Two Notes on Media

Writing is an activity fundamental to intellectual processes and theorizing of politics. Theory, and intellectual activity implies a relationship to the not-present, the ability to describe, with some persuasiveness and utility, political situations not immediately present in their entirety. Theory connects past events to potential future events by describing the politics that lies behind both. Thinking theory and politics implies duration and reflexivity on the inaccessible past and the unknowable future, articulated by a writer occupying a space that supposedly links both in a political moment. Writing creates a physio-logic-al duration to ideas that mirrors this task, indexing ideas as composed in writing to that which has gone before in the text, as well as what will come, in the eyes of the reader who makes sense of the written text.

Lost in translation – interpretation and conceptual understanding of language composes the subject doing the interpreting. The model marks an exchange of ‘intent’ or ‘symbolization’ for ‘effect’ to compose a fragile subject position. This model requires creating a disjunction between two forces – the symbolizing forces and the interpreting forces, that turn the symbol into meaning of some variety. Attempting to describe the interpretive conditions for meaning creation posits a subject as a bounded entity with discrete forces acting upon it. Attempting to parse the forces that determine meaning is constructing the history for a subject, even describing the subject as interpreting implies a disjuncture from other subjects or potential meanings, with this particular subject making decisions according to a rationalized set of procedures. It asserts an ‘interpretive difference’ as the foundation for setting up an economy of meaning as transformation and exchange. Left unsaid is the subject doing the interpreting, the specifics of meaning transformation as an activity.