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Page 103
of red, blood red, the sun's red, the red of apples or of certain plants and bushes. Again, Adam resegments the content and discovers fresh cultural categories (this means new perceptive realities), which oblige him to provide new names for them, although these are quite easy to invent. He composes complex sequences to denote these new categories and devises new verbal formulae in order to express this experience in factual judgments. The experience is subsequently assigned to the expanding language system by way of semiotic judgments. His language is beginning to swell in his hands, and his whole world is growing fuller. Clearly, neither language nor the world is so harmonious or single-voiced as both were during the period of situation (1), but at least he is no longer afraid of the contradictions concealed inside their language system; this is because from one side the contradictions force him to reenvisage the form which he assigns to the world, while from the other they induce him to exploit them for their potential poetic effects.
As a result of all this, Adam discovers that Order, as such, is nonexistent; it is just one of the infinite possible states of repose which disorder occasionally arrives at.
It would be superfluous to add that Eve goes on to encourage him to eat the apple. Once Adam has eaten it, he is in a position to issue a judgment of the kind «the apple is good», which reestablishes, at least for one item, the equilibrium which the language system enjoyed before the Prohibition. But this detail is irrelevant at the stage we have now reached. Adam was obliged to exit from the Garden of Eden after his first nervous manipulation of language. This was the mistake God made by disturbing the univocal harmony of the primitive language system by an ambiguously phrased prohibition; but, like all prohibitions, it was supposed to forbid something desirable. From that moment onward (not from the time when Adam really ate the apple), world history commenced.
Unless God was fully aware of this and issued his prohibition precisely to stimulate the birth of history. Or again, perhaps God did not exist, and the prohibition was simply invented by Adam and Eve for the specific purpose of introducing a contradiction into the language system and producing inventive modes of discussion. Perhaps the language system incorporated this contradiction from its very beginnings and the prohibition myth was invented by our forefathers simply to explain such a scandalous state of affairs.
Evidently these observations have taken us outside the strict terms of our inquiry, which is concerned with language creativity, its poetic applications, and the interaction between the world's form and language's form.
At any rate, it goes without saying that, once Adam had redeemed language's pledge to Order and Singleness of Voice, it was handed down to his descendants in a considerably richer form.

 
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