On the Semiotics of Small Consumer Goods in Conflict: Coding Purpose and Purposing Codes in Legal or Other Regulatory Systems

 

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Humans have a penchant for organizing the world around them, including those portions of that world that they make. This has ancient roots, two of which are worth recalling here. The first emerges from out of Jewish-Greek templates, an illustration of which may be found not in the Biblical story of creation, but rather in the Biblical accounting of the delegation of dominion from the Divine source to humanity. The second emerges from a roughly similar time from out of the Dao, an illustration of which might be found in Guiguzi’s notion of intelligent naming.

To grunt in a way that others understand is to embrace the world view of those to whom one grunts.

Homer was able to construct (or imagine) a closed form because he had a clear idea of the agricultural and warrior culture of his own day. He knew his world, he knew its laws, causes, and effects. That is why he was able to give it form.. There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, one where we do not know the boundaries o what we wish to portray. . . We cannot provide a definition by essence and so, to be able to talk about it, to make it comprehensible or in some way perceivable, we list its properties. . . . (Humberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (Alistair McEwen (trans); NY: Rizzoli, 2009), p. 15).

Cultures tied to the tradition of Abrahamic religions encounter this semiotic reality of signifying the world around the central figure of humanity under the leadership of God (Gen 2:118-19 (Adam naming all of the creatures brought before him by God), and lists. Lists are found throughout the Bible and provide a detailed description of historical connection, of pedigree, of the passage of time, and of the thing that is listed by reference to the quality the lists chronicle in common (eg, Gen 5:1-32 (the generations separating Adam from Noah and the first destruction of humanity). Guiguzi speaks of Ming (名)--of naming, of defining accurately, and of drawing distinctions, a concept that itself was closely though controversially tied to that of shi (实) of actuality, truth, or essence of the thing names (Guiguzi, Guiguzi: China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary (Hui Wu (trans) (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), p. 156; 60 n. 26. (Xi Jinping's Semiotics of Marxism (名实) and the Coding Languages of Knowledge Platforms: Tian Xinming, "Do a good job in philosophy and social sciences as a fundamental principle: the inheritance and development of Marxism by General Secretary Xi Jinping's important expositions on philosophy and social sciences" [田心铭, 做好哲学社会科学工作的根本遵循——习近平总书记关于哲学社会科学重要论述对马克思主义的继承和发展])

From the impulses at the heart of these ancient sources, it might then be possible to glean two important elements that drive these organizational impulses. The first is to recast the world around the human in terms that are more relevant to the human experience—that is to put the human at the center of the human experience of the world. The second is to assert some sort of dominion of this ordered world which is rendered in and through the act of intelligent naming. To borrow from Noam Chomsky’s development of the possibility of understanding ( ‘What Can We Understand?,’ Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 27 et seq. and to invert Chomsky’s emphasis, human collectives categorize and name to develop the means for identifying and managing those problems which fall within human cognitive capacity, which can then be projected around the mysteries which do not—a cognitive extension of sorts (ibid., 27-28, borrowing from Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics of “abduction” and that “array of ‘admissible hypotheses’ that are the foundation of human scientific inquiry.” (Ibid., p. 28).  

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All of this is to suggest that the nature and limitations of human cognition—and more importantly its ambition to name and control the objects so named and (well) ordered within human cognitive spaces, plays a substantially perverse role in the constitution and all objects that human either recognize, choose to surround themselves with, or constitute as instruments. But that gets at things backwards. Humans believe they can constitute a thing by naming it (in the sense suggested above). Yet recent events continue to remind those humans (and their ambitious projects) that while such naming may provide some (false) sense of order, and an ordered universe with humans at the center, that ordering is only as good as the willingness of the human collectives to indulge a belief in the “truth” of those naming rituals, and the regulatory ordering structures human spend so much time building for themselves.

Less abstractly, perhaps, the human proclivity for vesting objects around them with function, purpose or a specific relationship to the human—and then to develop baroque and complex regulatory systems around that set of ordering diktats (in law, morals, science, and the like)—misperceives the relationship between the human and their objects. The relationship between the human and their objects is dialectical and inter-subjective rather than hierarchical. Each shapes the other through repeated and mimetic interactions that are affected both by the “meaning” assigned to objects and the use to which they put or which resists containment within the name given. The regulatory structures which are then used to manage their dialectics might be understood as ideologically political—as a dialectics of meaning making through lived experience in relation to and against the idea of that object.

There are all kinds of human objects and activities in which this dialectic can be observed in action. Traditionally the recognition and suppression of markets in (the consumption of) things or experiences has been at the heart of the constitution of human solidarity and collectivity for a long time. But it also apples to objects. Objects transfigured into sacred things—flags, vessels, or other objects—have traditionally occupied a central place in this sort of semiotic phenomenology (where the object, as signified, is transformed by the investment of acts of collective meaning into something else). These conscious transformations of physical objects into concrete manifestations of abstract concepts, or even of the physical manifestation of one thing is a basic element of the constitution of human collectivity through the arrangement of collective consciousness of what things “are”, how they “behave” and especially their “purpose” and “use.” This basic set of ordering premises then permit the unleashing of the collective titans of human social relations—rules, laws, and systems generally of disciplining collective behavior and perceptions—as moral, legal, social, political, and economic system premises, goals, and orienting baselines for assessing and managing inter-human behaviors.

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Recently, though, these fundamental rules of the operating systems of human relations around objects have appeared more urgently in the context of common household products—even the description of the objects around which the problematique is to be discussed suggests the power of naming in cabining fundamental premises about the “thing”, its “legitimate” or “expected” use and as well the consequences for “mis” use.

Indeed, the condition or meaning of ordinary household products has exploded in recent weeks.

Literally.

The recent episodes of exploding communications devices in Lebanon and surrounding areas, targeting primarily (though not necessarily exclusively) fighters loyal to the group Hezbollah and their support systems, have made unavoidable a confrontation with the dialectics of meaning (and utility) (reporting here, here, and here). With that confrontation, one is (again) faced with what (for the human collective) is perhaps the disagreeable realization (again) of the inevitability of the semiotic revaluation of the premises of phenomenological stability vested in and through objects and ensured by the human centered identity-regulatory structures built around those premises of (enforced) stability. 

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War appears to be the lubricant for this revaluation of the values of objects—the perception and consciousness of object tied to purpose enforced through collective meaning structures policed by regulatory mechanisms. But then, in virtually every stage of historical development of human collectivity, warfare has tended in usher in periods of violent change; phenomenological transformation figuratively at the point of a gun, but now, it seems, in proximity to any number of human made objects (small consumer goods in this case) repurposed to those ends. Yet that is the point—the oddity of these analytical stances is the idea of objective purpose, and the investment of a morality in “re”-purposing. An object is itself—in itself, for itself—even as it is (at least for the human) unconscious of itself. Its purpose, then, in relation to the human, is not in itself but in relation to the human. One than does not name the object and find its purpose. One instead names the object as an expression of its connection to the human. One does not control the object as much as one seeks to control the relationship of that object to the human toward certain ends, with respect to which the object is wholly indifferent. Again, with the human at the center, the discourse of objective purpose inverts the reality of the object of that discourse—it is not the object that is at the center of its objectivity, but rather the relationship of the human to the object that is at the core. The core of what? Of the perception of the thing, certainly (that is of the way in which humans might agree to see and understand a thing; of the morality of the relationship of the thing in the hands of the human as well.

 

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And thus the perversity of the human desire to manage through intelligent naming; or rather the dialectical balancing from this lust for control. The greater the desire to control of thing by vesting it with purpose built into the perception of the object, and then surrounding this perception-purpose with rules, the greater the likelihood of human vulnerability. Expectation of purpose makes vulnerable ; the greater the investment in purpose the greater the vulnerability when the elasticity f purpose is revealed or experienced. That certainly was the case with the communications devices in the Middle East; vulnerability was experienced as a physical manifestation when the phenomenology of purpose reveals the arbitrariness of the investment in a fixed purpose. The great strength of that project can as easily be turned to its greatest weakness. Objects have no purpose in themselves; even those made by or through human agency. Perception of a thing is an investment of the human in the thing. The range of human perception of a thing is finite and directed by and manifested as the limits and forms of human perception. But they do not affect the elasticity of “purpose” to which an object may be put, or not put. And yet purpose is necessary to reduce infinite elasticity to something that may be managed for the stability of human social relations—in whatever form appeals to the human collective in each stage of its development. And there the tension.

This is a tension that is made more acute in periods, like this one, of potentially substantial transformation, or revaluation of values in themselves and in the things around and touching on the human—the planet, its environment, and the things that form part of this environment, including the human thing and their artifacts. One might object that the meaning and signification of these transformations (at least theoretically) have been more or less well enough managed as a form of regulatory bathos, a low level legal issue of little consequence because of its reliance on the power of the perception of a thing. This has taken the form of an emerging law on mixed use objects, in sanctions regimes, and increasingly in the context of the revaluation of things within the premise universe of human rights at least as that is understood within their conventional international apparatus). Nonetheless its transformative semiotics cannot be ignored, if only because the distance between the conceptualization of the thing (purpose) and its regulatory structures appears increasing detached from the performance of purpose(es) in the face of law (and as a challenge to its relevance in the experiential realms of human social relations).

That challenge is not confined to the great perception smelters of war. The human body provides another venue for the transformation of objects, especially those made by and in the image of the human. Pharma now also serves as a leading force of phenomenological instability of the perception of a “reality” of objects (or at least in activating its dialectical dynamics). Ozempic is merely an easily recognizable example, one that is most potently read on the bodies of those who have sought personal physical transformation through the repurposing of a drug to better align the abstract sense of self with what stares at them from a mirror.

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And human collectives in the business of supplying objects in suppressed markets have been adept at repurposing objects. In the case of the transport of suppressed drug trade ordinary objects are repurposed for transport, the delivery of the suppressed consumable, and more generally the objects that are employed in the pathways to transactions. In all these cases the power of re-purposing comes from the intensity of the perception of purpose imposed on an object. Common household objects are a primary target because the strength of the perception, including with it, the perception that purpose transforms the object into something inevitably benign. The greater the strength of the belief in the purpose of an object the more effective and profound the effect of recasting of that purpose, or of the use of the purpose to other ends.


Indeed, it seems , nothing is any longer necessarily what it was. The signification of objects have been increasingly destabilized, and that destabilization may be reaching the point where the grounding of perception is more generally destabilized as well. That destabilization, in turn, represents a fundamental threat to the self-reflexive system of naming-meaning through which collective perception (from the collective self outward) of properly signified things which are allocated places within order reinforcing cognitive systems objects. That threat is not merely to behavior norms but also to the perception of objects in and as behaviors. That is, the importance of exploding objects, in this case, suggests a recasting of the cognition of things as well as the cognition of the human as the experience of the objects around which the human can be conceived and ordered. The threat is only augmented by the response that seeks to use the evaded legality to negate the signific realities that both defy and make it impossible to indulge the perception of a thing as a “particular thingness.”

It is thus more than pagers and communications devices that exploded in Lebanon and adjacent places in recent weeks; it is the stability of the basis of the human perception of itself in and in relation to things, including those made in the shadow of its own image. The response is likely to be self defeating—an intensification of the legalities of perception around an imposed signification of purpose. Those legalities in this context tend to mask  its underlying politics in ways that are increasingly exposed--for good or ill (here, here, and here). That is only likely to intensify the abandonment of that perception within the experiential realms of human perception and the behaviors they will enhance.