[Nettime-bold] words and things

[McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>]

Mark Dery asks of words, and the work they do,


" *What* sort of work among *what* other orders of
*what* sort of things?"

which really is the question. What do words *do*? Ever since
Sassaure taught us to separate language from speech, and
then to separate the sigifier from the signfied, there's been a
problem with the way 'language' is conceived. Notice what
Sassaure does. He peels off all the active parts of the process
to leave language standing alone as a structure. Arguably,
what's been going on for a century is the slow realisation
that there is no such thing as 'language' after all. It just doesn't
exist. There's no transcendent structure hovering over the
process, calling it into being. The reverse is the case. The
illusion that there is language is an effect of the pragmatics of
speech and writing acts.

So what's interesting to me in writing as a creative act is looking
at those writings which disavow 'language' as a transcendent
entity, and look instead at the pragmatics as a place for creating
writing. Joyce and Burroughs were on the wrong track, to the
extent that there's a certain faith in language at work in them, a
faith in what, through a hyperpoetics or a cutu-up, might be
released from langauge as a kind of sacred double to the world.

It also means that a lot of hypertext writing was also -- to me --
barking up the less interesting tree, to the extent that there was
some faith in the link as a means of tapping into the deeper
polyvalent essence of language.

It may also be the difference between the way Deleuze and Derrida
approach linguisitcs. The former always seemed more interesting to
me, as there's always a mixing of words and things in the event, and
the release of sense outside of 'language' in Deleuze. (yes, unclear i
know, but its just a hunch at this stage).

If one thinks, following Havelock, Ong, McLuhan, that technical changes
in the media are significant moments that can reveal the *functioning*
of communication, then it may be no accident that the current moment
is one in which questioning the existence of 'language' has its moment.
Words existed for a long time before the concept of 'language', as i
am using it here, became so prevalent. Words have always had a pragmatics,
but perhaps only in the mass print era did they belong to 'language'.
It seems to me there's a fit between print, education, 'language' and the
grammar police. The extraordinary textual productivity of the internet
era is surely an affront to this.

These comments dovetail with the debate on 'englishes', many nettime
lifetimes ago.

ken wark


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