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Paul Chan's Alternumerics illustrate a growing restlessness with language: as fixed meaning, and as a network of predetermined and unchangeable signifiers vested with centuries of patriarchal Western meanings (I am thinking specifically of English and French, though every language is coded with its origins, as well as the nuances it acquires from the dominant power). Language and words are "inherited dictionaries" according to Isidore Isou, "naming the Unknown by the Forever" (Manifesto, 1). Furthermore, language constructs reality for the speaker. One's worldview is inherent to the word choices available to describe it, as well as in the syntax employed to connect the words into hierarchical relations of power. In a male-centric, colonial, capitalist culture, language only functions to represent these dominant values. Women and people of colour are effaced if not completely mis-represented, their bodies and experiences colonized by the language of the dominant social power.
The question that arises for these - us - "Others", is how to use/subvert language so that it will represent our particular reality. As Helen Cixous writes in Laugh of the Medusa, "beware of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified" (19). By disrupting grammar that precludes us (i.e. adding an 'e' for feminine endings in French) and subverting the linear structure of the male line (of narrative thought and patriarchal inheritance), a different reality can surface. Digital and hypertext literature, with its inherent multi-vocal potential, offers what may be the most successful incarnation of this disruption. |
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