1. Language as Body / Resistance / Material
Language does
not merely convey meaning — it breathes,
cracks, hesitates. It has weight. It
takes up space. In many diasporic and
Indigenous traditions, language is not
abstract form, but material presence — a
body in motion, a practice of survival
and resistance. When grammar breaks
down, when punctuation loosens, when
syntax unravels — what arises is not
chaos, but an alternate mode of
articulation. Deviation from normative
language becomes a gesture of refusal:
not a deficit, but a stance. A disavowal
of transparency-at-any-cost, and an
embrace of difference. Fred Moten, in In
the Break, describes improvisation —
particularly in jazz — as a practice of
sounding through linguistic failure. He
names a “phonic materiality” that
exceeds semantic content. Language,
here, does not mean — it pulses,
scratches, echoes:
*“Improvisation is sounding in linguistic failure.”*¹
This
sensibility is echoed in The Echo of
Collective Blur and Symbiotic Fictions,
where language is not a system, but a
skin: porous, rhythmic, resistant. A
medium not of representation, but of
encounter.
Fußnoten
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.