Words
Words are flying pell-mell amongst us. I thought to credit this at first to the tendency of rhetoric to be the currency of exchange during meetings like this. Then again, words are ghostly that float out of the elegances of contrived eloquences. Floating and circulating thus-ominously, it appears to me-these words haunt.
Many are meaningless; to many: "Greek". Words not in English proliferate in conversations that can only incline towards trepidation, or politesse, or fantasizing. Words from the language I speak back home are distant-sounding here, and hover wildly near syntaxes hybridizing even at the moment of speech. (Parole and langue become spectral distinctions).
Other words are ubiquitous-nation, for instance, or region, or Asia, or Pacific or Asia Pacific, and add, too, Triennial-seem to materialise the weight of the master narratives against which man~ ' of us struggle, though these struggles are of course inconceivable outside of (or without what Edward Said called a contrapuntal relation with) orders of knowledge constituted precisely within these grand narratives.l Still other words-like alternative, ethnicity, hyphenated, identity, other, indeed the number of words preceded by post-from the vocabulary or what are already traditions of discursive radicalism, so politically correct, so a la mode, are nonetheless signifiers with unstable signifieds, here, in for instance this melee, outside academic confines. The mythologies passionately being crafted out of mixtures of histories and desires and angers, are not quite-or not yet-coalescing into a palpability, indeed into liberation.
And perhaps we do not wish such a coalescing, because once again, another omnipotent canon will propose enslavement. I have no wish to privilege words over images, over the immediacies of experience, or over the miraculous intimacies which... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline