On Signification

FORGETTING KNOWLEDGE


"the 'true' dancer must never appear to know the dance she dances. Her knowledge (which is technical, immense, and painfully acquired) is traversed, as null, but the pure emergence of her gesture. “The dancer does not dance” means that what one sees is at no point the realization of a preexisting knowledge, even though the knowledge is, through and through, its matter or support. The dancer is the miraculous forgetting of her own knowledge of dance." (1)

Peter Eisenman argues convincingly, following Edward Said, that we currently find ourselves in a late period. Late periods repeat the marginal, esoteric, and flamboyant apsects pushed aside by the orthodox. They are complex, ambivalent, undecided. But these marginalized traits, given space to develop, provide the stepping stones for the early guard. A theory of forgetting aims to provide this spacing.

Clearly, forgetting as I will use it does not mean a complete separation from historical theory, nor advocate for pure unmediated genius were either of those even realizable possibilities. “The abandonment of the category of ideology does nothing so much as to insure the perpetuation of an ideology that does not know itself as such”.(2) Forgetting is not a theory of ignorance. Rather, like Badiou’s (and Mallarmé’s) dancer, historical and disciplinary knowledge is both the matter and support of such a practice.

A theory of forgetting repositions this knowledge relative to the thinking of new concepts; yes, given knowledge provides the support and material, but the attendant relationships, external to their ideas, are allowed to be forgotten in order that new forms can emerge. In this sense forgetting is a radical empiricism(3). “Every genuine instance of thinking is subtracted from the knowledge in which it is constituted... from every preexistence of knowledge.”(4) In Badiou, the dancer possesses technical knowledge of dance as well as a knowledge of the choreography, however this knowledge does not surface in the performance of the dance but is traversed “as null” in the emergence of the gesture.

Where would one place a theory of forgetting? For the dancer, forgettting is a refusal of signification. Badiou enumerates at least three locations where this refusal takes place:
forgetting of identity, of knowledge, and of desire.

Forgetting can be said to be an effacement of difference, though not as an erasure or subtraction actions which leave a legible trace. Maurice Merleau-Ponty urges us in The Visible and the Invisible, “understand perception as differentiation, forgetting as undifferentiation... not a destruction of a psychic material, which would be the sensible, but its disarticulation which makes there be no longer a separation, a relief. This is the night of forgetting.”(5) By unraveling differentiation, the operation of forgetting removes itself from the traditional categories of semiotics.

Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli. Trevor Patt.

Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the connection between forgetting and signification. Badiou’s refusals clearly show the need to position a theory of forgetting in relation to representation.

"in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system."(6)

Why a sign without positive meaning? Jacques Derrida has expanded and intensified Saussure’s assertion as a spacing that is “the precondition for meaning as such, and the outsideness of spacing is revealed as already constituting the condition of the ‘inside.’”(7) We should not think of difference merely as the distinction of one sign from another, but as the actual locus–a temporal and conceptual spacing–within which meaning is possible, the opposite of a meaningless sameness. It should be immediately apparent that there are many more potential differences, more constructable linguistic relationships, than there are possible signs. A semiotics whose signs had inherent meaning would be limited from the beginning. Such a a system could only create an impoverished representation,(8) never quite reaching a perfect semblence of the signified. Meaning which exists only by difference, in contrast, is an enriching representation, one which does not despair over the absence of the signified object/concept and the unfortunate necessity to re-present it, one which does not strain for versimmilitude, but constructs something in the space opened up.

Moreover, it means that forgetting does not void a sign of its intrinsic meaning. At the same time as it removes the difference which constitutes an accepted meaning, forgetting maximizes spacing by opening the sign to possibility for new, less established meanings to be constructed. Forgetting temporarily makes every sign a shifter(9) allowing it to signify anything by virtue of its emptiness.

Roland Barthes argues that only by forgetting its utilitarian justifications–among them “aerodynamic measurements, studies of the resistance of substances, physiology of the climber, radio-electric research, problems of telecommunication, meterological observations, etc”(10)–was the Eiffel Tower able to become the resonant sign it is now. “Beyond its strictly Parisian statement, it touches the most general human imagerepertoire: its simple primary shape confers upon it the vocation of an infinite cipher.”(11)

As an infinite cipher, Barthes contrasts the Tower with the panoramic prospect of Paris it creates, which exists precisely to be deciphered. For Barthes, the panorama is an image in which one seeks to connect the visible signs to memories of places as experienced, a process of recognizing, remembering, and reattaching. The Tower is a shifter capable of signifying many meanings, even contradictory ones. Its code has no “solution.” We might more accurately say that the Eiffel Tower provides the possibility of meaning.

This is precisely Badiou’s conclusion: “Dance is not an art because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body.”(12) For Badiou, art is the arrangement of knowledge to produce truth. Forgetting as a process does not produce truth, forgetting cannot be called a truth-procedure, but it does show the possibility of arranging knowledge, remember knowledge (technical, immense, and painfully acquired) is the basis of forgetting as a practice. Again, this forgetful-arrangement is made possible only through the externality of meaning from signs, and of relations from ideas.


1. Badiou, Alain. Dance as a Metaphor for Thought. in Handbook of Inaesthetics. p66.
2. Hays, Micahel. A++ forthcoming
3. Boundas, Constantin. Translator's Introduction. Empiricism and Subjectivity. p6.
“A more helpful definition of empiricism, in Deleuze’s estimate, must respect the irreducible dualism that esixts between things and relations, atoms and structure, perceptions and their causes, and also relations and their causes. Viewed from this vantage point, empiricism will be the theory of the externality of relations, and conversely all theories which entail the derivationof relation from the nature of things would be resolutely nonempiricist.”
4. Badiou, Alain. Dance as a Metaphor for Thought. in Handbook of Inaesthetics. p66.
5. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. p197.
6. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. p118.
7. Krauss, Rosalind. Photographic Conditions of Surrealism. The Orignality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. p106.
8.For an discussion of the extension of Platonic essentialism to mimesis and didacticism see: Badiou, Alain. Art and Philosophy. Handbook of Inaesthetics.
9. Jakobson, Roman. Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russsian Verb. Russian Language Project.
10. Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. p6.
11. Ibid p4.
12. Badiou, Alain. Dance as a Metaphor for Thought. in Handbook of Inaesthetics. p66.