Review of The Force of Language by Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004. vii + 186 pp.)
Quote: >>The Force of Language is a Napoleonic book, short and ambitious. In the very first pages Lecercle promises us a new philosophy of language, and he reminds us throughout of both his promise and the fact that its fulfilment will be 'utterly unpalatable to mainstream linguistics and current philosophies of language'. As if that weren't enough to accomplish in 170 pages, once you begin reading you realize that this new thinking about language implies a new style of writing about it as well. Lecercle thinks Chomsky's notorious 'the man hit the ball' is a terrible place to start when theorizing about language: the slogan and the literary work, not the simple declarative sentence, are far more typical and useful as paradigms. It is therefore apt that slogans and poetic writing are the authors' chosen instruments
as well as their chosen objects.<<
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
