One of the curious characteristics of Proust’s insufferable bourgeois prig Mme Verdurin is that she does not laugh; she rather ‘makes a sign that she is laughing’ – it consists of a whole 'symbolical dumb show' of raising the hands to the face, while using the rocking body as a metronome. Why this curious gesture, this substitution of the signifier for the thing signified? A disdain for the body, perhaps, from whose guttural dark interior the laugh issues? A sense of ‘etiquette’, where etiquette requires that all behaviour submit itself to a socially agreed code, to an externalised language of signs from which spontaneous emotion has been expunged? What was once directly lived (laughter) has moved away into its representation, and if it has moved away into a representation, then one of the conditions of a representation is that it is repeatable and/ or exchangeable. It can circulate, it can be copied. It can, if necessary be sold. My laugh, like my death, belongs ineluctably to me; Mme verdurin’s sign of laughter, by contrast, can be anyone’s.
Next a brief anecdote from the Radically Inept Blogspot:
'I remember growing up in North Carolina that a lot of my friends and neighbors would take the time and spend the money to make their cars and motorcycles louder. When I would ask what the purpose of this was, they would tell me it was a demonstration of 'power'. The idea supposedly was that louder was more powerful. But, these cars could not out perform the Mercedez Benz 450 SLs, or various Porches that I had seen around, and these cars were 'quiet'. The loud motorcycles did not out perform the BMWs, and late the Hondas, which were far quieter. But that didn't seem to matter, they'd pay the money and buy glass packed thrusters or other device just to increase the volume with no appeciable increase in performance - louder was cool.'
Not the manifestation of actual power, but a sign of power. The empty signifier is more important, more desired, than the thing itself. Why? A signifier solicits, and is defined only in relation to, the Other. One signifies to and for Others, so that this ‘power’ which they desired was really a desire for Others' desire. But those Others also desired the Other’s desire. And so, the endless circularity of a world of empty signifiers .
One thinks also of Baudrillard writing about tail fins on cars:
'There was a long period during which American cars were adorned by immense tail fins.. the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space – and they were purely a sign, because they bore no direct relation to that victory (indeed if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to make vehicles both heavier and more cumbersome [..] Tail fins were a sign not of real speed but of a sublime, measureless speed. [..] It was the presence of these fins that in our imagination propelled the car, which, thanks to them, seemed to fly along of its own accord'
The fins bear no functional, real relation to speed. They signify speed, according to a certain fantasy, floating around in the social imaginary, of what speed is. Just as, in the previous example, we were dealing with a fantasy of power – not an individual’s fantasy but a collective and buyable fantasy. In short, then, a world where things are dematerialised, turned into signifiers, signifiers of an imaginary world which has replaced the real; and, simultaneously, a world where ideological fantasies - of speed, power etc - are directly materialised in objects and images.