“To speak to one another means: to say something, show something to one another, and to entrust one another mutually to what is shown. To speak with one another means: to tell of something jointly, to show to one another what that which is claimed in the speaking says in the speaking, and what it, of itself, brings to light. What is unspoken is not merely something that lacks voice, it is what remains unsaid, what is not yet shown, what has not yet reached its appearance.  That which must remain wholly unspoken is held back in concealment as unshowable, is mystery.

[…]

Speaking is known as the articulated vocalization of thought by means of the organs of speech. But speaking is at the same time also listening.  it is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one man speaks, the other listens.  but listening accompanies and surrounds not only speaking such as takes place in conversation.  The simultaneousness of speaking and listening has a larger meaning. Speaking is of the itself a listening.  Speaking is listening to the language which we speak.  Thus it is a listening not while but before we are speaking.  This listening to language also comes before all other kinds of listening that we know, in a most conspicuous manner.  We do not merely speak the language—we speak by way of it.  We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language.  What do we hear there? We hear language speaking.

[…]

In our speaking, as a listening to language, we say again the Saying we have heard.  We let its soundless voice come to us, and then demand, reach out and call for the sound that is already kept in store for us.  By now, perhaps, at least one trait in the design of language may manifest itself more clearly, allowing us to see how language as speaking comes into its own and thus speaks qua language.[…] We hear Saying only because we belong within it.”

-Martin Heidegger, The Way to Language

Guys, there’s beauty in the infinite potential of language with ambiguous meaning. I go back and forth about how comfortable I am with the resulting lack of certainty, but I do genuinely believe this.

J: …do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable.

I: That is part, I believe, of every dialogue  that has turned out well between thinking beings. As if of its own accord, it can take care that that undefinable something not only does not slip away, but displays its gathering force ever more luminously in the course of the dialogue.

[…]

I: Thirst for knowledge and greed for explanations never lead to a thinking inquiry. Curiosity is always the concealed arrogance of self-consciousness that banks on a self-invented ratio and its rationality. The will to know does not will to abide in hope before what is worthy of thought.

-Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, ”A Dialogue on Language”

Our word choice is indicative of so many things and there’s no way to communicate those implications to the person to whom we are speaking. I hesitate because I realize I can never be certain that I understand your words in the same way they are meant. I’m incapable of foolproof translation, but words are all I have.

adverse, at odds with, antithetical, contrasting, contradictory, contrary, diametric, discordant, discrepant, dissonant, incompatible, incongruent/incongruous, opposed/opposing, paradoxical

(Source: thesaurus.com)

“their let-it-all-hang-out verbal style, their longings and regrets, their urgency and lack of time left”

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Whereas we might initially scan a painting, absorbing its general layout in a second or two, and then run to focus on particular details, we tend to read text in a linear manner, proceeding sentence by sentence. Consequently, a written description of a work of art can never parallel exactly, the experience of looking at the piece, for a viewer’s eye moves at a different pace and in a different manner than does a reader’s eye. As the art historian Michael Baxandall put it in ‘The Language of Art Criticism,’ ‘No consecutive piece of verbal ostension [that is, explication], linear language, can match the pace and gait of seeing a picture as it can match the pace of a text.’ Or, worded in a more dire way, truly evocative of criticism might be doomed from the start.”

-Kerr Houston, An Introduction to Art Criticism

(guys, I already love this class)

“I must confess then that, when I first began this discourse of the understanding, and a good while after, I had not the least thought that any consideration of words was at all necessary to it.”[…]”But when, having passed over the original and composition in of our ideas, I began to examine the extent and certainty of our knowledge, I found it had so near a connexion with words that, unless their force and manner of signification were first well observed, there could be very little said clearly and pertinently concerning knowledge…And though it terminated in things, yet it was, for the most part, so much by the intervention of words that they seemed scarce separable from our general knowledge. At least they interpose themselves so much between our understandings and the truth it would contemplate and apprehend that, like the medium through which visible objects pass, their obscurity and disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our eyes and impose upon our understandings.”

-John Locke

The circularity and repetition of her thinking seemed to me the way thought, when you’re not thinking, happens. Also, if…you hear your voice and watch your mind wander, stop and start, you censor it, see inhibitions, you take strange turns, words get scrambled, lead to events and incidents you couldn’t predict, and you contradict yourself often. Unlike “stream of consciousness,”…the mind returns to themes and incidents again and again in different contexts, but there are fixed points, “blocks.” It’s not all about the free play of language - that’s about writing as writing - but when attached to the unconscious, written thought will represent memories and events you can’t avoid and keep going back to. Everything you know and don’t know.

(Source: electronicbookreview.com)

“I don’t want readers to get bogged down in unnecessary language or linguistic frills. If they need to go back to the beginning of a sentence, I don’t want it to be because it’s cluttered with verbiage that doesn’t ultimately augment and elaborate clearly even contradictory or irrational sets of thoughts. As a reader, and writer, I dislike overwrought sentences.”

Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the “open” text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as “The Open Work”). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one’s potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best—although valuation terminology is not his primary area of focus. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather, they operate in the context of utterance.

“There is great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. To do so is to make objects strike a pose. And things themselves begin to pose in the light of meaning as soon as they feel a subject’s gaze upon them.

[…]

The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seen language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning—this is what fascinates us…The Vanishing Point of Language.

May not photography also be said to function as…the Vanishing Point of the Picture[?]”

sitting in the library with a stack of books as Baudrillard explains things in the words I could not find.

“By turning away the essential opposition between the temporality of the text and the spatiality of the image, the interdisciplinary reading of photography has created an internal subdivision between two types of pictures: on the one hand, pictures capable of being read within a temporal (or even narrative and fictional) prospective, and on the other hand, pictures where this temporal dimension is simply not relevant. And although the frontiers between both categories are always shifting, the mere acceptance of this difference is hazardous, since it sneakily reintroduces a kind of essential difference between time and space that the interdisciplinary approach of photography should question more radically.”

n o n t e m p o r a l   t h i n g s ,  t e m p o r a l l y

things I’m trying to say-

“Each new occurence of interdisciplinary research crudely reveals the limits of all other language. and of course taking into account the image itself as a thought- and knowledge-producing device can only intensify our attention towards everything that escapes or exceeds verbal language. Visual thinking is not only the lesson one can draw from the contact of words and images in photographic research. Why not turn the argument around and observe that whatever the obstacles may be, images do manage to say something, whereas words do not necessarily fail to do the same?…The very fact that the interdisciplinary intermingling of words and images in our discourses on photography only seems to enhance our faith in the impossibility of representation may be seen as a paradoxical invitation to go beyond this difficulty and to search for clarity…Why not consider our new commitment to interdisciplinarity and the new relationships between words and images an attempt to speak nevertheless?”

from Conceptual Limitations of Our Reflection on Photography: the Question of “Interdisciplinarity”—Jan Baetens

(Source: amazon.com)