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1. The Decomposition of Linear Language

                  

Language classifies, orders, excludes. It makes worlds legible — and thereby governable. Western linguistic traditions have privileged linear syntax: subject → predicate → object. This architecture produces a sense of clarity, logic, and progression. But it also carries deep violences: of erasure, hierarchy, and control. Édouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation, offers a counter-image. Against the colonial obsession with transparency, he proposes the right to opacity — to remain unreadable, irreducible, uncontained:

     *“We demand the right to opacity for everyone.”*¹


Opacity, for Glissant, is not confusion. It is a radical form of presence — a refusal to be rendered knowable on someone else’s terms. In a parallel register, Roland Barthes reflects on language that seduces rather than informs. In The Pleasure of the Text, he describes writing that evades instrumental clarity — that gestures, flirts, and dissolves:

    *“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.”*²


In both cases, the violence of legibility is made visible. And in both, we glimpse the potential of linguistic forms that do not follow the line — that break with grammar, certainty, and conclusion.

These are Disobedient Lines: linguistic gestures that refuse closure and open instead to dissonance, opacity, and multiplicity.

More on:  
2. Unbounding Syntax, Argument and Form (Fred Moten)
3. Language as Body / Resistance / Material (Fred Moten)

When theory ceases to function as system, it becomes a kind of disturbance. It no longer seeks to persuade, but to displace. Readability itself becomes a contested terrain.  Er erzeugt einen Raum, in dem nicht das Verstehen, sondern das Spüren im Vordergrund steht. Forschung nicht als Sicherung von Wissen, sondern als choreografierte Wahrnehmung des Ungewissen.

Footnotes:
1. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189.
2. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
3. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 198.
4. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 14.

 

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Index: