The Object Assumes an Exalted Place in the Discourse

Here is the object: it’s shaped like a polygonal prism and is luminous green. Can everyone picture it? Okay. This object comes sailing into the discourse, which we can think of as darkness. As if the object came sailing in through space. Slowly. The music we hear in the background is the music from Blade Runner, and the sound of the small flying cars that Harrison Ford uses. The object now sails slowly ahead, before starting to climb up and up, until it docks some way up in the discourse. And it sits there glowing. Yes, in an elevated position, just as Roland Barthes describes it in Writing Degree Zero. We let the magnifying glass glide over Barthes’s text, and see the word “discontinuous.” We carefully study a sentence we love: “The interrupted flow of the new poetic language initiates a discontinuous nature, which is only revealed piecemeal. At the very moment when the withdrawal of functions obscures the relations existing in the world, the object in discourse assumes an exalted place.” It is absolutely no surprise that at this point we have the picture of a luminous green prism sailing in through the dark and taking an exalted place on our retina, a bit like when you’ve been staring too hard at a lamp on the ceiling and then close your eyes! How strange, we think, that a sentence that was written to explain an aspect of modern poetry can have roughly the same effect on our imagination as science fiction. In particular, the phrase A DISCONTINUOUS NATURE, WHICH IS ONLY REVEALED PIECEMEAL makes us imagine a vast darkness and then rectangular blocks of bright green sections of nature, and they are not lined up as such, but appear in flashes. The blocks of bright green and sudden nature appear in flashes. And when the light disappears, they vanish into the dark like spooky, withdrawing creatures. And the phrase AT THE VERY MOMENT WHEN THE WITHDRAWAL OF FUNCTIONS OBSCURES THE RELATIONS EXISTING IN THE WORLD makes us picture “functions” as the switches in a spaceship that has lost contact with the Earth, which has been visible down there as a bluish-white marble until now, but now it’s gone, all is dark, and THE OBJECT IN DISCOURSE ASSUMES AN EXALTED PLACE. A bit like a ballet, where the plot involves nothing more than a ballet dancer suddenly entering the stage, then standing there completely still. Or a small plot in a short text that can be summarized in as many words as the text itself: “The object assumes an exalted place in the discourse.”