The Weight of Words

The point is not to seek to downplay the role of human language as something capable, in its turn, of energizing the sensible. It is rather a matter of recognizing the primary dynamic of reality as it presents itself to us, through images, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, and then, in response to the gesture, through consistencies, roughnesses, viscosities, densities…

Human language — to be grasped as a technological element — emerges from the affective, and keeps within it, potentially, a connection with the original richness of the world — a richness that is lost when language is instrumentalized within processes of domination. By contrast, the computer system will always be rigid, for it is bound by a one-to-one coding, in which each symbol corresponds to a precise signifier¹, any unresolved ambiguity provoking error, the halting of the system.

There is creation out of computer code in its creative destructuring, to be sure, but also when it manages to trigger humanly unpredictable emergences, just as when code makes possible assemblages associated with movements of deterritorialization. But this kind of human–machine creation does not function in the same way as creation arising from the exclusive use of human language.

Indeed, the process through which an artistic form emerges from human language — if a hypothesis were to be put forward in the light of the present research — seems associated with a loosening of linguistic codification, with a return of the symbolic toward its material stock in a movement of re-concretization of signs.

This intuition about the artistic functioning of human language — which is not the subject of the present research — emerges collaterally in the making², and from reflection on the — digital — artistic practices addressed. It could be further specified — through agreement or disagreement — by setting it in tension with existing conceptual structures, such as the “regimes of signs” evoked by Deleuze and Guattari.

Indeed, while a distance asserts itself between our impressions of the artistic use of words and the “signifying regime³” criticized by these philosophers, remarkable resonances are established with the (primitive) “presignifying semiotic.” Indeed, whereas within the signifying regime signs refer to one another ad infinitum, in a circular dynamic of abstraction of content that leads to the establishment of a voice of authority (the priest, who interprets the signs), in the presignifying regime the vocal form coexists with “forms of corporeality, gesturality, rhythm, dance, rite⁴,” within a “segmentary but plurilinear, multidimensional semiotic that wards off in advance any signifying circularity⁵.” It is within a process such as the latter that the artistic use of human language seems to us to belong.

The presignifying regime, moreover, foresees the outcome of the hegemonic establishment of the signifying regime. It is “animated by a heavy foreboding of what is to come […]: universalizing abstraction, the erection of the signifier […] the installation of the despot, priestly caste, scapegoat…, etc⁶.”

1. Within the framework of this research, this signifier is, in the last instance, a sequence of schematized and mechanized human gestures.↩︎

2. To be concrete, from the sensation felt while coding, a system that uses words drawn from human language (let, if, then, for, end, next…), but whose functioning is felt to be entirely different.↩︎

3. Gilles Deleuze, Mille plateaux, op. cit., p. 141.↩︎

4. Ibid., p. 147.↩︎

5. Ibid.↩︎

6. Ibid., p. 148.↩︎