Language Speaks and Speech is the Subject: The Desire for (authority within) Objectified Relationships

Although Weisser and Dorbin’s argument for a holistic reorientation and interdisciplinary approach to composition is in one way socially admirable and likely practically effective when considering popular notions of literacy and citizenry, this blurring of traditional genre lines and theoretical re-positioning does not go far enough to upset the ontological totality (epistemological basis’, empirical propagations and connotative reproductions) of its supporting superstructures. As such, this post takes as its point of departure the contention put forth in Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition that identifying nature as an object separate from human culture and life aligns it as an object that humans may act upon rather than within (10) as a notion irreconcilable with discourse unless that discourse directly prompts a violent rupture to the intransitive utility of cultural inheritances that grant the power over life and death through its power to define subject and object. I propose, rather than using discourse as a modality of analysis and action upon ecology, why not place the English language (and its colonial provenance with its current context-defining and meaning-making conspirators) front and center in consideration of its violences within the environment it creates as a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization of hegemonic discourses, which are both textually projected onto and set against our collective (liberal) myth’s denotative fictions as a putatively unsustainable and (subjectively) disharmonious ecological condition? This then might truly be a study of relationship, the one that Natural Discourse ascends toward but definitively stops short of — seemingly so to maintain the power to abstract through the object of language an endless supply of starting places for discourse.