In The Major Ordeals of the Mind, Henri Michaux describes "a schizophrenic table in terms of a process of production which is that of desire" (Deleuze and Gauttari, Anti-Oedipus 6). This process -- what Levi-Strauss will have called "bricolage" -- produces certain results which remain unassimilable within classical systems of meaning or use. The element of the unassimilable here marks the point at which the "infernal machinery" (FW 320.33) of this schizo-apparatus achieves an "unintended" complexity which could not be "explained" unless by something equally complex and unassimilable; the mark, in other words, of what we have begun to describe in terms of a transversal. Michaux writes:
Once noticed, it continued to occupy one's mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going about its own business ... The striking thing was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or intentionally complex, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been desimplified in the course of its carpentering ... As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as 'overstuffed,' and if finished it was only in so far as there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table ... Its top surface, the useful part of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing. [125-126]
For a transversal to be what it is, it cannot remain static. Like the schizo-table, a transversal is also an apparatus which, having marked a division, divides (itself), gradually effacing (itself) in a way that forces it to be continually approached and interrogated from different perspectives -- a kind of anamorphosis without derivation (cf. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 79ff.). In a sense, the transverse-apparatus accumulates these discontinuities -- genetic mutations -- so that the chance of putting a handle on it, of situating it in regards to a plane of reference, is continually diminished.
Like the schizo-table, the transverse will have "lent itself to no function, self-protective, denying itself to service and communication alike" (Deleuze and Gauttari, Anti-Oedipus 127). Non-communicating while making communication possible, it cancels-conceals itself in its apparent purposelessness, its "superexuberabundency" (FW 612.05), so that we can never be sure whether the schizo-apparatus is a table that has been debased, or simply a freak of chaotic assemblage that has taken on the appearance of something which may once have been a table. Either way, any hope of derivation or archaeology is spoiled by this indeterminacy. In a similar way, the figure of Shem the Penman is made ontologically and ontically irresolvable (to borrow Heidegger's categories) through the apparently random grouping of signifiers for his everyday "Being-in-the-world":
... borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets, blackeye lenses ... falsehair shirts, Godforesaken scapulars ... cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes ... once current puns, quashed quotations, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations ... crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits ... [FW 183.17-24]
What we call a transverse is not determined by particular signifiers, or by what we would call a theme, although in the above case the "theme" of dissimulation runs parallel to the way a transverse mocks "intentional" thematics through the construction of ruses, forgeries and plays which direct us toward a sham reality or sham originality. This sense of "sham," however, would not refer to the contamination of some prior pristine condition, but rather to an "essential" condition of the real itself, in that what language "represents" is not an exterior world, in the form of a transcendental signified, but its own clothing, so to speak, its own folds and enfolding.
This grouping of signifiers reveals, if it reveals anything, the way a transverse marks out a network of discontinuities, of metaphor and metonymy, as they relate, not to a particular context, but to what opens a context at its frontiers to an alterior discourse. Yet, in so far as we can assign to this grouping the name "Shem" (the word Shem also means "name" in Hebrew), we need to keep in mind that this signifier itself is part of another grouping, to which would belong all the so-called proper names in Finnegans Wake and their various manifestations as common nouns, parts of other words and in further disparate lexical forms. Moreover, we need to keep in mind the way Finnegans Wake spoils any attempt to situate the grouping of proper names ahead of, or above, the grouping of other signifiers. Instead, these various groups are in constant communication, defying our sense of dimension through what we might call quantum shifts ("as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it" [15.07-08]), or what Derrida variously terms "mise en abyme" and "differance," thus giving rise to "fables, communic suctions and vellicar frictions" (385.11-12). For example, the way in which the proper name "Shem" also functions as a common noun (antonomasia) -- thus acting as a double-hinge through which different groupings of other signifiers are summoned and caused to intersect -- demonstrates how a signifier is already open to an alterior communication within. This internal difference or partition gives rise to what Derrida calls an "invention of the Other". This invention is penetrated by a double genitive; it is an invention belonging to the Other and by which the Other enters upon the field of signification. The passage and place of invention is thus always heterogeneous. This place is a non-place, because it is also a process, a transit and a transfer, a translation and a citation.