Kane X. Faucher is a doctoral candidate and an emerging/mid-career author at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism in London, Canada. He has published in several academic and literary journals both online and in print. He also has published three novels, Urdoxa (2004), Codex Obscura (2005), and Fort & Da (2006).
Cell Phonemes and the Thumbstruck Generation--Or, StrucLing Comes Alive in LangPho.
We have quickly entered and exited the logophysical age of the click, beep, and the busy line, left now in the vertiginous confusion of the post-party anti-production of so many guillotined telecommunication metaphors so chiasmically uncertain between acts of dance and drink (or, what the anciens of freezer-burned theory call ecri-rapture). And, of course, tele- and web-communication invites its old McCarthyist visitors to use its ears to pirate the lines of the people, attempting to bake cookies more persistent than those Communist era chocolate anti-luxuries in the East and Twinkies in the West. It is the sloppy and dizzy cyberneticist that wags a gala-dispersing apocalyptic finger at cell-fauxness as a prosthesis of the deaf ear (Ma Bell and so many satellite dishes little more than a labyrinthine wishing well of idle talk--reach out and Euclidize someone). As the gala reposed back into the monotonous technicoccyx galaxy from which such things emerge, we find Gutenberg staring perplexingly at a soaring cell phone bill where text-message loquacity goes the way of so many well-to-do dodos. Meanwhile, the swelling thumbs of an acronymous mob truncate both their use of vowels and the original Roman inch. As the fingers do the walking, let the thumbs do the talking: the official motto of the Ugg-booted brigades outside the Saturday night flesh markets where social lobotomy is bought by the pint and pitcher. In this way, the apex of human development is finally realized: we have become all thumbs, desperately blunting an opposable digit to the possibility of meaningful discourse.
In the dusty prisons where structural linguistics still reigns, cell (mor)phonemology has requisitioned the use of all the great thumbs of communication, grasping anew those brittle branches of semantic language trees. For Jakobsonian axial priests, this structural phenomena of thumbing the phoneme by means of making logical distinctions through binary oppositions in sound would be the colonization of nature by culture. The synchronic trend in sloughing off apparently superfluous vowels in text-messaging (stretched taut over the diachronic metrics of one’s bank account and its relationship to time) adds meaning through financial paranoia, digital linguistic code, and the overall indolence of thumbspeak. Not long in coming is the great reversal of Chomskyian linguistics where the “common grammar” that grounds acts of all parole becomes the (compact) “grammar of the commons”. The Shakespearean injunction of brevity as the soul of wit is recast in its new form as brevity being the common law of the staccato thumb’s digi-lingual productions.
Minutes are precious, especially for the thumbstruck generation. The English language possesses a unique (dys)advantage in its capacity to exchange some of its prepositions to the numerical shorthand of figures at the exchange desk of keypadded sloth. The free ars combinatorial in this case is short-circutied by the banality of the phonemical voice, trained as it is to wrap its chapped lips around a word in a phonetic chokehold rather than to allow the tongue to wag in lingua libera (instead, a linguano takes the place of an absent creation, or a satellite-powered lingua francaca).
In Canadian poetics, one of the more heinous and humdrum productions in the last fifteen years is known as “LangPo”: language poetics, which is a diluted and family-safe alternative to French Surrealism, and a salve for those who fear the profusion of semicolons in E.E. Cummings (instead, moving toward the full colon, the evacuating of the entire bowels of literature into a mass-merchandisable floater left in the international toilet). Cellular LangPho, the new poetics, picks up where the briefly lived furor of inert Internet emoticonte leaves off in chat forums: the tedium of the contextualized emotion is re-placed by the absence of vowels and other letters. Monkeys pressing ecstasy buttons, children huddled around the video game console, or civilization expressing its discontent over mobile forms of linguistic immobility--it amounts to the same thing: the thumb speaks, and it yearns to wax poetic, and these occlusions of the letter gain their meaning akin to the Italian Renaissance zero which was a mere positional gap. Would not the new poetry of the thumb in essence be the poetics of positional “gaping”? We leave off here with a modern poem:
<<PLS MSG ME. R U GNG 2 C ME?>>
<<MNG WHT? WTF! IM ME L8R.>>
<<OK. 4 HW LNG R U GNG 2 B>>
<<NOT 2 B. THT IS THE CLPHONE>>