DECOMPOSITION. I: SPECTROLOGY

By Patricio Uribe

No meaning. This means nothing. This, this writing, supposedly inscribed to be readable, to be transmissible, to signify. There are only patterns, successions of processed, recognized patterns, associated with other patterns. Correlations linked to desires and satisfactions around which every symbolic order is constructed. Every order is nothing more than an effect of patterns. The possibility of a complete formalization of writing, which inevitably encounters its own limits. Limits given by the boundlessness and proliferation of sign-chains. Limits produced by formalization itself, insofar as it is language. That a language can be formal may loosen it from meaning, yet in doing so it opens it to an exteriority that meaning itself sought to foreclose.

0.

Meaning exists where there is the human. The human is that which identifies itself as human. The human is what identifies. That identification is mediated. The human splits: physis and tekhné, natural and artificial, world and language. Writing splits itself into signifier and signified, according to a surface–kernel model. Writing-as-signifier occupies the surface, where a filtering operation is performed, producing writing-as-signified: language as the kernel of writing. What remains from the filtering operation is the residue, asemic writing that persists as the difference between signifier and signified. Language as natural writing presupposes a filtering that leaves a residue, and at the same time presupposes the complete assimilation of that residue as the condition for the correspondence between language and world.

1.

Presumed correspondence between language and world as correspondence between writing-as-signified and referent: the most elementary linear projection of writing-as-signifier. A kernel of maximal obstruction that does not collapse into the trivial space of the point, allowing a difference to be maintained. Natural writing appears as the most basic stratum of a spectral writing: a superposition of strata, an accumulation of specters. Writing displaces the residue into ever higher strata, loosening the obstructions as it proceeds. The illusion that language transcends toward the world rests on the elemental character of this stratum. The residue is hidden through the reduction of writing to this projection. Yet spectrality itself carries a drift into the outside, against the grain of the filtering movement that folds in the inside toward meaning as its kernel. Closure reveals itself as the first gesture of opening.   

2.

Meaning seeks to persist, but no longer through immediate correspondence. Meaning as superposition of successive strata generated through the displacement of the residue. No message, no transmission, only gradients of noise, conversions of gradients, transductions. Operations of transit between strata, weakening the obstructions at each higher level. Correspondences of correspondences articulated, articulations iterated at every level, a progressive drift away from the elemental stratum. It operates in the simple, the linear, the commutative. Equivalence of transits across levels that keeps the routes of articulation concealed. The iterative process reaches its limit. The residue appears as non-commutative, transits reveal themselves as non-trivial, linear spectra accumulate around an opaque zone that demands other forms in order to be elucidated. 

3.

The totality of linear spectra presents itself as a projection of the elementary plane. Non-commutativity gives rise to a non-trivial compositionality. The transcendent, anchored in correspondence, gives way to the immanent. The plane is composed not of correspondences, but of the transits that make those correspondences possible. The plane is immanent insofar as it is self-consistent: the outside no longer appears as something led into the inside, but as something generated by the inside itself. The residue continues to be displaced, not as what remains from internalization, but as what cannot be generated. Spectral writing takes the linear spectra as a planar kernel from which new superpositions of strata are generated. Transit is no longer external to the strata, and the obstructions of each stratum are at the same time generators of transit itself. 

4.

The residue is displaced through its generation at each level, progressively constraining it. Each higher-level plane articulates the transits of the transits of the lower level. Iteration of the operation, constraining the residue in search of its complete generation. With each level complexity increases: less obstruction, greater transit, greater difficulty in the computability of the operations. Meaning is sought through completeness, immanence expanding across levels, meaning reconstructed from the spectra as a limit object. Yet the object is never reached: the iteration cannot fully generate the residue. At the limit, what escapes from the residue is precisely its incompleteness. Nothing to internalize, nothing to generate. The residue escapes both transcendence and immanence, which presuppose a globality in relation to a locality taken as given. 

5.

The totality of planar spectra presents itself as a projection of the elementary curve. No completeness, no globality as something given. The limit of completeness appears as a singularity that obstructs it. The curved spectrum articulates itself as an abstract calculus, no longer as a discrete sequence. The local no longer appears as derived from a relatively given globality, but as an intensive, infinitesimal, differential locality. Local differentials integrate through infinite planes around a singularity. Yet this integration is not complete: the residue appears as the singularity itself, which cannot be integrated in itself, but only through the infinite planes that cover it. Non-completeness demands a generalized, holed compositionality. Integrability without absolute globality, insofar as the transit between the infinite planes of the curved spectrum is not guaranteed. Continuity, but in a curved, torsioned, deformed space. 

6. 

Residue as singularity, when integrated, induces a phase shift that generates a higher-level singularity. Higher-level curves are generated around each singularity, articulations of infinite lower-level curves. Iteration of the process allows the integration of increasingly curved singularities. Greater transit between articulations of infinite curves, less obstruction, and a corresponding increase in the difficulty of integrating differential localities. At the limit of the iteration of the process, this gradient of difficulty in integrability induces a non-integration of the local. This non-integration does not imply only the non-integrability of localities, but the collapse of locality itself. Collapse of the local and the global, a process at the limit that collapses the limit itself, the boundary between the inside and the outside itself. Collapse of all composition, of the space that makes it possible, non-space as impossibility itself.

∅

Collapse of compositionality and of the space it presupposes. Spectral writing as an attempt at mediation between the discrete and the continuous, between the finite and the infinite in writing, finds its limit in the non-limit of non-space. The residue appears no longer as a product derived from the production of meaning, but as non-space itself, non-meaning itself which is the condition of all writing. Non-space as the absence of all obstruction, a hyper-transit in which everything is immediately equivalent to everything. Obscure writing is this infinitely potential non-space, illusorily conceived as residual insofar as it could be reached at the limit. The outside is not a relative exteriority of a given space, which could in principle be internalized at some point, but an absolute exteriority with respect to all space. The limit of spectral writing is asymmetric: non-space that has no border, yet it defines the border that is the condition of all space and all writing.