Our signatures/names, the improper use of the proper.

 

 

Sponges are objects of some fascination and disgust: ‘ignoble’ in so far as the sponge absorbs all manner of contaminating fluid, but possessed of a cleansing or hygienic power that oddly contradicts such impressions.

 

Thus ‘sponge’ becomes – improbably enough – the very name and locus of that undecidability which Jacques Derrida (God bless him) finds everywhere at work in language.

 

It signifies the deconstruction of limits, the dissolving of clearly-marked concepts and categories into a generalised porosity of substance and idea where boundaries no longer apply.

 

The sponge gathers up all those basic antinomies (proper/improper, self/other, nature/culture, presence/absence) which organise the discourse of classical reason. Itself a substance of physically dubious character – solid or liquid? organic or synthetic? – the sponge occupies a phantasmal zone of tangled crossings and confusions. It thus comes to stand metonymically for everything that tends to disrupt or subvert the proper economy of reference

Yet the  sponge also figures as a pitiful, contemptible object, one whose very nature or mode of existence is to sponge incessantly on everything around it.

 

But at the same time this all-absorbing material has a curious power to transform and preserve that which it soaks up into itself.  So if I sign off a post written by Bosco Redmond, I include the proper name Bosco Redmond but by signing

 

 it off as by me, I exclude, by employing the proper noun Redmond I am employing the sponge mentality, I have mopped up my oppressors, (where I get my ideas from) and the simple signature Bosco Redomond comes across (hopefully) as enfranchised by  ignoble labour.  The sponge Bosco Redmond, is able to resist its oppressor, all those ideas out there where he (Bosco) got his writing from.  The signature is way of munumentalising, enshrining, that it is you.

It was a typical Renaissance trope wherein names are monumentalised – saved from the process of natural attrition – by thus becoming part of a larger textual system. But we are not living in Renaissance times.

 

What the proper name Bosco Redmond gains in attributes from signing as 'author; are identity, individual value,‘title of ownership over the text etc. And so it comes about that the sponge,Bosco Redmond,  most debased and amorphous of materials, always in the end ‘recovers its composure’, reverts to the condition of ‘a free and frank object’ untouched by impurity or change.

 

What redeems the sponge/signature from its ignoble status is the ‘frankness’, the ‘freedom’ and the sheer resilience by which it habitually loses and regains its textural (or textual) composure. ie Bosco Redmond is now freely discussing the pseudo claims of the person called Bosco Redmond,

 

There is an absurdity and an aptness to conceal a potential for meaning in the name 'Bosco Redmond'. it is an improper use of the proper (nouns).

 

Hence the  absurd but incomparable aptness as a figure that denominates the potential for meaning 'Bosco Redmond', concealed within proper names.