Linguistic Contextuality: Deixis, Performance, Materiality
Aaron Finbloom
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 2
Abstract
This essay examines the philosophical-linguistic question of how does the context of an utterance impact its meaning and performance? In exploring this question the paper weaves a complicated story around the marginal linguistic phenomena of deixis to eventually argue that much of language may indeed be contextual. The paper offers a nuanced distinction between the function of writing vs speech to show how these differences imply that a singular utterance would differ in linguistic function depending on its context (written or spoken). It examines a post-structuralist trajectory around the performativity of language as found through Austin, Derrida, Butler, and Sedgwick and concludes with a few outliers whose radical accounts of temporality and embodiment provide innovative grounds of thinking through the contextual. This essay aims to open a framework for language to function contextually and argues for more marginalized accounts of language (materiality, media, embodiment, performance) to enter into semantic considerations.
Keywords: Deixis, Performance, Materiality, Context, Media, Post-Structuralism, Derrida, Butler
Aaron Finbloom (aaron.finbloom@gmail.com) is a philosopher, performance artist, musician and co-founder of The School of Making Thinking (SMT), an artist/thinker residency program and experimental college. Much of Finbloom’s creative practice functions as an attempt to expand the scope of philosophy’s pedagogy via structured conversations, dialogical games, improvisational scores, contemplative audio guides and performative lectures. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY, Stony Brook and is currently a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, USA.