How to Read Place in Literature with the Body: Language as Poiesis-Aisthesis

Abstract

In order to truly discern “the heterogeneous powers of the sensible” in literature—or literary productions of the world as a heterogeneous openness of smells, sounds, tactility, kinetics, and visual formations—we need to explore other dimensions of language, or other relations between language and the world than the relations that have dominated postcolonial studies ever since its (institutional) beginning, or, for that matter, the mainstream approach to literature since the linguistic and cultural turns (i.e., the idea of language as a discursive vehicle, as representation, as signifying sociocultural, political, or ideological productions of meaning). This idea of language has its origin in Saussurian theorizations of the linguistic sign as belonging to a self-enclosed system of language that is dissociated from the world outside itself (meaning being created by the difference of one sign in relation to another). The sociocultural extension of this idea reads language not as something that is of the world. Rather, the sign serves within a system of signs that interpret, or represent the world according to certain sociocultural interests (e.g., we do not have words like “cow” or “tree” to name particular phenomena as they appear in themselves (escaping utilitarian interpretations of phenomena), these words are the products of particular sociocultural or economic determinations of phenomena).