Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero

121 Pages·1987·16.32 MB·Language, Discourse, Society

by  Brian Rotman (auth.)

LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY
General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
Published
Norman Bryson
VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze
Teresa de Lauretis
AUCE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema
Alan Durant
CONDITIONS OF MUSIC
Jane Gallop
FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction
Peter Gidal
UNDERSTANDING BECKETT
Peter Goodrich
LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Paul Hirst
ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY
Nigel Leask
THE POUTICS OF IMAGINATION IN
COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL THOUGHT
Michael Lynn-George
EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND THE ILIAD
Colin MacCabe
JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD
THE TALKING CURE: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language (editor)
Christian Metz
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier
Jeffrey Minson
GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity
of Ethics
Michel Pecheux
LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY
Jean-Michel Rabate
LANGUAGE, SEXUAUTY AND IDEOLOGY IN
EZRA POUND'S CANTOS
Jacqueline Rose
THE CASE OF PETER PAN OR THE IMPOSSIBIUTY
OF CHILDREN'S FICTION
Brian Rotman
SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero
Raymond Tallis
NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean literary Theory
David Trotter
THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in
Modern American, English and Irish Poetry
Forthcoming
Lesly Caldwell
ITAUAN WOMEN BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE
Elizabeth Cowie
TO REPRESENT WOMAN? The Representation of Sexual Differences
in the Visual Media
Alan Durant
SOUNDTRACK AND TALKBACK
Piers Gray
MODERNISM AND THE MODERN
Stephen Heath
THREE ESSAYS ON SUBJECTIVITY
Ian Hunter
AFTER REPRESENTATION: The Relation Between Language
and literature
Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson
ON PORNOGRAPHY
Jeffrey Minson
GENESIS AND AUTHORSHIP
Laura Mulvey
COLLECTED WRITINGS
Denise Riley
'AM I THAT NAME?'
Michael Ryan
POUTICS AND CULTURE
Peter Womack
IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE
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Signifying Nothing
The Semiotics of Zero
Brian Rotman
MACMILlAN
PRESS
© Brian Rotman 1987
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
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First published 1987
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
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Phototypeset in 10/12pt Palatino by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rotman, Brian
Signifying nothing: the semiotics of zero.
-(Language, discourse, society series)
1. Zero (The number) 2. Semiotics
I. Title II. Series
001.51 P99.4.Z4
ISBN 978-0-333-45551-7 ISBN 978-1-349-18689-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18689-1
To the memory of Jill (1937-71) and to Lesley
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Preface ix
0 Opening 1
1 Number, Vision, Money 7
Zero 7
The vanishing point 14
Imaginary money 22
2 Emergence of a Meta-Subject 27
Anteriority of things to signs 27
Closure of zero: algebraic variable 28
Closure of vanishing point: punctum 32
Closure of imaginary money: paper money 46
Naturalising meta-signs into signs 53
3 Nothing: Zero 57
Iconography of '0' 57
Greek-Christian nothing 60
Hebrew nothing 72
King Lear and 'nothing' 78
4 Absence of an Origin 87
Xenomoney 88
The 'text' 97
Bibliography 108
Index 110
vii
List of Illustrations
1 Gregor Reisch: Margarita Philosophica 11
2 Diagram of Brunelleschi's experiment 15
3 Simulation of Brunelleschi's experiment 15
4 Albrecht Durer: The Designer of the Sitting Man 18
5 Jan V. de Vries: Perspective, plate 28 18
6 Jan V. de Vries: Perspective, plate 30 20
7 Jan Vermeer: The Artist in His Studio 34
8 Jan Vermeer: detail of chandelier from The Artist in
His Studio 35
9 Jan van Eyck: detail of mirror from The Arnolfini
Wedding 36
10 Giacomo Vignola: the first 'regola' or the
'construzione legittima' 37
11 Giacomo Vignola: the second 'regola' or distance
point method 38
12 Pieter Saenredam: Interior of Church at St Bavo in
Haarlem, 1636 39
13 Diego Velasquez: Las Meninas 42
14 Scottish twelve pound note, 1716 47
15 English one pound note, 1955 48
16 US dollar bill silver certificate, 1957 50
17 'A shadow is not a substance', 1870 51
18 Milk tickets for babies. 1n Place of Milk', 1870 52
19 German billion mark note, 1923 53
20 Albrecht Durer: St Jerome in His Study 67
21 The Tree of Life 75
22 Volume of futures trading, 1960-84 94
23 Title page of Mathematical Proof of the Creation and
Ordering of the World by Leibniz, 1734 106
viii
Preface
Zero, as readers of this book will discover, is a very interesting, singular and
thought provoking sign. Writing about it has proved at times to be an odd
and somewhat unreal experience.
For one thing, zero is intimately connected to the idea of nothing,
emptiness, the void. To write, read, talk about Nothing, or to believe in it, or
to claim, as Socrates did, to know nothing, is to sit close to the obvious
possibility that one is involved in the ultimate unreality of signifying not
Nothing but no thing. One might think, perhaps, that in the passage of three
millennia since Odysseus first used it to fool the Cyclops, by naming himself
Nobody, the nature of such a one-eyed confusion has become too obvious
to engender any interesting perceptions about Nothing. The hostile
reception given to zero within medieval Europe and the subsequent mis
descriptions and misunderstandings of it, as a mathematical synonym for
nothing, suggests otherwise and indicates that there is more to signifying
nothing than meets the eye.
But, leaving Nothing and its subtleties to one side, what sort of
phenomenon is zero? Does it, outside of elementary arithmetic and
computer binarism, carry any contemporary intellectual or cultural charge?
If titles of artefacts, intentional and proclamatory as they are, are anything to
go by the answer seems to be yes. At one point during the writing of this
book I felt inundated by zeros: a friend gives me a copy of a song Down to
Zero, then a newspaper ad announces the invention and sale of Zero Bonds,
an off-off-Broadway play called Zero is just closing when I arrive in New
York, a novel with the title Woman at Point Zero is published followed oy
another called Less Than Zero, my local video shop offers me The Zero Boys -
what is going on? Is there a zero-phenomenon out there, some actual pre
occupation with an extreme or terminal state, with the condition of being a
cypher, manifested in these titles, or have I merely sensitised myself to any
mention of zero, zeroing in on zero, obsessively foregrounding it out of the
cultural noise? And assuming there is such a phenomenon, am I, producing
this artefact and adding another item to the list, not part of it? Presumably so.
In which case, how? I do not know. And do not, in any worthwhile inter
pretation of the verb, expect to know: for, whatever the phenomenon is, we
(or at least I) seem to be still passing through it, and as Hegel said 'the owl of
Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk'.
In fact, the essay which follows does not address zero's contemporary
significance directly, though it does I think, in a more obliq 11e way, make it
clear why somebody might consider the question worth pursuing. Neither
ix
Preface
X
does it address the history of zero, if by this is meant the tracing of temporal
sequences of causes, effects, influences, filiations, and the like, embodied in
a narrative that is intended to explain the actions and instrumentalities of
historical figures and movements. Rather, the form of the essay is an archeology
(in the sense that Foucault has given to the term) not an historical
account: an inquiry into the nature of zero in terms of its semiotic character
and the systemic, structural, paradigmatic relations it enjoys as a sign among
other signs and signifying patterns. This means that I discuss, as indeed does
Foucault in The Order of Things, patterns of similitude, homology, structural
identity, parallelism, and the like between various different signifying
systems and codes such as mathematics, painting, money, and, to a lesser
extent, written texts. But the overall divisions and phases of semiotic space
which emerge in the present account do not map in any very productive
way onto the epistemes into which Foucault cuts the field of
historical data. In view of this I have, in the interests of clarity, directness and
a certain rhetorical simplicity, followed a path of my own through zero and
avoided comparison with the findings, though obviously not the method, of
his pioneering work.
This book started life as a lecture given originally at Cornell University
and then at various institutions both here and in the United States. It would
be impossible to thank the many audience members for their helpful
comments, responses and criticisms, but among them I owe particular debts
of gratitude to Neil Hertz, Marty Roth, Anthony Kerrigan for their sugges
tions; also to Roy Porter for the usefulness of his comments on an early draft
of the book, and especially to Norman Bryson for his sympathetic
comprehending of two versions of the manuscript and the generous
encouragement that came with it.
London BRIAN ROTMAN