a mechanism of hetero‐topical recursion. It is in the “nature” of such a mechanism that while it may be supposed, it cannot be represented other than in its “effects”—that is to say, by way of a topological metaphor, or by some form of analogy, allegory, or figuration. Choosing at random, one such could be the psychological illusionism of the Fraser Spiral—first elaborated in 1908 by the [116] mathematician James Fraser, after whom it was named46—which, as E.H. Gombrich points out, “is not a spiral at all but really a series of concentric circles. Only a tracing pencil will convince us that we are not confronted with a spiral moving towards the infinite.”47 But while the Fraser Spiral is not an actual spiral, nor is it quite, as Gombrich says, a series of concentric circles. Rather there is the appearance of concentric braids—described by complementary sets of linkages between black and white triangular figures—whose constellational two‐dimensional form supplies a visual analogy to the apparently three‐ dimensional dynamics of the whole, and accordingly seems to twist in upon itself, drawing the eye down into an open, grid‐patterned vortex. The Fraser Spiral This movement from circle to spiral, and from spiral to orthogonal “grid,” can be thought of as describing a verbal‐visual architecture or architectonics of the vortex, in which an apparently two‐dimensional, textualised edifice is set into a conceptual multi‐dimensional flux, within a whole which is thus de‐totalised (as a palimpsest of tromp‐l’œil effects). This whole (or hole) is the “entropic point” around which the entire tropic structure of the vortex is organised but which itself is seen to be empty and opened out, as a place or topos of perpetual substitution. Projected into this non‐place, a mechanism of “hetero‐topical” recursion sets the entire signifying field into a pulsation which is also a type of pulsion or drive—its vectoral trajectories shifting between a seemingly unlimited number of discursive co‐ordinates as though simultaneously, suggesting what Ezra Pound described in 1916 as “a radiant node or cluster … a VORTEX, from which and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing.”48 This compulsive, or rather convulsive, movement of structuration towards a totality of the (w)hole, provides an organisational impetus of the hypertextual apparatus, at the same time as it determines its radical decentredness. The illusionistic nature of this double‐ structure describes a quasi‐dialectic between the visual discursus of the mirroring horizon of subjectivity and the architectonic discursus of the hypertextual transverse. The implications of this movement point towards the way in which, for instance, hypertextual linkage, or its copulative function, occupies an interstice of complementarity which cannot be situated according to a straightforward Cartesian logic—as the transitional state of a forethrow of recursive substitution—i.e. towards the topos of entropy. 46 47 48 James Fraser, “A New Visual Illusion of Direction,” British Journal of Psychology 2 (1908): 307-20. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1994) 184-5. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970) 92. [117] The vortex, or vortext, consequently situates a geometry of incompletion and undecidability, fluctuating across multiple spatial and temporal dimensions of the signifying field—i.e. as a constellation‐effect. But where visual representation has long been seen as tied in one way or another to the limitations and necessary incompleteness of all two‐dimensional representations (as a set of marks on a Cartesian plane), this has rarely been seen as the basis for a generative, “architectural” model of signification. As Gombrich argues, however, despite the apparent literality of the two‐dimensional plane (or rather because of it), “some part of the motif will always remain hidden from us, and there will always be some overlap.”49 This metonymic self‐concealment in the “topical regression” of the two‐dimensional plane, cuts across the metaphoric axis along which the motif is substituted for the entire textual structure that gives rise to it, and which sustains it in its signifying “illusion.” But this movement also assumes another form of illusionism, in that its verisimilitude stands in regard to language itself. Here, too, we may find an analogy to those visual puzzles which Giorgio Vasari described as “hovering between the seen and the unseen,” as in the virtualised painting of the mythical Parrhasios. And like the architectural riddles of Maurits Escher and Giovanni Piranesi, the apparently two‐ dimensional textual plane constantly defies us to account for these effects of incompletion, inconsistency and undecidability.50 It is possible to similarly map a shift in the cyclicality of Finnegans Wake, Ulysses and La Vie mode d’emploi from the circular to the spiral, a shift whose visual analogy could be seen in the Fraser Spiral as a kind of topological wrapping of a grid‐like surface structure, suggesting also an analogous movement within the model of a hypertextual matrix of “whirlworlds”—from acrostic grid to vortext, and so on. This shift can be seen as consisting of sequences of schematic recurrence in which the complexity of the text is an outcome of what might be described as “positive feedback loops.” That is to say, the tendency to increase deviation from “stability” in a system, including linguistic and semantic systems. In a formal expression of such principles, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann defined complexity as the proportion of a system’s possible “complexions” (or microstates) correlated with each of its distinguishable macrostates. In this way Boltzmann also defines entropy as a measure of ambiguity in a system.51 Boltzmann developed a statistical approach to explaining the observed irreversible behaviour of macroscopic systems in a manner consistent with their reversible microscopic dynamics. This entropy agrees (up to terms that are negligible for a large system) with the macroscopic thermodynamic entropy of Rudolf Clausius. The “great confusion about entropy,” Boltzmann argued, lay in the perception that entropy is “real,” in the sense that it is a thermodynamic property (or dimension) of a system, and is often perceived as the dispersion of energy instead of as a measure for chaos, or disorder. Hence, in explaining in statistical terms the second law of thermodynamics, Boltzmann argued that: “For any process by which a thermodynamic system is in interaction with the environment, the total change of entropy of system and environment can never be negative. If only 49 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 176. 50 Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. 2 vols. London: Everyman Library, 1996. 51 Cf. David Ruelle, Chance and Chaos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) 136. [118] reversible processes occur, the total change of entropy is zero; if irreversible processes occur as well, then it is positive.”52 The Lorenz Attractor An adjunct to the second law of thermodynamics, concerning entropy, describes the tendency of energy in a closed system to become less available to do work with the passing of time. This tendency, defined in 1850 by Clausius, is also understood as the measure of the apparent randomness, disorder or chaos in a system. In thermodynamics, entropy can thus be considered a measure of turbulence. Turbulence, like white noise, static, or interference patterns whose variability defies reduction, is characterised by infinite permutations of “a small number of variables within a finite area,” which are “non‐repeating” even as “the whole broad spectrum of possible cycles is present at once.”53 David Ruelle, among other Chaos theorists, points to the way in which complex systems display “sensitive dependence upon initial conditions.”54 This topological effect is described as one of logarithmic compression across micro‐levels which, in analogous terms, is productive of schematic amplifications on the macro‐level of the “text.” In mathematics such relations are considered as describing a “hypersphere,” a schematisation of infinite dimensions which could also be one way in which we might formally express the structural topology of hypertext.55 Another way could be in terms of what, in 1976, Ruelle and Floris Takens first termed “strange attractors.”56 A strange attractor may be defined as a particular discursive phenomenon, characterised by non‐periodic cycles of recurrence or recursion. A more formal definition of an attractor in terms of dynamic systems would be “a region of possible states with the property that: 1. states ‘sufficiently close’ to those in the attractor lead eventually to states 52 53 54 55 56 Ludwig Boltzmann, “Analytischer Beweis des zweiten Haubtsatzes der mechanischen Wärmetheorie aus den Sätzen über das Gleichgewicht der lebendigen Kraft,” Wiener Berichte 63 (1871): 712–732. James Gleick, Chaos (London: Minerva, 1997) 121. Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 136. Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 58-9. David Ruelle and Floris Takens, “On the Nature of Turbulence,” Communications in Mathematical Physics 20.3 (September 1971): 167‐192. [119] within the attractor; 2. states within the attractor lead immediately to other states within the attractor.”57 In 1963 Edward Lorenz, working as a meteorologist, evolved a model for describing the various states of very simple low‐dimensional systems during the onset of turbulence or “chaotic behaviour.” The Lorenz attractor maps the dynamics underlying a system’s turbulence across a non‐integer dimension plotted against a time‐series in two‐ dimensional phase‐space. The simplified pattern which characterises representations of the strange attractor plotted in this way suggests an ambivalent or recursive oscillation about a dual axis. Most importantly, the recursive or cyclical patterns described by the strange attractor do not intersect—their vectors are non‐repeating.58 In Finnegans Wake we find analogous models of textual and spatio‐temporal discontinuities or turbulence, recorded in the distribution of apparently inassimilable elements across the entire field of textual signification and generative of other, “topologically perverse” patterns—from the sublexical “perversions” of Joyce’s triads and portmanteaux, to the cyclical “turbulence” of the Wake’s structural schemata or “circumcentric megacycles” (FW 310.07)—its vectors determined by the relation across this textual field by the movement of systemic instability described by certain hypertextual scansions.59 Such “perversions” have similarly been identified in mathematics terms, in the work of Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church, and were systematically put to work in the combinatorial experiments of the Oulipo in the 1960s and 1970s, in particular Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes and Exercises de Style, and Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. Yet where these tend towards the prolific and inflationary, the problems of “generative constraint” are shown to be contiguous with over‐reduction, minimalism, and base morphogenesis. The transversal marked out by means of this contiguity—between or across schematic and tropic and typographical or material aspects of textual “design”—could be thought of as the architectural principle par excellence. At the same time, this transversality is affected not as a hidden unifying principle, as such, but as a form of topical organisation along tropological lines. The various ways in which the seemingly closed structures of arithmetic, architectural design, perspective, and lexicology seem to break down—that is, in being revealed at certain crucial moments as incomplete, inconsistent and undecidable—suggest that transversality is implicit to structure, that it defines structure itself. The effects of generative constraint—the constellational “illusionism” of transversality, the “fissures and fracture lines” (FW 386.32) of lexical contiguity and narrative or grammatical discontinuity in Finnegans Wake, or the topological anamorphoses of the Fraser Spiral’s transference from the Cartesian plane—all affirm this. However, we are never able to situate these “fissure and fracture lines” which keep transversality in a continual genesis—as what Perec refers to as “an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion.”60 Such a constellation‐effect has been described 57 58 59 60 Ben Goertzel, Chaotic Logic: Language, Thought and Reality from the Perspective of Complex Systems Science (New York: Plenum, 1994) 22. David Ruelle, “Strange Attractors,” Mathematical Intelligencer 2 (1980) 126-37. The figures HCE and ALP, e.g., may be considered as describing an algorithmic function, analogous to the ordinary differential equations upon which physicists like O.E. Rossler have observed three-dimensional chaotic dynamical systems devolve. Cf. Rossler, “An Equation for Continuous Chaos,” Physics Letters A 57 (1976): 397-398. Perec, Life a User’s Manual, 117. [120] by Hungarian artist and theorist Victor Vasarély in terms of surface kinetics, whereby a two‐dimensional surface is set into an apparently multi‐dimensional pulsation, such that the stability of the visual field is disrupted through a kinetosis. In his 1955 Yellow Manifesto, Vasarély defines surface kinetics as “a single plastic sensibility in different spaces,” or “plastique cinétique,” in which “myriad formal manipulations [are] relentlessly permutated through the plane.” Elsewhere Vasarély describes this effect in terms of two‐dimensional “periodic structures” in which “simultaneously graduated values connote a smooth, cinematic progression along the surface, while sharply contrasted complementaries appear to jump, leaving the eye not only startled but also tantalised by after‐images. But the ultimate effect of this pulsating, syncopated matrix could be likened to a plane geometer’s vision of the heavens.”61 In this sense the textual edifice itself is always in medias res, a work in progress between morphological emplacement, on the one hand, and an interminable “anamorphosis” on the other, caught in the recursive “spiration” of the vortext. 5 In defining the generative constraints considered as situating a locus of the vortext, the recurrence of the chance event can be said to be characterised as ostensibly mechanical repetition insofar as it marks a generalised “technology.” Recurrence in this sense denotes a programmatic “circuit”—or locus of attraction—inscribing itself ahead of any teleological system or historical narrative in which the inception (or acquisition) of language or literacy, for example, already functions as allegory. And to the extent that this inscription predicates any “dialectical” movement by means of which recurrence might appear to be subsumed into a movement of totalisation, it does so only insofar as the movement towards totality describes a technological impetus that will have given rise to it in the first place, and whose “object” is nothing other than a perpetual forethrow of a possible totality. Posing the question of the “fundamental” nature of such a technological impetus (as a model of all allegorical unveiling of narrative), Jacques Derrida writes: “the current technology of our computers and our micro‐computerified archives and our translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys.”62 Elsewhere he is more specific: The game, of which the repetition of repetition consists, is a selbstgeschaffene game, that the child has produced or has permitted to be produced by itself, spontaneously, and it is the first of its type. But none of all this (spontaneity, autoproduction, the originality of the first time) contributes any descriptive content that does not amount to the self‐engendering of the repetition of itself. Hetero‐tautology (definition of the Hegelian speculative) of repeated repetition, of self‐repetition.63 This selbstgeschaffene game—which is more than merely a model of autopoiesis and is in fact autopoietical—refers to an “apparatus” described by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the 61 62 63 Cited in Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991) 232. Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 147. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 301. [121] Pleasure Principle (1919). Watching his grandson playing in his pram one day, Freud observed him throwing a toy out of the pram and then hauling it back in by means of a leash: This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long‐drawn‐out “o‐o‐o‐o,” accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word “fort” (gone). I eventually realised that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play “gone” with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o‐o‐o‐ o.” He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” (there). This, then, was the complete game of disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.64 For Freud, this fort/da game is interpreted on one level as depicting the child’s symbolic mastery over the maternal absence, and is accordingly taken to provide the basis of all future narrative (Erzälung, Geschichte) of loss and recovery. The actual mechanical repetition of this game is seen to open up a space which is not itself contained within the narrative sequence, but rather describes a space of repetition itself. This space, however overly determined, allows for possible contingencies to arise—for instance, the chance of the object not being returned. Without this possibility the game itself could have no force, and indeed would not be, although such an outcome, which would mark the game’s termination, necessarily stands outside the “system” described by it in the form of a detour. In a sense, this possibility effects a dissymmetry between the closed system of a dialectics (of identification, desire, etc.) and its discursive apparatus—within which the system is inscribed but which cannot be totalised or brought within that system, let alone be comprehended by it. That is to say, in the figure of a certain agency. Hence—across this dissymmetry which is also that of metaphor and metonymy, equivalence and contiguity— the “possibility” of a terminus functions, as the locus of any fort/da ritual, as the terminus of possibility itself—this locus being none other than what we might call the “agency” of repetition and difference—i.e. of any system of sign operations whatsoever. The binary fort/da mechanism is thus seen to function—like Lévi‐Strauss’s “Totemic Operator”—as a type of modulator, a switching mechanism or structural agency, in accordance with which discourse (or discursivity) is affected by means of a recursive apparatus—i.e. of sign operations linked to a generalised mechanics of possibility. 64 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C.J.M. Hubback (London: The Hogarth Press, 1922) 14ff. [122] Importantly, Freud describes the recursive fort/da movement by the German verb fortgehen, “to go away,” which necessarily leaves open the possibility of return and remains ambiguous in this sense (as in fort, to continue)—as opposed, for instance, to weggehen, to go away or leave, which suggests a definite absence—so that rather than describing an “opposition,” the terms fort and da are from the outset mutually implicated or complementary. This “possibility of return” prefigured in the impetus of the forethrow, poses itself as an imminence leading to closure. In place of closure, however, the possibility of return discloses the necessary possibility of the non‐return: recursion in place of “pure repetition,” meaning a contiguity within the structure of equivalence. It is by means of the necessary possibility of the non‐return that the return remains open to the initiation of a further movement or forethrow—at the same time as posing a threat to the very systematicity of the “game” and representing what might be called its motivating constraint—which is concealed precisely through repetition. The relation here of constrain to an “open possibility” describes what can also be regarded as a “destining” that characterises the fort/da game as programmed or determined in advance, marked by an experience of being “subject” to a certain chance, even as that subjectivity assumes the appearance of agency. This imagined transference of agency from the mechanism of the game itself (represented in the tropic figure of the leash, which ties the metonymic “object” or homunculus, as we may say, to its destiny and to its chance) to the figure of the subject in turn can be said to assume the outward form of a contrivance rather than a compulsion (a chance that can always be “switched”). The game itself determines nothing, its chance is “without content,” such that the element of compulsion always remains at a structural level as an engine of difference—i.e. contrivance in its root dialectical sense of pairing or “comparison”—and not, for example, of a transference from inertia to consciousness; from materiality to signification. The binary mechanism of Freud’s fort/da might consequently be thought of as describing a type of “strange attractor,” in its manner of operating as what René Thom calls a topological “fold,” or analogously as a structural hinge between the mechanics of chance and signifying possibility. The barre of the fort/da relation might consequently be thought of as “operating” a structural axis or hinge between the mechanics of chance and its situational constraints. The illusiory nature of the either/or repetitiveness of the game is thus belied in the nature of the absence which prefigures it and determines its dynamic as a play towards loss, to an always prior loss, of which it is the graphic expression. In other words, the fort/da “repetition” is in fact a repetition only in the sense that it presents a figure of a forethrow towards the inertia of a “there” or da which is never transformed into the “here” of supposed conscious agency. It is this da of a generalised inertia—figured in the Other, Real or Unconscious—to which the psychoanalytic subject is thus tied by means of this metonymic leash, its “actions” given in advance of it, as it were, by virtue of a purely mechanistic recursion. What is more, the movement of this forethrow is such that the subject is in effect “subverted”—a “turning under” which defines a tropic spiral in the dialectic of identification, a vectoral clinamen which Jacques Lacan locates in the paradoxical structure of the Freudian drives, represented in the following diagram— whereby subjectivity is linked, through the mechanics of agency, not to a determining consciousness but to the unconscious: [123] This paradoxical movement—between aim and goal—rests in what Lacan terms a “fundamental reversion,” which at the level of each of the drives “is the movement outwards and back in which it is structured.”65 Moreover, this paradox is irreducible and is in fact the structural motivation of the drive, just as the repetition of the “there” stands as the inassimilable point of motivation in the compulsive fort/da ritual (even if the repetition itself has no “point” other than its own perpetuation). The reduction of the subject to a moment of repetition, or locus in the recursion of the drives, defines a fundamental redundancy in which the subject is “lost” through a series of substitutions whose site it is (as a type of hole or void which must be filled). At the same time, it is the nature of the inassimilable object that prevents the structural subject from vanishing entirely, and instead sustains it—as a tropic figure—within an apparently limitless play of signifying substitutions: the movement of the vortext as inertial “forethrow,” or pro‐grammē, of a certain fore‐text. Analogous to the discursive Freudian‐Lacanian model of ostensibly textual “play” are certain concepts derived from information theory which in turn involve a theory of generative recursion and redundancy. According to Shannon, the “redundancy of ordinary English, not considering statistical structure over greater distances than about eight letters, is roughly 50%,” meaning fifty percent redundancy in the form of verbal or visual elements that are not strictly necessary to “convey” a message.66 Two extremes of redundancy in English prose identified by Shannon are represented by Charles Ogden’s Basic English and Finnegans Wake. “The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high. This is reflected in the expansion that occurs when a passage is translated into Basic English. Joyce on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content.”67 Redundancy in this sense can be understood as a predictable departure from the random. Part of the redundancy of ordinary language lies in its formal structure, by which successive terms can be deduced by virtue of the semantic, syntactic, or grammatical structures from which they are missing. Other kinds of redundancy, however, lend themselves more directly to numerical or statistical measures, such as the frequency of 65 66 67 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridon (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977) 177-8. Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July, October, 1948): 393. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 394. It is worth noting that Ogden himself attempted a partial translation into Basic English of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Finnegans Wake in transition 21 (March, 1932). In August 1929, Ogden, an authority on the influence of language upon thought and the founder of the Orthological Institute in London, had persuaded Joyce to come to the Institute to record the last pages of “Anna Livia.” This represents the only known recording of Joyce reading from the Wake. [124] repetitions of particular letters or combinations of letters in any particular language (for example the letter “e,” which in French, as in English, is the most common letter— occurring in English with the frequency of probability .12, and which is systematically suppressed in Perec’s La Disparition in a model of exacerbated redundancy that is the basis of the Oulipian procedure known as a lipogramme). For Shannon, referring to the basic unit for measuring information (binary digits of what J.W. Tukey defined as bits), vis‐à‐vis the signifying effects of ellipsis, selection, substitution, combination and contexture: “a stream of data in ordinary language is less than random; each new bit is partly constrained by the bits that went before; thus each new bit carries less than a bit’s worth of real information.”68 This echoes, in rather more quantitative terms, observations about aphasic disturbances made by Roman Jakobson in 1956, to the effect that: the more a word is dependent on the other words of the same sentence and the more it refers to the syntactical context, the less it is affected by the speech disturbance. Therefore words syntactically subordinated by grammatical agreement or government are more tenacious, whereas the main subordinating agent of the sentence, namely the subject, tends to be omitted.69 The emissive/receptive principles of exacerbated redundancy and “generative” entropy can especially be seen at work in the compositional logic, and the logic of outcomes, of John Cage’s Empty Words—a schematised “reading” of Thoreau’s Journal. Cage’s four part assemblage can effectively be taken as a manual of a poetics not only of chance and repetition, but of “signifying materiality.” Like the Roaratorio, it can be taken as affecting a type of literate technology, yet in the accompanying author’s statements Cage is far more explicit here about a generalised technology. As with Perec’s La Vie mode demploi, Cage begins with a set of structural constraints: What can be done with the English language? Use it as material. Material of five kinds: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences. A text for a song can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be just syllables, just words; just a string of phrases; sentences. Or combinations of letters and syllables (for example),letters and words, et cetera. There are 25 possible combinations. Relate 64 (I‐Ching) to 25. 64 = and number larger or smaller than 64. 1‐32 = 1; 33‐64 = 2. 210 = 46 groups of 3 + 18 groups of 4. Knowing how many pages there are in the Journal, one can then locate one of them by means of the I‐Ching. Given a page one can count the lines, locate a single line, count the letters, syllables (e.g.), locate one of either. Using index, count all references to sounds or silence in the Journal. Of all references to the telegraph harp … “Buzzing strings. Will be. The telegraph harp. Wind is from the north, the telegraph does not sound. Aeolian. Orpheus alive. It is the poetry of the railroad. By one named Electricity.”70 68 69 70 Cited in Gleick, Chaos, 257-8. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987) 101. Cage, Empty Words, 11. [125] Stochastic processes of this type are known in mathematics as discrete Markoff processes, and their study had already been extensively documented in the 1930s.71 Shannon describes a similar process in his outline of the “series of approximations to English” using a 27‐symbol “alphabet” (26 letters and a space). In this process, the order of constraints determining the probability of selection of successive letters in a particular letter‐group is comparable to that employed by Cage in Empty Words, with its “dependency” on an element of unpredictability. For example: one opens a book at random and selects a letter at random on the page. This letter is recorded. The book is then opened to another page and one reads until this letter is encountered. The succeeding letter is then recorded. Turning to another page this second letter is searched for and the succeeding letter if recorded, etc.72 The overall schema of Empty Words is described, in part II, as a “mix of words, syllables, and letters”: Pt. I includes phrases. III omits words. IV omits sentences, phrases, words, and syllables: includes only letters and silences. Categories overlap. E.g., a is a letter, is a syllable, is a word. First questions; What is being done?73 At the beginning of part II, Cage offers an answer to this question, and an indication of how composition by way of mechanical constraint can be taken as the basis of a method for reading: Searching (outloud) for a way to read. Changing frequency. Going up and then going down: going to extremes. Establish (I, II) stanza’s time. That brings about a variety of tempi (short stanzas become slow; long become fast). To bring about quiet for IV (silence) establish no stanza time in III or IV. Not establishing time allows tempo to become naturally constant … A new breath for each new event. Any event that follows a space is a new event. Making music by reading aloud … Making language saying nothing at all.74 While parts I, II and III remains comparatively “readable” in conventional terms, part IV (letters and silence) acquires the appearance of a cryptogram, random sequence of signs, or a chaotic “data stream.” Like Thoreau’s telegraph harp, however, it is a matter of inventing a literacy that is able—without recourse to mimesis, citational context, or symbolisation—to discover the form of “information” conveyed (making language say “nothing,” for example, yet nevertheless “saying”—it is here a question of a structural semantics rather than of semantic content): r a mnaiea ss stenmypr fmnc r kv y nth wly gfrch k t a s ae ooarywth aeo sta in h o ngte 71 72 73 74 Shannon cites M. Fréchet, Méthode des fonctions arbitraires. Théorie des événements en chaîne dans le cas d’un nombre fini d’états possibles (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1938). Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 387. Cage, Empty Words, 33. Cage, Empty Words, 51. [126] eu e nv ns tbl i h indss rlynd, b sprlph d. Th d o l o To o a e c a l e sp n kn tt arv blskevsar wst thraea75 The seeming paradox here is that, as Shannon says, the more “chaos” in a data stream the more information that is conveyed by each new “bit.” As in Cage’s mesostics and Joyce’s Wake, the highly ambiguous, “materialised” compositions generated by means of I‐Ching or acrostic co‐ordinates resemble—as with the cryptographic algorithms of Shannon’s “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”—models evolved in Chaos theories involving turbulence and non‐laminar flows in thermodynamic systems. Like these, the techno‐poietics of Joyce, Cage and Perec appears to function as a kind of “system” which moves from predictable behaviour to unpredictable behaviour, by virtue of the exacerbation within the system of an “element of indeterminacy,” or conversely the withdrawal of the possibility of straightforward or statistical “redundancy.” The crucial point being, however, that such indeterminacy is never simply the property of an “element,” or some “thing” introduced into a system that is otherwise semantically homogenous or stable. Rather, indeterminacy is a characteristic possibility of any sign‐ system. Indeed, it is this mark of indeterminacy or structural ambiguity which, like the “strange attractor,” effects signifiability as a dynamic system—gives signification its possibility and its chance (as an “equivalence” across contiguity)—within a field of probability which is never absolutely determined nor absolutely indeterminate. Mathematical cases in which stochastic processes which generate a sequence of symbols are merely abstractly defined may be considered indeterminate with relation to the “legibility” of the sequence produced, depending upon the criteria set down for “legibility.” This, however, would simply describe the contours of a generalised process without seeking to account for the specific environmental constrains associated with what we call literacy. Such constraints are themselves constituent of a formal “technology,” in the probabilistic sense we have already discussed, irrespective of whether or not they are said to apply to so‐called artificial or natural “languages.” In Finnegans Wake, the repetition and permutation of the letter groups or trigrams HCE and ALP assumes a level of determinability (or predictability) that is both limited and exacerbated by what is perceived as an element of chance in the interrelation between the frequency of distribution of letters, or groups of letters, throughout the text, and what we might call the “word” or “phrasal” sequences, or motifs, in order to produce the literate construct we call the Wake. Indeed, a purely statistical analysis of the Wake, on the basis of digram, trigram and word frequency, would likely provide us with a set of basic algorithms around which something like a “strange attractor” could be seen as being constellated—just as, with stochastic processes applied to a series of 27 symbols, something like a language can be seen to coalesce, and to do so with an increasing verisimilitude with each additional probabilistic constraint programmed into it. Shannon offers the following examples of 75 Cage, Empty Words, 69. [127] how, in purely probabilistic terms, combinatorial procedures can be seen to approach a recognisable system of language or literacy, shifting from a generalised indeterminacy towards what we might call an exacerbated indeterminacy, based upon a measure of “contiguity across equivalence” (i.e. between the stochastic process and the sign system it is programmed to approximate). In each of the following cases, the symbolic sequences have been produced by means of a probabilistic schema or matrix, in which the successive relation of terms is arbitrary, equivalent and independent, or constrained by the probability frequency of each letter, or grouping of letters, as it pertains to the English language: 1. Zero‐order approximation (symbols independent and equiprobable). XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGHYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD 2. first‐order approximation (symbols independent but with frequencies of English text). OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESEBYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL. 3. Second‐order approximation (digram structure as in English). ON EI ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE CTISBE. 4.Third‐order approximation (trigram structure as in English). IN NIO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BIRS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE.76 This procedure can be continued indefinitely—with tetragram, pentagram … up to n‐gram structures—depending upon the material limits imposed by the approximated system. In general, “a sufficiently complex stochastic process,” as Shannon says, “will give a satisfactory representation of a discrete source.” At the same time, however, the statistical structure of “English sequences” is not substantially far removed “from a random selection.”77 The increase in the level of constraint, however, also represents an increase in the level of redundancy (in English the digram QU, for example, is prescribed in such a way as to render the U redundant, since its requirement as a counterpart to Q is absolute and thus absolutely predictable: in this way there unnecessary to “read” U, as it is no longer taken as an addition to Q but as presupposed by it). Hence, the more the symbolic sequence corresponds to a measure of legibility, the less it functions as generative of literacy (and it is for this reason that actual language systems maintain a high degree of error‐tolerance, such that “a sizeable fraction of the letters can be received incorrectly and still be reconstructed by the context”). This seemingly counter‐intuitive argument can be refigured in terms of approximation. The more a sequence of symbols approximates a system of signs—i.e. a language—then the 76 77 Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 286. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 295. [128] more each element that deviates from that system is acted upon or “rectified” (as though mechanically) to conform to that system’s overall schematic. In other words, the more a sequence is said to approximate a system, the more it is “systematised” by way of a generalised literacy or literate technology—viz. a system or method of making or doing— i.e. the more it is interpreted, translated, de‐coded, read. Within an approximative sequence, it is the element of what is unpredictable, illegible or otherwise “unreadable” (according to the definitions of that system) that effectively provokes, generates, drives or instigates a process of “reading” and which thereby defines the limits or contours of what is called representation. For theorists like Robert Shaw, such “strange attractors” can be regarded as “engines of information,” which conflate the possibilities of order and disorder, giving rise to a signifying unpredictability which thus demands a form of “accounting for” (a complementary literacy), while at the same time affecting a structural locus around which semantic values are able to accumulate.78 Information in this sense takes the form of a forethrow of possibilities, which in linguistic terms devolves within both lexical and sublexical structures, and across the entire structural edifice of the text in which, as Joyce says, “MAJOR AND / MINOR / MODES COA‐ / LESCING / PROLIFER‐ / ATE” (FW 278.R2‐279.R1). This architectonics is suggestive of the two‐dimensional arrangement of crossword puzzles which, like the hypertextual scansions of Joyce’s acrostics and Cage’s mesostics, are founded upon a concept of redundancy in language. As Shannon explains, “if the redundancy is zero any sequence of letters is a reasonable text in the language and any two‐dimensional array of letters forms a crossword puzzle. If the redundancy is too high the language imposes too many constraints for large crossword puzzles to be possible. A more detailed analysis shows that if we assume the constrain imposed by the language are of a rather chaotic or random nature, large crosswords are just as possible when the redundancy is 50%. If the redundancy is 33%, three‐dimensional crossword puzzles should be possible, etc.”79 This can be thought of as defining what is called a constellation: being the formal relation between microscales and macroscales, trope and schema, across which “information” is generated in the form, precisely, of a hypertextual transverse.80 In other words, a structure between materiality and signification, entropy and information, whose “vacillation” states describes precisely such an engine as Shaw proposes. The logic of the constellation is hence that of complementarity—a generalised equivalence across contiguity—and in informatic terms this means that a transversal operates by way of an economy of compression (the metaphoric or co‐ordinate “anagrammatical” mapping of a uniform palimpsestic field, for example, by way of metonymy) where the structure of transversality—its very possibility, or what we may even call its “information”—is not 78 79 80 Robert Shaw, Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System (Santa Cruz: Aerial, 1984). Cf. N.H. Packard, J.P. Crutchfield, J.D. Farmer, and R.S. Shaw, “Geometry from a Time Series,” Physical Review Letters 45.9 (1980): 712-716. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 286. This constellation-effect of structural recursion may be considered analogous to certain models of cognition, such as that proposed by George Kampis, in which the brain is viewed as “a strange computer in which the software is identified with the hardware.” There is no prior algorithm upon which cognitive structure devolves, instead “hardware and software define each other without either of them being complete or independent.” George Kampis, Self-Modifying Systems in Biology and Cognitive Science: A New Framework for Dynamics, Information, and Complexity (Oxford: Pergamon, 1991). [129] itself subject to compression (rather it is “situated” as the both and yet neither of its structural topology: paradigmatic / syntagmatic; diachronic / synchronic; metaphor / metonymy). As David Ruelle has pointed out, a “message can be compressed if it is redundant, but the information is not compressible.”81 Hence we can say that the structurality or formal ambivalence of the transversal is, like the strange attractor, itself an agent of constellation. In Finnegans Wake, as in Cage’s Empty Words, the highly unpredictable and heterogeneous nature of this relation means that the transversal generated across differing scales of textual relations is never stabilised into a homogenous system, whose information stream could be linearised or reduced, in effect, to a “laminar flow.” Instead it gives rise to a form of structural turbulence, a type of matrix mechanics whose signifying patterns remain open to associative probabilities that are neither one nor zero and therefore a source of potentially infinite quanta of information. For Shaw, “just as turbulence transmits energy from large scales downward through chains of vortices to the dissipating small scales of viscosity, so information is transmitted back from the small scales to the large.”82 This secondary transmission of information is what Shaw locates as the “strange attractor,” which serves to magnify the initial randomness of microscales to macroscale effects, just as in Joyce and Cage lexical contiguity translates the effects of apparently random constellations of terms across sublexical relations to the macroscales of schematic organisation: from elemental recursion to semantic structuration, which in turn describes the fundamental topology of the techno‐poietic vortext. POSTSCRIPT Such “literary” techniques as those evinced in the work of Cage, Joyce, Perec and others may be said to correspond to a technological conception of literacy in the sense that they describe processes that remain autonomous of a utilitarian conception of language or sign system, as well as of generic assumptions of the literary “exception” and of the technics of “literacy.” That is to say, autonomous of any transcendentalised “function” or underwriting intentionality—as something that “originates” and that remains orientated towards a specific “end” to which its methods are “applied.” However, insofar as such concepts as intentionality may be otherwise defined, and retained within the framework of a generalised technicity, it would be in the sense of a “tendency” orientated—within a field of probabilistic relations—by an horizon of possibility, “in” which it is implicated from the very outset. This tendency would—in accordance with the etymology of in‐tendere— describe a certain topology of “distending” or “straining,” marked out by the operation of certain drives or moments of attraction whose forethrow situates precisely that direction, purpose or “end” towards which intentionality tends and which is “realised” solely by means of it. It is for this reason that intentionality is not opposed to the notions of chance and cyclical recurrence, détournement or recursion. What here might be taken as opposed concepts in fact represent complementary aspects of a structural dynamic linked to the mechanics of 81 82 Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 132. Cited in Gleick, Chaos, 261. [130] constraint. And while we may refer to the outcome of a throw of dice as “determinant” of a certain chance, we are speaking of an intention not in a metaphorical sense, but in a literal, material sense. In other words, as an intention that is a straining against and within a given set of probabilistic determinations, in the form of something we might describe as a “retrospectively” assumed possibility; its constellation‐effect. Intention only assumes the form of a possibility to the extent that it places “itself” in question—its “originary factuality”—that is to say, by virtue of straining the definition of its “object” to a point of radical reflexivity. This reflexivity, fold, “catastrophe,” subiectum, describes a mechanism of agency which retains the characteristics of a “consciousness” without thereby acceding to the metaphysical, and without declining to an oppositional crisis marked out by the relationship of technology to the discourse of humanism. If consciousness itself is to be regarded as a constellation‐effect, then the crisis of humanism may be seen as nothing other than the conditioning of a critical “reflex” against the assumptions of something preordained in man that nevertheless has nothing to do with humanity. It is for this very reason that we recognise technology as distinct both from a reconstruction of metaphysics and as a threat posed to mankind. Rather, we recognise that the very structures and operations of metaphysics itself belie a condition that can only be thought, in the broadest sense, as technological; and that in man technology acquires an exemplary calculus. From energeīa to ergon to entropy, an “intention” may therefore be seen as pursuing a human hypothesis by way of a transverse series of probabilities describing a “plane of immanence,” against which the possibility of man—as the figure of reflexive thought par excellence—is posed as the final, consummate horizon. But this figure, we should never forget, is nothing if not discursive or ambivalently “isomorphic”—a constellation‐effect within the co‐ordinate field of a generalised vortext. And if man represents the collocated versions of a “same” technological event (consciousness “itself”)—a collocation that thereby tends from auto‐poiesis to what we might call techno‐poiesis—this is because in the assumption of thought man describes the very technē of literate being. [131] Index abstraction, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 29, 55, 88, 125 accident, 10, 13, 16, 26, 52 acrostic, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 114, 116, 125 adaequation, 40, 41, 47 affective, 14, 29, 31, 35, 37, 49, 59, 63, 66, 70, 72, 73, 79, 88, 93, 94 agency, 2, 8, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 35, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 72, 74, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 101, 103, 110, 114, 120, 121, 123, 128, 129 allegory, 17, 56, 114, 119 anagrammatic, 103 analogy, 5, 7, 12, 15, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 38, 39, 59, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 114, 116 analytic, 4, 29, 33, 34, 82 anamorphosis, 58, 96, 119 antonymy, 31, 32 aporia, 38, 61, 63, 64, 74 apparatus, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 56, 66, 71, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 90, 95, 96, 104, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120 apprehension, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 26, 40, 41, 42, 58, 72 Aristotle, 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 23, 39, 52, 62, 86, 108 Armand, Octavio, 58 artifice, 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 71, 89, 91 association, 26, 27, 46, 56, 62, 113 asymmetry, 91 automaton, 34, 72 autonomy, 1, 3, 4, 7, 41, 62, 84, 87, 88, 105, 107, 128 autopoiesis, 7, 9, 10, 78, 119 Babbage, Charles, 54 Barthes, Roland, 8, 65, 113 Bateson, Gregory, 29, 31, 32, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 87, 90, 94, 99, 103 Bellos, David, 110, 112 Berge, Claude, 110 Berners‐Lee, Tim, 59 binary, 1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 45, 46, 54, 59, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86, 90, 92, 94, 102, 114, 120, 121, 123 biosemiotics, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91 bi‐square, 110, 111, 112, 114 Blake, William, 62 Bohr, Niels, 68 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 116 brain, 1, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 41, 54, 59, 67, 85, 93, 127 Bush, Vannevar, 54 Byron, Ada, 54 calculus, 3, 8, 16, 32, 60, 65, 72, 101, 102, 129 Campbell, Murray, 68 Cantor, Georg, 118 Cartesianism, 2, 19, 20, 21, 24, 30, 34, 35, 38, 41, 44, 70, 77, 83, 115, 118 Caxton, William, 51 chance, 9, 10, 13, 15, 57, 58, 59, 60, 96, 97, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 128 Chomsky, Noam, 11 Church, Alonzo, 71, 118 Cixous, Hélène, 100 Clark, Arthur C., 67 Clausius, Rudolph, 116, 117 clinamen, 66, 121 code, 3, 4, 15, 54, 67, 73, 76, 102, 103 cogito, 20 cognition, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 25, 27, 28, 31, 35, 39, 40, 41, 44, 52, 59, 62, 64, 65, 68, 72, 79, 81, 88, 92, 93, 101, 107, 127 combination, 7, 46, 55, 57, 59, 95, 97, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 123 communication, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 17, 57, 58, 59, 69, 76, 77, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 104 complementarity, 1, 8, 32, 33, 40, 45, 47, 49, 62, 65, 66, 78, 82, 83, 86, 88, 96, 114, 115, 120, 127, 128 computers, 3, 52, 59, 67, 68, 69, 73, 97, 119, 127 concatenation, 96 conscious, 1, 2, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 72, 86, 87, 92, 93, 95, 121, 129 constellation, 1, 40, 58, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 103, 104, 114, 115, 118, 125, 127, 129 constraint, 2, 32, 38, 59, 60, 77, 88, 90, 95, 100, 101, 103, 104, 118, 121, 124, 125, 126, 129 contiguity, 8, 9, 11, 46, 55, 64, 65, 78, 85, 91, 94, 96, 98, 100, 107, 113, 114, 118, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128 cybernetics, 14, 20, 29, 32, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 92, 99, 103, 107 Danesi, Marcel, 88 Darwin, Charles, 7, 11, 77 Deely, John, 89 Deleuze, Gilles, 31, 35 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 35, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 56, 119 Descartes, René, 7, 16, 18, 20, 21, 41, 70 détournement, 35, 45, 46, 47, 66, 71, 113, 128 deus ex machina, 20, 72 Dewey, John, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 40, 100 diachrony, 4, 46, 65, 66, 80, 82, 114, 128 difference, 7, 9, 15, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38, 41, 46, 55, 57, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 86, 90, 94, 96, 100, 102, 105, 114, 118, 120, 121 discourse, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 18, 26, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 61, 73, 82, 85, 87, 90, 91, 98, 102, 103, 108, 113, 120, 129 discursivity, 1, 2, 7, 9, 16, 22, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 55, 60, 66, 72, 75, 77, 79, 82, 83, 88, 94, 95, 99, 102, 103, 115, 117, 120, 122, 129 dream‐work, 26, 45, 47 Duchamp, Marcel, 99 dynamics, 4, 5, 13, 15, 29, 32, 44, 47, 48, 75, 77, 79, 80, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 125, 128 Edelman, Gerald, 93 ego, 2, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 38, 53, 62, 72, 74, 95 Ego, 21, 48 eidos, 8, 9, 11, 15 Einstein, Albert, 29, 33 entropy, 32, 35, 46, 66, 77, 87, 90, 94, 107, 108, 111, 115, 116, 117, 123, 127, 129 equivalence, 7, 8, 35, 41, 65, 78, 85, 91, 94, 96, 100, 113, 114, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127 ergon, 9, 10, 103, 129 Escher, Maurits, 116 Evans, Tom, 67 event‐state, 66, 92, 93, 94 experience, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 70, 75, 80, 95, 101, 121 facticity, 18, 62, 91, 95, 96, 129 Fauconnier, Gilles, 13, 14 Favareau, Donald, 92, 93 Fenolosa, Ernest, 55 Flusser, Vilém, 3 forethrow, 13, 37, 78, 91, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 128 [132] fort/da, 120, 121, 122 Fraser Spiral, 114, 115, 116, 118 Frazer, J.G., 79, 80 Frege, Gottlob, 14, 76, 78 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 35, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 56, 62, 64, 71, 79, 80, 101, 119, 120, 121 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 99 Geschichte, 120 Gödel, Kurt, 118 Goertzel, Ben, 117 Gombrich, E.H., 114, 116 grammar, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 48, 81, 99, 102, 105 grapheme, 51, 55, 100 Greimas, Algirdas, 103 grid, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116 Guattari, Félixe, 31 Gutenberg, Johann, 51, 54, 56, 57 Havelock, Eric, 4 Hegel, G.W.F., 21 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 37, 52, 53 Herakleitos, 53 heterogeneity, 76, 77, 80, 83, 128 hieroglyphics, 42, 56, 100 homeostasis, 21, 77, 81 Homer, 4 homonymy, 31, 32 hypertext, 59, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 107, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 127 image, 6, 8, 14, 16, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 55, 56, 58, 65, 72, 73, 86, 87, 93 incompatability, 12, 24, 45, 48 inertia, 32, 34, 40, 53, 65, 66, 72, 77, 81, 96, 111, 121 information, 3, 4, 7, 12, 51, 54, 59, 73, 76, 93, 94, 103, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128 inscription, 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 33, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 72, 74, 119 intellection, 40, 70, 71, 72 intelligence, 1, 5, 12, 20, 52, 59, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 89, 93 intransitive, 19, 20, 22, 23, 37, 38 invention, 8, 32, 50, 51, 54, 73 iterability, 26, 35, 42, 48 Jakobson, Roman, 6, 9, 46, 59, 65, 79, 123 Jousse, Marcel, 4 Joyce, James, 31, 32, 33, 57, 58, 59, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 122, 125, 127, 128 Kampis, George, 127 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 38, 39, 41 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 72 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 58, 59 Kristeva, Julia, 40, 102 Kubrick, Stanley, 67, 68, 72 lability, 37, 38, 77 Lacan, Jacques, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 42, 45, 46, 48, 64, 70, 71, 80, 84, 121, 122 Lakoff, George, 14 Lamarck, 75, 76, 77 language, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 75, 81, 82, 83, 89, 90, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 Leclaire, Serge, 21 Leibniz, G.W.F. von, 25, 108 Leroi‐Gouhran, André, 53, 54 Levin, Harry, 50 Lévi‐Strauss, Claude, 10, 15, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 91, 92, 107, 120 lexicology, 32, 55, 59, 81, 82, 84, 99, 103, 104, 118, 127, 128 literacy, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 32, 33, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 68, 73, 96, 100, 101, 106, 119, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 literate technologies, 1, 59 locality, 5, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 41, 42 logos, 8, 11, 35, 47, 51, 53, 56, 57, 61, 62, 98 Lorenz, Edward, 117 Lotman, Yuri, 87, 91, 93, 94 Lure, Andres, 86 machine, 13, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 43, 48, 53, 54, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 57, 58, 59, 60 Marx, Karl, 9, 108 materiality, 1, 2, 7, 15, 19, 23, 24, 28, 33, 35, 53, 55, 58, 61, 62, 64, 66, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 101, 102, 107, 121, 123, 127 Mathesius, Vilém, 6 matrix, 79, 100, 101, 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 119, 126, 128 Maturana, Humberto, 14, 76, 78 McCarthy, John, 68 McLuhan, Marshall, 6, 32, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 97 Mead, Margaret, 88 mechanism, 7, 9, 23, 24, 26, 31, 34, 35, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 55, 59, 64, 65, 66, 72, 77, 78, 81, 85, 92, 94, 96, 101, 104, 114, 115, 120, 121, 129 mechanistic, 1, 11, 20, 27, 32, 34, 35, 64, 94, 100, 121 memory, 4, 5, 6, 17, 42, 43, 46, 62, 73, 79 mentalism, 8, 10, 14, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 64, 75, 76, 79, 92, 93, 109 Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 41, 48, 64, 65, 66, 79, 82, 83, 100 Merrell, Floyd, 93, 94 mesostics, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 125, 127 metaphor, 7, 8, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 55, 65, 75, 78, 82, 85, 86, 93, 94, 96, 101, 114, 120, 128 method, 1, 7, 10, 16, 30, 35, 40, 43, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 70, 73, 78, 82, 97, 101, 124, 127 metonymy, 8, 26, 38, 45, 46, 65, 78, 82, 86, 94, 96, 101, 114, 120, 127 mimēsis, 8, 15, 33, 58 mind, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 27, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 48, 52, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 91, 92, 93, 107 Minsky, Marvin, 68 multiplicity, 29, 31, 34, 80 narratology, 4, 6, 31, 33, 55, 108, 111, 113, 114, 118, 119, 120 necessity, 6, 10, 16, 21, 32, 34, 40, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 91, 92, 93, 103, 113 negentropy, 66 Nelson, Theodor H., 59 Neumann, John von, 54 Newton, Isaac, 87 Nicolas of Cusa, 37 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 15, 95 Ong, Walter J., 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 onomatopoeia, 33 orality, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 15, 50, 53 paleotechnics, 7 palimpsest, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 56, 100, 115, 127 paradigmatic, 10, 35, 47, 65, 72, 78, 89, 93, 100, 101, 113, 114, 128 Parmenides, 53 Pavlov, I.P., 71 Peirce, C.S., 79, 83, 88, 90, 93, 100, 101, 102, 107 perception, 6, 16, 23, 25, 27, 34, 35, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 58, 62, 68, 72, 95, 96, 101, 116 Perec, Georges, 99, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 123, 125, 128 permutation, 57, 96, 103, 104, 113, 125 [133] Perry, Milman, 4 phenomena, 1, 10, 11, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 44, 45, 64, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 109, 113, 117 phenomenology, 29, 30, 65, 82 phonetics, 7, 31, 51, 56, 112, 113 phonology, 59, 112 physis, 8, 10, 52, 64, 89 Piranesi, Giovanni, 116 Plato, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 24, 61, 64 Pogodin, Alexander, 101, 102 poiēsis, 32, 83 Ponge, Francis, 59 possibility, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 48, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 101, 103, 107, 109, 114, 120, 121, 125, 127, 128, 129 Pound, Ezra, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 100, 115 preconscious, 35, 44, 45, 48 print, 4, 6, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57 probability, 2, 3, 4, 15, 16, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 76, 86, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129 process, 1, 3, 8, 9, 10, 20, 22, 28, 30, 34, 35, 41, 45, 47, 53, 54, 71, 72, 78, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 101, 106, 111, 116, 124, 125, 126, 127 programmatics, 1, 61, 71, 119 programme, 6, 68, 73, 97, 107, 109, 110, 118 prosthesis, 5, 8, 89 psyche, 10, 11, 21, 24, 30, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 56, 62, 80 psychoanalysis, 20 Pythagoras, 8 quantum, 71 Queneau, Raymond, 118 Quine, W.V., 14, 39 Rauschenberg, Robert, 99 recursion, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 35, 37, 40, 48, 49, 66, 71, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 93, 94, 96, 102, 103, 108, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 128 redundancy, 4, 12, 17, 101, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128 referentiality, 3, 48 reflection, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 41, 86 reflexivity, 1, 6, 8, 9, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 34, 41, 64, 92, 129 relation, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49, 55, 56, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 113, 114, 118, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128 relativity, 29, 31, 58, 61, 63, 69, 92, 95 repetition, 4, 12, 35, 80, 96, 99, 100, 104, 114, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125 representability, 71 repression, 35, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 71, 81 Rescher, Nicholas, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 Roget, Peter, 103, 108, 109 Rorty, Richard, 38, 39, 48 Roussel, Raymond, 59 Ruelle, David, 116, 117, 118, 128 Russell, Bertram, 14, 66, 70, 78, 107 Ryle, Gilbert, 14 Sartre, Jean‐Paul, 30 Satie, Erik, 99 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 9, 13, 15, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 46, 56, 65, 79, 81, 82, 89, 102, 113 schematisation, 4, 35, 43, 44, 46, 49, 53, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 76, 85, 86, 98, 109, 111, 113, 117, 118, 126, 127 Searle, John, 14, 19 Sebeok, Thomas, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 semantics, 2, 3, 6, 7, 13, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 51, 59, 62, 69, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 112, 113, 114, 116, 122, 124, 127, 128 semiosis, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94 semiospehere, 91, 93, 94 Shannon, Claude, 3, 4, 6, 7, 68, 110, 111, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 Shaw, Robert, 127 Shklovsky, Victor, 101, 102 sign, 1, 6, 13, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 37, 38, 41, 45, 51, 55, 56, 57, 61, 72, 81, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 103, 105, 106, 112, 120, 125, 126, 128 signification, 2, 6, 8, 10, 32, 33, 35, 38, 49, 55, 58, 59, 63, 64, 86, 88, 92, 96, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 114, 115, 118, 121, 125, 127 signified, 9, 15, 33, 37, 38, 46, 64, 94 signifier, 9, 15, 38, 46, 80, 84, 94, 104 situation, 5, 8, 16, 24, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 48, 66, 69, 95, 97, 113 Smithson, Robert, 95 Sollers, Phillipe, 18 speech, 5, 6, 7, 10, 21, 39, 61, 67, 68, 89, 123 stasis, 44, 58, 77, 96, 103, 117 Stelarc, 5 Stiegler, Bernard, 11, 12, 14, 15, 53 stochastics, 3, 4, 6, 59, 71, 85, 96, 103, 104, 125, 126 strange attractors, 35, 48, 117, 121, 125, 127, 128 structure, 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 71, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97, 107, 109, 114, 115, 116, 118, 121, 122, 126, 127, 128 sublexical, 59, 103, 104, 105, 109, 112, 113, 114, 118, 127, 128 Sweetser, Eve, 14 Swift, Jonathan, 51, 52, 56, 59 symbol, 3, 4, 7, 8, 17, 21, 23, 24, 56, 57, 62, 69, 79, 101, 120, 124, 126 symmetry, 4, 62, 85, 86, 99 Symons, Arthur, 60 synaesthesia, 39, 41 synchrony, 4, 46, 65, 66, 80, 82, 114, 128 syntagmatic, 46, 65, 82, 113, 114, 128 syntax, 12, 13, 14, 15, 48, 100, 102, 105, 113 synthetic, 1, 4, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35 system, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 43, 56, 58, 64, 65, 66, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 96, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 128 Takens, Floris, 117 technē, 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 73, 83, 89, 91, 94, 114, 129 technicity, 11, 13, 128 technics, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 27, 50, 53, 55, 73, 80, 90, 93, 94, 96, 102, 128 technology, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 23, 32, 35, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 67, 71, 93, 97, 119, 123, 125, 127, 129 Theall, Donald, 50, 57 Thoreau, Henry David, 99, 123, 124 Thoth, 8 thought, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 74, 79, 85, 89, 92, 95, 96, 100, 101, 107, 115, 118, 121, 122, 127, 129 Tononi, Giulio, 93 topology, 8, 12, 15, 43, 78, 109, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 128 Totemic Operator, 82, 84, 92, 120 Toynbee, A.J., 7 transcription, 1, 110 transduction, 8, 14, 92, 94 translation, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 109, 122 [134] transversal, 12, 31, 35, 40, 79, 83, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 103, 108, 114, 115, 118, 127, 128, 129 trope, 35, 66, 88, 109, 127 tropology, 45, 65, 78, 108, 111, 113, 118 Turing Machine, 71 Turing Test, 69 Turing, Alan, 54, 59, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 118 typography, 51, 53, 55, 67 typology, 54, 113 Uexküll, Jakob von, 88 Ulmer, Gregory, 47 unconscious, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 62, 71, 81, 95, 121 undecidability, 115, 118 variation, 11, 35, 55, 57, 63, 74, 78, 82, 102, 104, 117 Vasarély, Victor, 118 Vasari, Giorgio, 116 Vernant, Jean‐Pierre, 8 vicissitude, 45, 47, 63, 65, 66, 71, 77, 83, 96 Vico, Giambattista, 104, 108, 109 Virgil, 26 virtuality, 40, 42, 58, 66, 68, 71, 72, 96, 103 vortex, 93, 94, 115, 116, 119, 122, 128, 129 vortext, 94, 115, 116, 119, 122, 128, 129 Wallace, Russel, 11, 77, 78, 80 Weblen, Thorstein, 99 Weil, Simone, 16 Wiener, Norbert, 29, 94, 116 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 35, 39, 48, 49, 53, 55, 66, 70, 84 writing, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19, 26, 31, 32, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 71, 83, 89, 97, 98, 100, 101, 107, 110, 119 Xenephon, 22 Žižek, Slavoj, 21, 46 [135]