Anonymous
8/10/2025, 6:20:07 PM
No.24626866
I would like to propose a hypothetical situation: instead of writing, what if I were to develop a language that could only be signified through the expressions and physical sub-pixel positions of Yoshi, the fictional green dinosaur and main character in Nintendo’s Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, originally released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1995. Without being too reductive, the phonetic structure of the language would essentially be determined by a number of various patterns that Yoshi can perform, such as egg-positioning angles, short hops, and whether or not Baby Mario is riding him. Yet despite this, what I think is important to note here is that the structure of the language that I have created is based on what Yoshi does, which means that the nature of the way that the language presents itself (through Yoshi) is extremely pragmatic because it can only exist within the confines of each level of Yoshi’s Island and, more importantly, within the confines of Yoshi. In this sense, Yoshi is truly an avatar for the language that is created by us. This means that we understand what Yoshi is in terms of language, but we can also understand Yoshi in terms of his own gestures. I argue that this is precisely the way that we should perceive language in the sense that it is an avatar of us, which means that we can successfully become disinterested in the language itself. We can distinguish that Yoshi’s gestures and positions create words and essentially meaning, but we can also distinguish that Yoshi’s gestures are simply gestures. A similar dichotomy happens in Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel when his protagonist (Antoine) realizes that he can distinguish a table as a complete object, but also as individual slabs of wood that are separate from their function (or teleology) as a table. In the novel, this causes a type of profound existential dread for Antoine, which is why the french title of the novel is La Nausée (literally translated as Nausea). Yet at this point, I’d argue that, at least with language, this type of deconstructive viewpoint has positive connotations in terms of actually tracking why we utilize language in the first place, which would, in turn, unravel language as something considered deconstructive. This, of course, is the type of paradoxical thinking we see when we look at the work of someone like Hegel or a few of the other German Idealists like Schelling. However, instead of traditionally utilizing Hegelian dialectics, what if we were to attach the process of deconstruction to the dialectic itself, creating a new type of philosophical framework altogether? What kind of peculiarities would arise from that ineffable sludge of ontogeny we keep slapping adjectives on to? What egg of truth emanates from the clear reflective sheen of language? And what asemic glyphs remain once semantic meaning slips below the surface of our souls?