Transcendence Act 3: Behold, My Monster - Ideology

This example leads to another that lies hidden with the semantic carceration of the subject. The sign, being stripped of all power in its natural objectivity, begins to show the way in which the nexus of semantic imprisonment, the prison of concept in which the mind is held, gives way to the immense pressures of a matrix of totality – an all encompassing linguistic mapping of the sign. As the sign breathes its last gurgling breath, so too do the doors of the semantic prison clang shut revealing something even more horrific – a closed system. The appropriation of the sign points directly to the appropriation of concept, for “[t]he apparatuses, relations and practices of production thus issue, as a certain moment (the moment of “production/circulation”) in the form of symbolic vehicles constituted within the rules of ‘language’” which must necessarily include a specific moment in which the concept within language itself is appropriated as a “symbolic vehicle;” the sign no longer projects from a natural relation with the objective manifold, but it is treated rather as a byproduct of a systemic ideology (Hall 128). If this is the case then the seeming eternal return of the sign in an “integral reality” actually shows the integration, appropriation, and eventual manipulation of the concept itself, for “[…]the universe becomes a universe of fact, a positive universe, a universe ‘as is’, which no longer even has any need to be true. As factual as a ready-made” (Fringes 25). The subject cannot help but be bound by linguistic and conceptual chains, but it is an even greater atrocity that such an imprisonment actually becomes the source of its own binding. It is no longer that “[t]he meaning(s) of a text will also be constructed differently depending on the discourses (knowledges, prejudices, resistances) brought to bear on the text by the reader” (Morley 171). Nor is it the case that the subject merely dwells among the concepts, but, in post-enlightenment thinking, the mind manufactures them, he distributes them, and he patches them together to create his own monster.