Architecture of The Invisible

There is the visible, concrete world. We label it with words and usually have little problems when it comes to translation across languages. But there is also another world, the invisible world, lined with its own architecture. These forms and relations we label with words but fail to translate. It is this world that is constructed by language.

Phenomenology of Narration

What space do you occupy when reading or telling a story?

Deconstruction

"Language works through us...the deconstruction is its impulse to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another"

Linguistic Disorder

Lacan views schizophrenia as a linguistic disorder, a breakdown in the signifying chain of meaning in a narrative

An Ancient City

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city, a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses and of houses with additions from different periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses"
-Lyotard

Inverted Forms

"Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject’s past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other’s interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start"

Repressed Word

“The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of “prolongation of communication by other means’”: the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.

Slavoj Zizek

Expressing Deep Physical Laws

"Time is a subject subject and we are far from understanding it fully...the feeling that time flows is deeply ingrained in our experience and thoroughly pervades our thinking and language so much so, that we have lapsed and will continue to lapse, into habitual, colloquial descriptions that refer to a flowing time. But don't confuse language with reality. Human language is far better at capturing experience than at expressing deep physical laws"

-Brian Greene

Theory of Language

"Any philosophical system is, in the last analysis, a theory of language. Every inquiry about being calls into question the power of words"
-Albert Camus

No Exit

"Freedom is capacity to escape power, to subjugate no one. Then freedom can exist only outside of language. Unfortunately, human language has no exterior; there is no exist"

-Roland Barthes

Desires

"In appearance, speech may well be of little account, but prohibitions surrounding it soon reveal its links with desire and power. This should not be very surprising, for psychoanalysis has already shown us that speech is not merely the medium which manifests-or dissembles-desire; it is also the object of desire"
-Michel Foucault

Service of Power

"Once uttered, even in the subject's deepest privacy, speech enters the service of power...you are both the master and the slave of speech"
-Roland Barthes

Fascism

"Language, the performance of language system, is neither reactionary nor progressive. It is quite simply fascist, for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech"
-Roland Barthes

The Real

"From the ancient times...literature has been concerned to represent something. What? I will put it more crudely: the real. The real is not representable, and it is because men ceaselessly try to represent it by words that there is a history of literature"
-Roland Barthes

A Form of Life

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life"
Wittingstein

Reality is the Loser

"For Plato's Dialogues are nothing but long struggles between language and reality, in which paradoxically, reality is the loser"
-Camus

Failure to Find Words

"The history of philosophy...is basically a history of the failure of the mind, confronted with the problem of language. Man has not managed to find words"
-Camus

Being is Everything

"The truth of the word is not something it owns, but something which creates itself little by little in sentences, speeches, literature, and history of literatures...All words thus form part of an unending adventure that moves toward a universal meaning. At that point too language is being, because being is everything"
Camus

Terrible Inadequacy

"Language goes beyond individuals, and its terrible inadequacy is the sign of its transcendence"
Camus

A Metaphysical Question

"What is Parain's problem? He makes language a metaphysical question....for the problem is to know whether our most accurate expressions, our most successful cries are not in fact empty of all meaning, whether language does not, in short, express man׳s final solitude in a silent universe. What this adds up to is a search for essences of language, and a quest for words that can give us the same reasons we require of God. For Parain's basic premise is that if language is meaningless then everything is meaningless, and the world becomes absurd. We know only by means of words. If they are proved useless, then we are finally and irredeemably blinded" -Camus

Second Part of the Story

World of Thought

From chabad.org by Freeman


I suppose what really bothers me is this: Why did the Creator have to speak in order to create? Wouldn't it be so much more wonderful if we were all just a thought?

Actually, we are. That's how things started off. And that's what we connect into on the day of Shabbat.

You see, first there was a World of Thought. The written Torah doesn't start with that world. The Torah begins with a bet--the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It starts at the second part of the story. But at first there was a world that just emanated out of thought--and never left that place.

The second part of the story is when all those thoughts descended to become a concrete world. A place that seems separate from its Creator, outside of its source. Like speech: Your words travel outside of you and become part of someone else.

That's the world we live in for six days. A world that pretends to have no source. We try to push it around a little, it pushes us around a lot, and we both pretend that this is a real and autonomous world. That there is a world and there is us and we are all separate things.

But then, on the seventh day, the Creator let into this world a taste of that higher plane of the "World of Thought." We tune into it by no longer pushing anything around--or letting anything else push us around. We don't change anything. We don't create anything. We don't make fires, we don't cook food, we don't stink up the air with carbon monoxide or make cyberspace connections. We only meditate, contemplate and enjoy. We get a feel of a world that is no more than a single, vast, expressive and wondrous thought.

And then we return to the other six days. But we've already experienced this world's hidden truth. We can see through its facade. We can rip it away. We can draw that higher plane to illuminate our mundane world.

Voice of Seeing

"And so looking has force: it tears, it is sharp, it is an acid. In the end, it corrodes the object and the observer until they are lost in the field of vision. I once was solid, and now I am dissolved: that is the voice of seeing"

-James Elkins, on the nature of seeing

God's Utterances

"The book of nature is written in the language of math, whose symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word; without which one is a wanderer in vain through a dark labyrinth."
— Galileo Galilei

Constructing Reality

"The linguistic turn, therefore, is the eruption into human consciousness of the perspectival, contextual, and contingent nature of all truth claims. Language does not re-present reality, rather it shapes and constructs it, refracting the light of the world through its unique phonetic and conceptual prisms"

A Lost World

There is no deeper longing than the desire to regain the world lost to language.
Take me to a space where linguistic realities dissolve
To a time prior to their existence where the subject-object dichotomy evaporates
it gives rise to an amorphous reality that privileges relations as opposed to concepts.
A space where linguistic concepts bleed for they are inadequate to contain the multiplicity of the world and the walls they construct become
malleable and permeable.
Things blend with one another,
an amorphous state of existence that lacks rigid boundaries
A flux of networks, all infused with one another.
Deep nostalgia for this lost world.
Language kills the multiplicity of that which it defines with its imposed structure.
Through the acquisition of knowledge, we lose the experience of the world that can never be retrieved.
Learning a word strips us of the experience of the moment and imprisons us with its embrace.
This loss is a tragedy.

Fundamental Relationship

"To give language perspective is to shift the fundamental relationship between humanity and language, we have perspective not language is the wrong assumption. Language and perspective are one. Language is already a perspective. The minute you write, you become a body for language, you take on the perspective of language"

rhetorical philosophy

Limits of My World

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”

Wittgenstein

Exquisite Horror of Reality

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

Edgar Allen Poe

Creative Game of Tag

by me :-)

I usually get hit with inspiration in unfortunate times when a pen and paper aren't handy...


It is then when the muse runs through me, a if I were some tool for her creativity, and then my thoughts construct themselves as articulate prose in my mind...

A wave of inspiration.

I become desperate to cling on to it, to consume it entirely before it disintegrates.

It floats into me and through me.

It saturates me.

It consumes me.

I become one with it.

But only for a brief moment until the words evaporate into an amorphous state and my ability to retain them in their beautiful form vanishes that instant.


I feel that as much as the poems chase me, I end up chasing them more.

We engage in a creative game of tag where sometime I win, and often not.

Creativity is an encounter: a little bit of me and a little bit of the other, wherever it originates from, enmeshed together for a brief instant at the horizon.

In the beginning...

From Jean Baudrillard

"In the beginning was the Word. It was only afterwards that Silence came.

The end itself has disappeared...."

on the topic of the disappearance of the real into the virtual

Vanishing Point of Language

From "Why hasn't everything already disappeared" by Jean Baudrillard

"Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absense, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning- this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language"

Chased by a poem

From a speech by Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity

"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right?So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her,and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it.She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."

Echo of Infinity

"A silence is the echo of the infinity"
-Samuel Kessler :-)

Itches and Words

"You reach for a word as you reach for an itch" -Merleau-Ponty

it is that instinctual...

Remarkable Creatures

From artandculture.com

"Literature does not have the guarantee of immediacy which, say, the Visual Arts or Film or Music all enjoy. Its medium is the written word: there's no color, no sound, no bodies leaping to and fro - there's not even speeches to be made. The literary realm is a silent theater, spectral, a place where words roam in search bodies to inhabit. But rather then this disembodiment being a hindrance, it affords Literature a great freedom. For words are remarkable creatures and grammar an infinitely complex structure in which anything can happen. Literature may be silent but words can certainly scream, or whisper, moan, decry, they can announce and seduce - with all the subtleties and nuance of the voice. Nabakov's prose offers nibbles of nymphets, his words a caress; Melville delivers a whale in all its unwieldiness right to our doorstep; Maurice Blanchot whispers of death, haunting our every move with the inevitable's power; Montiagne's essays reveal a man more astutely than any gestures of hand or face; Homer carries us to impossible lands, letting us dance with gods. Now, other arts may offer similar possibilties, but only the word can go anywhere it may please and be anything it may desire: the word can taste of taffy, smell of sordid nights, it can whisk across your face with the vigor of a lover's slap or tickle your knees with a well-placed verb. Freed from the constraints of the body, words can meander across boundaries, through the smallest crevice, past all defenses to nestle deep within the body's skin tight fortress."

Silence and Nothingness

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness"
-Samuel Beckett

I love your silences

"I love your silences. They are like mine"
-Anais Nin

Bridges over the abyss

"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss"
-Italo Calvino

Grammar of Silence

"There are grammatical errors even in his silence"
-Stanislaw Lec

Paradigm Shift

**rhetoric 10, Coffeen

Our task is to shift how we think about language as not a vehicle of communication but an act that rearranges relationships

Any text is a speech act, rearranging different parts of reality and their relations among themselves

language becomes a choreography of your experience
it works you over
it always enacts the world rather than merely representing it

Definitions & Infinity

*** rhetoric ten, *Coffeen

A word is all of its possible definitions

Narratives and Identity

Each moment, we are recreated and a new self emerges as a part of a continuously evolving identity in the making. Identity, on some level, is rooted in a narrative. Narrative "creates us the very moment it is being created". It is through narrative that we are able to merge the various unfolding selves in which existence takes form. Narrative attempts to integrate the self that has been actualized in the past, the self that is unfolding in the present and the future self, that has yet to be born into existence. The stories we live by bridge the unstable, transitional, fleeting, situated selves into a coherent, discrete identity. They give form to our being.

But in the process of narrating the past self, we always forget. Each experienced moment vanishes into the abyss of our past and only a fragmented memory of it remains. The present is immediately transformed into an abstraction. In retelling, each lived moment is reduced to a brief summary, a couple of adjectives, a vague impression. Our memory fails us. Remembering thus...."is not the opposite of forgetting. It is a form of forgetting"

"An important challange to humanity is to recognize that lives are the pasts we tell ourselves"-Ochs & Capps

I think I'll dedicate the rest of my life to exploring the phenomenon of language.

Linguistic Realities

It is a choreography of my experience.
Nothing is more intimately intertwined with my reality.
It permeates my deepest thoughts.
It structures them.
As I enter its realm, it dictates how
My mouth moves to create every single utterance,
brimming with bottomless depths of meaning.
I don't speak it, it speaks me.
Every moment is rhetoric is motion.
A reality waiting to be read.
All aspects of the world are texts
Waiting to be read.
I am at your mercy, a tool.
Speak me.....

Creationism

Creation of the world. The ultimate speech act.

Ghostly Creatures

from: www.artandculture.com

"Socrates refused to write. He said that to write something down is to disembody it: words are left to float here and there, ghostly creatures, perverse and perverted by whatever and whomever they encounter. Of course, we only know what Socrates said because it was written. Two thousand years later, French philosopher Jacques Derrida says everything is writing, always and already. He says that when Socrates was speaking he was secretly writing, behind his own back, with and without knowing it: Plato's pen was really Socrates'. For Derrida, language is fundamentally ghostly, even when it's in our heads, when we try to put a word to a thing or idea. Language never had, has, or will have a body. So, what is a text? What is language? What does it mean to write something down and have someone read it clear across the globe, across centuries, perhaps in a different language? Is there a timeless meaning that hovers above the text, guaranteeing its meaning? Or does the meaning itself change? What determines that change? Can the author live up to his or her title in order to act as an authority, controlling the meaning of the words even if he or she has been dead 500 years? Does the reader control the meaning, in a sense rewriting the book as he or she reads? Or does the meaning emerge somewhere else, between the author, the reader, the words, the time, place, and mood? If a book is such an eruption of experience, what makes it the same book over time? Literary theory lives and breathes in the service of these questions"

Cracked Kettles

from: Gustave Flaubert in "Madame Bovary"

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Words in Exile

***From Chabad.org


There are no things. There are only words. The Divine Words of Creation.

The words become fragmented, their letters scattered.
Only then are they called things; for scattered, they have no meaning.
Words in exile.

If so, their redemption lies in the story we tell with them. How we reorganize fragments into meaning, things into words, redefining what is real and what is not, and living life accordingly.

Life is in the interpretation of the words G-d gives us.