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ok so this is directed double-wise.
i agree with art and i dont agree with art.
but i figure if i am going to explain why, i might as well just try it and so i tried it the way i know how to try such things and it's maybe a little harder than other posts. sorry about that.
that we make reference and so any aspect of that process could be otherwise doesn't mean it is. except maybe metaphysically---you know, in general---as if there was some domain of forms that showed what everything is "really like" so you dont have to deal with all the bent-up stuff you find down here amongst us people--so if there was such a level where real meanings lived, maybe with reference to there and how things worked there you could say that because we make reference and so any aspect of the process could be otherwise therefore every aspect of the process is in fact otherwise.
so there is no communication.
well, there is, but we dont mean what we say.
i think i saw something about this in a hal hartley film.
but then there are those stupid paradox things, like "i do not mean what i say."
and besides, if that were true metaphysically, it still be a problem because by its nature, we wouldnt understand anything about what anything meant there.
meaning is a funny category. there's usage and so there's communication.
one problem shows up then in what you imagine the other relation to entail, the one between a signifier and signified (which is ok) but the signified isnt exactly the experience of the signified and the experience can't be accounted for in terms of the signified or the signifier exactly. so sure. the world is not the word "world." i would think we already know that.
so there's also the experience of the signified itself, whatever that is, the result of a process of bringing phenomena into relation. if you figure that discreteness is a kind of grouping, then we're well into a process by the time that are discrete things that words can be fit to. but its a very odd kind of process, if only for its speed and complexity.
anyway, so there's the experience of some response or another being evoked through the fashioning of a signified and that fashioning is a process and that is a social process and you can't say anything really about this process using signifiers because it's always other than they are, it's always the process of bringing into relation and not what is brought into relation---so the process is bigger logically and would work on a different order.
if you imagine that syntax shapes not only relations between particles but also time and relations to time and experiences of time in a way yes, then it would follow that your ability to function linguistically relies on aspects of your experience that cannot be expressed linguistically but which are nonetheless the most ordinary thing in the world and that your experience of time may be the only one or range that you know about, but it isnt the only temporal register we work in. that seems very strange to think about. anyway, its ordinary because we're engaged in these processes all the time. sometimes i wonder if we are biological systems that live in the natural habitat of language because that would maybe explain something about the circuitry back there, on the other side, behind around and through this 2space, this sequence of letters and words and nothing else. the other alternative is to think about language as a social institution and about how constraints are fashioned, how the work, how they might be bundled and that's why i like castoriadis, because he gives a place to start and without a place to start even if this post makes little sense or has gaps in it because it is what it is, you can know pretty surely that without a starting point, it'd make even less sense.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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