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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