Signifier

The D&G quote of the day is:

The magic triangle with its three sides—voice-audition, graphism-body, eye-pain—thus seems to us to be an order of connotation, a system of cruelty where the word has an essentially designating function, but where the graphism itself constitutes a sign in conjunction with the thing designated, and where the eye goes from one to the other, extracting and measuring the visibility of the one against the pain of the other.

i think its just kind of a deconstruction of orthography in that each process involved in creating a writing system is kind of in conflict with each other. earlier he talks about the development of phonetic symbols and how it requires two seperate cultures / languages for one to meet up and misinterpret them because its easier to communicate a symbol as a sound than a concept,,. i think this is a really arbitrary assumption but its still fun to think about and it made me think about chinese picographic writing eventually creating japanese hirigana etc., in that its original symbolic meanings are lost. chinese characters seem to be the only modern exception to this but even several components are used phonetically and are certifiably a complete fucking nightmare.. in fact i created an entire seperate hybrid chinese writing system to deal with this problem.

There, however, as elsewhere, an irreducible exteriority of conquest asserts itself. For if language itself does not presuppose conquest, the leveling operations (les operations de rabattement) that constitute written language indeed presuppose two inscriptions that do not speak the same language: two languages (langages), one of masters, the other of slaves. Jean Nougayrol describes just such a situation: “For the Sumerians, [a given sign] is water; the Sumerians read this sign a, which signifies water in Sumerian. An Akkadian comes along and asks his Sumerian master: what is this sign? The Sumerian replies: that’s a. The Akkadian takes this sign for a, and on this point there is no longer any relationship between the sign and water, which in Akkadian is called mu. . . . I believe that the presence of the Akkadians determined the phoneticization of the writing system . . . and that the contact of two peoples is almost necessary before the spark of a new writing can spring forth.”55 One cannot better show how an operation of biunivocalization organizes itself around a despotic signifier, so that a phonetic and alphabetical chain flows from it. Alphabetical writing is not for illiterates, but by illiterates.

“alphabetical writing is not for illiterates, but by illiterates” doesnt sound like it makes sense but it does seem to actually happen, like with 女書 (girl writing) which emerged at a time when women were blocked off from education so they created their own writing system that was phonetic based on chinese characters. a similar thing was true for the early days of hiragana.

It goes by way of illiterates, those unconscious workers. The signifier implies a language that overcodes another language, while the other language is completely coded into phonetic elements. And if the unconscious in fact includes the topical order of a double inscription, it is not structured like one language, but like two. The signifier does not appear to keep its promise, which is to give us access to a modern and functional understanding of language. The imperialism of the signifier does not take us beyond the question, “What does it mean?”; it is content to bar the question in advance, to render all the answers insufficient by relegating them to the status of a simple signified. It challenges exegesis in the name of recitation, pure textuality, and superior “scientificity” (scientificite). Like the young palace dogs too quick to drink the verse water, and who never tire of crying: The signifier, you have not reached the signifier, you are still at the level of the signifieds! The signifier is the only thing that gladdens their hearts. But this master signifier remains what it was in ages past, a transcendent stock that distributes lack to all the elements of the chain, something in common for a common absence, the authority that channels all the breaks-flows into one and the same locus of one and the same cleavage: the detached object, the phallus-and-castration, the bar that delivers over all the depressive subjects to the great paranoiac king. O signifier, terrible archaism of the despot where they still look for the empty tomb, the dead father, and the mystery of the name! And perhaps that is what incites the anger of certain linguists against Lacan, no less than the enthusiasm of his followers: the vigor and the serenity with which Lacan accompanies the signifier back to its source, to its veritable origin, the despotic age, and erects an infernal machine that welds desire to the Law, because, everything considered—so Lacan thinks—this is indeed the form in which the signifier is in agreement with the unconscious, and the form in which it produces effects of the signified in the unconscious.* The signifier as the repressing representation, and the new displaced represented that it induces, the famous metaphors and metonymy—all of that constitutes the overcoding and deterritorialized despotic machine.

The signifier (phonetic abstractions of symbols) “overcoding” the signified (pictographic representations of concepts, which i think they think is more real or true somehow) is just described as “imperial” or like violent structuralist arbitrary rule-making and is actually stupid and gay and creates this kind of atmosphere where the meaning of a fundamentally meaningless string of letters is policed? like by law? only to be redirected to the original “signified” (the actual concept)., which now in extension has become an “empty tomb”. It’s just as easy to argue that writing can never be a real representation of anything and language through speech is more natural and has been around for much longer and is a core part of what makes us human, and so phonetic characters are not any more arbitrary than pictographic writing outside of their made up concept of what graphism is lol. but i think what they care about is moving away from representation entirely to a model of “production”. like with chinese characters there are ones that “produce” its represented effect - there are a lot especially ones with the 心 heart component. 忘 (forget/neglect) has the component meaning “lost” above it, 忍 (endure/hard-heartedness) has a blade’s edge, 愁 sorrow has autumn, 秋 autumn itself being a combination of a crop and a fire – they are images that produce or conjure up thought directly. outside of chinese characters, i think emojis are a decent foil to understand the concept by,, as in the emoji doesnt require a cultural authority to be understood, it just is., universally, and so it is able to transcend a single culture or state, as long as it is intuitive or legible enough. chinese characters do the same in a more abstract form which is why so many countries used to use classical chinese to communicate with each other and write despite their languages coming from completely different language families