Bernard Stiegler, in Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, argues that the question of culture is at the heart of economy, industry, and politics. In this book, he also stresses that philosophers like Jacques Rancière, one of the most preeminent representatives of contemporary aesthetic theory in art, strangely overlooked the dimension of sensibility in the industrial era, which was bombarded by marketing, targeting collective and individual cultural singularities as their victims. In this line of events, creativity, sensibility, and aesthetics have been subjected to the conditioning of the post-industrial epoch and the cataclysm of a new condition of labour, new symbolic representations, and the advent of marketing.
Today, the urge for a symbolic revolution shakes the veneer of normality and crushing inaction, carving out a place for a long-staging debate on cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic capitalism: how its indelibly political and economic effects shape a whole host of other factors, mental, intellectual, affective, as well as our aesthetic capacities. This process, framed by Stiegler as misère symbolique, or symbolic misery, leads to a waning in participating in the production of symbols, producing a symbolic collapse that has plunged people into a want for words and an unprecedented poverty of desire.
In alignment with today’s society, it is no wonder that this phenomenon is particularly present in the film and TV series industry, where publicity, streaming platforms, brands, and virtual economic transactions are the new expressions of cultural hegemony. This intricate process, as an integral part of our cultural industry, provides the symbolic and linguistic guidance, and has derailed an abstruse linguistic system, which was once believed to be part of a quintessential experimental community or a linguistically friendly atmosphere where a shared aesthetic experience was the quiddity of a new communal practice.
This marks the commonality of interest between those politically and aesthetically engaged and those who are just fluctuating – floating on a space of depoliticized chains of words. Ana Kornbluh, in her book Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, sets out to deconstruct the fanciful stories concocted about the complex and misleading equation of nurturing inclusion and generating openness to diversity. To this, I would add another caveat to this idea and frame the nexus between the speed of flow of information and the algorithmicized consciousness as the precipitants of generalized misinterpretation: namely, the new liberal spectrum of the internet regulation rapidly inputs information available without need for a meticulous long reading, or a close-knit relationship with the symbolic world of a video or a text.
Two other combinations of words caught my eye while navigating her text: “a torrent of images” wrecking, and “a deluge of images”, without context, words, without meaning. Should we frame this movement as a net democratizing effect, as Ana Kornbluh suggests, or should we say this is rather a domino effect that has eaten away at our memory, cognition, and affection? This is, to some degree, a peculiarity of our contemporary times, particularly as experienced in a modern-day society, fostering diversity, circulation of ideas, multiplicity, heterogeneity, but still unwilling to symbolically, linguistically, and politically act on the root cause of its limited reservoir of ideas. Given the scanty nature of language, our conception of understanding of the commonwealth of aesthetic and language is conflated with misunderstanding, lacking clarity, transparency, heterogeneity, presence, and immediacy.
On this note, Stiegler was an ardent believer that aesthetics had conditionally collapsed, while our symbolic experience was in shambles. As an example, 2002 was the year that encapsulated a moment when he sensed that people were engaging in acts stripped of intentional meaning: in France, voting for a nationalist, far-right party. For Stiegler, this was the reaffirmation not only that politics remained a deeply polarising issue within the country, but also the realisation that a younger generation had no feeling for what had happened in the country in the past years, as they felt no longer part of that society.
These young voters inhabit a zone that is no longer a world; it is aesthetically disengaged. In short, the year 2002 was a politico-aesthetic catastrophe: everyone was thrown into symbolic misery, which was no longer tied to socio-economic factors. Indeed, this was the havoc wrought by an aesthetic war governed by hegemonic rules of the market, the industry, situational political power, and the media. Blurred boundaries and convoluted footage of reality are part of the aesthetic, linguistic, and symbolic act of our modern-day society, encompassing history, art, symbols, and language.
In the last few decades, the paradoxical conditions of language and meaning have themselves been fundamentally transformed, so much so that these concepts are no longer interpretable using standard terminologies. Such ideas presuppose both the re-orientation and re-interpretation of their theoretical scope, which lays bare the essential and fundamental instability of concepts that enables us to envision a future where not only languages are evolving and changing, but so are we.
This process speaks volumes about the interplay between mutability, contingency, and complementarity at the very heart of language’s foundation. I would argue, however, that our approach to language shifts by the time we undergo a process of reassembling the pieces of a mosaic, which is an integral part of our understanding of language theory. Both symbolic transactions and decoding are the root cause of language production. This process, nonetheless, cannot be grasped as long as we think about it without taking the problem of aesthetics into consideration.
In this realm, aesthetic is, by far, one of the most important words whenever we think about language, namely because language is such a variable and flexible construct, whose intricate significations and arbitrary norms may vary over time – I would grudgingly admit this in a more academic environment, but context is a vital engineering of language machinery.
The question of language, by and large, is a question of aesthetics. Stiegler – and it would be relevant to recall his post-Derridian verve – was one of the most fertile minds since the boom of theorists in the 1960s. He once wrote that the question of aesthetics, in which aisthesis means sensory perception, is therefore that of feeling and sensibility in general. Honing in on the question of aesthetics equates with plunging into the question of politics in an appeal to the art world to recover a keen understanding of the nexus between art form and politics. Likewise, for him, the political world’s abandonment of the question of aesthetics to the culture industry is also a catastrophe.
Paramount for these debates, Stiegler foregrounds the pressing need for openness to the sensibility of the other, where, in sum, the political status of life lies. He argues, however, that politics is grounded in the relation to the other in a “feeling-together.” Politics resided in the relationship between life and singularity. In what ways can we live together, stand by each other, and stand together, yet securing our singularity, in-dividuation? Still, he argues that a political community is a community of feeling, bordering the Aristotelian idea of “loving ourselves is loving together things other than ourselves.”
Despite the bleak scenario, under no circumstances should we give up entertainment in favour of meditating on complex and heated topics extracted from a TV series. While streaming platforms and cultural industry impart a property-maintaining logic and system – a language, a nation, an ethnic group, a voice, an identity – by commodifying political experience and reiterating the establishment in the name of publicity, marketing, and wealth, an almost deconstructionist momentum takes place at the core of cultural productions, inside the instability and innate contradictions of their motifs.
There’s another path for such a communal aesthetic experience in terms of language and art, which may play a crucial role in dispelling myths and dismantling the fractured language system we inherit. For political reasons, we are often not given the tools or opportunities to further historicize its intricate parts and events. This tension between the visible and the historically apprehensible is at the core of Richard Eboah’s intervention in From Hackney with Love: an Intimate History of Gentrification.
Despite Eboah’s anthropological and sociological approach to urbanisation, his book is not tied to anthropology per se, but it becomes the site of a fortuitous intersection between different realms of knowledge, panning over the sordid underbelly of modern urban society within communities across London. As his gaze sweeps through the inner parts of the city, laying bare the unsavoury traces of gentrification and its indelible marks, the urban landscape unfolds as a semiotic intervention in which aesthetics forges a political relationship between people and their sense of belonging in urban space.
The apparent lack of mediation and the pressing issues surrounding the circulation and production of signs are confronted by the sheer fact that the city has a constellation of signs. Yet these signs and aesthetics are inextricably bound to material conditions: a fragile neoliberal financial and political order, entrenched institutional violence, and the uneven distribution of social spaces. We can also sense a political rationale behind this urban site of signs: inequality, racist and classicist discourses, and disparities intensified by Thatcherism and its enduring political agenda.
The debate he promotes around the increased process of industrialization in the East End is not physically or materially illustrated, as we do not see these ideas, but we linguistically and aesthetically apprehend their existence by the deconstruction of the common-sense understanding of the relationship between visible and invisible.
Richard Eboah’s work offers a primer on how urbanism, anthropology, semiotics, and aesthetics coexist at the same crossroads of social and political activism. When language and aesthetics lose momentum, our perspectives and analyses are impoverished, deprived of the resources needed to apprehend the intricacies of a broader and pernicious project: persuading communities to jettison their narratives, their language, and their heritage in favour of a promised land advanced by a reactionary neoliberal agenda. Recognising the layered historical movement at the core of Hackney and the complexities around urban spaces, he also explores the intangible impact that Margaret Thatcher’s policies and ideologies have had on the borough and the indelible mark left by the sanctions to modernise the community in the 1990s.
Hackney, a district in East London, symbolises the agora, where signs and languages are unremittingly scattered across diasporic urban spaces. The borough emerged as the spatial materiality and symbolic metaphor of Thatcher’s policy insignia. The political and ideological discourse in the intelligible realm gets imprinted on the materiality of London’s borough. This discursive symbiosis between signs and materiality applies to the physical geometries of architectural spaces, social and everyday behaviours of communities, and, most importantly, to a greater degree, the bifurcated concept of language, identity, and communities.
Eboah’s elaborate talk revolves around the tangled web of problems concerning the dramatic social and cultural economic transformation of Hackney, which is, without a shadow of doubt, an aesthetic transformation in a despolitized post-Thatcherian cultural and social context. It was very much a middle-class regeneration, very unlike the one people today are familiar with. What has happened to Hackney is a process in which middle-class communities that once existed 200 years ago are suddenly back and taking over the borough.
From a symbolic and architectural standpoint, He pinpoints that Hackney used to be known for its middle-class suburb in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a place for the emerging capitalist to shelter from the working-class, impoverished environments in the East End. In short, the universe of signs and symbols collides at the crossroads of political and urban refurbishment. In The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, edited by Mark Gottdiener and Alexandros Lagapoulos, the collection of essays presents one shared aspect: the non-physiological part of perception, conception, scientific modes of discourses, as well as value systems, prompting semiotics to overlap with sociology, social anthropology, and post-structuralism debates.
The socially and politically constituted word views of material and physiological spaces are also the vehicle of signification, so much so that a symbolic representation involves the work of signs and the conception of space – London, England, and the Caribbean diaspora communities – merge with the operations of traditional social sciences.
This unnerving rumpus happening in the place of significance gains new layers with Jacques Derrida, where the angelic theorist poses the question on the name Khora, from Plato’s Timaeus, as a third space, an aporia that means “to receive at all”. Khora revamps the idea of a single material space, without succumbing to the positivist perspective of a social environment that tends to overlook its conditions of possibility for language, cultural exchange, and unfathomable experiences. The intersection between language, semiotics, and spaces lies outside the tangible, material, and buildable that are of no less interest to theorists, urban specialists, semioticians, or architects. To Richard Coyne, the advent of the digital world and the massive influx of information made people more aware of “ other spaces”.
It is no wonder that regional disparities, grounded in successive rounds of uneven development in London, such as gentrification and capitalism, are erratic geographic demarcation. The illusion of social democracy has endorsed the fallacy of multiple opportunities for all people from every social background, but reality played out differently, and as a dire consequence, the aftermath of this process is the insertion of contrasting socio-economic territories and social formations supported by class inequalities. Resources are unevenly distributed and, if this is the common pattern, Britain is nevertheless a special case in the European context, witnessing increasing income gaps among regions, communities, and people.
These disparities and asymmetries are evident in the cultural production in the country. It is important to position language in relation to the hustle and bustle of social urban life, particularly in the sense that music, literature, and architecture are fully ascribed to a sort of thinking that looms large in the landscape of language. On a theoretical note, language, per se, within our context, is rooted in the post-structuralist problematic of the play between signifier and signified, and its dalliance with other thinkers’ views of the role of aesthetics, language, and signs in the materialisation of our modern reality.
This circulation of signs, spaces, and images orbits around a semiotic apparatus that takes a swipe at the known world and its immanent representation of traditions, mores, conservation, transparency, intransitivity, and stagnation. Slowthai, a British rapper, seems to have grasped this in a very shrewd manner, creating access to the landscape of words.
His lyrics may strike up a dialogue with Richard’s views on urban space, and He takes this semiotically architectural approach to another level. He sees music as a den of signs urging to gain different shapes in a chain of referentiality. Contemporary life in Britain can only be signified through a hermeneutic that encompasses the engagement with the mores and social expectations concerning social class, gender, and race as a standardized performance. This engagement with the norms, values, and views of a certain community involves laying bare truths that are somehow neither fixed nor immutable. Slowthai’s song both rebuilds the urban space and carves out space for a political and subjective refurbishment, being a catalyst for the creation of an invigorating and political interpretive community.
In his song Nothing Great About Britain, British rapper Slowthai fully comprehends the role of aesthetics and the play of signs, reminding us of the inner political verve in an aesthetic experience. The relations between signs help us better visualise how language has captured an extreme moment in the United Kingdom, but it also serves as a great language module to see how reality is made of language:
“I said there’s nothing great about the place we live in
Nothing great about Britain
(Nothing great about Britain)
Sip a cup of tea whilst we’re spittin’
There’s nothing great about Britain
Bottle of Bucky in Buckingham Palace
There’s coppers from Scotland all the way down to Dagenham
Waving a black cab
Munchin’ a Fab
Had to skip the flights, I ain’t chasing the dragon
You look like death warmed up
She ain’t a spice, just a korma
I ain’t Dizzee, I’m just a boy in a corner”
While sipping a bottle of tonic wine, which is strongly associated with British and Irish working-class culture, the narrator zooms out to the tragicomic social reality, waving at a black cab and being chased by the police due to his clear working-class appearance. However, this part of the humdrum life in Britain, where the nonsensical social inequality becomes the quiddity of life, shows that there is nothing exceptional or great about the place they love, even though they are on the prowl, watching the last social pillars of a society falling apart.
The language undoubtedly sets the tone of the song, deploying words that imbue it with a sense of disillusionment, a lack of optimism about the future, and a feeling of exclusion from the establishment and the status quo. In essence, this lyricist works as a sketcher, creating a social painting without needing to provide an exhaustive sociological analysis of the country through his highly surrealist lines.
This is the process that Timothy Bewes, in his work Free Indirect: The Novel in a Post-Fictional Age, named after “instantiation”. In other words, Slowtha’s song brings about an inextricable interconnection between the language and the socio-economic underpinnings, suggesting a logic where the work’s meaning is determinable even without being mentioned or specified by the work itself. The form of the song – just as it is with fiction and novels – includes a connective element that is minimally organized, allowing readers to interpret what is being expressed through the process of instantiation.
Fluid, smooth, and steady progress is being deputised by the rapid circulation of signs. The abandonment of the question of language is the abandonment of the question of aesthetics, which, in turn, equates to the abandonment of mediation in the name of immediacy. To Anna, immediacy, as the end of circulation, flow, gaps, instability, and unpredictability, is akin to the deluge without staunchness, or a stylized flood of intense immanence in aesthetics. The price for jettisoning the interplay of language, signs, and their symbolic chains, is elemental calamity besides immediacy as cultural style: the lack of dexterity to take up a discerning medium. The example of painting may strike a chord with this sentiment and the aggro of instantiation and immediation.
Art frames the medium in a juxtaposed relationship with mediation, as a painting, for instance, takes certain distance from the ordinary and the mundane functionality of languages and symbols, recalibrating the discussion and re-orienting the message behind the art: despite its inefficacy and impenetrability to communicate a direct and transparent message, the errantry of language, beholding its impossibility, may spark though and rerouted commonsense. However, Anna’s assumption is that art should not renounce its own project of mediation, once immediacy should not crush mediation, particularly because its seismic effect lies in the commonality between aesthetic and varied social and cultural dynamics at the heart of capitalist production. Mediation imparts a rumbustiously creative movement against a symbolic misery ignited by transcendental concepts such as presence, immediacy, and transparency.
What is the problem with immediacy? In rough, Anna suggests that immediacy quashes and destroys the social process of making representation, connections, and meaning. Instead of propagating immediacy as a cultural style, theorists should be aware of the aesthetic and symbolic programme of immediacy, where it palpates the seams of its own appearing, and this is where the logic of metaphysics of presence pools and becomes the anchor of symbolic processes.
Art can be seen as reliant on immediacy, which, in the context of capitalism, according to Anna Kornbluh, stylizes and intensifies the faster circulation of images, creating a deluge of images without context and that terminate in circuitous preemptive discourse instantiated and stylized by a merry-go-round of words. Contrary to this enduring work of immediatism, transparency, and transcendental presence, it’s paramount that our task becomes nothing but a reorientation amid all this swirl, as she advocates. Akin to the cultural and linguistic internal economy of Slowthai’s lyrics, language in the form of art ought to defamiliarize and reconceptualise the symbolic mediation in order to wage a battle against the tendency, and signals a fruitful conversation with Ana Kornbluh and Derrida to crush immediate presence. As Anna perfectly states: “Artform and theory alike demand the slow and uncertain work of making sense, countering immediacy with mediation.”
The form of what is being said through language refers to an idea whose presence is signaled in the work without being clearly or explicitly articulated – the dilapidated and socioeconomically deteriorated country, struggling with poverty, a housing crisis, and widespread mass immigration, is instantiated by the presence of mischaracterized words that help readers or listeners decode the paradoxical form of referentiality expressed through ‘nothing great about Britain,’ ‘Bottle of Bucky in Buckingham Palace,’ ‘sip a cup of tea while we’re spitting,’ ‘waving a black cab,’ and ‘I’m just a boy in the corner.’ There is a nonreferentiality that could be seen as a greater form of referentiality, and we are able to interpret the social types instantiated by the work.
Slowthai defamiliarizes traditional footage of Britain by squeezing other elements into the chain of symbols and signs. The circulation of signifiers is not deemed the final destination of meaning, which, to some extent, is the very process of poetry and the work of poetic language in the defamiliarization of the symbolic. Blurred circulation directs the flow of content through a process of widening the gap and creating distance between meaning and its layered and abstruse seam of transcendental meaning.
In Grammatology, Jacques Derrida’s gaze pans over crucial elements concerning this debate. We are reminded of the importance of recognising that communication in language involves signs that operate through difference in a variety of circumstances. Speech depends on the circulation of signifier; but rather than simply understanding this circulation as a final destination of meaning, in terms of transparency and intelligibility, this work of language has to touch on the course of what is believed to be the immediate access to meaning, pushing concepts to the limit until their contingency, impermanence and contradictions are brought to the surface: authenticity, original meaning, origins, fundamentals, essentials and the transcendence of subjectivity need defamiliarization and reconceptualization through the historicization of their genealogy.
I think it is vital to stress the importance of historicising language and its symbolic stream, its flow and dynamic, before deconstructing its inherently “Western” traces and its “imperialised” position in relation to sounds, dialects, appropriacy, and notions of standard. It is common sense that much of our view on language is primarily structured within a violent, racist, xenophobic, and colonising superstructure, riddled with oppositional terms aimed at eating away at language’s history and excluding those who are deemed unwelcome within the language system. The vehicle for this endorsement of language standardisation is, albeit fragmentarily, outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Structural Anthropology.
The anthropologist flawlessly identified the gist of the problem, drawing on Saussure’s discussion of the play of the sign, and presented the idea of binary differences, such as clean and unclean, male and female, in and out, and so forth. These are the basic distinctions embedded in modern societies, with their own regional applicability in shaping social positions, urban spaces, and language patterns.
When a speaker makes an utterance, for instance, a statement that endorses a central force or the core of a language as a standard, the origin of this idea lies in the trace left by chains of signification. Meaning and foundation are constantly in play and flux, and the very notion of a “core” of language depends on other conditions in order to establish itself as standard. This is why rigid and absolute statements are uttered: they are attempts to reinforce dependence on conditions that might override the inherent uncertainty and unpredictability of meaning.
This reminds me of what Richard Coyne states in his text on Derrida and architecture: it is important to shift the discussion – and Derrida did – from either certainty or despair toward the necessity of keeping the conversation alive, of keeping language in motion rather than trapping it within an unwieldy edifice of fixed definitions. In this respect, I truly see in Slowthai’s song a similar driving force found in a poem. To some extent, poetry may function as entertainment, but one of its most valuable and powerful forces lies in the possibility of putting you in touch with human intricacies and language pitfalls in a very specific way.
While being captivated and thrilled by the architectural passages of a poem, we are afforded the opportunity to navigate the turbulent waters of language through its gaps, intervals, and inaccuracies – chiefly because language is placed in a context of strangeness and complete disharmony, where the reader comes to terms with the impossibility of the immediate presence of meaning. All pillars and foundations crumble in the presence of language, and its parts are disassembled and in complete disarray in relation to its mundane and recurrent meaning outside of poetry.
In essence, this is the process we undergo when voicing feelings through language and naively believing this is enough to get our message across, as if we were in the presence of permanent meaning. On the contrary, meaning and language are, first and foremost, contingent and unpredictable, and this is why we are constantly weathering storms in the context of vulnerabilities and pitfalls of signification.
In this line of thinking, acknowledging the role language plays in the way we convey our emotions is pivotal, especially when we set out to dissect the architecture of a language as a form of social affiliation, characterized by heterogeneous interpolations and ambivalence. The advent of language lies in the impossible unity of a community as a coherent whole, and without such an understanding of the community embodied in this concept, it would be difficult to glean the effervescent variety of language that may emerge from interactions.
To Derrida, every noun he encountered in a poem by Mallarmé was not a word with an immediate meaning in presence; rather, it was an absence of signification, especially if it was a noun. In essence, the noun, the idea itself, is absent: nothing is simply named when a noun is invoked. It opens up all the windows to polysemy and ambiguity, which are integral parts of a word and the alchemy of a verb. A simple declaration of a name does not preserve the power of a word that makes the existence of the thing both appear and disappear upon being declared.
The identity of entire words disappears in a game that seems to leave them intact, but they are not. The production or annihilation of the thing through the name, by the declaration of a word, is not achieved with ease. This is very much the waning of an idea of the immediate presence of meaning. The word itself, isolated on its island, is no longer the primary element of language, and there is no such thing as a pacified harmony between a vocable and its meaning.
The intersection between language, aesthetics, mediation, symbol, and place resonates with the rotating process of language being reshaped and reoriented by space and signs, and space being reinvented and seismically affected by language and symbolic work. This process operates as a tiny stopper against symbolic misery. Language isn’t confined to the innocuous idea of a mere vehicle for transporting representations of ideas and signs.
Languages, indeed, are produced in a rumbustious atmosphere where conflict, harmony, symbiosis, love, and hatred among cultures generate something new and allow speakers to envision a less gloomy future. What lies at the heart of this process is the unremitting disarray and disharmony that multilingualism generates in us: the strangeness and forgiveness of any given language, because languages are not a linear circuit of words, but a deluge of images overflowing our imagination.
Rather than being so fixated on the idea of linearity and homogeneity, Derrida, Stiegler, and Anna laid bare the fractured and ephemeral logic at the heart of language, pinpointing the extent to which their reservoir of elements was encircled by different micro-geographies and conflicting heritages.
Anna Kornbluh terminates in the very idea that a book or a cultural product can make very little intervention in both material conditions and ideological formations of too late capitalism, but the very aim of working words and throwing the symbolic chain of signs of immediacy, presence, transparency and binary oppositions into disarray is to formulate new concepts that can work as tiny stoppers against the tide of immediacy, which in our case against the tide of mischievous cultural constructions that orient, guide and shape language in the ebb and flow of cultural, economic and political contexts.
References
Bewes, Timothy. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Post-fictional Age, London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Coyne, Richard. Derrida for Architects, London: Routledge, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Derrida, Jacques. On the Name, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Eboah, Richard. From Hackney with Love: An Intimate History of Gentrification, London: Biteback, 2025.
Gottdiener, Mark, and Lagapoulos, Alexandros Ph. (Eds). The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy, or the Style of Too-late Capitalism, London: Verso, 2024.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic, 1963.
Slowthai. Nothing Great about Britain, London: Polydor, 2019.
Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
This text is a short, experimental version of a postdoctoral project I have been developing, with the clear intention of expanding it into a book entitled Architecture, Film, Music, and Literature as Tiny Stoppers Against Symbolic Misery.
Felicio Dias has been active in academia for the past fifteen years, but has been working as an independent researcher for the past two years. He holds a degree in Linguistics, a master’s degree in Literary Theory, and a PhD in Theory and Literary Historiography. His research interests span language, architecture, and deconstruction. He has written on the intersections between language, urban space, and diasporic communities in London.
Blue Labyrinths 