Linguistic Turning

I can’t stop reading. That’s not meant to be a boast about bibliophagy. No, I can go weeks without cracking a book. What I mean is, if I see words, especially words in Roman script, I am going to see them as words and not just shapes. I am going to read those words, and I am going to think about their meanings.

I tried otherwise last week when visiting the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to look at Desert Islands, an installation featuring quotes from various Semiotext(e) authors and a dreamachine from Hedi El Kholti. I was in an art museum, a place where I prefer to focus on shapes and colors, and I tried to look down the tunnel in the museum's bookshelf and not read, but there were words and they were interesting words and sure, I was drawn to the short quotes, the ones with the bigger font, more negative space, but still, I was reading and not looking. 

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s just what happens. I prefer opera in Italian instead of English, and not just because the Italians invented it. I don’t speak Italian and I can just listen to the voices as instruments — instruments with so much feeling — rather than having my brain’s language processor kick in.

The influence of Semiotext(e) on American academia is difficult to overstate. Originally a journal and later a publishing house, Semiotext(e) was responsible for introducing French critical theory to many Anglophone scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. Think Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and other French names commonly dropped in humanities dissertations. 

Semiotext(e) still publishes new books, and I was lured into buying Ripcord, a 2024 novel by Nate Lippens, because I liked a quote on the wall. You can buy all the texts quoted in Desert Islands at the museum (including Deleuze’s Desert Islands and Other Texts). The publisher is holding down ICA LA's bookshelf residency – which, great concept – and the opportunity to flip through the titles alone is worth a trip downtown.

In Laurent Binet’s 2018 novel, The Seventh Function of Language, which is not a Semiotext(e) product but rather a loving sendup of the heyday of French theory, an anonymous student gives a sharp summary of how Foucault and others became so popular among American academics: 

“Yeah, well, obviously, the paradox is that so-called continental philosophy is now much more successful in the U.S. than it is in Europe. Here, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault are absolute stars on campus, while in France they’re not studied by literature students and they’re snubbed by philosophy students. Here, we study them in English. For English departments, French Theory was a revolutionary weapon that enabled them to go from being the fifth wheel of the social sciences to being the one discipline that subsumes all the others, because since French Theory is founded on the assumption that language is at the base of everything, then the study of language involves studying philosophy, sociology, psychology … That’s the famous linguistic turn.”

Many of the French theorists loved wordplay – and I do too – so I’ll take the word “turn” and segue back to El Kholti’s Dream Machine, which spins at the back of the tunnel in the museum’s bookshelf. Created in homage to Brion Gysin's original Dreamachine, El Kholti's work features a tube on a record turntable, with light beaming from holes cut in the cylinder. Inside the tube are photos of people, I assume the authors of the works quoted on the wall, but the contraption was spinning too quickly for me to figure it out. And I didn’t really want to know. 

I wanted to see light, shapes, faces, turning — without adding too much linguistic meaning on top. I wanted to just look for a moment.