Every Language a Private Language

Perhaps this is why in EC Lyotard finds it of substantial importance to situate D&G's AO as especially apathetic to transgression which was afforded special significance by Bataille. Capitalism gleefully rickashays between the circuits of the mother and the whore finding nothing ruptural in making the move from one to the other but rather insisting upon having both there at once, or in rapid oscillation, in a frantic series of yes and, yes and, yes and, whereby schizophrenia may be glimpsed.

Language here [in Lyotard] starts to look more and more like an old worn out quilt that hangs together at the remaining wild curves of of its thin stitched trails but elsewhere slides over itself as disconnected sheets and broken felt inlining meeting at times laid flat face to face but then again disturbed shifting over top of eachother separating entirely in wrinkles and folds and pockets of air. Tracing a finger about the spirals and criss-crossing pattern the layers join in silent invisible agreement. All a mirror. All in a symmetry. All held together in perfect mutual intelligibility as phrases form about the trailing path the finger takes crossing over itself at times and branching anew. And yet, diverging momentarily, straying off from the stitch a top sheet catches where the bottom remains. Layers between, once flat and taut, separate and split asunder wrinkle and fold forming a knotted width of superimposed strata. Press your finger there at a point and yes the layers meet but in a manner disturbingly new. a broken disjunction of a dense weave held momentarily by your insisting hand. The layers meet at the tip of your finger and an imaginary line intersects each beyond it but as a force imposed, one without history, without agreeance, without intelligibility. Faces forced together, made to momentarily join without a familiar shape. When the finger is withdrawn the quilt falls flat once more, abhorring the form impressed upon it. It lays flat one more but carries more wrinkles, more broken seems in spots of increasing distress.

It's hard not to feel sad about the quilt. to want to lay it flat, to smooth it flatter with one’s hand, to steam out the wrinkles to restitch it all, to put seams at every surface to reduce the delicate patterns instead to a vast dense weaving matrix, to join every layer with such fervor and assurance that nothing could pull it apart, as if it were a single sheet, that every point and every path would share with every other–regardless of how harshly a finger traces, regardless of how harshly one manipulates and twists at its surface for every soul and phrase and utterance and person and lion and sign and text and song color to communicate freely in perfect mutual transparence in the full clarity of bright sun illumined day that roots out every shadow and leaves none obscure.

All for love of the quilt, for love of language, did we tend to it so well and with such intensity and yet now we're left in a health worse than before! Tempting perhaps the 'moderate on language' that mumbles in some foggy place between packs of feral children and legions of semiotic militants engaged in mission trips to teach the lions esperanto. Or maybe in the end a paranoiac distrust is most appropriate. Better as rags. At least then things are more interesting. Getting a touch homicidal about it, it's difficult not to tear the thing to shreds. But then again speaking in tongues puts one in quite delimited poor company. A fanatical group that keeps nevertheless interpolating someone’s insistently asignifying chatter as meaning something or other about the complexly estatical voice of God channeled in this holy vessel, or by some skeptics as a publicity scheme to garner buzz and attention, and finally to the compassionate folks hearing about the outburst on that nights evening news a tragic exemplar of how our society can't seem to adequately attend to our societies patently crazy population.


The Parable of the Fax Machine

I'm reminded of the recounting of (or perhaps the series of recountings of) a parable once often (purportedly) told in the now defunct field of fax machine technology and modem networking recollected thusly:

"...my memory of the parable, in its simplest, went like this, ‘The fax machine: Have you not heard of the fax machine who in the bright morning began printing? It started sometime early before opening and as the employees of that small office began filtering in for the day it was already well underway, consuming nearly a full ream of paper. The secretary, noticing it low but not paying much mind to what was printing, topped it off with another ream and set that which had already been printed aside to clear the way for the rest of the pages. The fax machine, possessing a distinctive series of chirps when finished didn't attract much attention while in the process of printing. More or less everyone in an office grew accustomed to the dull mechanical humm of its printing running off and on throughout a normal day of faxes and never really thought of it till those chirps reminded one to go and see, in complete, what had been received. The office, busy with work and uninterrupted by any such message of completion, went about taking no notice of the machine's oddly protracted printing process. By the day’s end it still hadn't finished printing, not that any particular employee had noticed this fact. The secretary and the rest simply adding paper and moving the printed pages as they passed it by. This went on for several days, the office in this season inordinately busy and thinking not of the lack of incoming faxes–those with plenty of work rarely seek out more. Eventually the pile of the printed, always carefully removed from the tray, flipped such that it stayed in proper order, and neatly placed to the right of the machine grew to an unmistakably anomalous size. As well it did eventually begin to occur to some that they hadn't heard that distinctive and familiar chirp in the last few days and too, to the secretary and those seated closest to the fax machine's little room, there began to be a noticeable smell of heated electronic components and of printed pages. These fleeting, minor, hardly noticed to oneself observations began to mount and those of the office in the long awkward stints of break room and elevator silence, began remarking upon them. And thus a series of “now that you mention it...'s” and “I was thinking the same thing...'s” in rapid cascade grew to a shared consensus and so en masse they descended upon the fax machine's little room. Crowded in that small, now almost sweltering room they stood about it printing as it had been. When they went to touch its cream white shell they felt its heat in radiant waves and dared not meet it in touch. They remarked upon the several towers of face down paper, some reaching nearly to the ceiling, and concluded them to all have been the vast assortment of the thus far printed. They were all insistent to know what it had been printing all this time and someone grabbed the single nearest sheet off the least of the tall and worryingly precarious piles. An employee–a salesman perhaps, good orators them–took it in hand and reciting it aloud for the rest recounted this particular excerpt of the fax machines message, this particular segment of the fax machine's yet unheard and unfinished cries:

You could call its usefulness as a parable into question if you start to look for any consistent answer on what it's meant to mean. To my rather pragmatic professor it was an old trade joke made more or less to illustrate that generally one mussent rely upon the lay "users" to intervene upon obviously improperly functioning systems of technology and specifically about the potential dangers that lie in multipart-loops in modem based networking. "Always fence in infinity boys," he'd say with a truly dignified zeal. The story had permutations too, not just interpretations. To another I'd met in the field his version went further. He had said the people of the office being, again of a small office in a presumably small town, ones whose familiarity with technology extended right up their ability to keep it "moving" but was not exactly adequate to make diagnostic judgments on whether or not it was operating as it ought to be, were–upon reading the fax machines message–struck with quite serious awe. Suffice to say none of these simple salesmen, secretaries, HR reps, and managerial types had ever seen a little error message loop much less one gone incomprehensibly 'loopy' by a modem encoding issue. In short it scared the shit out of them and given the sheer scale of the message that was, if we recall, still at that minute printing, coupled with its total unintelligibility, and to top it all off that real sinister heat and stench coming off the poor overheated thing didn't exactly encourage intervention. To them it seemed to be working awfully hard and to that end on something of some presumed, yet elusive, importance. And it's a whole lot easier to feed the thing than to go pulling wires and maybe screw something up. So they let it run and made sure to keep it topped up on paper. They dollied some of the big stacks of print-off to storage elsewhere and more or less incorporated its upkeep into the usual order of things. When I asked about its meaning he said he'd thought it probably said something about who we are as people and the nature of office politics. That despite all our whinging about conformity and lip service to abhor the 'cog and the machine' style of modern living when push comes to shove no one cares to know anymore than they need to. That something so literally foreign as whatever alien junk this fax machine was spewing out could be with a bit of absent minded faith incorporated in one's loose sense of what is a productive piece in the organization's big picture. Enough to work alongside it, feed it here and there, but nothing more. That everyone loves a private language inasmuch as they are allowed to keep theirs.

When another of our coworkers said he'd heard the story more or less the same as we had but with the additional detail that after many months of this upkeep, of adding paper and sorting its printed sheets, the fax machine eventually got so hot from the constant printing that it caught fire burning the office down and a not insignificant portion of the staff too, the complex of potential meanings seemed to take another turn. He took this to be a lesson in passive participation. That something catastrophic can be innocently facilitated by the banal nonintervention of those content to stay uninvolved.

I had long resigned myself that any attempt to nail down a meaning of the story assuredly provided one but only as a momentary stop before another long told variation turned again in some other wild direction. Of course this perhaps is the truth to any fable that lives in the piecemeal variability of oral tradition. But, it occurred to me many years later, long after modem networking as job had passed by and fax machines, too with those who once maintained them, had obsolesced, that if it ever was a parable, a story yes, but one too that in its essential thrust aims to instruct, to communicate us a lesson, how strange it is that it is the essential character of the story, the fax machine, is most unable. It speaks and speaks more than anyone else in any variation of the story, and just as well more than anyone of us could ever spin and ramble and riff upon the pithy premise and yet only by way of towers and towers of pure noise, a kind of presumed pure unknowability–an essential negativity. Perhaps if we could hear the poor machine it'd have told us something truly parable worthy. Maybe we'd have had an answer and not came to the common silence of obsolescence. Or maybe that's all we could ever share..."

It is worth remarking the extent to which the narrator here appears to take the fax machine as the figure with which he empathizes and who he speculates as being resolved in the same commiserate silence. This seems especially curious in contrast to his somewhat apathetic characterizations of his actual peers in which a disappointing lack of satisfactory answers concerning the parabel are found. And yet it is they who we may well imagine are actually "in the same boat" of occupational obsolescence. After all, the figures of fables presumably do not live or die and while it is the case that fax machines did become broadly obsolete it appears not with them generally that he is of particular sentimental attachment. It's the "poor machine" that figures in the story, not the actual fax machines that fall into disuse, or even the coworkers that, like he, were presumably put out of work or made to reskill when such societal technological shifts demanded it. Could it be that it is not in spite but precisely because of it, as unreal, that the fax machine, as fantastically maligned, is suitable? If so then what of the fax machine, as a figure of parable, is suitable. We've established then that it mustn't be merely the concluding obsolescence, as silence, lest his commiseration extend to, and better fit, his former colleagues of the industry and all the fax machines forced to collect dust. What then?

Let us press a moment further upon this obsolescence "as silence." Who is silent at all and in what manner? We may take him at his word when he says he finds himself to be obsolete but should not we cast doubt when on one hand he claims it too a silence and on another recounts in protracted detail every varied piece of minutia of the parables, on the hunt for meaning, on the plight felt and speculated upon? Is it uncharitable for us to observe how curiously chatty is the purportedly silent?

If we were in the business of diagnosing character we'd say his sense of his own recounting, albeit factically communicative–inasmuch as we may, and obviously are, making sense of it and mobilize its sense to our ends–is forgone, that is mere chatter, mere noise. It is in the way that a fait accompli demands an acceptance, a silence on the matter, not by forbidding one to speak but by qualifying any further speech as purely superfluous. A chatter just as well as noise that is incommunicable to the accomplished fact.

And yet if we are making sense of him have we not redeemed him? Have we not proven a sense to his words he thought they could not have in thinking them assuredly doomed? Or have we heard him as in the story the coworkers "heard" the machine, in other words by arranging a home for its senselessness in our sensible world? So his chatter for us “speaks” in indirect ways upon issues of meta-language. And the machine “speaks” to him of unheard salvation. And too the machine “speaks” to every other point levied by every other parable. And too the person speaking in tongues “speaks” to evangelicals of God, to the skeptics of publicity schemes, and to the news watchers at home of societal ill. If we try to rescue him we doom him worse, us hungry semioticians. Noise is the talking silence.