[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> no people.

[Kali Tal <kali@kalital.com>]

Mark Dery, what is your investment in attempting to condemn and 
silence experimental writing and theoretical discourse on nettime? 
We all have our 'd' keys, as well as access to email filters if we 
truly wish to remain untroubled by writing that bores, annoys, or 
offends us.  Who, truly, reads all of the messages posted to nettime 
or, for that matter, any other email list? What is the advantage in 
being prescriptive?

Safire's insistence on the superiority of his language over others' 
language because of its conformity to "acceptable standards" of 
"correct speech" is inextricably tied to his political conservatism. 
It's a useful rhetorical ploy -- ridicule an opponent's grammar and 
sidestep the content of her or his critique. Standardization of 
speech is inherently political, as any history of the development of 
official grammars will reveal. (Dale Spender's work on this is 
particularly interesting.)

The exploration of new concepts requires a period of initially fuzzy 
or "ectoplasmic" language until understanding of the concepts 
solidify (and hence, in Barthes terms, become dull and nauseating) 
and definitions are arrived at by consensus or imposition. These 
explorations require more, rather than less, intellectual work since 
definitions do not rest conveniently in hand but have to be arrived 
at over time. At this level of discourse words and phrases often act 
as simple placeholders for terms that are still evolving towards more 
specific and accurate descriptors. Running around and demanding 
clarity at all stages of discussion is counter-productive.

>Trying to pin down your meaning, here, is like trying
>to hit a blob of mercury with a nail gun.

A nail gun is hardly the tool one should choose to capture mercury. 
You'd be far more successful scooping it into a bottle with a thin 
piece of cardboard. Your choice of metaphors is illustrative of the 
problem with your argument for clarity.  If all you've got is the 
nail gun you will be endlessly frustrated by the fragmentation of the 
mercury into pieces that are smaller and smaller and less easy even 
to hit with a nail.  The same goes for demanding clarity and 
simplicity in experimentations with new concepts and language.

Kali Tal


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