|
|
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| __NOTOC__
| | |
| In ''Towards a Lexicon of Usership'', '''Stephen Wright''' proposes to intervene in day-to-day language of "use" in order to change our understanding of what "use" could entail. When we asked him about a prompt to revisit reuse, he came up with the following playful script. The exercise is accompanied by ''Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Ontology'', an introductory text that is included on this page. You can download the pdf he sent us [[:File:Rebeing.pdf|here]].
| | |
| | |
|
| |
|
| <div class="prompt"> | | <div class="prompt"> |
| == Rebeing: A practical exercise in psycholexicography == | | == Rebeing: A practical exercise in psycholexicography == |
|
| |
|
| In your mind, go through the entire alphabet from A to Z choosing as quickly and | | In your mind, go through the entire alphabet from A to Z choosing as quickly and spontaneously as possible one verb per letter, prefixing each selection with re-, writing the verbs down as you go. |
| spontaneously as possible one verb per letter, prefixing each selection with re-, writing the | |
| verbs down as you go. | |
|
| |
|
| Repeat twice for best results. | | Repeat twice for best results. |
|
| |
|
| Here’s my first list, by way of example. | | Here’s my first list, by way of example.</br> |
| | | A second list will redig the same imaginary, just a little deeper.</br> |
| A second list will redig the same imaginary, just a little deeper. | |
| | |
| The third, a little deeper still. | | The third, a little deeper still. |
|
| |
|
| Line 42: |
Line 39: |
| * Reyeast | | * Reyeast |
| * Rezone | | * Rezone |
|
| |
| ----
| |
|
| |
| == Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Ontology ==
| |
|
| |
| In our former lives, we have all been earth,
| |
| stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect,
| |
| fish, turtle, bird and mammal.
| |
| (Mathias Énard, requoting Thich Nhat Hanh
| |
| requoting the Buddha)
| |
|
| |
| === Restarting all verbs with re- ===
| |
|
| |
| One might well imagine a verb dictionary in which all the entries begin with re-. Frontloading all
| |
| verbs — including verbal nouns and gerunds — in the language with this little prefix might
| |
| usefully draw attention to the fact that when you get right down to it all use is re-use, all
| |
| breathing rebreathing, all verbing reverbing. As thought-provoking as this retooled dictionary
| |
| might be — or thought-reprovoking —it would also ultimately be redundant for paradoxically it
| |
| suggests that all verbs have an embedded prefix anyway that we had previously failed to
| |
| notice and that was just being pointed out. In other words, it implies that the initiative allegedly
| |
| performed or expressed by any given verb is somehow a re-initiative, and all performance re-
| |
| performance, all doing redoing, all reading rereading, all discovery rediscovery, all action
| |
| reaction. Indeed, the dictionary’s conceit actually seems to invalidate the very conditions of
| |
| possibility of an event taking place at all since it inscribes action itself it in an endless web of
| |
| causal factors. In philosophical terms, this re-dictionary would seem to make an outrageous
| |
| ontological assertion: that being is rebeing, and that to be is to re-be. On the face of things,
| |
| that is something that sounds not only nonsensical but infuriating. Inasmuch as it strips us of
| |
| the very possibility of originating anything absolutely afresh, it insults our self-image as agents
| |
| of creative authority and authorship. And it does so through language usage itself, which feels
| |
| predominantly calibrated to uphold the constituant subject — the cogito upon which pretty
| |
| much everything else is contingent. Re- is a common prefix, and very much a subaltern one,
| |
| for those who rely on linguistic hand-me-downs. Recycling may be praiseworthy, but it is
| |
| linguistically sentenced to entropy.
| |
|
| |
| === Relooping reuse ===
| |
|
| |
| Still, the fact that any verb, gerund or gerundive whatsoever can be put into an infinite loop
| |
| merely by prefixing it with re- is intriguing. Though such usage may be jarring to the ear, it
| |
| remains grammatically irreproachable. Perhaps it’s jarring because a language-immanent value
| |
| system has habituated us to proceeding otherwise, and as we get used to the repeating logic
| |
| of re- a more complex web of morphing reuse will become perceptible. At any event, it is also
| |
| true that many common verbs take easily to the prefix re-. For instance, any verb expressing
| |
| some sort of recombinant action involving a preexistent set of component parts or ingredients:
| |
| reuse is spontaneously more logical than use, repurposing clearer than purposing, retooling
| |
| truer to life than tooling. Or what about activities that follow the rhythm of the seasons or the
| |
| recurrent cycles of life? Rebuilding, replanting, repairing, reproducing…
| |
|
| |
| === Refarming the lifeworld ===
| |
|
| |
| Let’s take things a step further. Like ancestral epistemologies, recent ecosystemic theory has
| |
| drawn attention to the intractable connectedness of everything. All lifeforms and agents are
| |
| endlessly remade from one another — what else, indeed, could they be remade from? We are
| |
| all one, redistributed; forever remade, reformed, remixed, recoded, reintroduced, renamed;
| |
| endlessly part and parcel of one another. The breath you just exhaled is already mine, for a
| |
| moment; breathing is rebreathing is refarming the atmosphere. To live together in a biosphere is
| |
| to remake use — or make reuse — of that atmosphere, of all that it is and all that is in it. Same
| |
| goes for any landscape, literal or figurative. To even mention such a thing should be redundant
| |
| — a statement of the obvious. That it is clearly isn’t says something about the ideology
| |
| embedded in use in general, and in language use in particular. This suggests there is
| |
| something quite profound, from an ontological perspective, about reuse — and about the
| |
| community of (re)users that make use and reuse. Let’s consider this from the point of view of
| |
| language (re)use.
| |
|
| |
| === Redistributed reuse ===
| |
|
| |
| Meaning — all the meaning there is in the world, and by extension, all the tentative stability it
| |
| provides — is generated, modified and upheld within language by the community of users of
| |
| that language. Meaning results from a conflictual relationship between speech and language,
| |
| between potentiality and power: individual usage (speech acts) may challenge or subvert
| |
| collective usage (the institution of language), but if it challenges it too much, it strays from the
| |
| realm of the collectively admissible and fails to take hold in language; conversely, if usage
| |
| blandly reasserts the norm, innovation founders and meaning grows brittle. This means that as
| |
| users of language, we are collectively entrusted both with upholding and renewing meaning —
| |
| all the meaning there is. That’s a daunting task, though it is sufficiently redistributed as to make
| |
| it manageable. Language, though, is paradigmatic in another way too: since no one user
| |
| invented language — which was always already available for use — we might as well say that
| |
| in circular fashion language invented its users. This means, though, that it is logically
| |
| inconsistent to speak of simply using language inasmuch as every component of it has already
| |
| been reused, countless times over in countless permutations, and hence that there is only
| |
| language reuse, making of us not users but quite literally re-users.
| |
|
| |
| === A reassuring ontology ===
| |
|
| |
| Here language reuse can be seen as the paradigm of reuse in the broadest sense. Modernity
| |
| contrived of many ways to put us humans on a higher plane than other lifeforms, but reuse
| |
| would seem to put us all on an equal ontological footing: as re-users of the conditions for
| |
| reproducing life itself, we find common ground with a planetary re-usership. Ontologically, it’s
| |
| very reassuring.
| |
|
| |
| SW
| |
|
| |
| </div> | | </div> |
