From: Unleesh-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 02:58:41 EST
Subject: Re:  Re: Provisional Remarks on the Question of Violence


" Language is
violent because it fixes things within boundaries and tries to halt
the movement of what it describes.  This is unavoidable "

Hmm, I wonder about this ... couldn't we visualize a language in continual
variation? (as opposed to reifying it in some sort of solidified "history of
collective usage", which would in this new version become more like the
tracing of a river through its windings, suggesting the windingness itself)
Couldn't language become a tracing of tendencies?

And doesn't creative thinking come from playing with the tensions at the
boundaries between words or concepts?

For instance : when is an apple a toilet, when is a toilet an apple? 

This would be an example of "lateral thinking" as Edward De Bono has defined
it.

I think if the social scene becomes more exciting and we see more challenges
of dominant languages through the creation of Creoles (ie. in America /
California for example, if we get rid of the everyone speak english shtick and
not only open up different languages as bound entities, but imagine people
from different language communities combining words from various languages,
like for example people from a mixed household might) --- and this would be
very exciting -- then the next phase would be open to a schismogenesis or
total differentiation across the social fabric, where meanings would be mixed
and matched and recombined continuously. It would be amazing if different
alphabets or graphologies were combined! This will imply mass parties and
intracity cultural exchange programs between different (sub/)cultural and
linguistic groups, similar to our foreign exchange programs where someone
comes in from another country and lives in someone's house to learn customs.
Here the practice would be not just to "learn" customs as part of an
integrated entity, but to actively collage, sharing and recombining...