Mediated Illusions and Conjuring Our Own Blinders
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” - Jean Baudrillard
The problem of distilling the meaning from our information supersaturated world does not stem from the fact that ever-proliferating signifiers function as highly effective containers for meaning; in fact, every sign has become overripe with meaning, dripping with irony but also overwhelmed with an unmappable contagion of interconnectedness. Frazer’s law of contagion —— the persistent relationship between objects and concepts that have been in contact, further suggesting that a sign carries the residue of every sign it has ever come into relation with —— has escaped the always tenuous restraints thrust upon it by reason. Words and other signs function best when they remain partially sequestered, unable to whisper their secrets to each other in the dark, limiting the other signs they risk being infected by; now, signs flow too easily and this outstrips their ability to carry coherence. The connections between signs and their referents have in many cases become too efficient through overuse; the noise floor in their ability to transmit information has been irreparably breached and the signal becomes overwhelmed before it can convey its message.
This is a hyperstition that Saussure could not have foretokened, for his signifiers were always bound to linguistic and linguistic-like content. His model of telementation —— thought transfer via words from one mind to another —— presaged the work of Bühler and Jacobsen in their models of linguistic conveyance. The models of all three thinkers, as revolutionary as they were in their day for their direct yet overly idealized explanatory power, ultimately assume —— despite their occasional protestations —— a static mapping of sign to meaning, of word to object, and of virus to host. This is more than slightly ironic, since Saussure well understood the sliver of arbitrariness inherent in linguistic signs: other than in the rare case of onomatopoeia, there is no reason other than the weight of diachronism why a given set of phonemes “means” some particular thing. What he failed to grasp is that arbitrariness is not dealt out in a limited, static measure; it is always lurking within the sign and pushing outward to transcend the artificial, and thus tenuous, boundaries that differentiate signs in Saussure’s now frozen thoughts.
Peirce’s and, by extension, Eco’s models of signs and communication are better able to adapt to the postmodern onslaught of unrestrained signification. Eco’s playful, yet eerily prescient, characterization of the sign is that a sign is anything that can be used to lie. In an era which has lost its taste for the truth (a genie that is becoming increasingly unlikely ever to accept a return to the safe quietude of its bottle), Eco’s model of the sign has become far more sober than he had ever hoped —— the player can no longer cling to the illusion that he can affect the game. To lie is to wedge a fatal gap into the connection between the reality of concepts and their ability to become actual within the world. This implies no moral judgment; a desire for even the most mundane change or action is always, in the strictest analysis of its relation to truth, a lie until it has found expression within the world of the senses. To lie in this sense is to know what a concept is in its potentiality yet deliberately to run counter to it; a lie is a judgment of the state of things now not the state of things as they could be through semiurgic rearranging of the world. Eco’s concept of the sign opens the crucial door that allows it to have a current mapping onto the real but not be permanently bound to it; it explicitly contravenes naive models of communication that cannot dream beyond the false assumption of static signs.
Peirce, who had far less flare for the dramatic and the ironic than Eco, developed a nearly infinitely flexible model for signs characterized by the critical insight that there is a conceptually unlimited effect on the interpreter unleashed through the act of interpreting a sign. Just as Eco’s signs (as hosts that can carry viral lies) may eventually be compelled to map onto something that is true, Peirce’s signs —— whose interpretation is always deferred through the paradox of unlimited semiosis —— only have meaning captured as a point in time. In the next moment, the one interpreting the sign may very well come to interpret it differently, for the moment and the interpreter have both been irrevocably changed individually and in their intersubjectivity. There is and can be no static mapping, there are only asymptotes of meaning as the ongoing spiral of interpretation eventually converges toward the closest we can access to the ‘final’ meaning of a sign. This model adapts well to what we now perceive as a plague of signs overripe with meaning, because it acknowledges that signs can contain hints of all the meaning that can be interpreted within them while still not being exhausted of their potential meaning in the perception of a sentient interpreter. In this sense, signs are an engine for thinking in excess of the limitations of embodiment.
Within the backdrop of Peirce’s and Eco’s models of signs that acknowledge the abyss always straddled by meaning, we can now more clearly see that Frazer’s law of contagion is essentially identical to Peirce’s indexical sign. An indexical sign makes plain the pathways between an event that has occurred in the world of the real and its residue: the sound of a bell alerts the hearer to its presence, the blood mocking the purity of the stark white snow reveals the recent if not current presence of a wounded animal. This brings the problem of overripe meaning into focus: the symbolic meaning of signs has become overwhelmed because the signs have had so many indexical encounters, being passed around with ever-increasing promiscuity through the dizzying array of ways that humans can now communicate in both mediate and immediate spaces. The virus has escaped and is replicating without limit in ways that are not only detrimental to its host but in fact has always lurked outside its host’s capacity for true comprehension. Each encounter with the sign leaves a trace, and the accumulated meaning of contagion seeps into the symbolic meaning of the sign; the embedded implicature of meaning is then passed on to the next unwitting victim of the sign’s interpretation – not unlike the written curse surreptitiously passed from victim to victim in the M. R. James story Casting the Runes.
This inescapably mobile curse makes clear a limitation of Peirce’s vision of signs as well: in his later writings he began to express skepticism that any individual sign could be purely and solely iconic or indexical. This arose out of the growing realization that his categories —— the deliberately bland yet precisely named Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness —— themselves did not have boundaries as rigid as he had originally surmised (we should of course excuse Peirce for his 1914 death having preceded Gödel’s 1931 incompleteness theorems, which Peirce would surely have both grasped and incorporated into his ontology). In relation to its object, a sign is iconic in its Firstness, indexical in its Secondness, and symbolic in its Thirdness —— appearance leads to relation leads to habituation of meaning and resultant action. If the boundaries between the categories (not to mention their implied ordering of manifestation) are not static, then the boundaries between the different gradations of sign could not be static either. Thus, Frazer’s laws of similarity (i.e., iconicity) and contagion (i.e., indexicality) still function as a valid and testable model with respect to how the interplay between these two laws combines to imbue and enhance symbolic meaning —— Thirdness —— in signs.
One cannot invoke Peirce without implicitly conjuring into the resulting séance his Pragmatic Maxim as well:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
In relation to the present analysis of signs that seem to have lost all semblance of consistent, conventionalized meaning, the injunction of the Pragmatic Maxim is clear. One of the inevitable effects of offloading not only our social interaction, but now even our ability to think, to the mediated experience of digital and networked technologies is that we have allowed —— and even implicitly encouraged —— these finite approaches to meaning to rob us of our non-finite cognitive flexibility. They present deceptively finite solutions to non-finite questions of existence and interaction. When we accept these mediated interactions as the entirety of our conception of some object of our attention, under the self-created illusion that we have cheated uncertainty, we have cut off the still latent interpretations of that same object of attention. We have prematurely arrested the unlimited semiosis that would present progressively more nuanced and complete conceptions of the object to which a given sign refers. This turns the original problem on its head: it is not that signs have become progressively engorged with too much meaning, it is rather that we have forgotten that interpretation is not given but instead must be followed through without prejudice or limitation for where that interpretation might lead.