the gamble of representation: abstractions in semiotics — polemic
⟡1 the canon as legitimation machine
capital through the use of platformed internet shows how the supposed established or legitimized status of canonical thinkers is used as an arbitrary and trivial form of engagement bait. the naive empiricalist standpoint would be to blame capital for its reterritorializing power, but that's hardly the point of contention, rather, we have to question legitimacy structures themselves. when the triviality of abusing thinkers either by reducing from them or expanding them too much is finally exposed, it's almost always too late, and the thinkers end up being diluted half to death due to over or under interpretation alike. the commentary community wrecks them to pieces by staking mind-numbing territorial disputes over the correct understanding of them, whilst everybody else creates them into memorable caricatures in order to feel they have a stake in remotely understanding or belonging to the world (they don't have any and never will, not like this). instead of actually creating understandings of their own, commentators would prefer to drown themselves in their own fear, failing to understand that production is an immediate process, not tied to some nineteenth century conception of inner talent. overexpanded commentary that doesn't tie to ones own project is a form of lithurgical infantilism, too abstracted from manic obsessivity to be considered a devotion, too legitimized to be compelling, too redundant to be important, figures are endlessly reconfigured into the will of whoever touches them. so how is it a sin to do that same process, but intentionally and outwards? dollplaying is the only honest way to engage figures.
⟡2 fear of approachability
the only practical and coherent way forward with figures is exclusively to performately attach their name to serve as tag-bait or as a surface defense over a narrative line. it is necessary to approach their thought in a way that is less delicate or systemic to the way we we approach eachother and our broader community of contemporaries and peers. the academic commentary community and its structural inclinations towards uninteresting fanaticism point to a wider poisoning, where simple structures and apparent systemic efforts compromise the realization that without the form-of-discourse, which depends largely on the character of the thinkers involved, philosophical works are entirely useless. commentators themselves are at their best when they are reviewing biographical histories, which is where they come closest to the actual lived practices of the thinker, the aesthetic experience of their livelihood is key to being able to approach them the way we would be able to approach eachother. however, out of fear of approaching eachother, we cling to them.
⟡3 hypocrisy
dollplaying with thinkers is not a unique nor novel approach or origination on its own (see: bifo, winters, land, sloterdijk, zizek, agamben) although the belief that dollplaying is one of the only politically faithful approach towards figures is quite fresh. however, its still important to hold to the idea that its valuable to read eachothers thoughts on said thinkers, because most discourses still unfortunately revolve around staking claims over them. those who argue against over-referential writings are never arguing against implicit references themselves, lest they are incapable of digesting and intuiting certain claims (or simply lack the experience to understand the built-in point), but rather, they are arguing against the form of referential writing itself, which creates a type of boring anthropology of philosophy. they are correct to do so, because the real cause behind the empty contemporary book format isn't a historical dialectical complexification, but rather a mix of the fear of approachability and the alienation of communities of thought - a fear of reputation, status and influencability, ultimately. today's philosophers have been renounced to the laughable, but unfortunately realistic title of "researcher" for this very reason, there is a certain failure to authentically experience fields of political (not aesthetic) aura, which is not the fault of thinkers themselves but rather a practical dilution and badiouian oversaturation of modernity, one which its likely to fall back to normal in the next few hundred years
⟡4 semiotics
deferral depends on the writing. certain structural semiotics have varying defferals of meaning where the same concept swaps the level of signification and creates connotations, and then there are others where its more outward facing and creates denotations that are inherent to it, some words act like walls and others like rivers, and this depennds not on the word but on the position + intent + sentence-level multiword context. whereas for language itself as a whole structure, it is partially derridian but also partially absolute, yet this also exists as a split value, the partiality doesnt depend on associative imagination or degrees of freedom though, it basically depends on the structural leniancy of the text itself as a style, the way it was written ends up dictating how the words behave in reiterations. for example most deleuze scholarship is actually extremely rigid and repetitive even if he stressed the opposite frame and the opposite substance in his content. this depends on how much for example you fix and stress particular concepts and how much total weight they carry in the writing
this isnt solely about the category of the word this is why theres a stress on positional itent, the heaviness flux occurs regardless, certain words may be predisposed but not necessarily. half of the frame is the analytic one that may be coming from outwards but that doesnt mean thats how you have to read it, like how we can read erotics into christianity. its not just a regime its a natural aspect of language, which actually can be beaten, not by stressing formality in structure like the analytics but by overdefining the limits by re-indexing every term in a way that re-closes their loop sequentially till theyre beaten into the floor (nobody has done this yet)
institutions would have failed either way, it was deleuzes responsibility to prevent this and he failed, he needed to raise ambiguity and to collapse his own concepts when they could have been read into re-metaphorization. the thinker needs to be so fluid that you can barely latch onto what they say without having to heavily transform the usage upon your own equipment of it
texts are definitely sovereign entities, nobody can co create meaning, the author is too complete for that. meaning basically doesnt survive outside of authorship, not because it cant, or because cross communication cant exist, but because the abstractions are too dense and auto personal in the current enviornment. theres basically no way to "get to" high level authors, which barely exist yet but are about to exist everywhere youll see.
also as for aristotle, encyclopedic thinking exists for reasons unrelated to genius and creation entirely, like look at the way popularity moves now, you can learn how banal it is, wit and invention never gets rewarded, and aristotle, whatever interesting things he did write, as for everyone else, sits inbetween his supposed realizations and not actually in the schematic of their main functional claims anyways
gravity isnt natural its just an invented construct. language is more natural than gravity, people dont realize language invents everything when you let it, most anglophones especially like the people you were built by always think of it as situated reference which is why they can never get anywhere with it.
nothing has drifted, in regards to stability and intention, hegel and husserl are perfectly self-situating and intended, they arent "closed" they dont need to be. it doesnt matter who writes what afterwards based on their ideas, it literally doesnt matter, it says nothing about meaning in language its just some useless social archetype that appears afterwards
interpretations exist not because authors failed or because the text didnt get there but because people naturally shift things, but actually, they are fully understanding everything, because at the same time they understand it exactly as they do (and translation fails it) and they understand it totally differently, but this is a phenomenological accuracy instead of inaccuracy, its kind of like a backward-working mechanism that prevents chaotic collapse into immanent singularity, its a deeper kind of understanding. but also, and most importantly, signification is basically fully seperate from meaning-creation, and till people understand this theyll never get anywhere with language
thinkers keep hinting at history when i keep saying i think it has nothing to do with language or signification because i see it as fully divorced systematically and mechanically but they keep assuming it isnt. basically, most minds are never a part of what i call theory. most of what they do to language is useless drivel, institutional demand, personal observation, none of it is careful or consistent enough to reach the actual domain where real thinkers operate, which is a constant flow of interchangable meaning which is all self-generating and entirely outside of cultural history as a totality basically, real thinkers recycled everything that came into their way and basically built a meta-language on top of everything common and general that appeared in historical time. what i mean by signification vs meaning is that language and intention and will and structure when they all combine basically build the entirety of a text, digestion deals with meaning which is like an imposed meta structure and has nothing to do with the actual act of writing, digestion has never actually been able to encounter the creation of a text. language itself is primordial, its its own operational form and idealistic metaphysical component, it has never actually even interacted with the world basically. it has its own virtual realm that always operates as fully self-understood, and readers and writers alike get closest to it not in interpretation or social processing or cultural signification or legitimacy ritual but by basically understanding it as already self-solved and programmable, shiftable, and infinitely rich in its very presentation rather than in its consequences or whatnot. thats why anglophones are perverts, they basically ruin the style of language, for them language and text are basically a type of social performance ritual, they basically de-significate language by treating it like almost a realized abstraction of physical props in the form of referential currents, the current becomes a physicality and gets its actual metaphysical "tone" ruined, thats why they cant even recognize concepts, they only have names like the stoics. language is only text and its self-artification, it isnt communication or speaking or understanding or interpretation btw - those are just some type of dumb social tool that parasitizes off language
art requires postulated grounding but not speculated grounding, the world exists as the ground but that doesnt mean it exists as the origin of all concepts not as their future driver. this basically allows language to present itself as original, novel and valuable in its primacy. also, its nothing like mathematics, because math doesnt speak, it can be operational, formal, whatever, but its simply a representation, whereas language screams to become ontology (and will become it in the future) its basically cheap ontology until ontology comes, but its a non-topological and non-symbolic ontology, math works through symbols which i see as ontologically inferior to language, which works through a weird mix of self-significance, messaging, interconnectedness, floatability and ambiguity, abstractions as felt experiences and so on, extremely different, language is proto-corporeal whereas maths is just deflated abstractions turned geometries or turned axioms which is just the raw skin of formality and can never significate anything. as for thinkers requiring prior systems of thought, totally false, thinkers dont require imbedded historical context, they basically invent whole non-existent future speculative histories with three times the weight of our present ones in their very words, thats a part of what makes philosophy valuable. basically, when analyticians reference history they waste their time with useless situated referentiality, but when continentals do it, theyre making use of raw material in the form of history cause theyre basically either being lazy and not creating their own worlds in real time to self-draw from, or requiring groudedness in their theory that cant self-generate (creative imagination can, language can, but the ground itself has to stabilize the glue somewhere, so thats why) or, sometimes as all of us do they appeal to economy, and when they do it thats fine theyre just popularizing their thought and basically arent saying anything about history anyways. or when they are, theyre talking about meta-history which is a component of discourse and not real lived-in history, which is just useless for us since its a realm that cant interact with ours or never has
philosophers do mostly draw from history and recombine contextual parallelisms of thought, but interpretators always obfuscate them by returning them one step lower from their average level of abstraction which is political infantilism and not always even intentional, whereas thinkers themselves mostly draw from history either cause they arent a part of the elite who dont need to, or they are the elite who are getting lazy. simultaneously, contemporary matters present unconquered terrain and maximum cultural and social capital, so its too not worth it to stray. otherwise though this is wrong, i still stick to the idea that philosophers create worlds entirely and self-correctively. patterns in thinking doesnt exist as sub-dialectical, if anything its equally dialectical aka generative as real history. sure, dialectics does present a deeper layer of creative origination than pure immediate thought, but immediate thought can ocassionally stack enough to bypass even dialectic origination. specifically for technology, philosophers of technology forget to make use of their own speculated technologies as if already writing from the future, basically they can re-format their own medium to fit an unexplainable domain of the future where technological change succeeds their own thinking.
⟡5 an original idea of syntactic meaning
a short theory of semiology
to cultivate a short theory of semiology, basically the term "ontology" has 3 different aspects to it:
its actually two words - onto - logy right? but, those two words dont just compromise a grammatical connection of latin terms that create a word that makes sense,b ut they also create images in the term itself that correspond to a world that varifies its meaning by its actual form and marker like the signifier and also its way of sounding and presenting, so "ontolo" could be an "ellephant symbol": or somnem shit, whereas "logy" is the act of a human specifically physically pointing in the direction of a thinking mind by pulling their hands outwards . if i say tree, the "tr" is different from the "ee" andd these produce two different images of a tree but cruically they cant look anything like a tree or else ur just creating a conceptual rather than impressionistic image
the sign itself either is a filler word where its value is purely associative that changes the direction of thinking, or a key word where instead of a master signifier its a primary signifier, meaning differance itself or varied signification exists for it, but not for most words around it the way postrsutrcuralists would want, so you can apply hermenutic circle only to specific sentence sor sometimes only to specific words, where supposition and ptosis occurs only ocassionally and most words are filler words without outright much productive capacityt in the text (conceptually productive maybe, maybe sometimes image-wise so, but often times not actually related to other potential signifieds
the sign itself, the inspiration for using a sign over another occurs at about half the motivational frequency of the occurance of it elsewhere. if you pick up cat from a teext, you may pick up adjectives that create impressions about it like cute, or creepy, or wise, or naive, or whatever, and in this new text they may be closer to how someone else could or might have used that in a writing you "stole" the sign from, but the sign itself still isnt determined by not being everything else in the writing, instead its determined by whether its a filler or a fixed word in 2 aka whether its function is to expand its conceptual meaning or just to vaguely associate or pile up words together and also whether you can interpret it plurarly or not, whether you already have a pre determined aesthtic image of it in 1 and how good or accurate that image is or if youve shared it, and also whether you 4) built it in a way that closes readers off from its possible meanings or opens them up (possible meanings isnt conceptual images, its a mix of possible impressions, possible conceptual additions, and possible varied but related non-aesthetic images, so thematic images, the sense it belongs in a certain world or whatever)
theres an impressionistic underlayer to conceiveing of sings, that when it becomes fixed, it alters the capacity to claim the plurality of signs (like how far poststructuralists can take it) bu talso it changes ur relationship to it, for example it prevents residue capture at times, increases the conceptual capacity of a term by fixing it into an image etc. this is a impressionistic theory. ill also add that theres two types of it, aesthetic fixers and aesthetic images. the former is when u imagine a tree in ur head to stabilize the reading of tree when u encounter it in text, the latter, the image, is for actually understanding the word as something intimate and weird (its not supposed to look like an image of a tree, its a vague impression of a totally unrelated image, but if you argue for it or present it, it could strenghten not only your texts but others, and how everyone perceives texts to begin with.