ex-stasis of language
Yes, it seems as if language has lost its stability, as if it has become indeterminate; it seems as if it has lost its materiality, as if it has become virtual, but the question is of course whether the medium affects the being of language.
Was language ever stable and referential? Has it lost its materiality in cyberspace? These are questions that have a bearing only if we see language as self-contained and distinct from its users, that is, if we perceive language in the old patriarchal way that is based on the male fantasy of being one’s own author(ity), originary and uncontaminated by the Other.
In psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the Other is the site of language. The Other is also the unconsciouss which, as such, embodies language within a corporeal practice. The question of the materiality of language, and thus of a text’s materiality, is hence a question of the way in which the body is involved in language production, be it the speaker’s/writer’s body or other bodies and other texts, and the various ways in which they may interact.
Language is not a monolithic space, enclosed within itself; rather, it opens up to the raptures of not knowing who the speaker is. Me? The Other? Or I in my absolute otherness?
Shades of Cogs shows an array a mapping a new media reading of texts published in the ‘old’ media print. The readings speaks about the indeterminacy and ex-stasis of signs, of mappings and structural frameworks. And music.
By happy coincidence, and despite his ambivalent relation to music, the string instrument kora resounds in Plato’s concept the chora, which he sees as a receptacle for the soul.
By happy coincidence, the string instrument kora resounds in Julia Kristeva’s rereading of the chora as the semiotic chora, a receptacle for the unconscious that embodies our being in the world. And this chora, this otherness, can be heard in the rhythms of our language, in the body’s movement…, and in the compositions we create.