If we look at a computer complete with operating system, we discover a hierarchy of apparently relatively autonomous languages, beginning with hardware, and working up to the user interface. These might include machine language, assembly language, macroassembly languages, compiled and interpreted languages, scripts, graphic interfaces, and so forth. The fact that I know 16 different types of languages, is irrelevant.
We can also consider these languages, top-down, as an extension of human psychological operations and memory as well.
If we look closer, say, at Perl, we find that it can call up the Unix shell and shell scripts, that it can call up programs in other languages, that it can interact in fact with assembly language, that it is written in another language, and that it may itself be called up by still another or the same language. We find it can interact with scripts, programs, or processes, and each of these can call the other up as well.
In fact, we can define a macro in Perl, a new function or verb, with any of these languages, etc, and we can define an object in Perl as well, with any of them. In fact, one might note that there is above all a syntactical plateau or inter-meshing of plateaus that constitutes the positioning of Perl in relation to the machine, to the Internet, to the user, and in general, to the porous world within which it is embedded.
We find then, that Perl is not so much at the top of a hierarchy, as it is embedded in a holarchy, and while it, in a certain sense, might still appear as an autonomous language, in another sense it is an accumulation of interwoven well-defined processes that are coherent in relation to each other and the outer world.
So that one might argue, taking these instantiations back into the human, that while thought itself is in relation to human spoken language, that is hardly the long or short of it; in fact, it is difficult to tell where semiosis begins and ends, and what constitutes a well-defined verb or noun, in other words a framework. Further, while difference may be said to be partly constitutive of a domain of signifiers, one might also argue that it is based on other processes within the holarchy, and that the holarchy itself is porous in relation to the real.
And I would argue in addition that there is a continuum (more properly, perhaps, a stretch of rational fractions) from the real through language, from the exhalations of speech through the mouth, and the reception of facial expressions through the eyes, from and to, in fact, numerous modalities – and in the midst of these, syntactical islands or attractors which operate as-if the linguistic were capable of foreclosure on what then appear to be various plateaus.
One might thing of the world as multiplexing, parallel/parallel processing, with formalization of the symbolic where necessary, for transmission, say, from one organism to another. This is not to argue, in addition in addition, for the computerization of the real, but rather for the real itself as organism with continuously multiplying, coalescing, and dissolving processes.
In this manner, the disjunction between thought and non-thought, and both in conjunction and disjunction with language, become bridged, re routed into numerous processes, of which, say, human language and the rationalizing/suturing discourse of psychoanalysis would be one among many elements.
My own work exists as “debris-work, work of the debris, of these troubling and interstitial areas. Thus, even within writing which must tend towards a certain foreclosure, I present writing, the fiction of writing object and person within a text, object and person which leak into uneasy dreams, fantasies, ghosts, peripheral shadows within the real itself. Further, I present processes as writing, writing as processes; I present foreclosure as broken, and a shattering of the vessels as foreclosure.
And further, still, ascii texts on the Internet employ what might be considered a variety of extra linguistic cues on numerous chat lines, ranging from Ozchat to ICQ, it is possible to read the pace of the other’s typing, to the extent that one might speak/write of a written parole. This embedding of language into the other’s time reveals the closeness, pressure, of the body against the keys, an intimacy which is
not as evident in the encapsulated messages sent out all at once, on MOOs, talkers, IRC, and the like.
Then there are, of course, emoticons, header information, lag, the timing of mail sent, and those porous extensions of the telephone, snailmail, video, etc. all of which serve literally to confuse the issue.
Which is exactly the point here, that “language”, a language, is a situated plateau in the midst of others, that there are always already issues of governance and porosity from the start, that there is a tendency towards foreclosure, that the porosity may or may not be formalized (for example there are specific commands for shell access from a Perl script) – that, in fact, one might consider a generalized process of worlding which includes all and none of these, what may or may not be interpreted as an abstract process, message of the deepest import, or signal through an autonomic nervous system, seemingly intent on keeping the organism alive.
Campbell Craig 