Situationist International

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Leader: ThunderPerfect
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Created on: 31 Jul 2009
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Sous les pavés la plage

The signifying regime is not simply faced with the task of organizing into circles signs emitted from every direction; it must constantly assure the expansion of the circles or spiral, it must provide the center with more signifier to overcome the entropy inherent in the system and to make new circles blossom or replenish the old.
Thus a secondary mechanism in the service of signifiance is necessary: it is no longer the amorphous continuum that is given without being known and across which the network of signs is strung. A portion of signified is made to correspond to a sign or groups of signs for which that signified has been deemed suitable, thus making it knowable. To the syntagmatic axis of the sign referring to other signs is added a a paradigmatic axis on which the sign, thus formalized, fashions for itself a suitable signified (once again there is abstraction of the content, but in a new way). The interpretive priest, the seer, is one of the despot-god's bureaucrats.
A new aspect of deception arises, the deception of the priest: interpretation is carried to infinity and never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpretation. The signified constantly reimparts signifier, recharges it or produces more of it. The form always comes from the signifier. The ultimate signified is therefore the signifier itself, in its redundancy or "excess." It is perfectly futile to claim to transcend interpretation or even communication through the production of signifier, because communication and interpretation are what always serve to reproduce and produce signifier. That is certainly not the way to revive the notion of production.
The discovery of the psychoanalyst-priests (a discovery every kind of priest or seer made in their time) was that interpretation had to be subordinated to signifiance, to the point that the signifier would impart no signified without the signified reimparting signifier in its turn. Actually, there is no longer even any need to interpret, but that is because the best interpretation, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently significant silence, It is well known that although psychoanalysts have ceased to speak, they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel interpretation on the part of the subject, who jumps from one circle of hell to the next.
In truth, signifiance and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, humankind's fundamental neurosis.

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  • ut0

    Foucault wasn't an idiot by any means. Of course he may not have been a historical materialist, but nobody's perfect.

    20 days ago

  • indicatif

    In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure, the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

    last month

  • pitchorneirda

    Foucault is an idiot.

    December 2011

  • indicatif

    Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

    September 2011
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