September 23, 2014

Les Ombres
Paul Delvaux
b. September 23, 1897

. . . words are a way of fending in the world: whole languages, like species, can disappear without dropping a gram of earth weight, and symbolic systems to a fare you well can be added without filling a ditch or thimble. . . .
—A.R. Ammons

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Equality, diversity, respect for orality, descriptivism (not prescriptivism), and “going to the people”: these remain fundamental tenets for any program of radical linguistics, and for anyone who cares about human language. But today there are sobering realities. The concept of linguistic equality has done little to change popular perceptions. Nor have two centuries of revolutionary political and social movements, though certain large-enough languages have been elevated to official status in the course of national liberation struggles. Nearly everywhere, a persistent stigma clings to minority languages, provincial dialects, “non-standard” accents, and working-class “sociolects,” not to mention the linguistic registers used by women, young people, and LGBTQ speakers. The vitriol routinely trained on Black English in America is representative, although politically committed linguists like William Labov and John Rickford have devoted their careers to documenting and defending its integrity. Debates about language are rarely just about language—they’re always about the speakers.

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In the early 1990s, a small subset of linguists began raising the alarm, trying to reorient a discipline whose well-meaning focus on elusive and trivial “universals” had led it to ignore actually existing linguistic diversity—an unfortunate legacy left by Noam Chomsky, who was a radical and a linguist but not a radical linguist.

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Leftists, liberals, and progressives have a bigger stake in the future of language than they know. We hardly realize how deeply embedded capitalist mentalities now are in our very language—the ways we talk about time, space, relationships. Liberals intensely aware of privilege based on gender, race, class, or sexuality seldom consider linguistic privilege—English (or Spanish or Chinese or Hausa) is just the air we breathe. The politics of language, when we practice it at all, has been about framing, about keywords, about sloganeering in the major languages. Meanwhile, the ground is shifting under us.

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Piano Keys Lake
1905
Frantisek Kupka
b. September 23, 1871

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The Cthulhucene. Haraway approaches a definition of the cthonic epoch by talking about the impossibility of existing as an individual – existing is far stranger than a bunch of monads wandering around and interacting. No, this epoch is defined by the frightening weirdness of being impossibly bound up with other organisms. She says, “complexity is impossible without infection.” This recalls Tim Morton’s concept of the “strange stranger.” Even the self is infinitely strange. The identity of an individual is amorphous, porous, and liminal. There’s never a clear point at which a being begins or ends, and that’s why we are all lichens: a being made up of multiple separate symbiotic organisms.

Haraway says, “The activation of the chthonic powers that is within our grasp to collect up the trash of the anthropocene, and the exterminism of the capitalocene, to something that might possibly have a chance of ongoing.”

What might this mean or be?...(more)

Sympoiesis, not autopoiesis, threads the string figure game played by Terran critters. Always many-stranded, SF is spun from science fact, speculative fabulation, science fiction, and, in French, soin de ficelles (care of/for the threads). The sciences of the mid-20th-century "new evolutionary synthesis" shaped approaches to human-induced mass extinctions and reworldings later named the Anthropocene. Rooted in units and relations, especially competitive relations, these sciences have a hard time with three key biological domains: embryology and development, symbiosis and collaborative entanglements, and the vast worlds of microbes. Approaches tuned to "multi-species becoming with" better sustain us in staying with the trouble on Terra. An emerging "new new synthesis" in trans-disciplinary biologies and arts proposes string figures tying together human and nonhuman ecologies, evolution, development, history, technology, and more. Corals, microbes, robotic and fleshly geese, artists, and scientists are the dramatis personae in this talk's SF game.

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My thesis is that anarchism is the form of political organization that haunts all politics. However, this formula is liable to misinterpretation. “Haunting” generally has negative connotations. Someone might therefore take this statement to denote the idea that anarchism is a danger that threatens all forms of political organization. Under this characterization, anarchy would be something to be defended against.

This is not what I mean when I say anarchy haunts all forms of social and political organization. Rather, I mean something closer to Marx’s claim that communism is a specter that haunts Europe. To my thinking, anarchism haunts all political thought and all actually existing political institutions in two ways: First, there is the positive way. Anarchism is the political ideal– recognized as such or not –that all emancipatory politics aspires to. All truly just political organization strives to be egalitarian and without hierarchy, whether hierarchy be organized around a privileged leader, economic class, privileged institutions (such as corporations or parties), a privileged gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. When we think the concept of emancipation to its logical conclusion, anarchism stares back at us. Anarchism is what emancipatory and egalitarian politics strives to be without being it. It is the regulative ideal that both functions as the aim this politics strives towards and the standard it falls short of.

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Solitude
Paul Delvaux
1956

Some books ask that you take them seriously, erasing everything comic, positioning themselves above the world. Others seek to make you laugh, erasing everything serious, positioning themselves beneath the world. There is a third category, much rarer. These books operate in a space where such distinctions are no longer possible: from an anxious—not a golden—middle. Where the laughable and the serious remain, mutually protecting one another; where they do not merge and yet are impossible to distinguish. We laugh, but that laughter remains caught in our throat. Such books are deadly serious.

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An aesthetic is emerging from Iyer’s work over the last few years, one that’s surprisingly consistent: rigorously anti-beautifying, anti-kitsch and yet, for all its cynicism, quietly optimistic.

Readers of his trilogy will find that Iyer’s style remains largely unchanged. For the most part this is welcome, though I wonder if a less fragmented approach might have worked better when treating the character of Wittgenstein. If Bernhard’s magic works by a sheer accumulation of terms—opacity exuding from an excessive paroxystic communicativeness; words piling up until the unspoken rears its head—Iyer’s disrupting of Wittgenstein’s monologues at key moments sometimes has a deflationary effect, can give them the finality of a well told joke.

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Wittgenstein Jr walks a line between cynicism and optimism, between the laughable and the serious; it’s a line too fine to be easily called. Whether it fall down on one side, or remains in the anxious middle, will depend on how much the book makes you laugh, and what kind of laughter that is. I, for my part, found it hilarious.

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