tag you're it

Prompted by AKMA's understated note about how we, following Orwell, tend to assume that clarity, accuracy, and power of expression are relatively easy to achieve, if only we use a little elbow grease:

Large topic. Some memorable writing appears in the comments sections of various blogs. Free there even from the looser normative constraints of blogging, this writing is often rife with ambiguity, rich in figure, and wide of the genteel deorative mark set by journalistic norms and public affairs bloggers.

That is to say, AKMA is noting a need to work on our communicative skills that is itself complicated by the burden of trying to get at something -- something that is not just a simplistic one-size-fits-all retread -- in language that daily enables this miracle to occur, but not without resistance. Language and community after all rely on universals, and we are and have particulars, but somehow even particulars, to be seen as such, must partake in some way of universals. It is at war with itself.

Throw in complications of medium, genre, audience and we can all feel collectively guilty and challenged. Without some determined effort to say what we mean, the effort of others to intepret is not earned. Some say what is most needed is some shared basis for the labor of interpretation:

...we lack collective narratives that recreate a shared imagination of our condition both in resistance and in liberation - to reforge an interpretive community. Alan Toner via wood s lot

And if the promise of shared information -- the managed liberation of worker knowledge, the formation of collective interests for the common good thanks to networked communication -- encounters a resistance that arises from the very process that is also enabling it: the disgruntlegregation, so to unspeak, of norms? Instead of a forging created by all this talking, blogging, conferencing, a fraying. (I seem to recall a kindred question on pseudopodium back when it was Bellona Times, in other terms, and can't find it.)

AKMA participates in more than one interpretive community, and has written interestingly about interpretation. He and Shelley Powers among others have reservations about tags, which are also supposed to be building the semantic web. The tags issue might be one sliver of how challenging semantic hygiene can be.

I fail to communicate. The trigger for this failure was merely this, cited by Toner:

Language... is the danger of all dangers, because it is that which begins by creating the possibility of a danger. — He cites Holderlin I've added a link.

As I take Orwellian responsibility for my misspeaking, so might I also be advised to probe the slippery theatrics of language, in and out of which all these misspent words slide.