| Chapter 1: | Uproarious Prologue |
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ordered. The final topic is a simulacrum of finality, but it is in fact an extension, a prolongation, a temporalization in process—exactly how the Yi jing itself wraps up.
The passage attributed to Confucius states that the Classic of Changes uses images (with formal structures) as signs. Image-based signs carry significance, as phonemes do, only through their articulation; as the lowest level of signifying, they are exemplary—promissory—of the potential for significance of perceptible differences, taken as distinctive features, in further configurations. Signs bear or complement linguistic (morphemic, lexical, sentential, discursive) functions and represent an aspect of experience not captured propositionally. As Lévi-Strauss (Savage Mind, 20) pointed out, images of this sort, having taken on significance in higher levels of coded messages, are intermediary between percepts and concepts: “[W]hereas concepts aim to be wholly transparent with respect to reality, signs allow and even require the interposing and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture into reality.” It is their capacity to undergo permutation that establishes signs as carriers of human culture, not only at the level of propositional information or representations in a theoretical system but also in that, through their long-term, successive articulations, they take on a quality where their “‘extension’ and ‘intension’ are not two distinct and complementary aspects but one and the same thing.” That is, aspects of denotation and connotation fuse: “pointing at” themselves, or rather at their use (in time), the signs show their significance through their repeated, patterned deployments and redeployments as operators of systematic interaction. As Hénaff (Claude Lévi-Strauss,127–128) elaborated,