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From the Mirror to Post-History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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All societies are made up of members who have a certain number of things in common, by virtue of which they understand, identify and communicate with each other, on the one hand, and establish differences with members of other societies on the other. Among the most important of these things is language.
In this regard, let us recall two examples raised by Ferdinand de Saussure. The first: “Language is both a social product of the faculty of speech and an ensemble of necessary conventions adopted by the social body to allow for the exercise of this faculty in each individual.” The second: “Speech, distinct from language, is on the contrary an individual act of intelligence and will … by which the speaking subject uses the code of language to express his personal thought.”
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- Copyright © 1994 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. Let us remember that the Cours de linguistique générale was first given by Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Geneva, in 1906-1907, 1908-1909, and 1910-1911, and that the work published under the same title is the result of the students' notes and the synthesizing work of Charles Bally and Albert Séchehaye, who published the Cours for the first time in 1915. The edition to which I refer is that published by Payot (Paris, 1965). The quotes have been translated from those on pp. 25, 30 and 31.
2. A distinction between two consciousnesses is incorrect; for this reason I have had recourse to the idea of levels of consciousness. It is the difficulties of lan guage, a point to which I shall return, which forces me to make this compro mise. Please note as well that I use "social consciousness" and "collective con sciousness" as synonyms, with the nuance that the first term emphasizes the contract and the code, while the second emphasizes the exercise of each one.
3. Consciousness certainly covers the ensemble of living spaces, which it mani fests among the micro-organisms in the most "humble" forms of retractility, or the hyper-refined ones of literature and painting, as with a Proust or a Kandinsky. Regarding the advent of consciousness in humanity, the reader will be interested in the paradoxical theses of J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (Boston, 1976).
4. See Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Le Miroir (Paris, 1978); L. de Freitas. 515, Le Lieu du miroir, Art et numérologie (Paris, 1993).
5. André Leroi-Gourhan, Préhistoire de l'art occidental (Paris, 1975).
6. See Erwin Panofsky, La Perspective comme forme symbolique (Paris, 1975).
7. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, op. cit., 9.
8. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (New York, 1963).
9. In 1993, in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, a vast Duchamp retrospective took place, which echoed the one organized in Paris in 1977 on the occasion of the opening of the Centre Beaubourg. These two events and two places say a great deal about Duchamp's significance and diffusion.
10. Topos (plural topoi) means, in Greek, place. With Aristotle, the topica designates the study of places, or the method of argumentation which allows for the imag ining of different points of view which one can take on a problem one is called upon to debate (Topica is the oldest of the treatises which make up Aristotle's Organon) In Freud, one can clearly distinguish two topica: the first, according to which the psychic places are the unconscious, the preconscious, and the con scious; the second, which is based on the id, the ego and the superego. For me, the topos designates the ensemble of places and practices which characterize the activities developing both from determined frameworks and procedures. The importance I attribute to technique, and the role it more and more plays in almost all activities, encourages me to group them under the term techno-topoi. Even if the term is rather inelegant, it has the merit to avoid laborious circumlo cutions, which are always approximative. In almost brutally flaunting its status as neologism, it intends to reveal the undoubtedly most marked fact of our times, that is, that there is no longer anything, or almost anything, that is not pro duced without the intervention of one or many techniques, and thus that they are now the constituents of our field of action that extends over the entire planet and beyond.
11. According to Freud, the pleasure principle is that which acts upon our mental functioning with the aim of procuring pleasure and avoiding or releasing all unpleasant tension. The second principle, to which it is coupled, is the reality principle, according to which the search for satisfacton must follow the twisted paths imposed by obstacles on the outside world. Since the pleasure principle never disappears, it is reborn over the course of a lifetime through trials while creating fantasies and hallucinations. See the Vocabulaire de la psychanulyse (Paris, 1968).
12. Hilflosigkeit is, according to Freud, the state of distress of the infant who, depend ing entirely on another for the satisfaction of his needs, feels powerless to accomplish the specific action needed to put an end to his internal tensions. For the adult, the state of distress is the prototype of the traumatic situation gener ating anxiety. See ibid.
13. J. Janes, op. cit.
14. This observation is of general import. Thus, when political, social, economic, cultural, or even scientific powers tend to assert themselves, they reduce the political, social, economic, cultural, or even scientific space to a double surveil lance, one that is both panoptic and panoramic. Re-presentation is replaced by re-pression. The signs belonging to exchanges become atrophied. Totalitarianism is nothing more than power which confuses order with reality. This tendency is found, we are not afraid to repeat it, on political, social, eco nomic, cultural, and even scientific levels. It has given rise to too many "suc cesses" for there to be a need to be more specific.
15. The Gulf War, which everyone was able to follow on television, became the subject of a CD-ROM published by Time in 1991, entitled, Desert Storm, The War in the Persian Gulf, The First Draft of History.
16. Fundamentalism refers to the tendency of certain religious environments that seek to make a literal interpretation of dogma respectable. Integralism desig nates the attitude of those who want to maintain the doctrinal system in its integrity. The two terms are practically synonomous, even if they take on differ ent connotations according to the specific religious and political circumstances. One speaks of Catholic integralism and Iranian or Egyptian fundamentalism.
17. B. Gille. Histoire des techniques, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Paris, 1968), 474.
18. It was in La mutation des signes, published in 1972 by Denoël, that I first drew attention to the necessary revision of suffixes in -logy, at least in certain cases, such as semiurgy in place of semiology. The latter is reduced to the study of signs; semiurgy is interested in their production (the importance of the media) and in the new meaning this entails, and of which advertisement, among others, is one of the great suppliers.
19. By "technogenesis" I do not mean the genesis of techniques, as conceived of by Bertrand Gille in the above mentioned work, but the combined evolution of man and machines, in the spirit of G. Simondon, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (Paris, 1958).
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