‘…the subject, doubled (or imagining himself to be doubled), sometime manages to sign his image-system’.[1]

Two parts don’t make a whole, they randomly come together, and just as soon may part. Their incongruity borne of a mutual alterity, each a displaced copy of an other, a feigned concurrence. Yet (when is ‘yet’ ever ‘here’?), there is a fit that seems ‘natural’, appropriate in a formally functional kind of way; the manner in which parts on a machine always signify their role via their relationship with adjoining parts (chains of signification).

The two parts here have an unnatural fit, they are a nominal fit, an imagined  doubling without reflection. Then, are they not copies? They are copies without originals, copies that have been signed into a different image-system, and thus doubled at the service of his notion that a pairing (signifer and signified) need not be duplication or replication.

Somehow doubling and duplication have become confused, but rather he thinks confounded. For there is little value in making signs so metonymically predictable, that after all is what we expect from conventional understanding. Confounding the functionality of the sign, allowing it to double itself into an unverifiable copy, and then to pair with another copy enacts a secondary alignment that could be read as a metaphor for a subjective mythology; a metalinguistic trope devised to incite the reader to write the text.

Yet (again), I fear the writer of this text has been forewarned and thus already doubled. How to calibrate the semiotic process when it has been made transparent? The writer is self-conscious now and doubled as he is himself. A doubled text is a paring on behalf of the writer, an unlikely relation to two parts, but not a replication or a copy.

Thus, resin, lead, 2010

[See casting]