*Nice fit of blue-sky handwaving from Adam Rothstein here. Too bad it's made of yellow text on a purple background, so that it's physically illegible as well as theoretically advanced.
*It gets better about halfway down. No, not the web design; I mean the ideas get better.
http://interdome.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-yeah-there-was-this-thing-in-texas.html
(...)
"I promised that I actually had some theory for you regarding semiotics and psychology, or other such nonsense. If you are not interested in such things, feel free to skip out now, taking the conclusion: Twitter is the beginning of a revolution in the means of communication, to a conflation of content and expression.
(((Yeah, that's what he was saying earlier. Which to me sounds like the toys in a
Crackerjacks box as a new means of industrial production; but when he points out that the 140-character limit is creating a weird new idiolect of hashtags and compacted URLs, he's right. Tons of the stuff in Twitter don't look remotely like human language now, and that's commonly the most interesting stuff.)))
But, for those who read my Marx-between-the-lines, and desire more, here is a deliciously (or perhaps annoyingly, depending on your preferences) difficult description:
The signifier, as the point of expression for meaning (the signified), has been receiving an altogether privileged place in our understanding of language. Whether it be the Holy Word, the unattainable signifier of Lacan, or even the juridico-discursive power of the "I" point in modern testimony, the moment and form of expression (I think therefore...) is seen to be the cutting-edge of the language tool.
While this signifier is hardly diminishing in its psychological position (consciousness demands a position for the "I"), our evolving technology of expression is reducing its sacred position over the signifier/signified duality. The psyche, as a technological realm of semiotic expression, is not in itself shifting; but in our current relations of production, in which our minds are interfacing with digital networks, we are ironically becoming "unwired" from our binary (the basic two digits) understanding of our own communication. We are not just signifying now, we are manipulating the way we signify as part of the signification.
(((I know this sounds opaque, but I heard British novelist M John Harrison yesterday describing how the construction of identity is changing because "culture," the factors that acculturate people, have been smeared all over the planet by the Internet.
And he sees this is as a challenge for novelists because literature is a description of how people are; it's about structures of meaning and feeling. And the structure of literary language needs to respond to, or even *lead,* new structures of meaning and feeling. And although M. John Harrison is not Derrida, I completely got it about what he was saying.
The role of the author is shifting. (((Yup.))) The power of attribution to a fixed, historical "I" is less important than the information to be understood. (((Okay, maybe.))) Understanding, and hence, expression, is less reliant on the signifier as a perfect concept of content production. Misspellings are common, and ignored. (((Where are we when we need you, George Orwell, homespun champion of clarified language.)))
If anyone is asked, of course the signifier still plays a role, but as the signifer grows in scope to encompass not only the privileged identity between word and speaker, but also between a choice in language, distribution network, semantics, time, and distribution, the signifier is becoming more meaningful as a material object. We are bringing the signifier back down to earth, muddying it with the effluviance of the signified phenomena, and enacting a phenomenological semiotic, rather than a formal (Platonic, Hegelian, etc) semiotic. (((I'm gonna take this brilliant insight downstairs and go buy myself a cup of coffee with it.)))
To appropriate Merleau-Ponty, our words are again made flesh. To appropriate Marx, our commodities are returned to the realm of production and use-value. To appropriate Freud, our fetishes are no longer abstracted neuroses of our unconscious investments, but properly sublimated transferences: well-oiled psychic machinery. (((Can't wait to Tweet this paragraph! Wow!)))
When we type hypertext, we are not only indicating, we are expressing the act of indication. This is not only "something to see", but "something I want you do see". Please click on this. The signifer now has supplementary value as a signified. The signified and signifier meet again, not through a reduction of the difference, but by a meeting of the two aspects in a properly material plain–abstraction is conquered (aufhebung alert!) (((Now: the sense in which the two terms "signifier" and "signified" are used shift between every philosopher's iteration, and even within each author use (somebody should be able to say something significant about that). To draw out this complicated dynamic and really treat the two terms fairly, I could read you the entirety of Of Grammatology, but I think we would all be relieved if I did not. (And certainly Derrida's own confusing play with the shifting meaning of these two words are indicative of his own philosophy. I imagine one could agree with that statement whether one appreciates him or not!)
"However, I will simply Derrida a bit, to close my thoughts for now. With the caveat, of course, that my use of the two terms here are not exactly the same as his–but I believe the point holds true for both of us.
"If, we wish to push our ability to write and express meaning beyond our current means, (((like we get a choice; the publishing houses are on fire))) we must seek to unravel, and perhaps "de-construct" the nature of our current system. I cringe while saying so, but we must "hack" our language. (((Oh brother. Well, I reckon we can do it – but can anyone read it?)))
Perhaps "script" is a better verb, not sounding quite as cliche, and closer my idea of what we should actually be doing: using and adapting pieces of our language as a material code for better interfacing with our language. A book is an excellent material technology, but we cannot use a book as our model of communication after considering our new, and vastly more "scripted" material technologies of signification:
"The good writing has therefore always been comprehended. [...] Comprehended, therefore, within a totality, and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, or the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality unless a totality constituted by the [material] signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, agains its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general. If I distinguish this [un-totalistic, scriptable, material] text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary."
-Derrida, Of Grammatology, "The Signifier and Truth"
