Description
Deriving from the Greek grammé (to inscribe; define) grammar pro-grams relationships between things and beings. In many Indo-European languages, this is done with noun declensions and verb conjugations. In a simple phrase like ‘amor vincit omnia’ (love conquers all) the word ‘amor’ retains the nominative form while the word ‘omnia’ appropriates the accusative form. This configures the relationship between the two words, designating ‘amor’ as the subject (agent) and ‘omnia’ as the object (recipient). Once pro-grammed, this relationship is fixed. Any word appearing in the nominative case will always act on any word appearing in the accusative case and not the other way around.Riffing off Derrida’s much-cited phrase ‘translation is regulated transformation’ (1981), this talk draws on intermedia and linguistic transitivity to explore the possibility of trans-grammaring, understood as a process of modulating (fixed) grammatical relationships. Initially coined by Coleridge, and reintroduced by Higgins in 1966, intermedia refers to the space between art media (e.g. painting, sculpture, sound art, film) and life media (e.g. walking, sleeping, eating). Linguistic transitivity is based on: a) Wittgenstein’s games (1953), which refers to behaviour-cuing and notion-formulating interactions; b) creative interpellation, with subject-constituting and status-conferring powers, and c) pervasiveness – the temporal working of language that sediments positions over time.
Using Ono’s event scores (four-dimensional perceptual ready-mades) and Xu’s immersive linguistic installations as representative of the intermedial and transitive approach, I analyse the process of transformation, not as change from one grammatical form, (such as non-tensed verbs in Mandarin), to another, (such as tensed verbs in English), but as a process of unhinged declension and conjugation which tests the limits of understandability and form.
| Period | 28 Nov 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | The Unsecret Agent Symposium |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Kristiansand, NorwayShow on map |