Collection of talks and essays about her own, personal experience with language and writing.
"For in the making of the thing, the object, language itself-- as writing-- became objectifiable and thus discoverable and recoverable as something not invented but inventing, bearing, writing, living to insure my own sense of it for its own sake, to be reviewed as an exercise in which the acting out and through makes, by that pattern and patterning, the very shape it mimics in its form." (243)
"Is there an essence of things? Beyond representability? Or is there only meaning in materiality? Is meaning death-- or is on-meaning a condition of complete destruction? Neither, but resolution into any closed sign is a kind of death, as the static representation of desire is a death." (247)
from "Other than Linear:"
"While many of these works push aggressively against the limits of language as a conventional system of communication and by so doing begin to break down linearity in terms of the possibility of achieving the closure inherent in the process of signification, the mechanics the operate through and against are not, in fact, structurally different from those of so-called 'normal' language.... Works which compose themselves as a field, without an apparent sequence, and spatialist compositions which literally hang suspended or displayed so that the relations among the elements shift constantly and change, also pose extreme disruptions to the norm of communicative language. Whatever they may achieve in terms of disintegrating the linear authority of language seems minor compared to the degree to which they undermine control over their own authority as texts in so doing." (249)
Not sure I agree with her here-- what 'control over their own authority as texts' should they be maintaining? It's not that these texts are illegible; they're just challenging-- or interrogating-- the system within which they, too, are still working.
Her talk, though, is more about "women's writing"; she poses the Q:
"Is it possible for the Other who is woman to occupy a position which is not defined through opposition? To what extent can the concept of complicity be drawn into this discussion in a positive way, rather than a pejorative one, so that women's use of normative language can be demonstrated to make use of the destabilizing effects of non-linearity from within that language rather than being required to position themselves outside of it?"
("...in addition,... women's Otherness, is a part of the Whole of language, is in fact the Other which makes the Whole appear to be so.")
--ties directly into Glissant then; a bit of a narrow view, though, that women are the Other-- as in only?
"the phrase 'Other than' implies that representation always implies an Other, and that Otherness is always in relation, though not necessarily oppositional." (252)
-- interesting because it seems to oppose Glissant there; I think he would suggest that Otherness is oppositional and rhetorically it's a trick of understanding; this is hot because it's not cold, high because it's not low, etc.; I'm not sure I agree with the model (or idealize it) but JD also seems to be contradicting herself-- if Otherness is always in relation but not opposition (necessarily) then there could be more than one Other-- which she doesn't ever address
A to the Q: "It is instead by showing the already present Otherness within Linear forms and the complex authority and power structures already extant which permits the reworking of these relations between form, language, and power." (253)
I should mention: she doesn't really provide a model (or any examples) of what this might look like, save a few excerpts from crappy novels she wrote aged 12-- one, for instance, written in letters, a blow she tries to soften by calling them 'let-hers;' ouch. She does show a lot of beautiful typography/design prints-- but since she's so invested in language, I'm not sure why there aren't more text examples.
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