Hyphen & Hymen, Pt. 2

On April 21, 2017 By NW FilbertIn communication, creative writing, Current Reading, Embodiment, Experience, Experimenctes, Language, meaning, Writing6 Comments

“Philosophy is the hyphen and the hymen of Being, and difference is the trait that cuts across and unites the twofold side of Being [mathematic-genetic / poematic-epiphanic; or in-itself / for-us-in-it]”

– Michel de Beistegui, Truth & Genesis –

“each word, need no more words, we don’t need words about words, each word enough with its excess and insufficiency, proliferation and paucity, problematics and production, each term inevitable blunder and surprise, miscarriage and gratuity”

– N Filbert, journal entry –

Everything that is not linguistic is absurd

– Vilem Flusser, Philosophy of Language –

I have no story.

Wherever I occur in the tangled, incalculable threading we might call “existing” or “being” or “living” I can make out no beginnings nor endings, only enigmatic, complicated “is.” Slight, partial, imperfect.

I have trouble with memory.

But we needn’t any other words. Or more words. Or words about words. Any word is enough.

There’s no story not made of inadequate and superfluous words. These words that might tremble any direction of the webbed and indecipherable, indeterminate and knotted operations that co-construct now, or whatever happens to be (for-us, with-us, in-us, with-out).

Stories like struck and resounding tones.

A vibration might seem harmonic or cacophonic, dull or brash. Violent, vanishing, or barely perceptible in the noise.

There’s no story in this. But many words, perhaps.

Wiggling, vague, offensive, bold, hardly visible, ephemeral words. Terms (demands?), language (lingual?), weaving darts between – inventive, fabulating, reductive, constraining – unknown syllables, shapes, referents (irreverent) toward and away from…

Vocables of happening. In-script-ions. Tyrannical and uncertain.

Accidents and rules.

My body of words. Limbs, organs, “hyphen and hymen” of being. My body of words – taste, touch. What passes un-sign-if-i-cant?

Accidents and rules.

Birdsong. Heard. “Bird” “song” “to hear.” This body of words. No note without notation. No recognition without cognition. Any one word enough enigma.

Grass, caress, event: embodying words, wording embodied. Tapestries or electrons – flood, immersion, surround within. Languaging: gesture, groan, gelatinous. Language.

Say “in-term-in-able.” Say “de-term-in-ed.”

Hyphen. Hymen. Accident. Rule. Deceptive measurements. Siphons, conduits, ex-press-in-g im-press-ions.

One is enough to sense there’s no story here.

Always more-than-one. All ways.

Perhaps what is called “experience” [what is it called “experience”? – one word is enough – think “love” or “fact,” “me” or “real,” even “tomato” to be made well aware of difference, ambiguity – of wobbling kinds pressed toward inauthentic and inaccurate generalities. Uniformity. Accidents and rules that hardly, so slightly, pertain].

Experience: inexpressible? In-term-in-able?

What is the story here? The trial and always (all ways) error. Errant words. Insufficient to their purposes (supposed). Perhaps.

Purpose being?

The questioning.

Our voices and gestures.

Enigma.

Irresolvable, over-determined. Language.

Systems like molds, scopes of lenses, structuring grids, abstract proofs and theorems: rules and measures, melodies, diagrams – not mirroring, mirage.

I have no story to tell.

Untelling. Moving back against the words with a “not.” Unworking. Unravel. Erase.

Toward?

Experience: to test, try; to feel, to undergo. Knowledge gained by repeated trials. Risk. Out-of. Try. To get handy at.

To undergo. Gone under.

The Drunken Brain: Ending it all one word at a time.

In-term-in-able trials. “Everything that what is isn’t” (Jan Zwicky).

“There is yet a way of speaking that leaves room for what can’t be said”

– Jan Zwicky –

Is there?

I’d like to language that way. Move, sound, gesture, touch. Word, waver, delete.

Try.

From the midst. In the midst of. Within. Risk, trying “out,” Feel, undergo. Words.

I have no story either, no narrative or narrator. I forget, I re-member, invent. Wherever, whenever I am (is it “I”?) – multiplicity, indiscretion. A-static. No beginning, no ends, -ing, -ing, -ing. Repeatedly, differently.

I think language pre-tends experience.

What is tried-out, already de-term-in-ed.

Oh to break.

To start.

To begin – become – be.

I have no story.

“I cannot get beyond language by means of language”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein –

and more “…” more “…” more-than

On December 16, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

“the more than us in us that is at that moment irreducible to meaning or satisfaction”

–Jacques Lacan–

“our repeated baffling by the trauma of a Real”

-Peter Schwenger-

“the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny”

–Martin Heidegger–

WORDS AND THE MURDER OF THE THING

by Peter Schwenger

(read online for free!)

“What hope do I have of attaining the thing that I push away?

My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things too…A name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence; language, abandoning the sense, the meaning which was all it wanted to be, tries to become senseless”

–Maurice Blanchot–

As relates to…

On July 31, 2013July 30, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, WritingLeave a comment

I have wanted to share (for years) the significance and import of Mikhail Bakhtin‘s manner of thinking, writing in the formation of my own worldview and understanding of the confounding irritations of working in language and the interactional miracles of the medium. C.S. Peirce and Bakhtin strike me as two composers with whom I do not encounter a brilliantly organized thought or true-ringing arrangement of letters that they are not echoed in. I discover re-presentations and simulacra of their models, but rarely extensions, corrections, or improvements.

With that in mind, I have been poring through a multi-authored volume entitled Bakhtinian perspectives on language and culture: meaning in language, art, and new media edited by Bostad, Brandist, Evensen and Faber. Note-taking, underlining, cross-referencing, formulating, and it has occurred to me that these texts are SO mesh-marked with mnemonic traces for me, that I should simply provide interested readers access to all I can link. Setting out to locate a Pdf of the introduction and chapter 2: “Rhetoric, the Dialogical Principle and the Fantastic in Bakhtin’s Thought” I came across the entire collection available online – and so I offer it here. If you begin, and the perspective captivates you – read on – to the chapters that carry concepts you are passionate about. If not, never ye mind! I am happy that texts like this can be available – not easily “stumbled upon” in contemporary bookstores and libraries (unfortunately).

To life:

par example: “Language is to be experienced as an interaction of signs neither neutral nor innocent: the word bears the burden of the contexts through which it has passed. And every speaker or listener bears the consequences of signs put into circulation, of signs he perceives and answers, of signs he picks up and makes use of for his own ends. One cannot stifle the traces stored in them. One has to face the cultural experience a whole language underwent in its history. Speaking this language and listening to it one unwittingly responds to this experience – the ‘word that lies on the border between one’s own and the other,’ the ‘word that is actually half someone else’s.’ The one meaning cannot maintain itself in the face of the many meanings. B’s concept irritatingly links the atomizing intrusion of the many meanings into the one (an act that atomises this meaning) with the idea that meaning ‘explodes’ in the contact of two different meanings. In other words: splitting up and differentiation, accumulation and trace must be thought of as occuring in the word simultaneously…Because meaning is always a recourse to another meaning and a project for creating new meaning, it doesn not achieve a decisive, definite presence.”

And so forth….!!!!

A probable linguistics

On July 26, 2013July 25, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Philosophy1 Comment

“In our day-to-day use of the English language we possess a perfect record of the language’s evolution; when we hear ourselves speak we listen to the voices of all those many millions who have come before us, who have, in their own use of the language, constructed ours, as we continue to construct it.

Whether or not we’re able to decipher this record is another matter altogether.”

-Evan Lavender-Smith-

Take it from here…

On July 21, 2013July 21, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

“If one wishes to describe the enunciative level, one must consider that existence itself; question language not in the direction to which it refers, but in the dimension that gives it; ignore its power to designate, to name, to show, to reveal, to be the place of meaning or truth, and, instead, turn one’s attention to the moment…that determines its unique and limited existence. In the examination of language, one must suspend not only the point of view of the ‘signified’ (we are used to this now), but also that of the signifier, and so reveal the fact that, here and there, in relation to possible domains of objects and subjects, in relation to other possible formulations and re-uses, there is language“

-Michel Foucault-

“The opening of speech – every time – presupposes the material site provided by that structure of exposure that defines the essence of human being ( at least insofar as we are dealing with human speech), and the problem of thinking that exposure requires a new understanding of what calls for thought and the possibility of thought’s answer…An offering occurs in language, but this gift and its historical unfolding – thought from the way language is given – cannot be thought apart from a usage of the human that it presupposes…The notion of an experience with language, in other words, pointed to a thought of the way the human being, in its essence, is itself given to the speaking of language – every speech event entails at its limits an exposure of the human – language communicates im-mediately – the human essence is relation“

-Christopher Fynsk-

It’s Language – Must be a story of something

On July 5, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing6 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers during cacophony – July 5, 2013

Scales, rituals, angles and lines. Struggling to make sense, instead of staying on the ground. Design, construct, infer, deduce. Climb that ladder. Circle that ring. Aching for a view. We’re earthed here. But we keep on grasping. Incessantly. Invent equations, theorems, rules and laws. Apply to sensation and perceive. Revise. Repeat. Try numbers, letters, words. Try gesture. Communicate. Calibrate. Be social. Get everyone to make the hike. We make sense by making abstractions. Distractions. Bastardizing metaphor. Some things go deeper, some things go out.

N Filbert 2013

Making Trouble….er…Making Meaning (via Jay Lemke)

On June 11, 2013June 11, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces1 Comment

I personally attempt to read every writing I am able to obtain by my favorites. Some of my blog entries may therefore be redundant, as redundancy is a way that I am able to sense patterns and make connections and thereby forge what I experience as meaning. The following is one of the summary writings (nah, that’s not quite right – even with redundancies and retellings I rarely find a summary-type writing by my favorites – there’s always difference – and that is what snags me!)… Okay, for your interaction, pleasure, and engagement, without further ado…