On using quotes, appropriating language & concepts

Words are “both symbols and resounding matter”, designed to manifest things we cannot summon to our midst. This is the source of the “terrible, magical and magnificent power” of language. But (as we have elsewhere discussed) words are “imperfect symbols”, their semiotic capacity is bound up in “singularity and circumstantial here and now” of the “quasi-proper” linguistic object[i]. Especially in the case of “prolonged social use”, the symbolic nature of language is diminished. Words become “quickly loaded with subjectivity, each dragging after it the whole psychological stuff” of a people[ii].

Thus Pound tells us that a competent writer selects his language for its signification, certainly, but also because he is aware of its historicity, irreducible locality: “it comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used”[iii]. This historicity can, if we are careless, reduce speech to a purely formal exercise based on the domestic dynamism of the “word-thing”[iv]. It can fixate the speaker such that the inbuilt, historical and “structural dimension of language becomes autonomous by excluding the referential dimension”[v]. It comes to “let off mental reactions without the intervention of any meaning: the less intervention, the more reaction”[vi] in the “blind but brilliant ambiance”[vii] of the word-thing.

But instead of falling victim to the word-thing menace, as drowning men attempting to scream symbols through murky circumstantial depths, we will exploit the very historicity that characterizes language, deploying all its roots, all the infinitesimal associations it releases[viii] that have “grown into the skin”[ix] of a culture. Quoting him will be akin to “taking an author from behind and giving him a child”[x]. His own words [and potentially even conceptual formulae] will be used, the child will be “his offspring… yet monstrous”[xi]. Language, quotes, phrases, all local baggage will be rendered a mere means, a “material element of the work” on which we will impress the brilliance of another form. We will take up the latticework of unspoken local meaning into the “material component” of language [alongside, say, properly-sensible vocal sounds] in order to impose on it our own “formal component” or intelligible determination. We will “diachronically expand the context of texts, encircling and enclosing them on all sides, quote-unquote-meaning”[xii], “stretching out a plane of immanence” in our work that absorbs the intent of their authors into an altogether different totality[xiii]. We will cultivate a “brilliant ambiance of simulacra”, one that conveys our concepts on a gushing tide of diverse aspects born from different minds, befitting ontological being, the polyvalent superabundance of which “incomparably transcends all the words in the dictionary”[xiv], all schools, camps, ages, cliques or histories.  

[i] https://greendragoncvr.com/why-do-we-drink

[ii] A+S 206 (https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Scholasticism-Jacques-Maritain/dp/1944418105)

[iii] Pound 36 (https://www.amazon.ca/ABC-Reading-Ezra-Pound/dp/0811218937)

[iv] A+S 206

[v] BD 27 (https://www.amazon.ca/Symbolic-Exchange-Death-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/0803983999)

[vi] A+S 206

[vii] BD 96

[viii] A+S 58

[ix] Pound 36

[x] D.D 1 (https://www.amazon.ca/Dark-Deleuze-Andrew-Culp/dp/1517901332)

[xi] D.D 1

[xii] Collapse VI 48 (https://www.urbanomic.com/book/collapse-6/)

[xiii] Collapse VI 45

[xiv] Preface 94