Re: Nightmares and deterritorialization

Dear Wouter,
On Thu, 09 Nov 2000, you wrote:
 
> >I find this interesting. the way some people like spoken language
> >over written 
> If you want to know more about this, and about the differences
> between oral and literary cultures, start from Ong (1982), Orality
> and literacy, -a literary approach, or from Goody, J. (1968)
> Literacy in traditional societies -an anthropological approach. 

Many thanks for these references. I was thinking I will have to chase
this up for the theory part of my research degree. Right now I am
working on a series of novels, the first novel being part of a 
research degree in Writing. To be honest I find theory discourses and
the rules of writing theory quite frightening. I am probably more in
the business of twisting language and laying out a plane of
composition so the sort of help you offered is always most thankfully
recieved.

> In fact it is exactly the
> other way round; spoken speech contains relatively more verbs,

I didn't mean to suggest speech has less verbs, but that it doesn't
need  a verb, although true more verbs are used, so I agree.

 > There is also another issue:
> imagine what it is, to have really no texts at all!!

YES!  Imagine... no texts, us poets would be a happy lot!!!!! 
Seriously, what you describe takes me right onto the technical plane
of poetry writing. There are poets in Aust who argue for a 
bastard line of poetry they call the goddess tradition which goes
back to the pre-ancient Celtic peoples who did not know text and when
they came to know text did not trust this writing. A fiction writer,
poet and novelist both, should share this distrust of writing. Do not
put you faith in text, instead resist it, twist it, bastardise it. In
this way I have come to think; is there such a thing as nomadic
writing? Also, the Australian aborigines did not have text. They had
stories, which belonged to a particular group along with paintings
that had stories attached, but the story still had to be remembered.

> Speech is simply phonetically transcribed, in
> this translation process of course losing information, like visual
> cues, and intonation patterns. 

YES, I agree very much. Even a simple poetry reading depends so much
on body posture, hand movement, microphone use, intonation et al. The
words printed on a page take so much away from a poets reading of
poetry. Here the poems truly come alive. As text  in a book
it feels so much like these poems are in a temporary grave.

>> So there is another type of writing called literature 

> With as a prime example, of course, oral literature. 

What oral literatures do you refer to? Performance poetry is one I
know of. I have been called a performance poet but this is not exact.
Performance poetry is something different.  I am merely a poet
reading my poems the way they should be presented.

> The use of "voice" -and also "subject" by Deleuze in their two
> meanings, is also a classic example of a rape from behind. Of course
> it is quite suggestive to connect the linguistic notion of "voice",
> that is, active voice, against passive voice, to the ordinary
> language use of "voice" (same applies to "subject"). however it
> remains to be seen whether one does not fall into the huge trap
> laying open there for every mystic etymologist and language
> fetishist.

I welcome this warning. Really, as far as I can go with active and
passive voice in linguistics is to just use it as an example of how
affect can be manipulated or different affects can be set up, and from
here into another arena, created. Also, being a writer I tend to get
a bit lazy with the word, since voice to a writer is what I think
Deleuze calls affect. Again a type of voice very different to voice
in linguistics and also spoken language. A writers voice, that does
not trust language.

Anyhow, so many thanks for your useful comments.
best wishes

Chris Jones.