29 July 2010: "Kanye West performs SLAM POETRY for white Facebook employees"

This post is about the thetic. A trembling on the horizon of pure semiosis, and yet a threshold, shattered. An irruption of meaning that is at once a loss of the meaning. What is the thetic, Carles seems to dare to ask, if not "emotional rapping without music", as he observes in the laureatic strains of noted cultural gadfly Kanye West. Music, of course, is indicative of the semiotic component of linguistic utterance, the psychical charge in a state of motility. The key question, as Kristeva herself recognized, is "how is the thetic, which is the positing of a subject, produced?" That is not to reject the Bedeutung as Kristeva notes, but to acknowledge the precedence of the semiotic to the subject, to posit a language without symbolic content, a noncommunication that is nonetheless a psychically explosive discharge of libidinal drives of the protodoxa.

Carles suggests that West's poetic language, uttered in spontaneity, generates an analogical discharge without entirely surrendering thetic consciousness: "he is ‘coming back’," Carles declares, in a process of cyclical return to the prelingual, the lalangue of prenatal eidos. Naturally this poesis will "seem ‘raw’ and ‘humble’" to auditors, and may possible verge on the abject, the rejected significatory excess over transmitted meaning that threatens to subsume the rhetorical process in its deep structuration. Carles regards this flirting with the abject as a matter of "'overcoming demons’", a necessary purging through expurgation of the semiotic surplus.

The nature of that surplus in poetic language is juxtaposed rather adroitly by Carles with the immaterial surplus manipulated in what he deems "Web 3.0." The epistemic shift he anticipates in the digital technological interface with culture is precisely a matter of affectual components re-introjecting into digitally mediated communications: "enhancing the POKE functionality" -- as Carles playfully puts it. The semotic irrupts, in a kind of return of the repressed, at the heart of functionalist networked discourse, a kind of communication without meaning, an espousal of pure bond between situated beings, of the rhythms of communication liberated from the prison-house of semantic literality.