RE: tools + signs = artifacts
D S Hendler (bison who-is-at mail.utexas.edu)
Wed, 22 Jul 1998 21:25:01 -0500
Control/ Identity/ Ownership. I think of the phrase, "I own
you." It means that there is a sense of total control of
the speaker to the listener or target. But, too, it means
that the speaker is one who controls, one who can own. So the
state of ownership is both an issue of control and identity,
that is, power, (even sovereignty). I take this from nate's comments.
But then there are the tricky things that are the
objects of this discussion. Language and Money. One can say
that one owns a word or that a particular word "is" an author's
word (that she or he used it in such a way as to transform the
word, as with "being" and Heidegger; and this, interestingly,
is totally dependent upon the audience-- if the audience has
no idea of the use of the word or the author, then the point is lost).
There is the assertion of control and identity, but it is fluid.
So, too, is it with money, or as incarnated here, cash. If I lose
drop a dollar bill under my bed, I have lost it. When I reach down
and pick up a dollar bill, I have found it, whether or not it is
the same dollar bill as the one I dropped. The sign value overtakes
the artifact itself (the same as with the money you put in the bank,
or, for that matter, the money we put into social security).
But, to tie this in with another thread, I think of Bill's
comments on email from june 30. "We become the forces that vary
their [emails'] genetic structure and select which traits are passed
on with a rapid scale of semiotic symbiotic ecology and evolution."
Email and information are viral, and take us over even as we try
to control them (such is the case with money). William Burroughs
makes this the topic of his ouvre. So identity, even when asserted
as a controller (or controlled) role, only more greatly asserts the
value of the culture and (perhaps?) the inability to have total
control.
It is narrative, as I believe diana pointed out. Money is
narrative (and control of money is control of power, of the story
of life). I am reminded of Michael Douglas in Wall Street: "Money is
in case you don't die tomorrow."
david
D S Hendler
University of Texas, Austin
=A0
>Abort, Retry, Influence with large hammer?