>John, when I said that there were some non-words that I can't mention
>here, I didn't say mayn't mention, so that leaves us with possibility.
>There are some things which I am not necessarily interested in attempting
>(vainly) to translate into this here medium.
Fiona, I was not suggesting that you were being prescriptive in any way,
nor that you or any of us should waste our efforts trying to make the dumb
and illiterate speak or write.
I simply imagine, say, the 'silent' object or action -- a glass of water,
the gesture of a hand hesitating to pick it up -- introduced into the text,
the text of a (and this?) performance. Is it vain to introduce these
things? Is it hubris to see them functioning as signs, as part of the
language-life of those present?
>The aforementioned vanity is in more than one the sense; to ascribe such a
>hubristic role to our relationship with language actually devalues
>language. It doesn't work for me to give attention to the "not normally"
>literate or vocal, and then to just call it all language anyway.
And I think that language can survive any attempt to wear away the
distinctions between, say, the spelt (constructed, abitrary, conventional)
sign and the found or acted sign. That terrible "normally". As if I could
convince us all -- 'normally', day-to-day -- to carry around sacks of
'real' objects in order to converse in a 'real character', like Swift's
academic Laputans. I'm not against even those/these (privileged) techniques
that *work*. It's just that it seems to me to be the case -- the fact that
any thing that is, is a significant part of what can, potentially, be
spoken or written, and may also, I believe, assume a direct role in the
inscription of a text 'on the surface of a complex medium' (not my phrase,
but it's stuck in my head and I don't know where it's from -- help me
someone?) -- How can that "devalue" language? Make it worth less? Damage it?
Mixing strong text with a site or an event or a gallery of 'things', seems
to me to be something that, far from killing it, makes it stronger. Isn't
that what *you* (singular here, but also applicable to others on this list)
do?
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