Through articulation

Two dimensions characterize the human mental process: the articulatory walking and significant aiming. The first articulates its object according to the necessary structuring of the coherence of a system which tends towards closing. The second creates significances in the opening of the sense. Concretely these dimensions are distinguished like two divergent polarities. They are interactively and dialectically complementary. However such or such activity of the spirit privileges one rather than the other, science, for example, rather the 'articulating logos', philosophy, rather than the 'meaning logos'.

Science, for example, testifies of this historical adventure of the logos spreading itself at the same time in continuity and in rupture according to the epistemological evolutions and revolutions. Synchronically this adventure of the logos reveals a constant and universal process of the human spirit. The human spirit is adventurous. It engages on increasingly dared routes. The human spirit is curious. It continues its search of innovation ad infinitum. But the human spirit is also concerned with coherence. It is badly at ease in front of disorder and contradiction. The human spirit is also avid to constitute a knowledge. It seeks an increasingly precise adaptation between itself and the reality in order to build an increasingly adequate representation of a totality so it can understand, envisage and act. Curiosity and ventures on the one hand, precision and constructive order on the other one. There is a tension which, to be profitable, must become dynamically complementary. The scientific knowledge which is prolonged intechnician praxis can only proceed through the synthesis of this discrepancy.

'Articulating' and 'signifying' play in dialectical interaction. This interaction represents the originating possibility of any tool at the service of human creation. It is immediately invested in the tool par excellence, the most universal tool, the language.

There is language when the released significances are articulated between themselves, for themselves. This possible articulation allows the demiurge of significances to spread out in a new space where presences become transparent. A new space open to the gratuitousness of the being, where things are released from their individual characteristics to become available to the universal, released from the determinisms to get open towards the impossible. In communion with all the spirits. In an infinite opening.

Man is a speaking animal. He is the only one to speak. We would be stricken with stupor in front of a speaking monkey! The voice lets the human word blow. It is blown on the things. It is blown between the things. It is blown between the breaths.

To speak is impossible without this specific tool articulating a resonant materiality produced by the pulsation of the air through the larynx, the tongue, the palate, the teeth and the lips. A relatively small number of basic sonorities can thus be produced by voluntary control of the muscular motor function adapted to the whole of the vocal apparatus. It is a combinatory possibility. A minimum of two different elements is enough to combine an infinity of different sequences or structures, provided that these elements are multipliable or can be repeated ad infinitum and that they can be linked together in a free way. Generally, the more there are species of simple elements, the more the system is complex and the more its articulation is simple. On the contrary, less there are species of simple elements, plus the system is simple and the more its articulation is complex.

To speak, it is to articulate signs. In a minimal system, to each sign corresponds a significance and only one. The sign is fixed in its significance and the significance is fixed in its sign. The sign is univocal and merges with the signal. Also functions the 'animal language'. To the other extreme, two different binary digits are able to produce by combinative articulation an infinity of meaning signs and, therefore, an infinity of significances. Man has this capacity. Between these two extreme possibilities, the human languages could have chosen between, on the one hand, to invent more and more elementary signs thus saving a too large articulation, or, on the other hand, to start from few elementary signs to articulate more and more significances. The progress of the human language took this last direction.

To have signs at your disposal… It is not only question of articulating phonemes, the 'material' bases of any language. The chimpanzee has almost the same phonetic materiality as man. But it is not at its disposal. What a miraculous power in this 'disposal'! The animal does not have a meaning function. Only man has this specific possibility which comes from an absolutely new hunger and a new thirst within nature. Something like a metaphorical Eros. This Eros opens the space of an infinite questioning. A space where the sense occurs and where it multiplies.

The irruption of the difference of the specifically human world by opposition to the natural world of the animal is from the start on under the sign of the sign. If that were not… But already that cannot not be! This page does not remain white. Signs are traced there. And these signs are readable. They make sense in a community of sense.

The properly indefinable sense… since any definition presupposes it and is there only for delimiting it. The sense is at the same time origin and end of the meaning function. It includes it and overflows it. As the hand includes and overflows the tool. The sense is the act of the significance open to indefinite creation.

In a world of objects and of immediate needs, the free creation of signs represents a liberation of the human project. It opens also an indefinite possibility of articulation of signs. Why did humanity adopt this mode which is against nature? It is the only one which can indeed deploy infinitely. The arbitrary sign has an infinite and universal availability. It is fixed in its perfect stability. This opening and this closing make it combinable. Combinable with a maximum of economy. And usable universally.

If, indeed, the sign were only a possibility of resumption of the world on another level, and therefore indefinitely equivocal, there would yet be only one vast superstructure, certainly rich and original, but cumbersome. The sign does really become a tool, usable and handy for a project of significance, only by its possibility of articulation. Now this possibility is contemporary of the sudden appearance of specific humanity. If the significance is a capacity to take again a world, it is especially a capacity to have it at your disposal and, from there, to create a new world. Thanks, primarily, to the articulation of new bonds.

Facing the things as they are emerges the act of a subjectivity which makes be the things starting from itself and, by there, builds them as objects for themselves. To articulate significances is a specific characteristic of man. And of man exclusively. The chimpanzee has almost the same phonetic materiality as man. But they are not at its disposal. Whereas the animal exists in user-friendliness with the structures of the world, man is creator of distance. He is thus delivered to the discursive adventure. Articulating a new world.

goto