THE SEMIOTIC WOUND

[william_kent]

Old world Italian aristocracy.

there were two girls with dreadlocks in the circles I used to move in

one ended up on "site", living in a trailer, chasing the trickle of brown down a blackened piece of tin foil

the other re-appeared wearing a thousand $ Gucci belt after a summer of debauchery in an Italian mansion

 

[vershy versh]

“A good realtor says ‘home.’ Never ‘house.’ Always ‘cellar’ and never ‘basement.’ Basements are where cats crap on old Santa costumes. Where men drink themselves to death. Where children learn firsthand about sexual molestation. But cellar. A cellar is where you keep root vegetables and wine. Cellar means a proximity to the earth that’s not about blackness and rot but the four ritual seasons. We say ‘autumn,’ not ‘fall.’ We say ‘The leaves in this area are simply magnificent in autumn.’ We say ‘simply magnificent,’ and by the way, ‘lawn,’ not ‘yard.’ It’s ‘underarm’ to ‘armpit.’ Would you say ‘armpit’ to a potential buyer? Say ‘yard’ and your buyer pictures rusted push mowers, plantar warts. Someone shearing off his thumb and a couple of fingers with a table saw. A tool shed where water-damaged pornography and used motor oil funneled into fabric softener bottles cohabitate with hints of trauma that are “as thick and dark as the oil... You have to be careful about words. You’re thinking about your commission, your hands are starting to shake at the idea of the money, and meanwhile your client hears ‘yard’ and sees himself nudging icky amateur porno with his foot, potato bugs scattering from their damp hideout underneath. Again, it’s ‘lawn.’ ‘Lawn’ means crew-cut grass. It means censorship, nice and wholesome. It means America. And you know what I mean by America, and by the way, ‘cul-de-sac.’ Not ‘dead end.’ If I have to explain that, you’ll never pass the exam to get your license.”

Very Delillo. The short sentences. The fixation on words.

 

[vershy versh]

the other re-appeared wearing a thousand $ Gucci belt after a summer of debauchery in an Italian mansion

A summer with IdleRich.

 

[sus]

The idea of the semiotic wound is that before, people thought the signifier and signified were the same thing? But then Saussure caused them to wake up out of this hallucination?

I'm not sure I believe this, e.g. the American pragmatists were talking (in a much more extensive, sophisticated way) about language being a series of pointers to action.

This is more of that French provincialism. So much of their philosophy is retarded (literally, i.e. developmentally delayed) court politics. This is why Latour distances himself from all the other French philosophers and identifies instead with William James and John Dewey. There are some exceptions but I just can't take seriously any school of thought based on Saussure.

 

[sus]

I think if you look back 1500 years to Augustine and his treatment of language there is an understanding that the signifier is not the signified.

I think if you read Genesis, this notion of Adam naming the animals. That they aren't named by God, that names are a tool used by man for man.

 

[vershy versh]

The idea of the semiotic wound is that before, people thought the signifier and signified were the same thing? But then Saussure caused them to wake up out of this hallucination?

I'm not sure I believe this, e.g. the American pragmatists were talking (in a much more extensive, sophisticated way) about language being a series of pointers to action.

It's really just a flashy title for a thread about semiotics, I liked the phrasing. Here's the relevant passage from the Dupin review:

Being one of the most prominent poets who wrote during and after France's post-structuralist period, Jacques Dupin consistently worked toward a poetics of presence while bearing in mind—rather than simply rejecting—what had been learned from the crisis of signification: the decentering of the authorial self, deflation of grand narratives, denial of binary oppositions, etc. Dupin is probably the one who speaks with a more consistent intensity through the semiotic wound opened between the signifier and signified—the same wound made painfully clear by the critical analyses of language by Barthes, Derrida and others. For this reason, Dupin seems to be the poet who most successfully carried the basic principles of post-structuralism without becoming another twentieth century-born poet shipwrecked on nothingness.​

​

We don't have to accept the concept, just do something with it, i.e. work out why it's wrong or build on it.

 

[sus]

That's a nice enough gloss but I'm curious if his poems are any good. Where should we start? Can you post some?

 

[sus]

What are some things Saussure said that you think are interesting?

 

[vershy versh]

That's a nice enough gloss but I'm curious if his poems are any good. Where should we start? Can you post some?

Here are some excerpts I liked enough to pull when I read the collection a couple months back:

"Outside, charnel-houses fill the beds of rivers lost beneath the
earth. The rock, stripped of its foliage, is sister of the cleaving
sky. Event precedes prediction, bird attacks bird. Inside, under
the earth, my hands are grinding colors that have hardly begun."

"When walking becomes impossible, it is the foot that shatters,
not the path."

"l inscribe the duplication of the imprint through time — imprint
of the twin narrative thwarted . . . in my haste I confuse the flight
of the sparrowhawk with the mechanics of a catapult —"

"Lit up by the fever, a whole crumbled future runs through his
fingers, covers him, sinks him in the sand —"

 

[vershy versh]

What are some things Saussure said that you think are interesting?

Haven't read him yet, I've been inadvertently working my way backwards from Baudrillard to Barthes to Levi-Strauss, presumably ending up at Saussure.

 

[vershy versh]

That's a nice enough gloss but I'm curious if his poems are any good. Where should we start? Can you post some?

Here's a good one:

 

[sus]

Haven't read him yet, I've been inadvertently working my way backwards from Baudrillard to Barthes to Levi-Strauss, presumably ending up at Saussure.

Where is Bourdieu on your list?? He's the only one worth reading!!

 

[vershy versh]

Where is Bourdieu on your list?? He's the only one worth reading!!

I've a bunch of his, but haven't felt like reading him yet. I've got Acts of Resistance, Language and Symbolic Power, On Television, Firing Back, Sketch for a Self-Analysis and The Field of Cultural Production.

 

[sus]

Give me your mailing address I'll send you the best one, Field of Cultural Production

Oh you have it amazing!

 

[sus]

I've actually never heard of half of those, I'll have to investigate

 

[vershy versh]

What are some things Baudrillard said that you think are interesting?

His idea that referentiality has totally broken down to the point of signs now being exchanged for signs. You can poke holes in it, but it also feels completely true. The same thing DeLillo talks about in Cosmopolis when he has that character say, "Money is talking to itself."

 

[sus]

No I think that's fair

 

[sus]

I don't hate Baudrillard I just am not super familiar. I have read secondary treatments of simulacra theory and enjoyed them.

I am working on a theory of OPTICRACY, the idea that coordination and selection games are only ever based on IMAGES and APPEARANCES. It will be a rival theory to JEAN BAUDRILLARD so I will have to see what you think, you can help me workshop it, I will include a title page dedication that says THANK YOU VERSION

 

[vershy versh]

I don't hate Baudrillard I just am not super familiar. I have read secondary treatments of simulacra theory and enjoyed them.

I am working on a theory of OPTICRACY, the idea that coordination and selection games are only ever based on IMAGES and APPEARANCES. It will be a rival theory to JEAN BAUDRILLARD so I will have to see what you think, you can help me workshop it, I will include a title page dedication that says THANK YOU VERSION

The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact is a good one to read. It's the last of his 'theory fiction' cycle and his last major book before his death, so it gives you a good overview, plus it's one of the better ones in general and has a good intro from his translator, Chris Turner, covering his whole career. I liked it a lot.

In this impossibility of reapprehending the world through images and of​

moving from information to a collective action and will, in this absence​

of sensibility and mobilization, it isn’t apathy or general indifference​

that’s at issue; it is quite simply that the umbilical cord of representation​

is severed.​

​

The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way​

mirror: you see the world, but it doesn’t see you, it doesn’t look at you.​

Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens​

out any dual relation (any possibility of ‘response’).​

​

It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action,​

underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an​

ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts​

in that direction inevitably fail.​

​

All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant​

performance of the medium.​

​

Susan Sontag tells a good story about this pre-eminence of the​

medium and of images: as she is sitting in front of the television watching​

the moon landing, the people she is watching with tell her they don’t​

believe it at all. ‘But what are you watching, then?’ she asks. ‘Oh, we’re​

watching television!’ Fantastic: they do not see the moon; they see only​

the screen showing the moon. They do not see the message; they see​

only the image.​

​

Ultimately, contrary to what Susan Sontag thinks, only intellectuals​

believe in the ascendancy of meaning; ‘people’ believe only in the​

ascendancy of signs. They long ago said goodbye to reality. They have​

gone over, body and soul, to the spectacular.​

 

[william_kent]

I was just trying to work out my top ten novels of the year that I read, and I got caught up in some EPIC slog reads, but "Creation Lake', the Kushner spy noir is probably going to be in the upper reaches of my TOP 10 of 2024

TIP!