Living Language


Richard Rorty identified philosophy as a series of turns.
Like the head of a small bird, the head of philosophy pivots around to find new concerns each generation.

In the early twentieth century, Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn precipitated a concentration on language as fundamental metaphor. In 1994, the pictorial turn (of W.T.J. Mitchell) proposed a visual generation, ocularcentric and inundated in photons. The pictorial turn is living in parallel competition (and partial completion) with many other concurrent turns: the genomic turn, the media turn, the hybrid turn, the non-linear turn, the interactive-tangible turn, the agency turn, the augmented turn and the singularity network turn.

When tavits become indiscernible from reality, where language and the pictorial meet new-media 3D-representations, there will be a re-turn toward aesthetic animism, animism without precedent: a digital animism that includes language as a proto-animal.

This will be the turn toward living language.

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