Being & Light: Weaponizing a Language of Visibility against the Symbolic
By Palais Sinclaire
To begin with, we can reimagine Sartre’s being-as-a-nothingness as characterized, not by emptiness, but by fullness, or even by a sense of overflowing. What Sartre understood as Being, eventually is reimagined by Deleuze & Guattari as Becoming. This nothingness is the result of Becoming constantly exceeding its own boundaries and thus never being fully identifiable; there is always something that gets away from Becoming, or that falls out of it, which constantly disrupts the metastatic processes of meaning and identification.
In this situation, there is no empty space in an empty space; the most seemingly empty space is full. We can then develop this concept of this inverted, overflowing (non-)nothingness by thinking about it in terms of Lucretian materialism: everything—the Universe—is a kind of raw matter or substance that is characterized by its flow. Everything—as matter—is constantly (over)flowing. Yet, this matter is mostly lacking visibility because, as Marx wrote in his Thesis: “atoms disappear as they move”. Matter in motion is invisible, meaning visibility is characterized by relative stasis, or metastasis. Atoms, in a simple sense, are the part of matter that is discernible to us, a peak that surpasses a threshold, underneath which you find the rest of matter.
The less matter moves, the more visible it is, or, the less chaotic the motion of matter is, the less constant or undifferentiated its movement is, and the more visible it is—to us. Light reflects off of only that which is relatively still—to us.
Different scales of temporality create this illusion of metastasis: we identify the mountain as a mountain, we assign it a word based on how it looks to us, and the thing we point at when identifying the mountain is, as we all know, more of a process than an object. The mountain rose up, and will again disappear as the tectonic plates ceaselessly shift underneath. That process happens on a colossal time-scale compared to that of our individual consciousness or even our—this isn’t the ideal phrase—collective or acculturated consciousness because we think of human history as being 5,000 years—then evolution, and so on—so the million year cycle of the mountain, you might say, dwarfs our perception of time. The mountain is metastatic, to us, from how we see it in our temporality and in our semiotic realm. This idea of a 5,000-10,000 year history is the mountain on top of the process that is our evolutionary history. It is even tempting to argue that this idea we have of the human beginning with language and agriculture in Sumatra, Ethiopia or China and so on, is the moment in time the human species stopped evolving—this is a contemporary evolutionary theory that suggests humans are no longer evolving through natural selection and these other processes. We implicitly understand that our history goes back hundreds of thousands of years, but the only version of ourselves we seem to recognise is the one that begins with the symbolic.
So we have this starting point, a möbius strip of Motion/Matter, one appears to take over where the other ends though they are ultimately one and the same. This maps onto the idea of Becoming/Being, Semiotic/Symbolic and Evolution/Culture. These things appear two-fold to us because within the chaos of matter, for example, within the flowing, swelling and folding, different concurrent flows acquire an identity. It’s a simple process of negation that will become central to this text: flow is just flow until it is transformed into “a flow” by the appearance of “an-other flow”. The word appearance is central to all of this, because in that word you have the fusing together of the meanings (1) “how it looks to us (when light reflects off of it)” and (2) “it begins existing”. A rival appears—they appear hostile. It is the same möbius strip, of motion and matter, two that are really one, separated only by their appearance to us.
This ultimately alludes to the role of Light in this discussion, as it is only really in Laruelle’s work where Light is exposed in such a way. Sartre and Lacan’s work, as well as many others, deals with Light indirectly, but the central importance of the Eye and the Look within this negative process of determining Being. The Authority of Light is a curious notion that I begin to attach to this discourse around the schism between Eye and Look, as we can think of this “authority” in terms of “the first axiomatic”. This is because, to Sartre and Lacan, an Eye can either look, or be looked at, not both, so there is a determination of ordering, in the form of active and passive, which is the source of this primary antagonism. This antagonism begins in response to Light, it begins with the faculties of Light, the Eye and the Look.
The permeation of Light through the Universe marks the first separation, this first axiomatic that sets in motion process of differential negation that brings forth a never ending cascade of dualisms. We are “at one” with the Universe until there is Light, and the presence of Light initiates the revolving process of Eye and Look. Everything is singular until the Light bounces off of it and the scattered reflections reach our eyes and the Universe splits into two: what can be seen and what cannot. There is one until Light splits it into two: Visible Matter and Invisible Motion. For Derrida, this is the primary symbolic category, the first position taken by the symbolic. He is of course talking about how meaning in Language is underpinned by a symbolic ordering of these dualisms. As we will come to see, Language itself is a process of negative differentiation, and it is Language which brings with it all of these dualisms. All of these dualisms are ultimately reversible until there is a collective agreement made, or perhaps a coercion, that x aligns with y, and y aligns with z. Male and Female are reversible signs, until one attaches Male to Heaven and Female to Earth. Then one attaches Heaven to Mind and Earth to Body, and slowly this symbolic ordering attempts to fix everything into place, to create the illusion of stasis. It is, for many French philosophers, within this process of constructing a symbolic order that so much of the antagonism between Beings crystalizes.
What we are talking about here is the Semiotic and the Symbolic, a kind of low and high-energy state. The Semiotic is indeterminate, flowing like underground lava, as Kristeva may put it, the unformed (l’informe) in Bataille, and occasionally it bursts into the Symbolic. The Semiotic is the raw material of signs, and signs are encoded into the semiotic. The semiotic is the unconscious of Language. This is, as you will undoubtedly see, also based on Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of desire which is itself closely related to Lucretius’ materialism. With Lucretius, the One swells and, in doing so, folds into multiplicity—appearing to fold into various orders of complexity: first the One folds into the elements, then into the gods, then into man, and so on. The Semiotic can be folded into the Symbolic, and we can think about this in terms of encoding it.
So Motion bursts into Matter. It ruptures, which implies a break, an inter-ruption. The visible aspect of the One is fixed into place as Materiality, and the invisible aspect of Motion is discarded. This is why Derrida is talking about the metaphysics of presence, as for him, the first symbolic position taken is in regard to absence and presence. What we see, is there, what we do not see, is not there. That seems like the kind of innocent compromise one often makes with Language, as the Symbolic cannot get close enough to the Semiotic to render it without colossal failure—but it is the root of the problems in our discourse and philosophy. One can say that discourse is predictable, and dwelling within Language is going to continuously bring the same conclusions over and over again, because the root of our Symbolic, the root of our Language, is fixed in place, centered around this primary dualism of “there” and “not there”, which to Laruelle is a domain within which Light has the commanding authority.
Light is the Authority because it is the primary determinant of position. Even though it is only metastable—in the sense of death—we temporarily appear to acquire this attribute of position. Becoming is without position, and the illusion of position transforms Becoming into Being. Position is a matter of relativity between two things, and so position only emerges as a phenomenon when the One is split into two (or more).
All of this still has its root in the Hegelian “creation myth”, the negation of Self and Other, a story which Sartre reinterprets. Everything is one, then in the presence of Light, you see the “them” and so you begin to suspect that there is an “us”. In looking back at the Other, we also turn the Other into a finite Being, or a multiplicity of finite beings. This is the process of identification. Everything that we turn into things, in other words everything we identify, takes on a sense of position due to the Light. Once we have more than one, we have a sense of relative-position. These relationships have absolutely no bearing on the outside, which has no sense of position, so we cannot ever talk about a boundary within which these relationships form, yet this is also what Einstein had referred to, in describing Space as simply the relative distance between things, rather than in the sense of “a space”. Being coalesces within an infinite pool of Becoming.
The point is, even though we are all ultimately one undifferentiated becoming, we momentarily arise as differentiated beings, we achieve metastasis and thus a metaposition, and the line which separates us from everything else is Light. It is the primordial cause of negation. Thomas Nail’s work on Kinetic Materialism explains how this functions. First we might imagine infinite chaotic movement, movement that never repeats itself because it is so infinitely chaotic, so its motion is pure and undifferentiated. In the theory of infinitely large numbers, all kinds of unexpected or implausible events occur, and yet in a sense, no events ever occur. We can say that the planets sometimes align, a kind of miraculous event in terms of probability and frequency of occurrence. Yet this idea of planetary alignment is also meaningless insofar as it is based upon our perspective, our position. The alignment of the planets says more about our position than the position of the planets, ultimately. Yet, in this supposedly infinite chaotic movement, eventually some kind of repetition occurs. From our position within the Universe, something appears to repeat itself, something we once saw returns, and that’s the moment we identify it.
It is with the repetition that we confirm the existence of what initially was just an impression. It is the temporal relationship between flows of matter that create repetitions, the position of our flow against all other positions that cause this repetition. Something is folding around our position creating the illusion of a loop. One position leads to infinite others. One axiom driven into the Semiotic Earth is enough to root in palace an entire Symbolic, axiomatic structure. Our position as a break, breaks everything else, and this breaking is the looping—an otherwise infinite undifferentiated flow is broken and rendered as differentiation.
If the flow of Matter is rendered as invisibility, then visibility is a matter of discontinuity, of breaks. Visibility must constitute a relative reduction in flow. Light is then tied to Space as such. In an overflowing universe, you can’t “make space” by adding, only by subtraction. You need to subtract from nothingness to create space where Light can propagate. So discontinuity—interruption in the flow—creates space where Light can propagate. We can imagine this in terms of a “gap”. It’s not so easy to imagine but if we thought about the idea of an infinite flow of water, if you were to somehow interrupt that flow, even momentarily, some physical space of air would take a position within the flow, and be replicated all the way down. You run a tap, and cut the flow momentarily, and where there should be running water, there is momentarily empty space that is once again filled with water once the tap is opened again. A segment is cut-out from the whole. The overflowing of matter creates interruptions, which creates space in the form of breaks, into which energy can escape as Light.
Once there is Light, the World is irreparably divided into two. In Sartre and Lacan, where you begin with Being-in-Itself (être-en-soi), a nothingness, it is the introduction of Light that sets in motion the formation of Being-for-Itself (être-pour-soi), where our existence is perceived as operating in accordance with something else, an object or an Other. We become self-conscious when we are looked at by the Eye of the Other, Light mediates this process. Our sense of Self is contingent upon the Appearance of the Other and their Eye, our Being-for-Others (être-pour-autrui), self-consciousness, requires the Mirror Stage. This experience of Being, a Being-for-Others mediated by the appearance of Light, is then consecrated into Language, out of which we build our World.
Perhaps there is always Light in the Universe, but we only see it when it propagates through pockets of space that open up with the Universe when extremely intense overflowing causes momentary subtraction.
Language also operates through negation, every Word is itself a nothingness that is determined by being ordered in a sequence with other Words. Language is itself split into two, composed of binaries and double-inscriptions. When the Eye makes something the object of its consciousness, it turns a nothingness into a something, and we affirm this process by labelling the now-something as object. So our Language is populated by Words that are chosen or determined in their relation to Light. Light is therefore the Authority on the line between what exists and what doesn’t, because we do not live on Earth, we live in the World, and the World is made of Words, and in the World of Words, Light rules. If something doesn’t reflect Light, it doesn’t get a Word, so it doesn’t take-place in the World.
We might therefore talk about Language in terms of its contingency upon Light and Appearances, it is a Language that preferences Light as that which determines the composition of Being. From Marx we can think then in terms of Base and Superstructure, and the way that biases within a Language Base can become biases within a Political Superstructure. It is this Language of Visibility. Yet, the limitations of Language need not become the limitation of Politics.
We end up wanting to make the argument that we should not wage war on Language, but on the Symbolic, we cannot get out of the binaries of Language, we can’t get out of Language, but it is not the dualistic nature of Language that makes certain Political formations inevitable—we can disrupt the tendency of Language to drift towards these formations. We must learn to love our Language, because a neglected Language will inevitably reproduce bad-outcomes, and a Language that is loved may produce better outcomes. There is no need to point at the dualistic nature of Language as an unresolvable Sin, as the conversion of Linguistic formations into Political formations can be encoded, it can be mediated by other processes. We must instead, as Guattari said, use Language to create weapons against the Unconscious, against the Symbolic, against the Code that extrapolates negative-Linguistics into political formations.
We must ultimately be very cautious about the discourse around visibility today, because the language of visibility is all we have ever had anyway, a language that is ordered by visibility, a philosophy that therefore happens under the Authority of Light. If Derrida reads it correctly, there are things encoded into the Symbolic that are then entangled into our Semiotic Realm. This brings us to Base and Superstructure. Semiotic is the base, Symbolic is the Superstructure, but then the Symbolic becomes the base of Language, which becomes the base of Politics, and Politics then becomes the base of the Symbolic. Each Base becomes Superstructure, only to then become Base again, as each agreement leads inevitably to the next agreement. This is the axiomatic.
Deleuze talks about this in relation to dreaming, and I think the example is very relevant: he speaks about anamorphosis when saying that first, a dreamer is presented with a plane of green light permeated by white interruptions, which in the eyes of the dreamer, becomes an open meadow with flowers, but it only does so by already becoming something else, a billiard table, for example. One thing only becomes what it is after it has already become something else, in this case it is an image becoming something by becoming something else. This is very revealing about our process of identification. The first axiom is the green light, which sets in motion the axiomatic of meadow, billiard table, and barrel of apples which then becomes an eye. A cascading of incomplete ephemera that are only completed as identities upon death. This is something important to Baudrillard’s work—the reversibility of life and death in regards to signs. A sign with meaning is already dead, it falls from the tree as a perfect apple, which is dead upon arrival, but baring the seeds of new life. As soon as the Apple is an Apple, not a tree, it is a dead apple.
You have here again Base and Superstructure, with the tree as the base, which produces the apple, which is the base of the new tree that is the superstructure of the apple and it immediately becomes the base of a new emergent superstructure and so on. That is how we can imagine the Semiotic and Symbolic, where the Symbolic falls out of the Semiotic as signs, like apples from trees, perfect because they are dead, but containing seeds of new life. Language evolves because new signs are always growing out of dead signs. Through doing this, we try to achieve a relative sense of metastasis in our World, which, even though it is dead, still swells on the current of the real. We mistake the dead as alive because it is animated by the real, like apples floating in the river. It is a matter of illusion.
Laruelle again talks about the illusory separation between Universe and Earth. Both are fundamentally the same, yet perceived as separated by the illusion of Light. As Light ripples through “the void”, it bounces off of Earth and reveals the Sky in doing so. The Earth separates out from the Universe, interrupted by the Sky. Laruelle says the same of Man: the Universe, the Earth and Man are black (without position) and Reality, the World and the Philosopher, are white (with the illusion of position).
From here it is really clear how Lucretius factors into this because this is very similar to the discourse around Ancient Greek creation myths in Nail’s work. There is chaos, where first chaos brings forth Night and Dark, then chaos brings forth Earth which automatically sets in motion a process where Earth produces Sky.
Lets break this down: (1) First there is Chaos, undifferentiated movement of matter with no interruptions, no space, no duality, no relative position. (2) Second, out of Chaos comes Darkness and Night. This is very curious, and can be explained by Laruelle because if we think about Light as this moment of illusion, the primordial axiom of difference, Chaos must be succeeded by the illusion of Light. In a Universe where light has never propagated, it is impossible to speak of Darkness. Darkness must come second to Light, because without Light, there is no differentiation that the sign “Dark” could refer to. Dark falls off of Light as a negation. Once Light propagates through the Universe and disappears/is absorbed, the Universe then settles into Darkness. Black becomes Light, which becomes Dark, which creates White because Dark is an illusion of Light. This brings us to (3) where the flash of Light also reveals the separation between Earth and the Universe. Light gets in-between the gap, Universe/Light/Earth, and because Light is always transient and illusory, it settles into Universe/Sky/Earth. Gaia, the Earth, brings forth Uranos, the Sky, as a way of resolving the image, of balancing the equation. Light flashes, Earth appears, and out of the Earth falls the concept of the Sky-as-mediator. There is no Sky, where does the Sky begin and end? The Sky begins and ends with us, from our position on Earth, as a sign it has no other bearing on the real. Our illusory position gives the Sky its illusory position.
This is important to our discussion of Language (of visibility) because the reason we have all of these dualisms in the first place is because of Language depending upon them. Language produces dualisms because it operates negatively. As you identify something and attribute it a sign, an image, a word, you by default create a negative sign, a “not-”. If you point at something as say “that is a tree”, by default you have some relatively intangible idea of “not-tree”. You can now say about something else “that is not a tree” and it can be perfectly true despite saying absolutely nothing about the not-tree. We know its saying nothing about the not-tree because our idea of the tree is ultimately not as tangible as it seems, if we spin the term tree as the French do, and think about trees of evolution, then suddenly everything is a tree, of sorts, or nothing is, so calling something a not-tree is saying nothing because there is no tree.
This is the crystalization point of many of our societal problems, at least when looking at it from a relatively liberal perspective. The temptation before was to say that Patriarchy has its roots in Language, and that the symbolic association between Man and Good and Woman and Bad—because that’s really what Derrida is accusing western philosophy of doing, of building a system where all dualisms stack on top of each other, and so the dualism of Man and Woman has to be fixed onto the dualism of Good and Bad, and the arrangement of that positioning within the symbolic base of Language becomes part of the political superstructure. Yet, it is now more preferable to think of this in terms of crystalisation.
I argue this because the political superstructure feeds back to the base of language, or rather, it becomes the base of new language. The association of Man and Woman with Good and Bad was not decided by the flipping of a coin, this decision was fundamentally political, even if we are talking the politics of 100,000 BC—the creation of any sign whatsoever, any kind of fixed agreement, does seem as miraculous as order arising from chaos, rhythm arising from noise, or metastasis arising from undifferentiated motion—because the forging of these first words of Language may have taken millennia. I say this as I don’t want to frame this as conspiratorial. If we are working with Baudrillard and Anthropology, signs are forged within ritual, and ritual is defined by deliberate and regulated repetition of movements. Humans have to somehow arrive at ritual and music before arriving at words.
Even here, we could imagine that the context in which a ritual arises, is itself one of relative stasis. If you always live next to some mountain, the fixed relative position of a people and this mountain, produces a condition (a base) within which the superstructure of ritual arises. Let’s say it’s a solstice ritual that is only possible because you are in the same position every time the solstice comes around. This is again axiomatic, where the first metastatic fold creates a cascade of other positions. The politics of the people who develop the ritual, is imbued into the politics of the ritual. Any symbols of signs forged within a ritual must contain the politics of the ritual as these are all base and superstructure; apples and trees. So with language there is a crystalization, and within ritual another crystalization. The words we produce, then, are also containing these crystals, but, and this is the important point, Language then has a circular ability to loop back to influence its own political base.
It would certainly explain why people are so resistant to Language, even if they believe language can change, they don’t want it to, because they understand that it would change the World. I guess the conclusion to this is somehow disappointing, as I ultimately wanted to create the grounds upon which I can make the argument that the only way to make a Language of Visibility politically useful, is to turn it into a weapon against the symbolic, by throwing it like a stone. We already have a Language of Visibility, Light is the Authority in Language, and it is that Language which needs weaponizing, as a stone, to be thrown. This is what I believe was the project of Baudrillard, not to abandon Language per se, but to throw it at the Symbolic, to dislodge stuff, to demand and force structural change, not by asking for it, but through vandalising. Baudrillard vandalising the terms Man and Woman, because you cannot throw them out fully, but you can interrupt their authority through defacement.