how to do things with words
DESCRIPTION
A lecture exploring the phrase 'how to do things with words'. Full of creative ideas and theoretical perspectives the presentation aims to provide a platform from which people can think about their own creative or art writing. James CleggTRANSCRIPT
- 1. how to do things with words
2. how to do things with words
3. This is not a lecture
4. Criticism and Embarrassment
5. A picture of toothpaste to illustrate the ideas of Henri
Bergson
6. Why jump out of windows and hide in cupboards, or, why do a
writing for free?
The economic requirements of particular forms of writing place
constraints on what you can say or produce?
You might test ideas that could be reapplied in different
circumstances where they may be remunerated?
You have a capital of ideas that can be charitably
distributed?
7. Some forms encountered in the stream
Sketchbook ideas for creative writing
General discussion on the connotations of how to do things with
words.
Collected lineage of ideas connected to J.L Autins HOW TO DO THINGS
WITH WORDS.
8. sketchbook ideas for creative writing:bringing 2 things
together
Where does inspiration come from?
I think that a lot of people who perhaps dont work in the creative
industriesmisunderstand the imagination.A lot of it is
justcombinatorial, its almost very banal like a computation.
Creative people are often mixing things that other people think at
odds or strange.
9. sketchbook ideas for creative writing:bringing 2 things
together
10. sketchbook ideas for creative writing:Jane Austin and Dr
Dre?
11. Gender
Free indirect style
Morality
Social Status
Colonialism
12. Gender
Masculinity, Chauvinism
Free indirect style
Morality
Ganster Rap
Re-recording over sampling
Criminality
Social Status
Celebrity
Colonialism
Racial Divisions in Mulicultural America
13. Tricia Rose
There's a long history of a particular pleasure in consuming the
ideas of black-ghetto-excess dysfunction. It used to not be
ghettoized in setting because black people weren't always urban
people, but the same images can be found in American history for
centuries. So this idea that a certain kind of sexual deviance or
violent behavior defines black culture has had a huge market in
commercial mainstream culture for at least 200 years. Also, sexist
images, which hip-hop has a lot of, seem to do very well across the
cultural spectrum. So sexuality and sexual domination sell. Racial
stereotypes sell. The market is more consolidated, which makes it
easier for those images to perpetuate themselves.Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1866048,00.html#ixzz1IUobQIQx
14. 15. General discussion on the connotations of how to do things
with words.
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS
16. Possible titles of books or chapters
How to do things with wood
How to do things with lego
How to do things with a rubber glove, a bucket of hot soapy water
and a Lionel Richie CD.
Quilting chapter 6: How to do things with Words
17. Material words
Robert Smithson (1966) A Heap of Language
18. Sites and non-sites: homage to Robert Smithson
Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968)
19. Cut ups and the Moonage Daydream
20. Words my son likes
Oliver Jeffers (2006) The Incrediable Book Eating Boy
21. 22. sketchbook ideas for creative writing: Write between
sentences
23. Les lettres du blancsur les bandes du vieuxbillard....
[The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard
table...]
Les lettres du blancsur les bandes du vieuxpillard...
[The white mans letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]
24. Oulipo (Ouvoir de litteraturepotentielle [workshop of potential
literature])
25. Props and writing as role playing
26. Belief & TechniqueFor Modern Proseby Jack Kerouac
List of Essentials
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own
joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in
mind
Dont think of words when you stop but to see the picture
better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &
knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier
the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in
Heaven
27. General discussion on the connotations of how to do things with
words.
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS
28. The insides and outsides of the language we use
When philosophers use a word knowledge, being, object, I,
proposition, name and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one
must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way
in the language which is its original home?
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their
everyday use.
Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
29. Everyday life wor(l)ds
Michel De Certeau (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life
30. A lot of everyday life wor(l)ds
In the accidental ways of being a foreigner away from home (like
any traveller or keeper of records) Wittgenstein sees the metaphors
of foreign procedures inside the very language that circumscribes
them.When we do philosophy [...] we are like savages, primitive
people, who hear the expressions of civilised men, put a false
interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from
it. This is no longer the position of professionals, supposed to be
civilized men among savages; it is rather the position which
consists in being a foreigner at home, a savage in the midst of
ordinary culture, lost in the complexity of the common agreement
and what goes without saying.And since one does not leave this
language, since one cannot find another place from which to
interpret it, since there are no separate groups of false
interpretations and true interpretations, but only illusory
interpretations, since in short there is no way out, the fact
remains that we are foreigners on the inside but there is no
outside.
31. Enter the distribution of the sensible
Joseph NicphoreNipce (1826)View from the Window at Le Gras
32.In order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility
on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they first need
to be recognised as art.That is to say that they first need to be
put into practice as something other than techniques of
reproduction and transmission...
33. For his subject Flaubert took the unheroic, mediocre,
provincial, everyday heart of petit bourgeois village life.He
listened intently to the language of his class.He mimicked
unerringly the pompous rhythms of paternal clich as they sounded
benignly from the lips of the doctor, the lawyer, the journalist
and the priest... He kept a scrap-book, entitled The Dictionary of
Received Ideas, in which he collected and classified the choicest
specimens.
(Wall2003 [1992], p.xviii)
(1856)
34. Collected lineage of ideas connected to J.L Autins HOW TO DO
THINGS WITH WORDS.
35. how to do things with words
36. how to do things with words
37. how to do things with words
38. JL Austin
39. a performative utterance will [...] be in a peculiar way hollow
or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a
poem, or spoken in soliloquy.
Austin
40. J L Austin (1955) How to do Things with Words
41. Communication, Lack of
Derrida (1972) Signature Event Context
42. 43. Close reading Austins work
Derrida (1972) Signature Event Context
44. Iteration, Or, the footprint of form against the strides of
life
45. Catherine Hayles (1994) Deciphering the rules of unruly
disciplines: A modest proposal for literature and science
Someone elses strides
46. Philosopher John Searles response to Derrida
Reiterating the Differences:
He defendedAustin by saying that it was right that Austin focus on
serious speech over fiction because serious speech is normal and
not parasitic.
For Searle, to the extent that the author says what he means the
text is the expression of his intentions and The situation as
regards intentionality is exactly the same for the written word as
it is for the spoken: understanding the utterance consists in
recognizing the illocutionary intentions of the author and these
intentions may be more or less perfectly realized by the words
uttered, whether written or spoken (p. 202)
47. ...the speaker and hearers are masters of the sets of rules we
call language...
(Searle, Reiterating the Differences)
48. Consider [Searles] assertion that it is self-evident one should
consider the standard case before taking up the deviant or
parasitical instance.The assumptions embodied in the assertion are
mirrored in the language he uses to locate his reading of
Derrida.Confessing that he did not find [Derridas] arguments very
clear, he says that he will not attempt to deal with all or even
many of the points [Derrida] raises, concentrating on those that
seen to me to [be] the most important and especially on those where
I disagree with his conclusions.The language implies a privileging
of centre over periphery, clarity over obscurity, concentration
over dissemination, importance over frivolity... Hayles
49. Copywright 1977 by John R. Searle
50. ReiteratingDifferences: A reply to Derrida
1)Thanks to H Dreyfus and D. Searle for discussion in these
matters.
Derrida:Limited Inc A B C
51. Derrida concludes that the text must be owned by a Copyright
Trust.In French this is Socit reponsabilitlimite.Playing on words
Derrida shortens this to Sarl.
52. The Publicity [Derridas] ideas have attracted have only
deepened the tragedy:The bad influence of those he has himself
influenced has added frivolity to the obscurity; the ridiculous,
indeed despicable response to John Searles criticism of his views
is a characteristic production of recent years
Raymond Tallis
53. Many philosophers who take issue with Derridas style fail to
understand that if he argued using the discourse conventions
exemplified in Searles essay, he would lose the game before he
began, for the conventions presuppose precisely what he wants to
challenge.(Hayles , p. 44)
54. 55. sketchbook ideas for creative writing: time travel, Or,
form is content
theory about the causality of a plot
56. 57. sketchbook ideas for creative writing: time travel, Or,
form is content
58. sketchbook ideas for creative writing: time travel, Or, form is
content
theory about the causality of a plot in novels with a time
machine
59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. Beyond deconstruction
65. Realism after Derrida
Dont believe all that crap about being limited to ones
perspective.All of the sciences have been inventing ways to move
from one standpoint to the next, from one frame of reference to the
next, for Gods sake: thats called relativity.
Bruno Latour as The Professor (2007) Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
66. Realism after Derrida
... no amount of methodology will ever bring a text closer to the
distant setting about which it writes, no amount of ignorance of
deconstruction will take a text farther away from it either.
Latour, B. (1988) The Politics of Explanation
67. Applying the breaks to deconstruction
Readers seem to be much more devious, much harder to take in, much
cleverer at deconstruction, much faster in fiction-making than is
assumed by those writers who, with some arrogance, believe that
others believe. Here, too, we need to play down the exoticism of
the other'. Scientific texts prepare themselves against a much more
likely outcome: that of nor being believed by their readers, or
worse, that of not interesting anyone.
Bruno Latour (1988) The Politics of Explanation
68. how to do things with wordsactor network style
69. sketchbook ideas for creative writing: make a mess and clean it
up
70. how to do things with words
You cannot summarise what can be done with words without falling
into the conceit outlined by Wittgenstein, without creating a
distance between your self and the words spoken.
Try to recuperate the ambiguity of an exhibition from the
inside.
What you can and cannot talk about in certain places officially or
unofficially is constrained by the distribution of the sensible.The
more you understand this or explore it the more you might
contribute to its shifts.
Con(text)tent.
Trying to describe reality can be more complex, messy and
fragmented as meta-fiction.
71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. how