Like maybe (not) use language

This page draws its title from a now-deleted attempt at linguistic dissolution (certain among you may find it significant that we have not said “deconstruction”) by Jacobi of The Wild Will Project. This foray, in turn, draws in part--but also deviates substantially--from the relatively naïve antilinguistic ramblings of John Zerzan. In the belief that Jacobi was onto something great but left lots of possibilities on the table, this page will house a compilation of linguistic fuckery.

Preliminary thoughts include:

—We cannot, as Zerzan claims, move into a new nonlinguistic era. Or maybe we can, but such a move would have such a devastating effect on our fitness for any recognizably human world that it would be idiotic.

—We accept, for now, the common idea that linguistic components (from pre-vocal, pre-auditory thoughtforms to phonemes, tones, words) carry on their backs a mass of historical baggage like little invisible Santa Clauses.

—Ferdinand de Saussure can go fuck a duck: Pre-word sounds carry meanings that may or may not be formally codified but which nevertheless do something. See Bouba-Kiki effect.

—It is no coincidence that the words “history” and “story” bear such (cross-linguistic) similarity. History is constantly regenerated as it is thought about, utilized, or evoked. As such, we may construct new histories for linguistic components that have the power to transform the things in their Santa sacks. Such histories need no empirical grounding but, with enough driving juice, come to behave as hyperstitions.

—Construction of new linguistic entities (either via genesis or alteration of old entities, which is itself a subform of genesis) has the potential to sever the controlling circuits of language (as made famous in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or, more poignantly, in the hyperdeterministic pop-readings thereof), fracturing language and the worlds it asserts. Regardless whether there is some base reality measurable by means outside human perception, the only worlds we can live in are those of our own (necessarily {but oft-veiledly} plural) perceptions; to alter the construction of those worlds is to form new realities in a way that is neither metaphorical nor insignificant.