Notion of perfect language

Cue Borges, obviously. Bahktin probably also? but whatever.

The notion of a perfect language, which can express every possible thing and idea, shown up in philosophical thought from early classical greek thought, through to modern thinkers such as walter benjamin. It’s through the error, mistake, or perhaps most clearly within the mistranslation, that we have the capacity to observe a limitation of language and those values and descriptions are thrown into question. If we encounter a situation where there is a conflict of specific societal value structures that developed with some degree of separation, can one see that those structures were not pure to begin with.

I think actual recognition of the proposed ‘perfect language’ (capable of expressing anything) exists as a symptom of an error between languages. The notion of a divine language forgoes the feature that language itself creates the perimeters of ideas and objects worth expressing through a set of societal associations, by occurring on two distinct planes where language exists as a processing of a specific socially scripted system, and error calculations where a separate societally scripted system is put into contrast. This is a conceptual contrast to an infinite world of language that is defined as boundless, instead this is a world that has uncertain boundaries and therefore appears boundless is also a superimposition of two systemic ways of thinking that are at odds with one another. The exhibition consist of performance-based video pieces which reflect upon this contradiction, the translation of ideas into language as well as the translation between different languages.

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