Trapped in words

After a year of studying the philosophy of language I am beginning to feel a bit less confused over a topic that has baffled me my whole life. I remember that when I was younger I would look at an object, a chair for example, and after thinking about it for a while I would wonder over why this chair was called a chair. Why was it not called car, or called tree. After some longer puzzling the word would eventually feel foolish upon my tongue and I would get the sense that this chair was not a chair, chair being merely something that had been bestowed upon it. Then the word would vanish and I could no longer describe the object before me, it was as if language had fallen away, I could no longer signify or make sense of what it was I was looking at. If I asked anyone else about this experience they would tell me to stop being stupid, that it was a chair, had always been a chair and always would be one. But then different languages; chaise in French, stuhl in German and on into other languages. In which case a chair was never simply a chair but can always be translated into something other. And words, innocent as they may seem, are devices that we are forced to use. I could hardly start talking to a friend and use a completely different word for a chair, nor could I indicate it with the silence that I felt, so I was forced to use something that I never quite could understand.

I sometimes wonder about deaf people and about how they think and perceive the world. With sign language they have their own system of signifiers that point to different objects, however how is it that they think? My thoughts consist of words, if I'm day dreaming then they might be pictures but usually it is words that float about my head. I can't imagine existing without the flow of sentences that are constantly running through my brain.

While Heidegger posits that 'Language is the House of Being' perhaps it is necessary to go further, language is a cage, a prison and while there are still certain lines of flight we are still mediated by it, not only in our daily conversations but in the very way that we think:

'Things are what they are only because of the meanings words give them… we could not live without these things which are words, just as we could not live with-out these words which are things. But words and things enclose us, stifle us; and it is very difficult for us to escape from them, to find ourselves beyond words and things (Bataille 'Surrealism and God.')'

However it is still possible to subvert words, to sacrifice meaning. My favourite personal example of this is the usage of the word 'glue.' Glue in its normal sense is something that you use to stick things together but in the context which myself and my friends use it we struggle to define it. Other words that have evolved from 'glue' are 'gluebag' (which is a little more obvious) and 'glueboot'. The action of taking this word and using it in a different context was never something conscious, it just happened and now when someone says 'that's glue,' or 'you're talking glue,' there is no need for explanations. This form of word subversion is extremely common, especially in dialects; for example 'tab' or 'canny' in geordie-speak, or the use of the word 'cool.' Eventually though these subverted contexts of words get taken up by language and assimilated back into it in their new context. The subversion has then ended and we are trapped once again in language.

If words in their normal usage constitute discourse and in their 'non-normal' usage constitute poetry then it is in poetry that the lines of flight take place. For Bataille poetry constitutes a sacrificing of language, in which poetry points to an experience which cannot be grasped by normal means. If we delimit or try to make sense of these experiences then we lose the sense of what they are; the great ungraspable. I am reminded of times in my life when words were no longer of any use, to use them seemed somehow wrong and in those moments silence held a poignancy that words could never attest to.

Even a name belongs to that moment when we delimit a person. I am Siobhan, and yet Siobhan is not all that I am. 'Siobhan' does not grasp me in my singularity. You might of course list my properties, my height, my weight, my eye colour but still does not attest to what it is that I am. In the same way by naming you I am unable to grasp the Otherness of which you are, something other, something that language will always fail.

Perhaps then poetry comprises of one of the great revolutionary moments if by a revolution we mean something that overturns or overthrows social, political or cultural norms. Think of Mallarme, Rimbaud or the Surrealists. Words are no longer a cage but are turned into something anew, from the poetic struggle with discourse these poets point to something that discourse will never be able to take hold of.



So now I'm going to write an essay on Bataille, but in writing on Bataille I feel a wrongness in doing so, for I am taking him and placing him within the discourse that he disparaged. No doubt I'll talk about discourse, fragments, poetry and ontology, I will rationalise my way through his labyrinth and produce something that can be marked and criticised. I plan on violently raping his work, taking it to pieces to produce something that conforms to academia. It makes me feel kind of dirty but I'll do it anyway because when it comes down to it I really am a bitch to discourse.

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