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But there exists for those interested in destabilizing normative language a certain paradox. How do we go about problematising the hegemony of the symbolic, from within the symbolic? In other words, how do we use language, against language from within language?
This problem was neatly encapsulated not long ago during a Q&A session that took place just after I delivered a short talk on this subject. An audience member put his hand up, leant forward and asked: “… quinxgladn of ghikdklmcnsajkcn sjkk mnm.” Unsure of how to respond, I ended up just agreeing: “yes, that’s very true...”
And while it is hard to ignore the explicit and self-evident limitations highlighted by the audience member’s question, there is still much to do in terms of delineation this problem. And, somewhat more belligerently, given the presence of this paradox – rather than just giving up it seems like a better to just push on through, fortified in the belief that – against the logic of the Wittgensteinian unsayable – the greatest enemy here, for me at least, is silence itself.
As a starting point against silence, and as something to hold onto in this otherwise slippery space we now find ourselves, I find the strategic schematic proposed by Sherri Turkle in response to her observations of the anti-psychiatric application of disordered/displaced language as a most useful tool due to its simplistic clarity. It is to this we now turn before some short closing remarks.
Turkle, identifies three distinct strategies local to anti-psychiatric exposition, each of which is “directed towards subverting our usual way of thinking about ourselves” in order to “fight the normalization that everyday language imposes.”12
1) “Invention” --- essentially the reinvention of language through a new symbolic order. Turkle here cites Lacan’s turn towards mathematical ‘formalization’ in the Ecrits as an example of this.
1) “Unconvention” --- the use language in a highly unconventional way. This could involve heavy reliance on punnery, word games, codified speech and nonsense talk. Equally viable here is the invention of new language forms that have no real extended definition and are purely self-referential.
1) “Novelty” --- the idea that discourse itself can be reinvented. That the very terms of the debate can be displaced in favour of new regimes capable of breaking the reader’s usual “set”. After Kristeva, we can see that examples of this sort of strategy are not uncommon in the history of subversive intellectual movements. One need only consider the work of figures such as Joyce, Artaud, Breton, Burroughs in order to understand, as Turkle argues, that with each of these cases (and many more) “the text is not there simply to transmit content or to convince you of an argument, it is there to do something to the reader. The text serves to help the reader reject standard notions about the nature of knowing.“13
12 Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics. 1978, 147
13 Ibid.
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