AMONG SIGNS, WORDS HOLD THE CHIEF PLACE
“Of the signs, then, by which men communicate their thoughts to one another, some relate to the sense of sight, some to that of hearing, a very few to the other senses. For, when we nod, we give no sign except to the eyes of the man to whom we wish by this sign to impart our desire. And some convey a great deal by the motion of the hands: and actors by movements of all their limbs give certain signs to the initiated, and, so to speak, address their conversation to the eyes: and the military standards and flags convey through the eyes the will of the commanders. And all these signs are as it were a kind of visible words. The signs that address themselves to the ear are, as I have said, more numerous, and for the most part consist of words. For though the bugle and the flute and the lyre frequently give not only a sweet but a significant sound, yet all these signs are very few in number compared with words. For among men words have obtained far and away the chief place as a means of indicating the thoughts of the mind. Our Lord, it is true, gave a sign through the odor of the ointment which was poured out upon His feet; and in the sacrament of His body and blood He signified His will through the sense of taste; and when by touching the hem of His garment the woman was made whole, the act was not wanting in significance. But the countless multitude of the signs through which men express their thoughts consist of words. For I have been able to put into words all those signs, the various classes of which I have briefly touched upon, but I could by no effort express words in terms of those signs.”
–Saint Augustine
“Arts are also called ‘beginnings,’ and of these especially the architectonic arts.”
–Aristotle
There are theories of visuality present today that have no relation to the principal venue by which words hold sway (as signs hold sway). Augustine’s words, as above, signal that signs are multiple and speak in different ways to the addressee for those signs (words, images, and things). While visuality in art and in present-day media considers the image supreme to the word, it is only because the Word has lost its grip on things. Things as primordial words are also the origin of words — while that origin is not dissimilar to the origin of images (in art and in literature). Words connote the word as image (image as word), yet only in a certain half light, or only in a zone within memory and within cognition (means to knowing) that serves a purpose to illumine the vortex of worlds drowning in signs.
It is axiomatic that words are signs, and it is more so in the abstract anti-nature of structural and semiotic theories of signs. Prevalent in this regard is the interpretation of signs — the hermeneutic circle that discloses the so-called empire of signs, and the post-structuralist emphasis on the self-referential plenitude of language proper, as it dovetails with a de-materialized veneration of signs signaling signs. This contextualization of the formal means within signs (and within language) has oddly revealed a type of bracketed preliminary subjectivity that, oddly, opens up whole new points of purchase within the structural analysis of language.
The foremost cause, then, for visual languages is a formal regard for the noetic and liminal nature of all signs insofar as they approach as dynamic function within representation an elemental regime within language as such.
There are, therefore, certain principles to denote:
1/ Visual language is caught in a difficult and uneasy rapport with verbal language, making non-discursive forms of intellection idiomatic, on the one hand, and utterly radical, on the other.
2/ Images in terms of their relationship to complex theories of representation and systems of utterance (developed or primitive) suggest that the functionality or agency of the word as image (as one thing) is no longer a threat to the ideological regimes of power or the suzerainty of orthodoxy, but, instead, to the supremacy of the dis-embodied word proper.
3/ The supremacy of the word proper denotes the primary coordinates for knowledge as knowledge of worlds, versus knowledge as abstract language mapping worlds. Such mapping of worlds incurs a price or cost that, indeed, is a de-materialization of the world it maps, paradoxically or not making of that world a prison-house of language.
4/ The avowed originary ground for language is the world as such. The world as such is also the common ground for visual language and its primordial and timeless relationship to the one-to-one configuration of word as image (and image as word).
5/ The one-to-one figure of language as image connotes a reserve function within visual and textual exegesis that suggests a possible end to the dialectic of word and image (form and content, etc.) — yet only insofar as the image becomes (as word) and the word becomes (as image) as powerful as its elemental origin permits.
6/ There is, therefore, the necessity of a reduction within all forms of knowledge that, in turn, begins to access what might only be called anamnesis or an evocation of a type of transmigration of words between states within thought proper. This transmigration relates intimately (and in the most salient means given to language) to the subjective field of incorporation of thought into images and words.
7/ The incorporation of thought in all forms of language is the gateway to a subjective state that is co-equal to what has been called con-science. Yet, arguably, and in terms of contemporary thought, what is here called con-science has nothing to do with individual subjective states whatsoever but, instead, a more anterior form of knowledge that is always present but evoked most powerfully in art and literature; these venues for the same being tutelary outposts for an ever-present present that only seems futural or past due to the time-space conditions and constraints of modern subjects.
FRANCISCAN ONTOLOGY
Both Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri in denigrating Giorgio Agamben for indulging “Franciscan ontology” and “philosophical chiaroscuro” inadvertently ennoble something incredibly important; that is, the presence of two worlds in one world. This doubling of the world is, for Agamben, the fundamental condition of subjects in the world. This “ontology” of difference, or this shadowy world conception is a concession to the inescapable fact that one never quite inhabits the world as such, but is caught, instead, in-between two worlds.
Franciscan ontology in this sense engenders a vision of a world that might be but never quite inheres here-and-now. This vision becomes in such a chiasmic structuring of experience the evocation of experience as history, and the reduction of worlds to world suggests a profound disconnection between subjects and world due, perhaps, to the failure of distance (the failure of difference and distance) and its empowering of a form of alienation through difference only because something incredibly important is missing.
Words as images close in upon (slowly) that cause that supersedes causes, or the Franciscan perspective that might condition two worlds as one world, strangely, then, overturning the production of two worlds in place of one world, as one world belongs not to the dialectical struggle of subjects caught in the chaos of mere worlds but another subject altogether — and one that proves through simply being that Being as such (and Being-in-the-World) is utterly ill-defined.
Philosophical chiaroscuro is an image that serves to delimit a realm within the production of images — and its relationship to the word as image is such that it almost always renders worlds shadowy and recondite. This shadowland conceals more than it reveals. In the world of images (versus words), and in the dialectical machinery of thought that produces worlds atop the world (substitutes fictions for the real), shadowlands become means of denoting the very nature of captive subjects, plus possible ways out of captivity. The evocation of another form of subject (subjectivity) by way of the interplay of light and dark produces in its chief moments an extraordinary uniformity of purpose in all forms of speculative intelligence (or thought as means to escaping the syntagmatic excesses of discursive thought — thought overcoming thought).
In the production of ontologies of disciplines (the delegation of autonomies for discrete representational systems) yet another ontology of another order emerges — that is, an ontology of ontologies. This is, after all, a Franciscan ontology, and it runs all the way up to the far horizon of thought and back. It returns, as loop, creating what can only be called con-science, circumnavigating sense and instilling an entirely different perspectivism than any present in mere ways of explaining away Being.
Therefore, and for another subject, the suggestive contours of an idealism that proceeds by the production of difference through the eliding of differences instills a paradoxical paradigm of worlds within worlds that lead to one world — yet only one world in the penultimate figure of word as image.
THE REDUCTION: A POVERTY OF SIGNIFIERS
“Zakaj osamosvojene lepote / Brez osirotelosti od / Nerojenih vesti”
–Neža Zajc
The word as image implies the path from a topology of affects to a poverty of signifiers by way of the categorical reduction as new categorical imperative. This process of removing chains of signification to empower or re-empower the given is the chief characteristic of a Franciscan ontology (or ontology of ontologies).
In a seminal manner, then, images and the words to which they are attached become detached to reconfigure the very nature of Being in a model that is no longer a model (a relational torsion that also suspends the primordial chord that subtends Being).
Lorenzo Chiesa writes of Agamben’s concept of the messianic (a move from his theorization of homo sacer to his theorization of a form of time that inheres in all time):
“Messianic time should rather be equated with the time we need to ‘bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time’. From this perspective, eschatological and chronological time can no longer be clearly distinguished: the kairos ‘is nothing else than a chronos that is grasped’ as such.”
–Lorenzo Chiesa
In this regard, Agamben’s statements regarding “the time that remains” and its relationship to art (and especially poetry and music) exposes the elemental reduction that is the heart and soul of his so-called Franciscan ontology. That this time that resides within all time also serves notice on time by isolating and bringing to perfection historical time is, quite simply, an elegant and austere evocation of the premises of the word as image.
Chiesa continues:
“Having said that, the fact remains that Agamben is able to formulate a transvaluation of biopolitics only in the guise of a bio-theo-politics. The importance of this conclusion cannot be overstated. Badiou is therefore correct in emphasising that Agamben’s thought ultimately expresses a ‘latent Christianity’ for which the heroic homo sacer of politics is silently turned into the homo messianicus of Christian religion. Furthermore, according to this interpretation, Agamben’s notion of ‘weak’ [faible] being, a being characterized by a ‘presentative poverty’, could qualify his ontology as ‘Franciscan’. Although Badiou’s remarks are concentrated in less than two pages, this appellation seems far from gratuitous, especially once we give the right weight to what Agamben himself says about Franciscanism in The Time That Remains. Francis and his followers conceive their Order as a ‘messianic community’, Agamben claims, whose ultimate aim is to ‘create a space that escaped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them yet rendering them inoperative’. This can be achieved by means of the so-called usus pauper, literally ‘the poor use’, which Agamben unhesitatingly defines, again, as a ‘form of life’. In other words, the Franciscan principle of poverty does not limit itself to refusing private property, but rather promotes a use of worldly goods that, as ontological ‘nullification’ (the ‘as not’/‘hos me’), radically subtracts itself from the sphere of civil law. Here Agamben’s distinction between ‘imperfect nihilism’ and ‘messianic nihilism’, which in Homo Sacer he derives from Benjamin, finds its final Christian meaning.”
The nature and — perhaps — law of the circulation, presentation, and economy of signifying signs that constitutes discourse, and its relational or topological field of embodying what might best be called anomie (the foundation of the state of emergency and the point upon which homo sacer becomes either pariah or hero) carries within it the purposeless beauty (in the Kantian sense) of another law — an austere ascetic/aesthetic law. What obtains in the reduction of images and the circularity of language to “presentative poverty” is the formal ontological “x” that remains in all formalizations of the Categorical Imperative — that is, a content-free function within all metaphysical formulations that confront their own limit as impassable image (word as image). Beyond “this,” or at this threshold, something else is possible that is nominally impossible in terms of the image that separates itself from the word or holds itself within itself, immune to the other of its own formulation.
The reduction of language to its frontier as image, and the reduction of the image (negating its suspect autonomy) presents the negation of nihilism as a return to the nexus of both in thought. Worlds famously appear where there once was nothing; out of many causes one cause begins anew.
THE NEGATION OF PRIVILEGES AND BIASES
The privileges, autonomies, and biases of singular disciplines melt away under the austere auspices of upper-level ontology (an ontology of ontologies grounded in universal precepts). This has always been the case, and it also why singular disciplines often resist both formalization and intertextual operations from within. In the case of a poverty of signifiers, and under the spell of the closure of dialectical maneuvers based in discursive thought, the possibility of a strange syrrhesis appears in the form of universality being re-naturalized in discrete experience (the avowed pursuit of transcendence in immanence) and the particularity and elemental nature of worlds being absorbed into a unitary vision that is non-ideological and non-hegemonic. That this same process has been evident across the history of modernity suggests that it is also the location of the very idea of history and diachrony proper, or the source of the arguments for and against the autonomy of disciplines. That Kant famously protected the arts from all instrumentalization is not in itself surprising; yet that autonomy of the aesthetic also conferred upon the arts a necessary correlation with the Categorical Imperative — or the aesthetic is not so much the production of works that evade temporality and contingency as singular things that engage upper-level ontology as limit.
A poverty of signifiers is a process of reduction that requires discrete gestures toward the ineffable insofar as the ineffable is the “unknowable.” The reduction, in the spirit of phenomenology (but not of phenomenology as a discipline), in turn, turns on the negation of signifying chains in order to erase the apparatuses of thought (the architectonic forms of rationality and discursive reason) while also, more critically, negating the torsional folds of subjectivity that hold self and other in perpetual strife (no matter how evocative or Romantic that strife may be or what conciliatory forms that battleground within subjectivity might take, in Art, in Love, or in Revolution).
An ascetic aesthetic, yet without its High Romantic modalities or its religious instrumentalities, is paradoxically both a “road to riches” and a “road to ruin” — even if this road paved with lead only ever prompts the desire that it be turned into gold. The attendant pursuit of negating the nihilist raptures of autonomous disciplines in a highly elegant and highly non-confrontational manner elicits from worlds one world. And nihilism (as an elective versus enforced state of being) is formulated always by degrees, or discipline by discipline, such that its overwhelming cultural presence is accomplished by the conformity of worlds to a vision that originates in the production of anomie (estrangement and privilege as superstructural force-field). Any efforts to prevent full naturalization of one world devoid of this superstructural anomie only leads to the renewed spectralization of this one-to-one rapport of word as image (image as world) and a perpetuation of the isolated dramas of singular disciplines (a typical, permissible affect of the apparatuses of power), a fact that accounts for all failures (historical, personal, and otherwise) of avant-garde praxis.
The principal means to this end that is “no end” is through the elective embrace of what Agamben has indicated is the collapse of the dichotomy given to time (the twinning nemeses of eschatology and teleology) insofar as this schism is configured metaphysically and closely associated with the mental and discursive apparatus of subjects as autonomous agents caught in worlds (and thus, in the manner of Cartesian subjectivity, given to provoking a crisis in thought that produces that sense of autonomy while preserving the entire farrago nonetheless).
This reduction of topological production in both ideology and in the physical premises of worlds proceeds by way of the word and its embeddedness in things, and by way of how things become illumined by the word (as worlds). Such half measures resemble the straightjacket of discourse, and at the threshold of exiting the same the figural excesses of the apparatuses under duress return as meta-discourse: meta-philosophy, meta-critique, and in singular instances of the art-historical kind, theoretical positions that escape art-history proper and take up residence at that austere frontier — for example, meta-painting.
TRANSCENDENCE & IMMANENCE
“But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
–Thornton Wilder
Arguments for transcendence in immanence typically take the form of a deconstruction of metaphysical precepts based on the summary judgment of the same regarding disembodied forms of thought. As such, all arguments for the work of art as an exception also rely on an incarnational theory of art that closes down this very dichotomy within thought by way of non-discursive means given to art.
Perhaps one of the most problematic accounts of transcendence in immanence is to be found in Gilles Deleuze’s book Pure Immanence, a series of essays published posthumously, and closing with the essay “Pure Immanence.” In Deleuze’s battle with metaphysics and spectral forms of thought, politics is conceived as proceeding from actual circumstances, versus from the rarified realm of political agency. This confers upon politics a highly material aspect that is never quite played out in the theoretical apparatus of his work — insofar as philosophy, for Deleuze, is always futural. The additional recourse to impersonal agency suggests that the subject remains the primary conundrum, yet a subject once again delineated as subject-slave in most forms of political expedience.
In the work of art, this so-called impersonal agency is jettisoned for the highly personal passage of the work of art through its various phases in the production of its supposed autonomy as work of art. Deleuze was always, in many ways, grappling with Kant, as all attempts to re-situate the artwork in social and politicized venues must overcome Kant’s Categorical Imperative for subjects (and, arguably, for subjects in the process of becoming, or in processes of subjectivization, all of which might be considered a metaphor for the production of works of art that exceed that very process of forming worlds — subjective worlds and actually existing worlds).
Sovereign power famously indulges abstractions such that abstraction in Art is often perceived as siding with the hegemony of a de-materialized world co-equal to speculative thought itself. While this de-limitation of contingency in formulations of “transcendence” considers abstraction a reduction of the Real toward the spectral, it is also possible that abstraction is one means of invoking a degree of reduction that re-actualizes the Real through the very act of circumventing it (or selectively and electively negating aspects of its formalization in worlds). Transcendence and immanence then become one thing when, in the work of art, the various means of its production, its means of reception, and its interpretive apparatuses are set aside for the work of art itself. Here the subjectivization of an impersonal thing (the work of art) connotes the very terms given to the production of subjects per se. What occurs along the path of the work of art, and its reception, is normally the re-naturalization of this austere figure of thing-in-itself, yet a thing-in-itself that requires an Other nonetheless to exist (and to be re-naturalized). In this case, Jacques Rancière’s privileging of the “spectator” takes on a sense of urgency insofar as the observer of the artwork is also a participant in the re-naturalization of the abstracted subject (the impersonal agency) of art.