22. July. 2024. This past weekend, I have submitted a chapter for my Ph.D. thesis. One of my main points of reflection in writing this chapter has been the rigidity of terminology, and how it enforces the way we process and relate to concepts, and to the world by extension. Take what is on the surface level a simple term such as ‘text’, for example – what is a text? Linear definitions for it already exist ingrained in the mind, with associations made between ‘text’ and ‘writing’ – a text is considered a book; or a paragraph; or a work of ‘literature’. (‘Literature’ is another seemingly simple term which poses enormous problematics when one attempts to offer it a functional definition – Terry Eagleton comes close by attempting to define it as fluid ideology).
I particularly like Alan McKee’s definition of a text as that which ‘we make meaning from’ (2003; p.4). McKee notes that whenever the process of meaning-making occurs, in the interpretation of ‘something’ that could be either ‘a book, a television programme, film, magazine, T-shirt or kilt, piece of furniture or ornament’, that is being ‘treated as a text’ – as that which meaning is made from (p.4).
If we stop to question any concept or term that we are in the habit of using, it becomes fluid and pliable, revealing itself to be a marker or a reference point to a facet of reality, but one which cannot be mistaken for a substitute of reality itself. It is through language that we consolidate our realities, and when the rigidity of terminology is not seen through, we become bound in binaries – both in research, and in our day-to-day lives.
amaryllis 