Discourse Spreads

There was a time when scientific research both required and implied a methodology. Today, science seems to have been transformed into a signifier so broad that it includes investigations of metaphor. Thus, a study about secret lives of symbolic allegories of writing before it became speech as a self-consuming act reportedly must utilize a methodology. Such research may also, by extension, pretend to determine an ontology, thereby, tangentially, claiming an epistemology. Or vice versa.

It is a great relief to live in an age when collocations such as aethics of deselfed fellowship do not oblige one to limit one’s reasoning to disciplinary divides or to counterintuitive presumptions about incommensurable relationship between individuality and communality. Living in the world in which language sweeps the anxiety fueled by extralinguistic orthodoxy raises awareness of semantic subtleties, one of them being the false pair individualism and individuality. The other one being a slightly outdated, yet still relevant, distinction between dignity and pride.

That very linguistic sensitivity to discursive quirks is a piece of evidence of the bitter-sweet rivalry between tradition and newness. Traditionally, history is alive and well. Novel vocabularies, however, say that it lives on in the abovesaid science of metaphor. These two collide in the form of perpetual loops—alternating cycles in the lives of authors who write history and stories that tell tales about the lives of authors.

Such a discursive fluidity frees one from the burden of definition. To live in an era when even the word postmodern sounds ancient means not to have to consider seriously how obsolete the term posthuman is. Or not. That, too, seems to be beyond definable. Beyond a need to define. Because of extralinguistic unorthodoxy that makes living so much less complicated because of that. By contrast, back then, one could talk about enclaves of specific worldviews. Later, in retrospect, they were categorized in the key of the culture which diachronically analyzed the dynamics.

More precisely, what synchronically once was a coexistence of isolated stories about the world at one point in history was later understood as the moment when the whole world started telling stories in a specific language, different from how stories were told prior to that. The confusion was due to the neglect of the distinction between the universal language of the era and occasional occurrences of discursive experiments--because the retrospective study was told in the language that leaves no room for extralinguistic stories, no possibility for enclaves, no background to juxtapose them against. It is a language with a miraculous power to conquer the everyday. To conquer the mind. It is the language of reason.

What makes such discourse so specific is that its spatial limitlessness is a dialectical counterpart of its temporality. What’s even more stunning is that while one speaks it, there is no awareness of either. But, of course, that’s nothing but temporary blindness to spatio-temporality. And can be reconfigured, should the discursive community share a consensus on a need for such a turn. If so, it is sometimes necessary to reassert the relationship between language and the everyday. Sometimes, that necessitates readjusting the boundaries of the everyday in accord with the discursive territories. Sometimes, however, the everyday does not share the affinity for such tailoring. Simply, the everyday might just happen not to like it.