Jean Francois Lyotard “The Tensor”

The Tensor

Semiotic sign

• The ‘Thing’ can always be treated as a sign. The sign is a code that needs to be decoded to retrieve information.
• The ‘Thing’ replaces the ‘information’, which can mean one of two things: 1) The sign replaces what it signifies. 2) Signification itself is made of signs, so we only get cross references. All signs are substitutes for one another.
• Out of proposition 2) follows that all material is annihilated. Is this dematerialization is the work on the capital? Or is it the case that dematerialization gives rise to the refinement and intensification of affection? Isn’t this dematerialization at the same time a cartography of a material voyage in areas of sound, colour, sculpture, politics eroticism and language, which thanks to the dematerialization are becoming pure impulses, offering the libido new opportunities to intensify itself.

To sumarise so far:The process of signification causes dematerialization. Dematerialization makes culture immaterial, turning it into impulses. Culture becomes an arena for the libido.

• We no longer have anything but signs. That has several consequences: 1. Because signs get endlessly substituted, recurrence becomes a fundamental quality of the system. We never get presence itself. Additionally, we always have the job of determining the conditions under which our subject of study operates. 2. with the sign begins the search. This is a metaphysical search disguised as a scientific search for a discourse that can produce predictable changes.
• All signs are about power. This search is the avant-garde of the capital. Capitalist imperialism is the process of dematerialization and signification. We experience foreign cultures as signs that must be decoded.
• Signification inspires an endless conquest in which the finishing line is constantly postponed. This conquest is driven by desire.
• There is no escape from signification. Even by supporting the oppressed we are still playing the signification game.
• Another condition of the sign is that there is always a subject who perceives the sign. The self exists in the sign.
• Semiotics operates in concepts. A sign is a concept. As such signs are searching for their own limits and are happy to uncover the opposite and accommodate it. ex: ‘stupid imperialism disguised as tragic laborism.’
• Semiotics is nihilism. It is a religious science because it believes that someone is speaking to us and at the same time the final meaning always evades us.