The Semiotic Square

The basic structure

Note 901 lays out a semiotic square applied to aesthetic positioning:

The move is diagnostic: "As we withdrew ourselves from the endless struggle for the New and the Different, a deeper underlying problem was exposed. Namely, the question of how to recognize, or even establish, Relevance." The square doesn't resolve into a preferred position — it maps the logical space of positions, including the negations that are usually invisible.

The artwork Loin de moi (the title means "far from me") is linked directly to this note — possibly the sculpture enacts a position on this map: neither identifying with the object nor disavowing it, but at a studied distance.

The parallel matrix in note 1010

Note 1010 applies the same logical structure to artistic practice itself:

Where N = a fixed problem/approach, ∞ = endless variation:

• N → ∞: same limited set of problems, indefinite approaches — "obsession is gratifying, gradually they get closer to the essence"
• ∞ → N: ever-changing circumstances, same approach — mannerism, "never change a winning team"
• ∞ → ∞: everything different — hard to pinpoint; either incoherent or homo universalis
• N → N: same problem, same approach — "most unfortunate," but most visible in a crowd

This is the semiotic square re-applied from the realm of cultural positioning (what the work is in relation to) to the question of practice itself (how the artist operates).

Non-dialectical simultaneity (3004)

Note 3004 (Strategies, 2010/2011) provides the most direct statement of the epistemological condition that makes the semiotic square useful:

"All takes place at the same time, non-dialectically"

The dialectical model is sequential — each position supersedes the previous one, the New defeats the Old, the Different displaces the Same. The semiotic square refuses this: it maps all four positions (and their negations) as simultaneously available, none privileged, none superseded. This is not a failure to reach resolution — it is a structural claim about the actual topology of cultural positions. Nothing is past; everything coexists.

Authenticity as a position on the square (3004)

"After all, authenticity can be thought of as style too" (→ 3004)

Authenticity is conventionally the exception to the square: not a position to be occupied but the ground from which positions are occupied, the bedrock beneath stylistic choice. The Strategies line collapses this exception. If authenticity is also style, it is also a cell on the square — occupying, typically, the "Different" or "Not-Same" position, presenting itself as irreducibly individual while being as available to imitation as any other position.

This is the deepest form of the square's anti-essentialism: even the gesture of refusing to be located on the square is a locatable gesture.

The square as a recurring formal tool

The repetition of this structure across different domains — aesthetics, practice, and via 909 the visual representation of semiotic squares as such — suggests it is doing recurring philosophical work. It allows mapping logical space without claiming to occupy a privileged position within it. It is anti-programmatic: the square doesn't prescribe a position, it names all positions including the ones defined negatively.

The most interesting positions in the square are always the negations: "Not New" (used, second-hand), "Not Different" (insisting, sceptical). These don't simply collapse into Old or Same — they occupy a distinct logical slot that has no simple cultural name.

Connection to assemblage identity

The semiotic square's refusal to reduce to a single term resonates with the assemblage theory in assemblage identity: both resist the logic of general categories and essential properties in favor of a topology of relations and positions.

See also

• Assemblage Identity — shared resistance to essentialism; topology of relations over essential properties
• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Quantizer's "permanence of change" is analyzed there as a challenge to the square's positional logic; you cannot locate Quantizer as New or Old
• Works Overview — Recursive Intervention (recursion made architectural) and Loin de moi (912) as works that enact positions on the square

Aesthetic force and its decade-scale decay (857)

Note 857 adds a historical dimension to the temporal problem the square diagnoses:

"some things that work in one decade / just don't work in the next"

This is not about a thing becoming wrong — it is about a thing losing force. The aesthetic object that was potent in one decade is not refuted by the next; it simply no longer operates. Its claim to New or Different has been absorbed; it has become Not-New, a known quantity. The semiotic field has moved around it and left it stranded.

This is the square's positional logic operating at a cultural timescale. The work that occupied a charged position (New, Different) migrates, as the field shifts, into the uncharged zone (Not-New, same). Nothing is done to it. Time does it. The decay of aesthetic force is not a critique — it is entropy in the semiotic field.

The New that condenses into the Known (3003)

Note 3003 — the Loomer (2015) press release — provides the most precise phenomenological account of the New/Not-New transition:

"There is still a potentiality in the 'new', regardless how quickly it condensates into a 'known', which then slips through my fingers again."

This is the semiotic square's New → Not-New movement described from inside the experience of it. The New carries potentiality — before it has been categorized, named, absorbed. But the condensation into the known happens almost immediately, mirroring 952's "upon arrival its novelty fades." What's distinctive here: the known doesn't stabilize either — it "slips through my fingers again," opening the next cycle. The practice is not a search for a durable position on the square but a sensitivity to the brief moment of potentiality before each condensation.

"Subdued iconoclasm" as a position on the square (ZORA ZINE, 2021)

The ZORA ZINE journalist's label for van den Dorpel's stance — "subdued iconoclasm" — names a position that the semiotic square helps locate. He explicitly refuses the revolutionary posture ("Fuck the old system, we are going to just start from scratch") and equally refuses conservative defence of the traditional gallery system. The position is defined by its negations: Not-Revolutionary, Not-Conservative.

On the New/Old axis: the work is not asserting Newness (it doesn't require the destruction of the Old) but it is also not Old. It occupies the "Not New" slot — present in a new medium without performing novelty — while simultaneously refusing the "Not Different" slot of conservative sameness.

This is the structural correlate of his label-agnosticism elsewhere: "I used to be called a net artist, then I was a Post-Internet artist, now I'm a crypto artist. I don't care." Refusing to be pinned by a label is the same refusal to occupy a fixed position on the square.

Relevance as the displaced problem

The key claim in 901: relevance cannot be found by retreating to Old or Same once New and Different are abandoned. Relevance is the problem that remains after the obvious answers are exhausted — "the most sustainable quest is the one for the non-existing."

Note 1266 offers a name for the destination this points toward: not a better position on the square, not an escape from it, but a condition in which the square's terms "cease to have the divisive force they carry today." The distinctions (New/Old, Different/Same) would still exist — "all persons and all objects would not float freely in a space without meaning" — but they would no longer function as instruments of selection and exclusion. This is the political corollary to the square's diagnostic function: the square maps the field of positions; 1266 describes what it would mean for that field to stop being a battlefield.