22nd
From language and floating to code and flickering: something seems very wrong with this reading of Lacan!
“Language is not a code,” Lacan asserted, because he wanted to deny one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and signified. In word processing, however, language is a code. The relation between machine and compiler languages is specified by coding arrangement, as is the relation of the compiler language to the programming commands that the user manipulates. Through these multiple transformations, some quantity is conserved, but it is not the mechanical energy of a thermodynamical system of levers or the molecular energy of a thermodynamical system. Rather it is the informational structure that emerges from the interplay between pattern and randomness. When a text presents itself as a constantly refreshed image rather than as a durable inscription, transformations can occur that would be unthinkable if matter or energy, rather than informational patterns, formed the primary basis for systematic exchanges. This textual fluidity, which users learn in their bodies as they interact with the system, implies that signifiers flicker rather than float.
To explain what I mean by flickering signifiers, I will briefly review Lacan’s notion of floating signifiers. Lacan, operating within a view of language that was primarily print-based rather than electronically mediated, not surprisingly focused on presence and absence as the dialectic of interest. When he formulated the concept of floating signifiers, he drew on Saussure’s idea that signifiers are definied by networks of relational differences between themselves rather than by their relation to signifieds. He complicated this picture by maintaining that signifieds fo not exist in themselves, except insofar as they are produced by signifiers. He imagined them as an ungraspable flow floating beneath a network of signifiers. He imagined them as an ungraspable flow floating beneath a network of signifiers, a network that itslef is constituted through continual slippages and displacements. Thus, for him, a doubly reinforced abscence is at the core of signification—the absence of signifieds as things-in-themselves as well as the absence of stable correspondences between signifiers. The catastrophe in psycholinguistic development corresponding to this absence in signification is castration, the moment when the (male) subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language, is founded on absence.
How does this scenario change when floating signifiers give way to flickering signifiers? Foregrounding pattern and randomness, information technologies operate within a realm in which the signifier is opened to a rich internal play of difference. In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes. As I write these words on my computer, I see the lights on the video screen, but for the computer, the relevant signifiers are electronic polarities on disks. Intervening between what I see and what the computer reads are the machine code that correlates alphanumeric symbols with binary digits, the compiler language that correlates these symbols with higher-level instructions determining how the symbols are to be manipulated, the processing program that mediates between these instructions and the commands I give the compueter, and so foruth. A signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level. Precisely between the relation between signifier and signified at each of these levels is arbitrary, it can be changed with a signle global command. If I am producing ink marks by manipulating movable type, changing the font requires changing each line of type. By contrast, if I am producing flickering signifiers on a video screen, changing the font is as easy as giving the system a single command. The longer the chain of codes, the more radical the transformations that can be effected. Acting as linguistic transducers, the coding chains impart astonishing power to even very small changes. Such amplification is possible because the constant reproduced through multiple coding layers is a pattern rather than a presence. (N. Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman, 30-31)
