altermodern?

so i was thinking about our conversation the other day in class and the space in which language is faced with its own "corrupt" nature. After reading this short blurb on we-make-money-not-art, i thought about the implications behind labeling a socio-historic era in connection to how foucault presents the notion of the "transdiscursive position". Once one hears that s/he are living in a altermodern world and no longer a postmodern world (these are both still problematicly oversimplified terms) does one begin to think about things in a way that is accepting of the altermodernist and critical of the (antiquated?) postmodernist anti-conventions?

I wondered how in a hyper-discursive (postmodern) era, where it has become necessary for a work to incorporate both self-reflexivity and the socio-historical (dis)placement of a discourse which simultaneously forms and is formed by the limits of this reflexivity, how one might ever say anything other than, "we are all doomed!" or, "anything goes."

And because i am seriously interested in Charles Gaines' use of metonymy as a political (i would prefer to say ethical) practice, i was wondering if it as a process (not entirely isolated from metaphor but distinct enough in its function) might offer us a pragmatic approach to building functioning but open contexts of meaning. For instance C.S. Pierce discusses semiotics in threes (in contrast to Saussure's binaries) and always allows for a "ground" to contextualize the sign (be it an index, symbol, or icon). This context is always necessary for the sign to exist (it makes perfect sense to say that a sign cannot be comprehended without a context and without a context, it is simply an object). Therefore, it is not the meaning of the sign that is universally applicable or even conceivable but rather the capability of the artist to create and forge contiguous (spatially delineated) context(s)/relationship(s).

thus, this notion of globalization or altermodernism (which at this point still appears to be westernization) might be understood as an attempt to apply foucault's notion of the theory writer beyond the theory work and asking for people to live as if their lives themselves are "transdiscursive practices".

A text that is what it is!

Just a quick thought pre class, inspired by reading a workshop from Howard in a different class...

Does the sound, feel, essence of a letter/word embodied in the visual text of the letter/word? Like in sound...there are words that sound the very thing that they describe (I know there's a word for this but can't remember). Ooze sounds like its oozing. Squishy sounds squishy. Soft feels soft.
Can this same concept be transferred to the way words look?

This of course is a question to Western European languages. Where as in Chinese the entire language is predicated on the way the word looks.

In marketing they say that Round images are more appealing to women while angular or square shapes are more appealing to men. Though this might seem like a false binary, however, this does say that images produce socio-cultural significances. Does the angular A have a particular signifier that the O does not? Does the word COTTEN evoke softness because of the way it looks?

Just a quick thought.