Monday, January 10, 2005

Prison House of Language

"There is a sense in which all sensory perception already constitutes a kind of organisation into language. Imagine the way in which, for a trained naturalist, the disorderly undergrowth of thickets and bushes pressing in upon each other sort themselves out into order, the peculiar outlines of each type of leaf standing as a visible sign and mark of their determinate species; imagine the way in which a wholly unfamiliar landscape would offer itself to such knowledgeable perception as a kind of language the words of which were not yet known, an order already making itself felt through the clear forms of the vegetation, where for the layman there would be nothing but the confused and jumbled vision of space."

Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language.