I couldn't find my copy of Jacques Ellul's Humiliation of the Word, so Lu ordered got me one on e-bay and I started reading it again, in the light of recent dialogues on this forum.
I'm finding gold. For Matt: "The important thing is that the unique value of language lies in truth. Language is not bound to reality, but to its capacity to create this different universe, which you can call surreal, meta-real or metaphysical. For the sake of convenience we will call it the order of truth. The word is the creator, founder and producer of truth. Note carefully that I am not establishing any hierarchy in this connection, from a mediocre reality with no value, ascending toward a transcendent truth. I merely establish two different orders. Rather than speaking of Truth, at this point I am still dealing just with the order of truth (which is also, to be sure, the order of untruth, error and falsehood!). Nor am I saying that language has nothing to do with reality. We will examine this relationship later. I am, instead, looking for specificity, and in this case it resides in the fact that nothing besides language can reach or establish the order of truth." Isn't that similar to Rorty's "conversation"? For Marsha, a passage in praise of ambiguity and poetry and spiders: "Language deals with connotations and overtones. It takes it place in the center of an infinitely delicate spider's web, whose central structure is fine, rigorous, and dense. As you move away from the center, the web becomes larger and distended, until it reaches incoherence, at its edge, where it sends off threads in every directions. Some of these threads go a great distance, until they arrive at invisible spots where the web is anchored. This complex web is a marvel which is never the same, not for me at different points in time, nor for another person. The spoken Word puts the web in motion so that waves sweep through it and cause lights to flicker. The waves induce vibrations that are different for the other person and for me. The word is uncertain. Discourse is ambiguous and often ambivalent. Some foolishly try to reduce language to something like algebra, in which each world would have a mathematically precise meaning, and only one meaning. Each would would be put in a straitjacket, having only meaning so that we would know with scientific precision what we were saying. But the blessed uncertainty of language is the source of all its richness. I do not know exactly how much of my message the other person hears, how they interpret it, or what they will retain of it. I know that a kind of electric current is established between us; words penetrate the other, and I have the feeling that they either reacts positively or else reject what I have said. I can interpret their reaction, and then the relationship will rebound, accompanied by a rich halo of overtones. They do no understand, and I see that. So I speak again, weaving another piece of cloth, but this time with a different design. I come up with what I think will reach them and be perceived by them. The uncertainty of meaning and the ambiguity of language inspire creativity. It is a matter of poetics, but not just the esthetics of poetry. There is a poetics of language and of relationships also. We must not limit this poetics to language, which must be constantly rewoven, but remember that the relationship is *also* involved. Language requires that we recommence this relationship, which is always uncertain. I must disavow it over and over again, through sharp questioning, explanation, and verbal interchange." There. According to Ellul anyway, she's been doing it right all along. JC Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
