Suggestions for the expression of desire in language
Francesco Aprile
from Exegesis of a renunciation, Uitgeverij, 2014
1.
#communication#absente#unheimlich#rinuncia#poltiglia#slurry#poem#subliminaux#morceau#sexe#oubliè#rencontre#de_langue#interrupt#das#ding#miroir#narcissus#words#extensions
2.
Writing as movement: as pointed out by the Canadian sociologist the web between author, gesture and content is dynamically expressed through differing variations on the level of movement. Even the signals originating from the image are related to movement, quite simply because implicit within the image as well as in the perceptive construct of the social actor. Words are mediatic and throughout history have been nurtured by images, from the Palaeolithic to more modern times. In the contemporary afflatus the Mcluhanian separation between sign, image and sound recedes, engulfed by a transmedial approach which enriches research papers with greater vitality, and thus, despite the loss of continuity caused by the spatial separation, with a stronger sense of movement.
3.
The matrix of movement is a form of desire which, in its various connotations, denotes the cardinal, pulsating element of language as it is torqued by diverse links, relations and conjunction[1] owing to a manque à être the primary cause for the separation of the subject from the maternal complement[2]. We are not dealing with a “pretext for” but with a “desire for” movement towards the expression of desire.
4.
The move away from a modality of hypo-communication to a context of hyper-communication highlights our increasing frustration and hinders all emotion by rendering our response merely intellectual. Desire is objectivated and what is Other becomes part of a process of disclosing, of uncovering, of denoument.
5.
The way in which the media has transformed the human body into a sort of Freud-Lacan-McLuhan triptych is foregrounded in modern media as an extreme and artificial amplification of the primary, archetypal, maternal miroir (the primary medium: the body of the mother). The social actor is thus narcotized both by the projection of his own self-image and by the emergence of a number of intimate, subconscious elements all linked to the sense of touch (physical contact). The resulting social and psychic tension points to a form of interrupted communication in the projection of our intimate being, largely owing to the numerous attacks made by modern day media. What is Other is barred. Thus, the tendency to repeat ancient, intimate, individual and collective (or rather universal) archetypal patterns of reuniting, comes to the fore in a way that is both irratic and strained, neurotic and morbose: in other words, conflictual.
5.1
Social narcosis.
6.
The exegesis of relinquishment implies understanding an unfinished, unpolished language. A discarded language which, lacking in desire, ignores the boundaries of both conscious and subconscious guidelines. A written language seen as a magmatic, incomplete and imperfect language, a form of communication anchored to the matrix of the original, archetypal chaos which goes beyond the limits of das ding. A form of writing catapulted towards the expression of desire as a means of adhering to the dialectical contact of communication, to the primary impulse of language.
6.1
The media today is so intrusive that it may cause one’s relationship with the Other to break down, and this can be examined both in the terms of Rimbaud and Lacan. Language derails and falls apart when there is an interruption in communication.
Social relations are evidently the privileged sphere of action of great powers. When such powers take paradigmatic leaps from one social milieu to another different, immaterial one, the social actor is denied the possibility of becoming a subject of history. Such social relations are characterized by this immaterial fluidity which obscures the goal from the collective view.
7.
Different types of words may be found at the heart of poetic language in this context. Among these words, two types stand out as being either subliminal – nurtured in journalism and advertising – or abused, having become meaningless mash (following a breakdown in communication). The latter terms seem to be a remainder of forgotten pleasure which, while pulsating, meet the limits of the body and perceive the body as something beyond a performing body, as the privileged seat for communication in the language of art. Words are crushed onto the written page. Language becomes mash. The semantic structure of the Other is overturned and the body is now seen as the starting point from which the individual experience of the self and of the outer world, through numerous stops and starts, sets forth.
8.
Writing as a desire for language. This implies a written form which expresses an archetypal wholeness and not merely a written form of “all the rest”, of whatever might concern the repressive establishment of civilization.
9.
The Freudian das Unheimlich. The disturbing: what hasn’t yet emerged, what is hidden but close to home, what might yet surface. In other words, here the disturbing is the common, although figurative, practice of authors. Unheimlich. In this, it is something close but at the same time obscured and out-of-reach. A language which is familiar because it lies within us and in our homes but, being anchored to inaccessible primary experiences, is also disturbing.
10.
The phantom of a long-lost pleasure, of a demagnetised language comes forward dressed with the different meanings which the words, in differing historical contexts, express. This is an artistic language whose aesthetic practice is that of exploiting abused words in order to highlight man’s isolation: a mash-language that has become aesthetic reduction, the phantom of a residue of pleasure, of language, of desire.
[1] Dòdaro, F. S., Dichiarazione onomatopeica, Lecce, Ghen Arte
«Il linguaggio è una congiunzione. Il linguaggio è una “e”».
[2] Dòdaro, F. S., Codice Yem, Lecce, Ghen Arte.
