The Capacity to Signal is Everywhere in the Corporeal Substance
I say “I”; the living organism puts forth a sign for itself. This sign is not simply an effect it produces and puts forth; it is that with which it puts itself forth. It does not only make a sign, it makes itself a sign. The sign is a sound uttered with the throat, or a visual mark made by the hand. A contraction in the throat, a diagram of muscular enervation in the fingers and wrist are sustained by the posture held by the whole body, by the sensory-motor nervous circuitry that orients it at the moment, by the respiratory and circulatory system that brings air to the throat and blood to the contracting and extending muscle system. The capacity to signal is everywhere in the corporeal substance. The muscle tonus and sensory thresholds, the rate and force of respiration, and the heartbeat signal; the posture, the muscle tensions and relaxations, the positions of the limbs and of the facial muscles~all diagram signs.
That is, the audible and visual and also the tangible and felt positions and movements of the bodily substance are referential. They are polarized before an objective, which they indicate or designate, which they set up as a recognizable term. In uttering a cry or a coded sound, in forming a gesture with the fingers and the hands, in turning our face and in shifting our posture, we refer a witness to some exterior thing or pattern, we isolate that thing or pattern from the surrounding field, and make it visible to that witness. But it is also by orienting our gaze, by centering and directing our posture, by focusing our receptor surfaces, that we isolate that thing or pattern for ourselves; it is by contracting a certain pace and rhythm in our hand and applying it with a certain pressure that we make the grain of wood or the texture of the velvet or burlap into a separate pattern; it is by breathing with a certain rate and force and walking with a certain gate that we make the atmosphere and its odors, the landscape and its rhythms into perceivable elements and patterns. It is by making our corporeal substance into referential diagrams that we make the surroundings into referents, objects, objectives.
Uttering a sound, making a gesture, a body calls attention to itself. An immobilized, sleeping body, half-buried in the bedcovers or in the vegetation of the meadow, can still emerge as a referent, a distant object, because the witness sees it as a substance that can call attention to itself by assembling its parts, now dispersed by gravity, into a referential diagram. But is it not because it can say “I,” put forth this audible pattern, is it not because our body can gather up its limbs and organs into a distinct diagram of posture that it can become a referent for itself? When we lie collapsed on the hillside or on the bed or floating in the pool, we lose any distinct sense of our body volume and boundaries, and the substance in which sensibility simmers is sunshine, humidity, earth, or liquidity as much as it is ourselves. This state sinks toward the non-self-awareness of sleep. It would seem that we make ourselves into objects for ourselves, as for others, by becoming the referent of a sign we put forth.
~Alphonso Lingis
“Hard Currency” ~ Foreign Bodies ~ NY : Routledge, 1994 ~ pgs 107-8
