Addenda…Creative Languaging

Here I would like to insert some thoughts and observations regarding the import and opportunities of artistic or literary, making-up, collaging, discombobulating, rearranging “ordinary” languaging. If “words are congenitally conceptual,” and I believe they are – that fact alone being one of the fiercest tractions to work through and past in utilizing language as a medium for art – as objects in the world, rather than symbols standing in for (or between or over) objects in the world – then to arrange them or copulate them between languages or existent terms in a language, etc…is a way to bring the word and the activity of languaging toward experience in itself. Being creative with existent languaging systems means often turning accepted uses or meanings back on themselves, undoing “ordinary” uses and definitions in order that the words might be substances of a medium (like paint or clay for plastic arts, the body for dance, shapes and frames and objects for photography, and so on) that then can be its own artifact – its own place of meeting for a community of persons – a field for creating “meaning” in the world.

Ronald Sukenick and kin repeatedly direct us to view novels and poems not as “problems to figure out” but as “experiences to respond to.” Kafka suggested that “language must not be used as a means but must be experienced, suffered.” Given the flexibility and inaccuracies, polysystemic and multivalent capacities and references of existing language systems, to craft new paths of language, tweak or invite new usages provides us with new ranges of possibilities for direct relations. In a way, using language “novelistically” (ever-new) intends and evinces the making of new “speech fellowships” – occasions for overlapping our experiences – in each new reality of speaking, saying, inscribing.

To draw attention to letters and words as things-in-themselves rather than simply signs-referring-to-things-in-themselves, opens up vast territories of potentiality for the meetings and relations of human beings across languaging-systems, cultural contexts, professional or social standings, psychophysiological realities and so on…meeting in the words, the new words, the repurposed words, revised and invented as new objects in the world – artifacts – for us to engage and encounter together.

I would argue that this is precisely what great literature does (and a principal criteria for “greatness” in literature) – serves as a meeting point for the widest range of humans to deepen and expand their engagement with themselves and the world. The “speech fellowship” aspect might help to explain why some persons respond more strongly to particular authors or styles of languaging, but those works which are great, which renew, humans will recognize (given time) from any point of view.

This, I believe, is a challenge to all humans to attend to their languaging – viewing it as an activity much like sex or eating, work or play, that we do, indeed must do, in order to survive, but may also take pleasure and care in – that it might enrich and increase our moments of being alive – and create opportunities for more and more meaning – which occurs when we actualize and accentuate our interrelatedness – the fact of our being.

Well, there’s that…

Pt. 8: Mean What You Say What You Mean

“Meaning, the torture of meaning, is the vain and interminable agreement between what there is,

on the one hand, and ordinary language, on the other – between ‘well-seeing’ and ‘well-saying.’

The agreement is such that it is not even possible to decide if it is commanded by language

or prescribed by being”

-Alain Badiou-

“What makes a word is its meaning”

-V. N. Volosinov-

“As a general rule – each word when used in a new context is a new word”

-J. R. Firth-

“A new meaning is the equivalent of a new word

The real is only the base. But it is the base.”

-Wallace Stevens-

I am supposing that it could be inferred from the previous section that since we are implicitly unable to adequate our total experience in language, and that a direct transference of our experience in and through language is not possible; in other words, that our presentations of our experience in language are inherently ill-seen and ill-said efforts; that dipping into the language palette as a member of the human community equals an action or activity of relating rather than an accurate substantive transaction…

that it might not, in fact, matter what signs or gestures are utilized, but merely participating in the activity itself.

A skeptical view, perhaps, that, if all signs are multiplicitous (like all perceptions) – both overly general and inanely individualized – simply using language accomplishes its meaning, not what language(s) is/are used?

Another way of saying – is it possible to effectively mean something, or to translate substantively, matter, in language…communicating content instead of relations?

Common-sensically writing, we are, when speaking, utilizing billions of units of accrued and generally agreed-upon ranges of “meaning” or indications, directions, references and significations attached to these kernels of sound and expression…”words are congenitally conceptual” (Jerome Klinkowitz).

de Saussure might have signed these palettes as langue – the fund of sign-systems in parlay at any given time among certain social systems of persons – the cultural clime, professional environments, demographical contexts of semiotic webs. But accounting for the psychophysiological uniqueness of individual entities in these systems results in a furthering texture of usages, an explosive ganglia of intentions and purposes and desires for each occasion of a gestural item or practice of signs.

Which leaves all manner of matter of languaging approximate. Every time.

If involvement in languaging at its essence is relational, the primary or ontological “meaning” of the fact of languaging is given: languaging is a human system of engagement and encounter. That means a lot already, as a purposive human activity. Beyond that, we demonstrate a need that that fundamental exhibition of relatedness have experiential-personal-specific trans-actional effect.

This is where each palate or hand operating with the ocean of signs always affects and, at its fullest, effects the language(s) utilized…

I’m tempted to say that the languaging experience, whether that experience is of language itself, or is using language to stand in or refer for some other content (feelings, ideas, messages, objects, etc) is an activity of what we “mean” by “meaning” at its core. If by “meaning” we sign something like an experience or sensation plus the rationality of awareness added to agreement, that is, gesturing some aspect of reality in to a field shared in common, therefore a capacity of understanding, a co-relation of questioning or co-mprehension of experiences, then to constantly increase our apprehension of available sign systems and continually developing our facility of utilizing (organizing, selecting and incorporating) this universe of signs seems critical and imperative.

For the function of languaging in humanity it seems crucial, given its relational reality, that although perhaps “any old sign” will arbitrarily “do,” in the fullness of possibles our closeness to well-seen/well-said satisfaction will be in proportion to each entity’s concern and acquisition of the greatest possible breadth and depth of shared sign-systems, and locating or languaging into what J.R. Firth has called “speech fellowships” – something referring to collections of humans sharing the greatest overlappings of sign-systems and contexts they generate/are generated by.

“within speech fellowships a speaker is phonetically and verbally content because when he speaks to one of his fellows he is also speaking to himself. That can be the most deeply satisfying form of self-expression” (J. R. Firth)

“And to meet: in my sense, exceeds the power of feeling, however tender, and of bodily motions, however expert” (Samuel Beckett). This harmony that may occur between happenings and their languagings into a shared system, wrenches each inhabitant of the “speech activity” away from anonymity…provokes “meaning” I believe. As does shared feeling (or an overlap of sensory/sensational happenings among persons) or shared movements and embodiments.

This drives the urge of ill-seeing ill-saying toward better-seeing better-saying, the compulsion to recommence and recommence the attempts…extending/expanding utilization and aptitude of sounds and gestures available and seeking “fellows” with similar or overlapping apprehension of languaging-systems…to co-rrelate and co-rrespond, ask and answer toward…to relate…to “mean…”

Part the Sixth: A Palette of Words on Your Palate

Your lips and tongue and oral cavity, in the manner of your fingerprints, pronounce consonants and vowels like no other body. In most cases this is noticeable only to machines and highly trained specialists, but physiologically speaking, your speech has a distinct personality, in the manner of what some would call your psyche or soul.

Your make-up is distinctive, by-and-large very similar to every other human being. This is one of the reasons you are able to understand others – recognize humans, their gestures, expressions, actions and sounds. They partake in voluminous similarities to your own. Still, a far cry from “identically.”

In fact, from one day to the next, even one hour, you yourself are not identical to yourself, body or otherwise. So how do we keep track of who’s who, where, when, etc? We use signs and labels for things and concepts…symbols that can stand for things and adjust to things while they change and flow.

The socio-linguistic faction of semioticians view human consciousness, personality, individuality something like this:

Your physiological composition and arrangement, however similar it may be to other human beings, is still unique. Individuality refers to this aspect: indeed, you are a discreet example/entity of the species.

This plays a very important part in your acquisition or formation/development of personhood. As the other entities immersed in the systems (polysystemic – gender, race, nationality, education, economics, etc.) incorporate you into these systems by means (primarily, or most directly) of more overlapping systems of signs and gestures, your individualized entity adapts these uniquely – fitting yourself into the systems, learning to use existent systems (ideologies) in your particular, but enmeshed way.

This interplay of inner distinctiveness and outer systems of interrelated elements = your flexible and evolving personality.

You are granted, accorded a place in the systems – counted as a person, even as you adapt and acquire roles and behaviors in the systems you engage – becoming a “person.”

The chicken and the egg are synchronic. You can’t have one without the other.

Languages are those threading elements you affect and alter even as they effect and shape you. “Psyche,” “personality” does not exist separately from these systems. In other words, you could not recognize yourself, think, have awareness, in a void or in total isolation (even “isolation” as a word doesn’t make any sense without “others” or “else” to be enabled by – isolated from). You are you by virtue of your physiological uniqueness and capacities immersed in systems of anythings not-you.

Sign-systems, languages, general as they may be, are the medium whereby your personality (formed with those systems) and all that you are not, encounter and engage, take shape, “become” in what we call a “conscious” matter.

Crux? Your palate and brain, organs and anatomy are things (particular objects), your interrelational existence (roles, personality, style, etc.) are not, that is, not extractable realities, but are however you ideology (idea-words) the flow of your individuality and everything else or other-passing-by at all moments.

Fluid, flexible, and always, we chicken-and-egg-and-chicken our “selves” and the “world” linguistically.

Languages our floating, loaded systems of communication (self-to-self, self-to-other, other-to-self) we select from and individualize with each application, while keeping us immersed and enmeshed with itself and its social and organic forming and flow. Palate-to-palette-to-palate it goes…

Your palate, aswim in the world-palette, dabbles in and mixes the palette, further coloring and staining your palate, and so on…or so my palette palatates it…

“one is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness,

one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

“Language and personality partake of both nature and nurture

and are the expression of both”

-J.R. Firth-