Transcendence Act 2: Thus Ceased The Sign

The death of the sign seems a most obvious point to begin when seeking the process by which the transcendental is lost. The semantic incarceration of the subject (meaning the way in which cognition of the world is necessarily bound by its use of language to make sense of it – humanity created the means by which it knows the world) lends only to the realization of a continual discourse of subject versus object as the two stand opposed to each other. The former must appropriate the latter, but as these signs become more fully integrated into the subjective cognition, they return as synthetic; humanity appropriates and then re-appropriates the sign as a cognitive function so that it no longer mirrors a "reasoning entrapped in representation" but vice-versa (Ellis 193). That is to say that naturally, as the sign moves through the discursive apparatus of the mind, one notices a one to one ratio between the actual phenomena and the subject that interprets it. However, as the sign is appropriated, changed, synthesized, remodeled, and tweeked to perfection, it becomes the case that the normal function of the sign apparatus is no longer a dominant case because "[…] if objects exist outside of us, we can know absolutely nothing of their objective reality. For things are given to us only through our representation. To believe that these representations and sensations are determined by external objects is a further representation" (World 39). In fact, it reveals that the sign may be no more, in the technological age, than an extension of the subjective which seems even more plausible when one remembers that "objectivity can be conceived without a subject; not so subjectivity without an object" (Adorno 502). Humanity has created a synthetic version of the natural sign sequence. On this, it might be suggested, linguistically, that the sequence of the sign originates with the rise of conceptual thinking – man must conceptually discourse that to which he comes in contact and which would be the interaction with the objective world. However, the subjective appropriation of the sign, moving beyond its culturally discursive function, causes an internal use of the sign. That is to say that the notion of an "integral reality" assumes an ideological system that is not arranged by nature but is synthetic and manmade thus revealing that "[d]istance is obliterated, both external distance from the real world and the internal distance specific to the sign" while also showing "a pornographic materialization of everything" – the death of the unknown (Baudrillard 69). So, the employment of a sign discourse is also synthetically enacted or, in other words, within the confines of the ideological system, but what is more striking is the way in which this points to a third synthetic element which is the teleological nature of the ideological system. An modern thinker does not necessarily lay down a teleological system by chasing evidential knowledge, but he recreates it by these means; the appropriation of the sign into an "integral reality" reveals the rise of a new teleological system.