Equipoise
To begin with, I must admit that I am all but obsessed with examination of representation. In technical terms representation deals with the modality through which information is expressed, the set and type of symbols of which it is composed. This is personally relevant because I am constantly attuned to the gap between what people signify and what they intend to signify. Either may reveal more complete information as to the motivations of an individual.
We passively probe the social environment for subtle disparities between behavior and words. Baudrillard would agree the illusion of words is that there is a truth. There is no doubt meaning to words but they lack relation to universal truth. Humans seem to have a difficult time understanding that universal means impervious to human perceptions or unframed by them. As such, we must be extremely careful to avoid the assumption that every signification enfolds a meaning. Did she frown because I upset her or because she had cramps? To attach every perceived relation to oneself is just as much folly as to attach none at all.
We happen upon an interesting question. Does every signification have meaning? Does the expression 2 + 2 = 3 have meaning? Yes, it has false meaning, but meaning nonetheless. To even inscribe the abstract act of addition requires the precession of a vast array of mental (read: memetic) technology and verbal machinery. Meaning is implicitly expressed through the representation or the medium of a message. x + y = z, completely devoid of its singular content, implies the notion of equipoise, that two opposing forces resist each other in equal proportion. This is, of course, the central dogma of arithmetic: x = z – y. In other words, there will always be a way to “balance the checkbook.” Notice the operation is energy conserving – the x, y, and z may be juggled around ad infinitum and still produce the same set of relations. But, can I compose a signification that is utterly meaningless? Even “asdfr sdfi dfeokm” wears the symbolic veil of letters, an entire layer of assembled and organized machinery buried within the signifier. I still believe it is possible to transcribe the meaningless, but I will return to this point at a later date.
The dogmatic arithmetic relationship negates entropy, ignores completely the vital impulse that leeches energy from the circuit into divergent, emergent territory. Circuits transverse circuits and form gears, molecular entities. Rudiments of materialist thought are founded upon the recognition that entities inevitably form dynamic relationships with other entities and nothing exists in isolation, which is to say the notion of brownian motion applies to corpuscles of all forms, physical, ethereal, or noetic.
When we study representation we attempt to define one or several abstract relationships between entities in the human perceptual system. We understand first and foremost that anything represented is rendered such by our neural and cultural hardware. The shockingly recent emergence of computer science represents mankind’s most profound attempt to date to develop a dynamic metaphysics. Like most modern studies, it has fallen victim to a romanticism of sorts with its obsessive progression toward a deistic perfection.
Error does not exist in this realm, there is no distance between what the machine signifies and what it intends to signify. Isn’t that space precisely where we subjectively reside, always vacillating along a continuum girded by what we convey and what we intend to convey? This dynamism reveals an implicit molecular relationship that may not be readily accessible to machinic dissection by means of symbols. It is partially soluble to symbolism or likeness, perhaps, but not to symbols. The space between the sign and the signified contains indifferentiable intrusions of meaninglessness, that which is signified but contains no particular significance or that which expresses remnants of the asignifying. Of all things we should be most interested in that which does not signify, the asignifying, as it seems to constitute the dark energy of our metaphysics.
Reflections of the Machine 