The Sign World and Chasm World

Con­tem­po­rary modes of exis­tence exac­er­bate a kind of con­sti­tu­tive dual­i­ty in man. This dual­i­ty is that which is artic­u­lat­ed around what one might refer to as the finite being and the pro­ject­ed being. The finite being is the local being, phys­i­cal and mor­tal, which is defined by its lim­its and its mate­r­i­al con­tin­gen­cies. It is this being who suf­fers and who enjoys. It is the being which walks or runs at a lim­it­ed speed, jumps to a lim­it­ed height, and whose voice car­ries at a lim­it­ed dis­tance. It is the being which grows tired, gets sick and feels hot or cold. Upon this body-being, the being fac­ing the infin­i­ty of the world is super­im­posed; the being who dreams of being poten­tial­ly unlim­it­ed and eter­nal (as, sup­pos­ed­ly, the world around him). This being has always expressed itself, for exam­ple in the social game, polit­i­cal posi­tions, ideals, patri­o­tism, feel­ings of belong­ing or beliefs. It is the part of each per­son that is pre­cip­i­tat­ed into a space that tran­scends it: the space of sac­ri­fice, of pos­ter­i­ty, of com­mu­ni­ty, that is to say the oth­er space or the space of oth­ers; in short, the space of elsewhere.

Such artic­u­la­tion is obvi­ous. It has been stud­ied in a thou­sand ways. What is less so is that which it pro­duces. The cur­rent era offers a new con­text to this dual­i­ty and makes it tox­ic. This con­text, which is so spe­cif­ic, is split. It is illus­trat­ed, in the first place, by the advent of a tech­ni­cal era that will soon ren­der pos­si­ble the expres­sion of a total­ly syn­chro­nous world; one in which each point of the globe will be con­nect­ed and updat­a­ble in ​“real time” by its posi­tion­ing in a net­work; and sec­ond­ly by what Jean-François Lyotard called the end of the great nar­ra­tives, typ­i­cal of the post­mod­ern era we live in, where the dis­cur­sive meta-struc­ture in which we can inscribe our his­to­ry is fail­ing. Today, the pro­ject­ed being no longer deploys itself through projects of soci­ety, ideals, reli­gions or beliefs. One of the com­mon func­tions between all these forms was, in fact, the abil­i­ty to tra­di­tion­al­ly explain, extend and per­pet­u­ate exis­tence beyond the finite being (with the con­cealed objec­tive of being able to dis­pose of this same finite being and thus to sub­mit it to its Law). The pro­ject­ed being now thrives less through these tran­scen­dent axes in such a way that it syn­chro­nizes with the Net­work to rejoin the sta­sis of the hyper-present, and this, for the sole pur­pose of find­ing itself con­firmed there at every moment. Let us remem­ber, the pro­ject­ed being dreams of being eter­nal. Death is no longer a hori­zon for him. And that is the secret objec­tive: to reas­sure one­self and hide the hori­zon of death.

One of the major symp­toms of this con­tem­po­rary tox­i­c­i­ty which is instilled in the ​“finite being/projected being” artic­u­la­tion touch­es the sen­so­ry reg­is­ter, in the sense that it results in the asphyx­i­a­tion of expe­ri­ences which are imme­di­ate or made imme­di­ate, attain­ing the grad­ual but irre­sistible silenc­ing of the finite being. One of the most strik­ing exam­ples, and which for the past decade has con­sti­tut­ed a series of mis­cel­la­neous news items that have tak­en place main­ly in Asia, is that of young peo­ple dying in cyber-cafes, after con­tin­u­ous­ly play­ing online for days and nights. Their being is pro­ject­ed into the glob­al­ized and sta­t­ic syn­chro­nous world of the Net­work, while their for­got­ten body strug­gled in silence before final­ly col­laps­ing due to immo­bil­i­ty. Here is an extreme exam­ple of the pro­ject­ed being which knows how to silence the finite being until its destruction.

Now, with­out wait­ing for such fatal con­se­quences, the same imbal­ance in the artic­u­la­tion is expressed today for every­one, at any moment. And this, through the over­all mod­i­fi­ca­tion of our rela­tion­ship to the world and the pos­si­ble sen­so­ry expe­ri­ences that such a con­nec­tion either allows or, on the con­trary, neu­tral­izes and con­ceals. Hence­forth, what is ​“allowed” to be felt is that which can be uttered. Accord­ing to Jean-François Lyotard, ​“for the ani­mal that speaks, the most spon­ta­neous treat­ment of per­cep­tu­al space is writ­ing, i.e. abstrac­tion. Spon­tane­ity leads to the con­struc­tion of the field as a frag­ment of a sys­tem that ​‘speaks’”…1 How­ev­er, to utter the world is not exact­ly to describe it, and this is even more impor­tant nowadays. 

Because if lan­guage can shape, deploy and even sub­li­mate sen­sa­tions and feel­ings, and thus inten­si­fy our rela­tion­ship to the world by mul­ti­ply­ing nuances, as lit­er­a­ture shows, if it can even try to describe the inde­scrib­able by build­ing bridges between two words to evoke an inter­me­di­ate tonal­i­ty, it also hides and obstructs any pos­si­ble direct rela­tion­ship to the world. This obstruc­tion is more and more obvi­ous as lan­guage los­es its rich­ness and the range of words mak­ing it pos­si­ble to utter the world becomes scarcer. Let there be no mis­un­der­stand­ing: there is a strange rela­tion­ship between the rich­ness of the vocab­u­lary and the abil­i­ty to feel. There is, more­over, an affec­tion, qual­i­fied as a per­son­al­i­ty trait and not as a pathol­o­gy, called alex­ithymia, which denotes the dif­fi­cul­ty of iden­ti­fy­ing and qual­i­fy­ing one’s emo­tions. Alex­ithymia points to the com­plex rela­tion­ship estab­lished between feel­ing and for­mal­iz­ing one’s feel­ings, expos­ing the fact that not being able to express one’s emo­tions is already not being able to feel them ful­ly. It remains to be deter­mined if alex­ithymia is not the pre­lim­i­nary step to gen­er­al­ized anes­the­sia of the syn­chro­nous world. 

Because, in the Syn­chro­nous Net­work, it is less impor­tant to say than to sig­nal. How­ev­er, to sig­nal is not to say, and even less to describe. It is not to per­form a dis­course, but to send a sig­nal and sig­nal­ing one­self. By pro­duc­ing or respond­ing with stan­dard­ized pro­to­cols and a grid of sym­bols and pic­tograms (a heart, a star, a thumbs-up, an emoti­con), we share emo­tion but more impor­tant than that, we sig­nal our­selves accord­ing to a stan­dard­ized procedure.

In our retic­u­lar con­tem­po­rary world, that is to say the world where the sense of per­for­mance has instilled itself in almost every­thing thanks to the World Human Net­work, there is now a trend: we sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly dis­qual­i­fy that which does not make a sign; more pre­cise­ly, that which is not syn­chro­nized. In oth­er words, that which does not make a sign accord­ing to a pro­to­col that is sim­ple enough to be used, trans­mit­ted and received (here, the tech­ni­cal con­straints are not as impor­tant as the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and for­mat­ting of the mes­sage itself). Infor­ma­tion sat­u­ra­tion has led to a sec­ond age of the Net­work – the one where we clock in and out synchronously. 

Pro­ject­ed space, the oth­er space in which the being projects itself as infi­nite and unlim­it­ed, is pre­cise­ly the space that sum­mons the world beyond itself. This sig­ni­fy­ing out­ward motion, that goes beyond the local and mor­tal being, has long been asso­ci­at­ed with the worlds of the sacred, whose func­tion was pre­cise­ly to evoke the excess part of the being: the soul, life after or before death, ances­tors and descen­dants, and some­times the future of soci­eties. How­ev­er, the wave of moder­ni­ty and its grad­ual reces­sion, once the dis­course of progress has been deliv­ered, have left behind a fore­shore deprived of almost every­thing that is sacred and mys­te­ri­ous. The ter­ri­to­ry of the sacred has been left fal­low. It has been sub­sti­tut­ed by a glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the present moment through the Syn­chro­nous Net­work. The pro­ject­ed space of the utter­able world has been almost entire­ly reduced to the sig­nal­ing space, there­fore to become ever-synchronous.

On the oth­er hand, if the sen­so­ry is sub­ject to the sign in the Syn­chro­nous Net­work, what could be the resid­ual world of the fail­ing sign, where noth­ing can be said, but every­thing can be felt, then? In the work of Bel­gian artist Fran­cis Alÿs enti­tled The Night­watch, a fox named Ban­dit is prompt­ed to walk in the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery at night in Lon­don. A par­al­lel world opens up to us when we watch this work. A par­al­lel world where there is no guid­ed tour and where the paint­ings do not inspire enough inter­est to give us pause. The gallery sprawls and defines itself once more accord­ing to the way Ban­dit uses it and walks through it: In a cer­tain way, it reveals the fox’s own world. 

One could sim­ply con­sid­er this work as anoth­er reminder that every species evolves pre­cise­ly in its own world, its envi­ron­ment, as Jakob von Uexküll showed more than a cen­tu­ry ago. And it is indeed a reminder. Pro­pelling Ban­dit into a space that can bare­ly be recon­fig­ured into an envi­ron­ment for a fox is an implic­it­ly dis­turb­ing reminder of what Uexküll calls the ​“con­ven­tion­al fable of a uni­ver­sal space2. Man, like the ani­mal, does not evolve into a homo­ge­neous uni­ver­sal space but to quote James J. Gib­son, into an ​“envi­ron­ment com­posed of sub­stances with a greater or less­er sub­stan­tial­i­ty, of a medi­um –the gaseous atmos­phere – and of sur­faces that sep­a­rate the sub­stances from the medi­um. ​“In this envi­ron­ment, the human being moves more pre­cise­ly in his own world, defined by his fac­ul­ties of per­cep­tion and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of his actions and pow­ers. How­ev­er, one of the speci­fici­ties of the human being is that he has man­aged to extend his pow­ers and devel­op the envi­ron­ment beyond him. This is the mean­ing of the sen­tence by Peter Slo­ter­dijk, who writes that ​“I am not […], as the cur­rent sys­tem­a­tists and bio-ide­ol­o­gists think I describe myself, a liv­ing crea­ture in its envi­ron­ment; I am a soar­ing crea­ture with which genius­es cre­ate spaces.”3

The world in which Ban­dit is evolv­ing is no longer com­plete­ly ours. It is a world aban­doned by man, a world with­out lan­guage, or more pre­cise­ly, a world where our lan­guage is absent. And this world is hos­tile, in the sense that man has no place, because he has no more words. In any case, accord­ing to Hof­mannsthal, ​“words are not of this world”, that is to say, they nev­er man­age to give a true account of it, but always con­ceal and reveal it. This back­ward rev­e­la­tion res­onates with the oth­er side of that which is inef­fa­ble, which is no longer on the side of the ani­mal, but of that of the con­tem­po­rary man who has chased the genius­es away and moved them else­where to take refuge in the syn­chro­nous and eter­nal hyper-present, the time of the pro­ject­ed being.

In this econ­o­my of the hyper-present, there is a polar­iza­tion of the sen­so­ry where lan­guage plays a strange game. On the one hand, there is the world of the express­ible which is not quite the world of shar­ing but that of the exchange, or infor­ma­tion about one anoth­er. It is the world of the com­mu­ni­ty of the utter­able, which has become, through accel­er­at­ing, sat­u­rat­ing and dis­man­tling the lan­guage, the world of the syn­chro­nous dom­i­nant sign. On the oth­er hand, there is the inef­fa­ble world of impres­sions, the infra-sen­so­ry, and emo­tions engulfed by the stream of con­scious­ness. There is no oppo­si­tion in prin­ci­ple between these two poles, which are only oth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tions of each oth­er, but there is more to observe in the rela­tions to the world, which based on one or the oth­er of these poles and which work against those who pull from the oppo­site pole. The only pos­si­ble dis­tinc­tion must be in terms of inten­si­ty of life, inten­si­ty of expe­ri­ences, and use of the sensory. 

The infra-lucid dynam­ics (in oppo­si­tion to the extra-lucid that detects mes­sages from sen­so­ry expe­ri­ences), which explore and rec­og­nize the influ­ence of a world that is inef­fa­ble (and yet pro­duces affects, rather than signs), are both reveal­ing and inspi­ra­tional. It is a ques­tion of delv­ing into these oth­er pos­si­ble worlds as illus­trat­ed by the hybrid world in which Ban­dit evolves, in order to under­mine the sen­so­ry and sig­ni­fy­ing struc­tures which val­i­date this ​“con­ven­tion­al fable of a uni­ver­sal space”4 that is syn­chro­nous space. We then need to see ​“behind the fable”, to use the expres­sion of Michel Fou­cault, of this space, to delve into the chasm world. Let the silence fall. To rein­ten­si­fy one’s rela­tion­ship to the world as a finite being and to silence, to a cer­tain extent, the pro­ject­ed being, the social being which con­stant­ly repli­cates expe­ri­ences in order to live towards a syn­chro­nous matrix of nar­ra­tive. It is no longer a ques­tion of read­ing or utter­ing the sen­so­ry through the Net­work, it is a ques­tion of using it.

For if, as Pao­lo Virno writes, using does not allow the iso­la­tion of the char­ac­ter­is­tic prop­er­ties of a being, but iden­ti­fies its ​“con­ve­nience, (or on the con­trary, its resis­tance), to the cur­rent activ­i­ty”, and if ​“using is marked from one end to the oth­er by the seal of inter­est, in the most lit­er­al sense of the term: inter-esse, inter-being”,5 it is through such use of the sen­so­ry that a rela­tion­ship to the rebal­anced world can expand. 

We are nev­er total­ly in the world in which we are in. Nor are we in an estab­lished envi­ron­ment – nei­ther a pure­ly syn­chro­nous dialec­tic space. We are in a hybrid envi­ron­ment that is always a bit mag­i­cal, to use von Uexküll’s ter­mi­nol­o­gy one last time, that is to say a world where the invis­i­ble shows up and where the imag­i­na­tion tries to pre­vent it as much as it can. We live in a world inter­sect­ed by lines of force that call and sig­nal towards oth­er worlds. The chasm world, the infra-world, is the one that flour­ish­es between these lines of force. Fac­ing this, the world stands dis­armed, sta­t­ic and synchronous. 

Two antag­o­nis­tic poles fight over the sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence of the world. One of these poles is syn­ony­mous with the pan-sig­ni­fy­ing and syn­chro­nous deter­mi­na­tion of the world as a con­struct­ed world, while the sec­ond, on the con­trary, sig­nals the sen­so­ry con­cealed beneath the thresh­old, the infra-sen­so­ry. From one pole to the oth­er, all the becom­ings of the sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence, from the ter­ror­iz­ing expe­ri­ence to the anaes­thetized over-cod­ed per­cep­tion, are grad­u­al­ly sprawl­ing. And from one to the oth­er, the dou­ble impos­si­bil­i­ty of lan­guage set against the two irrec­on­cil­able worlds of signs and chasms dissolves.