to a world in which other objects, proteins, explore it in three dimen-
sions, or even four if we include time, because proteins can change
their shape. (Antoine Danchin, The Delphic Boat, 284)Danchin compares epigenesis to the generative power of writing.
Writing does not produce a world as an effect of information, but
through intersections of waves. Try to picture how a wave is produced
in a sports arena, as Alessandro Sarti suggests.^7 Someone raises his
hands, others beside him do the same thing, people on the right lift
their arms while the first ones drop them, and then the wave spreads
out toward the right, and row after row a hundred thousand spectators
raise their arms in slow or rapid succession, and then more slowly or
more quickly.
How can a similar phenomenon happen (this is what Kevin Kelly also
studied in his Out of Control)?^8 Between information and matter, between
codes and the event there is a relation that resembles the form of the
wave. What is a wave? It is an accumulation of modifications of the status
of a fluid body, transfers of form, information that moves and is moved.
The wave consists of an intersection of information and fluid matter.
Even literature produces waves in the sense in which Burroughs said
that Jack Kerouac caused a million blue jeans to be sold and that
Mayakovsky moved proletarian troops.
This does not happen because words create consensus and action,
but because words accumulate in communicative space until they
create an anticipated rhythm, a way of being, desire.
Here we enter into the problem of the semiotic double articulation,
that of the dual sphere in which linguistic signs function, that is not
only the semiotic sphere, because words are also psychic stimuli,
graphic matter that ends up modifying the ethno-mediascape.A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not
only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive:
there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals,
only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages.
(A Thousand Plateaus, 7)Assemblages of a-signifying traitsThe distinction between the biological, the semiotic and the machinic
has an intellectual and cognitive usefulness, but in reality, distinct and
hierarchically separate spheres do not exist. When we move in the worldKafka, Hypertext and Assemblages 1039780230_221192_10_cha09.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 103