But if something exceeds the event, what is it? I want to argue that this excess
is an expressive ‘virtual’ dimension which can be summarized as the generation of
signs grasped in practice. I want to understand signs in a quasi-Deleuzian way.
That is, I want to depart from a consideration of the sign as a result of the arbitrary
relation between the signifier and the signified. Instead:
a sign comes into being when thought is thrown into crisis because the
reassuring world of representation has broken down. The signifier and the
signified constitute a ‘dreary world’, whereas signs indicate the deterritorial-
isation and reterritorialisation of thought. The sign itself entails heterogeneity
in three ways: it ‘flashes’ between the two realities of the sign itself and the
object which carries it; the sign also ‘envelops’ another object within the object
that bears it; and the sign does not produce resemblance in someone per-
ceiving the sign, but rather perception as a sort of aparallel evolution. Deleuze
uses as an example the process of learning to swim: the movement of the
swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements
of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation
to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping
the former in practice as signs [.. .] Our only teachers are those who tell
us ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity
rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce (Deleuze 199 4 : 23). The
sign is an expression of the way in which order has been created rather than
discovered.
(Marks 1998: 3 7 )In order words, ‘the sign is an encounter rather than an act of recognition. and
it can only be felt or sensed: signs act directly on the nervous system’ (Marks
1998: 38).
In turn, this emphasis on the generation of signs leads us to the three chief
elements of signification which together form, to borrow a phrase from Bateson,
an ecology of mind or consciousness. The first of these elements is embodiment.
But quite crucially, this is not the body considered as individual being, but embodi-
ment as a field of flesh in which ‘the body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if
it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorise the
past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life’ (Bourdieu 1991: 23).
In such a conception, embodiment is about the content of social worlds and
‘not just those which are material and extant but those which are ephemeral
and possible’ (Radley 1996: 560). Embodiment, then, concerns ‘what is made
possible because we are embodied – in brief what we can show about ourselves
and our situation’(Radley 1996: 561) because
embodiment involves a capacity to take up and to transform features of the
mundane world in order to portray a ‘way of being’, an outlook, a style of life
that shows itself in what it is. Like the painted pictures in a frame, it has self
referential qualities that allude to something not easily specified. This is theAfterwords 115