Pataphysics is the science of particulars and imaginary solutions; social-pataphysiology is the social-science of particular citings of the body and their socially imagined (or theorized) figurations. In many instances, these citings may be conflictual, contradictory or unexpected; just as often, these particular citings are so overtly polyvalent that their descriptions are incomprehensible and absurd. However, as pataphysics recognizes, life itself is absurd, and we should not shy away from this fact in terms of the social-body. The absurdity of the body may in actuality spark illuminating insights into those spaces that usually remain excluded or repressed; on the other hand, this spark could fizzle, undoing our totalized sense of body construction. Either way, social-pataphysiology offers a divergent means for reading a body which has already been through the cut-up-machine of hyper-mediated-capital.

But if the body defines itself through its partiability, those parts often gesture toward other collectivities of which they are fragments. Indeed, the ambiguous relationship of body part to whole may itself call into question the [social]s embodiment. The prosthetic limb, for example, might render either the mechanism human or the human machine. Even objects at one remove from the bodys physique, but integral to its development and function, pose a similar question: if the factory workers body becomes productive only in concert with the elaborate machinery she operates, is her identity wholly extricable from that of her machine? What about the television viewers whose bodily habits and contours reflect the transmissions they receive? The body part, inhabiting the slippery boundary between self and other, conditions the parameters of subjectivity itself (Critical Matrix: Body Parts 1997, 1).

On a hot, humid, rainy night in the summer of 91, windshield wipers sloshing the rain from side to side, I wheeled my car into a parking lot of the future. Dialectic cyborgs awaited my arrival stylistically predicting my enchantment. Speedy moments of fragmented and morphological techno-body politics chanted aura(tically), yet silently, at the expectation of my filled desire. These would be images of a culture of catastrophe thrust forward twenty years into a time of revolution and untamed cybernetic assault; a homogeneous world of exclusion haunted by an analog of deconstructed continuity. I ran across the dead black parking lot as huge drops of (acid) rain engulfed my body, wetting me like sex (or foreplay).

Reaching my partial destination, I find myself momentarily absorbed by capital accumulation, and I buy my ticket. The Biggest Movie Of The Summer, I hear someone say. Glancing over-into my mind, I see Arnold Shwartznegger on my memoried screen of televisual persuasion laughing with David Letterman. Suddenly or without warning, my ticket gets a Tear of Eros I am propelled into a darkened room of otherworldly ecstasy. Not wanting to disturb the Habermasian inter-subjective silence of the theater, I quickly find a seat distanced but in collusion with the generalized others sitting in Great Expectation. We collectively watch the preview scene creating a consensus environment of communicative passivity, yielding to the spectacular possibilities our theatrical futures might entail, but all aware that we are here for one liquid-metal-purpose. We want to see Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

With trailers passed and the feature (future) presentation ready to begin, a wild empowered tension builds inside the body apolitic of the audience. Eyes unglued from reality and (re)glued to the screen, we watch the final performative command to throw away our trash, and we are free to be engrossed. A whirlwind of sound and words and images blow across our faces, greeting us with someone more real than real, more insane than insane, more fascinating than fascination. The beautiful buff babe lies strapped to her single bed, surrounded by panoptic walls. Is she drugged or undercover? No one can tell, but soon we can understand the dilemma. Like a panic eroticism, she has become alien, confined, cut off, and fragmented (Habermas 1987, 214). Slowly, we are led to understand that her tongue has been the culprit all along. As she moved her hyoglossus, the direction of her future (and ours) opened and closed simultaneously. Communicatively active, she sealed her fate as an overwrought paranoid schizophrenic body of knowledge. And ours as victims of hyper-technology.

My stomach clinches. I know that with our fair haired beauty strapped (pornographically?) to the bed, humanity is in danger of eradication. What can be done? Nothing, we all must sit and wait, unable to be moved by anything but the communicative images flying through our timeless space. Watching closely (voyeristically), we see the door to her solitary room slip open. A white suited orderly enters the room. He walks across the floor, desire in his eyes (maybe its our desire in his eyes) and prepares the subject for her shot. His passion envelops him, a passion of a consensus oriented inter-subject to get a bit of the other. Closer and closer he moves to the waiting woman (still strapped to her bed), like Sade, he smiles. His face is so close to her face now and then, it happens. Our collective moans ring out into the night beyond the walls of hyper-reality into the collective domain. A culturally collective displeased groan, viscerally experienced by all. Again the truth lies in the tongue. Out of his mouth, the object (the tongue) gleams ugly on our faces. But even more disgusting, he slicks it across her face like a wet wash cloth cleaning off dried vomit, only there is no vomit, just his tongue. We double over with disgust for the wet and wild image pasted on the buff babes face. What perversity, what disgust, what a horror is that body part that touched her face, his tongue should be cut out.

Two Tongues In the futuristic movie Terminator 2, two tongues dance in collusion for the (re)construction of a re-played plot. One tongue represents the movement of discourse, the manner in which we can be both intersubjectively constructed through language and exiled, excluded, and removed due to our language (the normative principle of the tongue). The other tongue can be understood as an object of perversity. As a visual object, the tongue often challenges the normative sensibilities of the social order. One only has to think of the transgressive tonguing of Gene Simmons in the rock band KISS or the displaying of tongues as objects of pleasure (or pleasuring) in pornography. While the pornographic image of the tongue is not necessarily overt, it does suggest a certain sighting of an object of perversity which we rarely see in our everyday lives. The tongue can be perverse (transgressive) and yet, remains immanent to our inter-subjective linguistic communication. However, numerous other sites inhabit the amorphous quality of the tongue, and it would be a mistake to situate the tongue in a bipolar or dialectical space between language and perversity.¹

Democracy desires domination and despises the danger of deconstruction digitally demanded.

Auto-Critique #1

HABERMAS IS A THEORIST WHO MAKES TONGUES. MAKES, IMAGINES, DOMINATES, NORMALIZES. ALL OF HIS TONGUES ARE COMMUNICATIVE TONGUES. THE COMMUNICATIVE TONGUE ISNT VERY LARGE AND IS ALL TALK, PHILOSOPHER TALK, GERMAN SPEAK, CRITICAL HUMAN TALK, NO PUSSY.

ONE NIGHT HABERMAS GAVE THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO TO HIS COMMUNICATIVE TONGUE:

Imagine a world in which reason is by its very nature incarnated in contexts of communicative action and in structures of the lifeworld. To the extent that the plans and actions of different actors are interconnected in historical time and across social space through the use of speech oriented toward mutual agreement, taking yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims, however implicitly, gains a key function in everyday practice (Habermas 1987, 277). Better still, imagine that this world is not at all imaginary, but the real-life-world; the world in which each human must interact. Let me extend this real imagining farther. Suppose that inside our mouths, our tongues move around to give coherence to the vibration of our vocal cords, and in so doing, begin a series of sounds that have a validity principle. Each utterance then acts in connection with others, and those others have the rational (respons)ability to counter, commune, agree, disagree, or challenge the validity of my tongue.

Auto-Critique #2

HABERMAS DIDNT MAKE ANY AVANT GARDE POET TONGUES.

Art has no tongue. All those involved [in art] (including the critic as a technically trained recipient) commit themselves to examining the problems they deal with in terms of an abstract criterion of validity (Habermas 1987, 352). The artist might, on a rare summer night when the moon is waning and the art has already been historically proven to have an effect, create an aesthetic experience. However, this experience can only take place if the aesthetic value is not translated primarily into judgments of taste (Habermas 1987, 353). And only when it is related to life-problems or used on an exploratory basis to illuminate a life-historical situation... [does it enter]...into a language game that is no longer that of art criticism (Habermas 1987, 353). Art itself, being without a tongue, cannot enter the language game until it acquires a life-historical situation. As I see it, the work of art has no historicity of its own; instead, art floats in a self-contained vacuum into which the right person might enter at the perfect time of their life, receive the work, and be transformed. A specific variant of the mode of reception I am talking about is captured...by the heroic process of appropriation [Peter Weiss] depicts in the first volume of his Aesthetic des Wilderstandes.³

Auto-Critique #3

HABERMAS THOUGHT ABOUT MAKING A TONGUE OF PERVERSITY, BUT DECIDED NOT TO.

.....hmmm.....

Auto-Critique #4

HABERMAS WANTED TO MAKE TONGUES OF DEMOCRACY, BUT NOT OF AESTHETICS. IN THE UNITED STATES UPON SEEING THE WORK OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, SENATOR JESSE HELMS PROPOSED AN AMENDMENT TO THE FISCAL YEAR 1990 INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES BILL FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROHIBITING THE USE OF APPROPRIATED FUNDS FOR THE DISSEMINATION, PROMOTION, OR PRODUCTION OF OBSCENE OR INDECENT MATERIALS OR MATERIALS DENIGRATING A PARTICULAR RELIGION. THREE SPECIFIC CATEGORIES OF UNACCEPTABLE MATERIAL FOLLOWED: (1) OBSCENE OR INDECENT MATERIALS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO DEPICTIONS OF SADOMASOCHISM (ALWAYS GET THAT ONE IN FIRST), HOMOEROTICISM, THE EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN, OR INDIVIDUALS ENGAGED IN SEX ACTS; OR (2) MATERIAL WHICH DENIGRATES THE OBJECTS OR BELIEFS OF THE ADHERENTS OF A PARTICULAR RELIGION OR NON-RELIGION; OR (3) MATERIAL WHICH DENIGRATES, DEBASES, OR REVILES A PERSON, GROUP, SEX, HANDICAP, AGE, OR NATIONAL ORIGIN. IN HONOR OF JESSE HELMS, HABERMAS READ GADAMER.

Communicative reason finds its criteria in the argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony.^{Albrecht Wellmer has shown that the harmony of a work of art aesthetic truth, as it is called can by no means be reduced, without further ado, to authenticity or sincerity} (Habermas 1987, 276, 280n3). These criteria work through and for the consensus ideals of democracy, that is to say, they form a basis for the inter-subjective debate over validity claims. In context to the aesthetic-expressive domains of speech, the rational potential of the subject becomes inter-woven with the communicative capacities of other actors who also seek universal validity inside their lifeworld context. For a truthful conception of democracy, we must recognize^imagine rational subjects having a specific concentration of communicative competence, and competence to question validity has its moment of inauguration not in prelinguistic isolated reflection which can be tied to Gadamers hermeneutic-historical conception of tradition, but instead, arises out of a context bound internal interdependence of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld and its material reproductions. The tongue is never actually tied, only dominated (Habermas 1987, 278, 277)..

Domination continues to plague social systems in late capitalism. State intervention grows; the market-place is supported and replaced; capitalism is increasingly organized; instrumental reason and bureaucracy, seeming ever to expand, threaten the public sphere, the sphere in which political life is discussed openly by a reasoning public (Held 1980, 250). However, the reasoning public itself will be that which overthrows this domination. Only through reason can the social world and the individual sphere be freed; as rational beings begin to gain in degrees of competency, making consensus based decisions, their capacity for rationally reconstructing the political sphere will increase. Through rational reconstruction and self-reflection, we can create a materialistically transformed transcendental philosophy in which there would be no need to for censorship, due to the fact the rational actors would not have to challenge structures of domination through artistic nonsense that merely confirms the double error of false sublation (Held 1980, 327 and Habermas 1987, 351).

Auto-Critique #5

HABERMAS MADE A TONGUE THAT SOUNDED EXACTLY LIKE HIMSELF. IF YOU PRESSED A BUTTON ON ONE SIDE OF THE TONGUE THE TONGUE SAID SOMETHING NO ONE COULD UNDERSTAND.

Surrealist artistic practices, not to mention all other avant-garde art, make the same doubled mistake. On the one hand, when the containers of an autonomously developed cultural sphere are shattered, its contents disintegrate. When meaning is desublimated and form destructured, nothing is left; no emancipatory effect is produced. The other error, however, is of more consequence. In the communicative practice of everyday life, cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, expressions, and evaluations must interpenetrate one another. The processes of reaching understanding in the lifeworld require the whole breadth of cultural transmission. Hence a rationalized everyday life could not be redeemed from the rigidity of cultural impoverishment through the forcible opening of one cultural domain, in this case art, and the establishment of a link with one of the specialized complexes of knowledge. At best, such an attempt merely replaces one form of one-sidedness and one abstraction with another.

On the other hand, the consequences of dogmatism and moral rigorism reveal the same error as in the Surrealist project: On the one hand, when the containers of an autonomously developed cultural sphere are excluded (in this case perversity, aesthetics, and madness), its contents haunt. When meaning is over-inflated and form becomes cartography, nothing is enchanting; no emancipatory effect is produced. The other error, however, is of more consequence. In the interaction of everyday tongues, cognitive interpretations, morals expectations, expressions, evaluations, meconnaissance, immoral pleasures, infections, and devaluations must interpenetrate one another. The processes of reaching understanding in the lifeworld require the whole breadth of cultural transmission and silences. Hence a rationalized everyday life could not be redeemed from the rigidity of cultural impoverishment through the forcible opening of one culturally (tongue-like) domain, in this case communicative action, and the establishment of a link with one of the specialized complexes of knowledge. At best, such an attempt merely replaces one form of one-sidedness and one fantasy with another (Habermas 1987, 351).

Auto-Critique #6

HABERMAS WANTED TO MAKE MANY TONGUES.

One of my tongues responded to a conversation in an open letter in the following way:

Your claims for the critical transcendence of an undistorted or communicatively clear ideal speech situation is often juxtaposed to Gadamers condemnation of interpretive human action to the infinite regress of an endless hermeneutic circle. From my (general economic) point of view, neither of these perspectives make reflexive connections between the historical appearance (and disappearance) of seemingly autobiographical subjects of interpretation and the contradictory sacrificial rituals that have made such modern western notions of agency a changing whitemale material possibility. The fact that women, nonwhites and those condemned to being economically exoteric to captials reason have been denied equal historical access to such subjectivity is not a major concern of either your or Gadamers theories. Nevertheless, by ideally including everybody in the network of rational communications your model initially appears superior to Gadamers hermeneutic circularity. But what if your ideal of nonexclusion or nondistortion is just that and ideal; or worse yet, the liberal ideological promise of a restrictive economic form masking the sacrificial violence inherent in all cultural and linguistic practices? (Pfohl 1992, 242-3)

I said, "I am too old to think about such things..."

Auto-Critique #7

WHAT IS IT? HABERMAS WROTE, TO BE AN ARTIST? WHERE IS THE VALUE?

THIS MESSAGE IS A PUBLIC SERVICE PAID FOR BY THE CHASE

MANHATTAN BANK OF NORTH AMERICA⁴

'WE DONT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU ITS NOT THAT WE

WANT YOUR MONEY, YOU HAVE MORE MONEY THAN

US, YOU HAVE MORE EVERYTHING THAN US, YOU

THINK WE WANT YOUR MONEY AND WE WANT TO KILL

YOU, WE DONT

'WE DONT WANT YOUR MONEY ITS SEVEN O'CLOCK

IN THE MORNING WE'RE TOO SCREWED UP WE LIVE ON

THE EDGE WE LIVE ON EVERY EDGE CONCEIVABLE AND

ADD A FEW WE ARE SHIT

'THIS'S NOT ANGER

'THIS IS NOT ANY EMOTION IT IS LIVING AT THE 

EDGE, AT EVERY EDGE, MIGHT AS WELL HATE EVERY-

BODY. WE DONT WANT YOUR MONEY WE WANT

(1) TO BE SCREWED NOW AND THEN

(2) TO GET SOME LOVE IN OUR LIVES

(3) TO HAVE FREE HOSPITALS

(4) TO HAVE THE CONSTANT OPTION OF ONE

UNPOISONED MEAL A DAY WE ARE ALL SCREWED UP 

AND WE HAVE WANTS. WE HAVE OTHER WANTS. LOVE

LOVE LOVE. THAT'S WHY WE ARE SCREWED UP

OH YES

LOVE LEADS TO DEATH.'YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THIS BECAUSE YOU 

DON'T LIVE HOW WE LIVE. ACTUALLY YOU DO, BUT

YOUR DIET PILLS, AND ADULTEROUS SNEAKY ONE-

MINUTE GENITAL DRIBBLES, AND MONEY-FRANTIC-

NESS AND LOVE OF MEDIA AND PSYCHIATRISTS AND 

EVERYTHING THAT IS ANYTHING HAVE SO TAKEN OVER 

YOUR MINDS THAT YOU CAN'T SEE AROUND THEM, SEE

THAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY SCUM, YPICAL NOTHINGS

WHO CANT FIGURE OUT HOW EVEN TO ALLOW BEING

HYSTERICAL AND DESTROYING BUILT-UP ROOMS,

ALWAYS DIFFERENT (WITHOUT HABITS) - JUST LIKE 

YOU. WE ARE ALL ALIKE WE ARE ALL IMACULATELY

CRAZY.

'NOW THAT THIS IS THE NATURE OF REALITY

THIS IS WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN:

(1) I NEED LOTS OF LOVE 

(2) YOU'RE GOING TO GIVE US ALL YOUR MONEY 'CAUSE

YOU HATE YOURSELVES AND 'CAUSE YOU KNOW

(3) ALL POWER SYSTEMS SELF-DESTRUCT WITH THE

ADVENT OF ROBOT CANASTA PLAYERS WHO SHOW THE 

GIRLS WHAT THEY'RE REALLY LIKE. I'M GOING TO SLEEP. GOODNIGHT.'

Auto-Critique #8

WOULD MAKE MORE TONGUES

Some tongues speak to critique and reformulate Habermass ideas. One tongue in particular says that by allowing need interpretations to move to the center of moral discourse and by insisting that inner nature be placed in a utopian perspective, Habermas comes close to subverting this bias of traditional normative philosophy; but his insistence that the standpoint of the generalized other alone represents the moral point of view prevents this move. It is also inadequate to claim that aesthetic-expressive discourse can accommodate the perspective of the concrete other, for relations of solidarity, friendship, and love are not aesthetic but profoundly moral ones. The recognition of the human dignity of the generalized other is just as essential as the acknowledgment of the specificity of the concrete other. Whereas the perspective of the generalized other promises justice, it is in the relation to the concrete other that those ephemeral moments of happiness and solidarity are recovered (Benhabib 1987, 397).

Auto-Critique #9

WOULD MAKE MORE TONGUES

Auto-Critique #10

SINCE THERE WERE NOT ENOUGH TONGUES, HABERMAS BEGAN WRITING LANGUAGE.

Since language is the key distinguishing characteristic of human life, and since it cannot be fully comprehended independently of the process of communication, [I feel] it is particularly important to focus [my] analysis on explicit speech actions. Speech acts take precedence over language itself due to the fact that in communication intersubjective realms of knowledge and reason are created. This is communicative reason, that is to say, reason created through the sharing of discourse of various interlocutors and their evaluations of the validity of that discourse whether it be cognitive, interactive, or expressive. It is obvious...that institutionalized actions do not as a rule fit this model of pure communication. But...we cannot avoid counterfactually proceeding as if the model were really the case on this unavoidable fiction rests the humanity of intercourse among men^{and women, the intercourse among men and men, and the intercourse among women and women (intercourse is great).} The supposition of accountability is a necessary feature of ordinary language communication; without it the nature of ordinary language could not be comprehended (Habermas 1987, 332, 339Auto-Critique #11

SINCE HABERMAS WAS A UTOPIC CRITICAL THEORIST, HE BELIEVED SYNTHESIS WAS PREFERABLE TO TRANSGRESSION OF SYNTHESIS, A SYNTHESIS ACHIEVED ACCORDING TO THE DICTATES OF THE IDEAL SPEECH ACT.

SINCE HE HAD POWER IN THE HUMAN-TONGUE RELATIONSHIP, HIS TONGUES WERE UTOPIC CRITICAL THEORISTS TOO.

Universal pragmatics are the only truthful manner in which to understand subjectivity. Since the subject is communicatively created, we must look to the elementary units of speech (utterances) in an attitude similar to that in which linguistics does the units of language (sentences) (Habermas 1987, 332). Through this scientific methodology, the modernist conception of subject centered reason can finally be done away with and be replaced with the critical conception of communicative centered reason. Subjectivity has its place only in context to other speaking subjects and the discourse in which they all use in the everyday lifeworld. Many subjects are vulnerable to sexual humiliation. Nakedness, stimulation with aphrodisiacs, constant supervision to embarrass subject and prevent relief of masturbation (erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water, thus reducing the incidence of wet dreams to a minimum). Kicks to hypnotize a priest and tell him he is about to consummate a hypostatic union with the Lamb then steer a randy old sheep up his ass (Burroughs 1984, 27).

Auto-Critique #12

THEYRE ALL PERVERSE, HABERMAS THOUGHT. THEIR TONGUES FLESH IS NOW BECOMING...

HABERMAS THOUGHT, IS SPEECH MOVING THROUGH PERVERSITY OR PERVERSITY MOVING THROUGH SPEECH?

HABERMAS THOUGHT, THEY CANT KILL CONSENSUS.

(1) The Problematic Induced by Psychoanalysis It is certain that the principles of the analysis of resistances, however well-founded they may be, have in practice been the occasion of an ever greater mconnaissance of the subject for want of being understood in their relation to the intersubjectivity of speech...This disaffection in the psychoanalytic movement can in fact be ascribed to a confusion of tongues, and in a recent conversation with me, the most representative personality of its present hierarchy made no secret about it (Lacan 1977, 78).

(2) The Validity Confusion Any validity created and/or understood in speech, must inherently be ideological and linguistically constructed. Regardless of any given group of subjects having even the communicative competence to question the validity of any given claim, the validity will be related to a preconstructed conception of what validity means. In any context, power will be functioning, regardless of what interpretation of power one uses, the validity of speech acts will be mediated by power. This mediation then requires a transgression of the basis on which validity itself LIES. 

The communicative tongue which can be understood as preceded by language, i.e. the language with which the tongue uses to communicate always already carries with it an undercurrent of ideological imperatives. When conceptualizing these tongues as communicatively creating knowledge, their (unconscious) historicity gets undercut by the privileged positioning of the historical present and the transcendent expectations of the future. By overvaluing a communicative consensus construction, the communicative tongue becomes nothing more than a flapping protrusion which simulates an interaction which can never be because the tongue must continually be slipping, sliding, forgetting, and tying. However, if one adds slips, et al, into the discourse on the tongue, its communicative nature can no longer relate at all to consensus based rationality nor to the communicative construction of knowledge. The multiple sightings of the tongue then become those spaces that are excluded by the Habermasian conception and over-inflation of communication.

(3) The Problem of the Eye From the space of the hyper-mediated-First-World-Order, the communicative tongue passes through the eye as often as through the mouth and the ear. Imaginal structures of televisual and computer projected life invade the place of discourse creating mimetic spaces that cannot be mediated by language because the mediation has already taken place through the ineffable hyper-reality of the sign. In this context (which often seems to be the most prevalent context), the communicative tongue finds itself pinned down under the weight of the screen. Emancipation through linguistic communication alone has become a retrogressive ideology. 

As simulations gain more strength and seductive power, communication must take into account the object of the viewer. The tongue as a visually perverse image or sexualized icon or sign of a basketball guru multiplies its potential scenes, leaving the communication function as only a minor aspect. Even contexts which seem unrelated to the simulated reality of everyday life, sometimes prove untamed by communicative action, or consensus based understandings of the lifeworld fail to understand how the languaged-lifeworld builds itself on exclusions and visual imagery eventhough certain communications still circulate, often they are textually prefigured. Take for example, the Boston police officer Michael A. Cox who bolted from his unmarked cruiser to chase a murder suspect and subsequently found himself brutally beaten by fellow police officers because he happened to be a black man in plain clothes. Obviously, the officers who beat Michael Cox did not know he was a police officer, but their preconceived imaginal notions of reality preceded spoken rationality, but nevertheless communication continued to move them. The image became the medium of communication and speech ceased to be an issue. 

One might wonder if the previous example could relate to the aesthetic-expressive sphere of the communicative tongue, but still the tongue had no play in the event. Ultimately, communicative tonguing cannot function to overturn domination, when domination occurs (frequently) outside the realm of speech. The ideal speech act might represent a means for emancipation in a world in which all the beings were devoid of all communicative capacities other than speech, but that world cannot exist on the Earth.⁵ Images enter our bodies as signs which distribute meaning, meanings which may be prefigured by language, but no longer rely on language for their validity. Each subsequent generation of humanity has been preceded by sign systems ungrounded linguistically and in this sense enter the lifeworld constructed by both language and visual signs. Under this historical reality, the communicative tongue can only describe a minuscule aspect related to change and interaction. (4) Communication Break-Dance Subtlety and specificity existent in the communicative tongue have begun to spiral in a communication break-dance. No longer are those wonderful days (if they ever were) of the simplicity of communication through spoken word simplicity. In the wild spaces marked by technological rationality and utility, communication transforms into a Mighty-Morphic frenzy. Wickedly dancing through the Internet, information accumulates a knowledge surplus which cannot be communicatively constructed, but only accessed through terminal subjects committed to the (computer) screen. Simultaneously, communication operates at light speed in systematic structures of hyper-capital. Not bound by the slow insignificance that the speed of sound implies, communicative capacities transcend the tongue. Now the spectral visions beamed down from Mars or the end of the solar system interpellate us, a call to extend our vision beyond the meandering of the communicative tongue. 

On the other hand, the communicative capacities of First World humanity have become super-personal. While our vision and communication (with computers) has reached the outer-limits, our own interpersonal discourse has also altered dramatically. Space has at one and the same time extended and condensed. Communication by transmission has taken precedence over the communicative tongue. Distance becomes an obstacle only to touch, but our capacities to commune across those distances have grown infinitely. However, the communicative tongue no longer represents a vital aspect to those transmissions. Like Derrida suggests, By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general...no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier is beginning to go beyond the extension of language. In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language (Derrida 1976, 6-7).

Spaces for the written word have broken open through e-mail, fax machines, Web pages, privileging the written word in ways it could never have been privileged before. However, the communicative tongue still finds use through the telephone, but this position only deconstructs ideological systems which suggest a consensus based communicative orientation. Eventhough the basic rules of speech might remain similar, their functional capacity directed toward a form of validity are inherently usurped. Any relation which dissects from itself the material realities of space, also suffers a further dissection of rules. Telephone technology achieves a selective means of interaction in which any subject's relation to the other undoes most sensibilities of validity. Communicative tongues find themselves freed from the restrictive economy driven by the rules of intersubjective interaction. Spoken interaction which was once closely related to what we could call the aura of the other, or their panoptic eyes, has broken free from its chains. This freedom allows for endless simulations and dissimulations which essentially disallow most tests of validity. Cyber-sex and phone-sex both illustrate the manner in which this phenomenon flows. The rapidity with which identities alter, mutate, and distance in cyber-space and phone-sex/chat-lines suggests that the implications of intersubjective reality and the communicative tongue as a valid principle of communication have slipped into an entirely Other figuration. Bracketing off for the moment that the tongue does not even enter cyber-space, I will treat cyber-sex and phone-sex as structurally similar constructions. Cyber-phone-sex survives off the capacities of the absolutely non-valid to infer reality more profoundly and in a more embodied manner than validity. Those participating in cyber-sex often discover, after getting off that their experience (often a lesbian experience) was actually a homosexual male experience clothed under the auspices of lesbianism.^{This is not to suggest that women do not have cyber-sex; however, there does seem to be a tendency for men to pose as women in order to have a lesbian experience.} Or take for example the movie Short Cuts in which a mother of two changes her babys diapers and talks into the telephone (her job being that of verbally counterfeit desire) playing the part of the whore whose only purpose is to get her customer off. She lives simultaneously in the material reality of mothering and the communicative reality of perversity. In these contexts, the communicative tongue no longer communicates anything related to a consensus based reality, but commits itself to perpetuate simulated communication in a real way. The communicative tongue (speech) may still function, but it cannot carry with it validity claims because the nature of communication has become also that of simulation.

Acker, Kathy. (1978). Blood and Guts in High School. New York : Grove Press.

Becker, Carol. (Ed.), (1994). The Subversive Imagination : artists, society, and responsibility. New York : Routledge.

Critical Matrix: Body Parts. (1997). Vol. 11, p. 1. 

Derrida, Jacques. (1976). Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Burroughs, William S. (1984). Naked Lunch. New York : Grove Press. 

Habermas, Jurgen. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity : twelve lectures. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 

Held, David. (1980). Introduction to Critical Theory : Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley : University of California Press. 

Lacan, Jacques. (1977). Ecrits : a selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York : Norton. 

Pfohl, Stephen J. (1992). Death at the Parasite Cafe : social science (fictions) and the postmodern. New York : St. Martin's Press.

^{2 This subtitle, and the subsiquent subtitles in all capital letters have been borrowed from Kathy Ackers Dead Doll Prophecy in The Subversive Imgination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility. As an example of this 'borrowing,' Acker's original subheading reads as follows:}

^{"CAPITOL IS AN ARTIST WHO MAKES DOLLS. MAKES, DAMAGES, TRANSFORMS, SMASHES. ONE OF HER DOLLS IS A WRITER DOLL. THE WRITER DOLL ISN'T VERY LARGE AND IS ALL HAIR, HORSE HAIR, RAT FUR, DIRTY HUMAN HAIR, PUSSY.}

^{ONE NIGHT CAPITOL GAVE THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO TO HER WRITER DOLL:" (p. 20).}

^{3 For a more comprehensive understanding of my views, see Critical Theory, p. 353.}

^{4 Blood and Guts in High School, p. 121-2}

^{5 Habermas might be better off naming his project Extraterestrial Pragmatics.}