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The thing itself

The arguments we have followed have led us to this conclusion: that the most accurate representation of the thing itself is a mathematical formula. Words cannot represent the thing itself because they are always already mediating: prior to words, thought is formless; the emergence of a word simultaneously generates the concept. Rather than representing the concept, we are constructing it; there is no pre-existent signified. We hypothesised that this premise may be wrong: perhaps not all conceptualisation is linguistic. Painting seemed to offer a solution, as a self-evident signifier capable of accurately imitating its pre-existent signified, vision. However, painting proved to be equally problematic: paint is not a self-evident signifier; its mimesis is convincing but not accurate; and most crucially, vision is not a pre-existent signified. Moreover, painting is as entrammelled the network of meaning as language: once we enter the symbolic order of which painting and language are a part, we are always already acculturated and so anything represented in paint or language invokes cultural meanings which are not the thing itself but of which it cannot be divested. The only form of representation which can offer a pre-existent signified and evade slippage of meaning is the formal language of mathematics.

This is not what we wanted. A long formula, comprehensible to a tiny minority of trained mathematicians, is not what we meant when we sought an accurate representation of the thing itself, and yet it meets the criteria. Fibonacci numbers[1] govern the patterns in which sunflowers grow — both the number of petals and the spirals of seeds — and colours can be represented mathematically, but is this the sunflower itself? This must force us to ask, what did we mean, what did Byatt mean, by 'the thing itself'? What is it that post-structuralism supposedly excludes from its theory? If not the referent, what? Can we reasonably continue to posit its existence?

The impossibility and contradictoriness of our quest should not persuade us that the thing itself does not exist. Rather, contradiction, like Kristeva's semiotic, is essential to the healthy life of a sign-system, for it represents the possibility of change. The symbolic order carves up the world into categories by which we apprehend it; we cannot apprehend its state prior to these categories, for we have no other means of cognition. Nevertheless, we suspect its existence, and attempt to theorise it. Each posited term — the semiotic, the presymbolic, yes, the unspeakable Other, the thing itself — becomes an analogical figure, a fetish, for as it is named it becomes part of the symbolic order and so is always already a substitute for the object of our desire. Without this pre-existent world, our categories are immutable, but as long as we are suspicious that something (however inaccessible) is being carved up, the possibility remains of it being carved up differently, and thus the authority of our categories is undermined. The contradictoriness exhibited by Byatt, Barthes, Derrida and Kristeva is not proof of error, but a theoretical necessity; the error would be to resolve it and call it 'paradox' for without its tension our languages fossilise, with it we are able to recarve and recategorise — to write new texts. Before the text, running through it, unrecognisable and unwriteable, is what may be a love letter of sorts; it inscribes something but remains mute; it is made up of old texts, but breaks them up, and is nevertheless the force by which the new text is written.

1 This is a sequence where each number is obtained by the sum of the two preceeding it, beginning with 0 and 1. For instance, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc.