< The ends of the means >
Cicero Inacio da Silva

Contemporaneously, the digitalization has configured a series of analyses on the text, on the authorship and on the work. Much has been said about the impact of the data generated and placed in network-connected operational systems on our culture.

In this fashion, the path to analyze such episodes, in an attempt to establish an event, may be seen as the return to a discussion that was progressively lost during the debates on the digitalization and, particularly, on the writings that gradually came up in these electronic medias that manipulate digitalized data and process logical information between numeric parities that have been reduced to 0’s and 1’s.

What can be viewed as a loss, in the sense to which I refer, is the fact that we have dedicated ourselves to think of the digital media, of its characteristics and of its – if we choose to get quite ahead of ourselves – identity, based on phenomenalistic characteristics that follow very outlandish decontextualizations, generally associated with media-related procedures (not to say to the writings) analogous to those currently existing.

The great majority of the users of the electronically operated digital languages are well aware that the manifest characteristics of such spaces no longer agree with the definitions we had thus far, both for spaces and for writings.

Not only can the digitalization no longer be viewed as an event that constitutes a mere support, but also it is, in itself, a feature that dislocates the possibilities for the establishment of what we understand as “a means of communication”.
I.e., with the digital languages we experience a radicalization opposite to the movement that would reduce all to the communication of something, returning to the exacerbation of all that will be once again written. And all these forthcoming writings will be granted a place, with no restrictions and, most importantly, with no previous condemnation. In other words, there will no longer be space for homogeneous communicating discourses, nor for signs based on static assumptions.

It is very likely that what we previously knew as a “support” or as a “medium” will no longer have any meaning in a culture materially disconnected from the static structural references. Issues such as the information, language, writing and telecommunication, among others, will progressively find more space, unconnected to the theories that were previously thought of as contributors of the “meaning” and of the transmission (as in the structuralism, for instance).

From the moment when data transfer became possible through remotely operated supports, such as the telegraph, for instance, many issues could be predicted, as, in fact, some have been, concerning the changes to languages, writing and response. If a series of possibilities surfaced from rudimentary methods of sign transmission, the current networks and dematerialized digitalization, via informatics, have taken such transmigrations to an extreme.

However, it is important to note that a series of analyses that attempt to understand the current phenomenon of mass data digitalization through the electronic systems are not generated by the system itself (language). I.e., the great majority of texts on this subject are still based on the logic of the broadcasting and the reception, of the communication and the transmission of a meaning, of the information that can be frozen and sent, etc. The mean is still, for such theorists, something innocent that conveys and transports (and the use of such signifiers is not unintentional) what one wants to say.

Along these lines, the communication is still the guideline and the regulatory marker of the analyses that attempt to understand the sign language processes that operate in the digital systems.
The digitalization allows us to think that the communication has been dislocated to another instance.
And what would this instance be, when the very word “communication” only communicates something to someone when it acquires, in the presence of this listener or of this reader, a meaning? I.e., we anticipate what it means and then, in its name, elaborate a discourse1 .

Therefore, it is quite common to see several researchers that scrutinize theories on the broadcasting and reception making rather awkward mistakes when analyzing the language production digital media. Firstly, because they seriously believed that such languages would not interfere at all with the process of signification, or rather, that they would be nothing more than mere mediations that would carry with them the readability conditions of the codified data. Secondly, because they are still stuck in the structural systems that obligatorily solidify and delete the parasitisms and iterations of the discourses – even of the digitalized ones – in order to disseminate what they piously believe to be “pure” information, free from all the awkwardness of the “ordinary”, conveying through its paths the most truthful truth. Moreover, this truth would be centered within the meaning that the signifier would carry everywhere. Let me get to the point, so as to avoid taking up space or your time: the subject who is based in the logic of communication believes – blindly, almost religiously – to be able to say that he/she knows that he/she knows; forestalling all the language, in an authoritarian and transgressive manner, and making it into his/her object of delight, of gratification, almost as a way to force the Other to find pleasure in his/her delirium. Namely, to decide what the others should understand from what is written in the words. In summary, it is the basis of the hermeneutic logic that arises and reveals itself in this incestuous action against the languages that do not bend to such inapt discourses.

In this fashion, it is convenient to adopt a posture of careful observation of the movements that analyze the shapes and that are restrained by the details of the meanings, of the significances that are present in the more rigid affirmations of those that guard the meanings and signifiers.

The rigid, solipsist and awkward enclosed concepts of the theories of interpretation that are claimed as true have shaped, for a long time, an entire tradition of thinkers. The very theoretical concept of the existence of the possibility of something being informed or even communicated was only possible after a series of rigid norms that solidified a tradition and ensured that those holding the knowledge could place themselves, even institutionally, on top of the parasitisms and deviations of the discourses and communications structured in and by the norms.
Based on these conclusions, I suggest another condition for the results that this culture of dematerialization, of destabilization, of dissemination, has brought to our deepest manifestations as subjects: the impossibility of something being taken as a medium.

With the introduction of various objects that enclosed and phenomenalistically presented an image and a sound (the TV, for instance), we were taken by an idea, linked to the previous status (of the writing), that what we heard or saw was nothing more than a support to a series of things that generated meanings. And that such meanings would be produced in the beginning of everything, i.e., in the very “message” that would be transmitted.

From that moment on, the association with (not to say the appropriation of) the logic of the writing is flagrant, and as inadequate as it may be, it is still valid until this day. In the process, an analysis of the subject facing a device that broadcasted the sound and the image was masked. This moment, which could be viewed as a radical cultural change, with the introduction of new elements within the individual’s space and the change of this way of viewing the very space through an identifying manner, was subtracted by the current discourses at the time (and I maintain: the logic of the writing), particularly through McLuhan. In an attempt to propose the sign as a representation of itself, he once more remits to the construction of the metaphor as a synthesis of the meaning, and meanwhile leaves the impression that the identification of the subject does not occur through a language, but through a representation that we may have of it. The inaccuracy consisted of crediting its signs as objects of meaning, and, therefore, no longer seeing (in a perceptive sense, not in a visual one) that its entire scriptural concept brought with it the notion of the very presence of a message, disconnecting the means from what would be merely the communication as an effect, and nothing else, from a culture based on the word (logos).

The communication, facing the rupture that was inserted by the dissemination of the dematerialized writing, will no longer be viewed as it was until then.

What was previously known as the “medium” and “message” was swallowed (and I highlight the polysemy of the word: a drink may be swallowed, a ship may be swallowed up by the waves, and so on) by what was conventionally denominated as language. What could be thought of as a transmission became a process, and what could previously be understood as an interpretation became an appropriation of the Other, in every way.

Nowadays, to communicate is no longer to refrain to the numerous semantic attempts confined to the signifiers. It became, if we will, the fact of observing that the possibility of the Other to exist resides exactly in the impossibility of the existence and of the being of a mean, of a communication and of an anticipation of anything.
The existence of an authority implies in the existence of subordination; the existence of subordination implies in an idealized imaginary construction of the Other. In brief: I annihilate any possibility of the existence or of the surface of other forms of language, as soon as I declare that something is “communicable” within a broadcasting and reception protocol.

Is there another possibility of understanding beyond those restricted to a printed culture, generally linked to the writing and transposed to all the means of information transmission?

As there are already works that note, even subtly, that more and more writings will appear, and that such writings will manifest the dynamics of the understanding (I refer here to the works of Giselle Beiguelman, highlighting her “Poétrica”), I should think that the answer would be “yes”.

The communication by and through the media is something to be analyzed and seen as the founding stone of the logocentrism, and, as it should be, to keep operating under this logic of the writing facing the parasitic dissemination of the languages that come up every day is to insist in the institutionalization and in the annihilation of the difference that inexorably comes up, in the Reality, as Lacan would put it, from what is impossible.

The abrupt and the unforeseeable break with the hypothesis of the existence of a solid means of transmission. The ephemeral languages operate precisely on such ruptures and move towards the possibility of having the most varied shapes of difference being expressed with no prior view and observation by their contexts (political, economical, social and institutional), and with no guidance from someone who desires to manipulate the thinking towards a single interpretation, as, unfortunately, still happens in most of the education and research institutions, with rare exceptions.

The universe (I refer to the meaning of a set) of the digitalization dislocates and makes impossible the tradition of communication (and, as Derrida tells us, we must be careful with this word), finding itself in a predicament, maybe one that cannot be solved, unless through its long-term conceptual abandonment and its pinpointing (so as not to move too fast and suggest its replacement by the signifier writing) within the concept of the writings.

To think of a form of culture that takes appropriation of the idea that a conception of an undecidable original trace implies in marking a space of radical difference, which, I here anticipate, may be thought of with the digitalization of the writings. To attempt to build a culture that in this manner calls itself digital, sounds as a contradiction, as the very concept of culture, is still somehow linked to the allegedly tangible and readable traces (such as those of history) of a hypothesis substantively linked to the presence.

Therefore, the digital writings operate other paths and are no longer linked to the previously decoded conceptual assumptions, such as culture, interpretation, writing; and “To leave to this new concept the old name of writing is to maintain the structure of the graft, the transition and indispensable adherence to an effective intervention in the constituted historic field. And it is also to give their chance and their force, their power of communication, to everything played out in the operations of deconstruction. (...) writing, if there is any, perhaps communicates, but does not exist, surely” (Derrida, 1971).

1) “Is it certain that there corresponds to the word communication a unique, univocal concept, a concept that can be rigorously grasped and transmitted: a communicable concept? Following a strange figure of discourse, one first must ask whether the word or signifier "communication" communicates a determined content, an identifiable meaning, a describable value. But in order to articulate and to propose this question, I already had to anticipate the meaning of the word communication: I have had to predetermine communication as the vehicle, transport, or site of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one. If communication had several meanings, and if this plurality could not be reduced, then from the outset it would not be justified to define communication itself as the transmission of a meaning, assuming that we are capable of understanding one another as concerns each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.). Now, the word communication, which nothing initially authorizes us to overlook as a word, and to impoverish as a polysemic word, opens a semantic field which precisely is not limited to semantics, semiotics, and even less to linguistics. To the semantic field of the word communication belongs the fact that it also des- ignates nonsemantic movements. Here at least provisional recourse to ordinary language and to the equivocalities of natural language teaches us that one may, for example, communicate a movement or that a tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be communicated that is, propagated, transmitted. It is also said that different or distant places can communicate between each other by means of a given passageway or opening. What happens in this case, what is transmitted or communicated are not phenomena of meaning or signification. In these cases we are dealing neither with a semantic or conceptual content, nor with a semiotic operation, and even less with a linguistic exchange. Nevertheless, we will not say that this nonsemiotic sense of the word communication such as it is at work in ordinary language, in one or several of the so-called natural languages, constitutes the proper or primitive meaning, and that consequently the semantic, semiotic, or linguistic meaning corresponds to a derivation, an extension or a reduction, a metaphoric displacement. We will not say, as one might be tempted to do, that semiolinguistic communication is more metaphorico entitled "communication," because by analogy with "physical" or "real" communication it gives passage, transports, transmits something, gives access to something.” (Derrida, Signature event context, 1971).

< os fins dos meios > (portuguese version)

Ricardo Barreto e Paula Perissinotto (orgs.)
São Paulo, IMESP, 2004
ISBN 85-89730-02-6