An Eco-Echo-Philopoetics of Dialog & Place: Why & When Should Language Alert & Alter Itself?

Abstract

How does one re-late to the other when dialoging? This piece sets out to explore the resonant ecosystem of a dialogically relational, relatively elastic dialogical place that itself becomes mobile, one that traverses its own topological confines and configurations including pathosemiotic vibrations and proliferations: topos as a dynamic zone of interstitial logos that stays autogenerative, autopoetic. Reframing the classical “call & response” reciprocity of hermeneutical discoursing, away from its often monorailed, anthropo-logocentric sites/sights & sounds where scaffolded speaking or logos itself is literally normativized or else finds itself antagonized by its structurally invisible and inaudible other, I try to imagine a somewhat alternative, more alternatively alter-native, ecosystem of dialoging, inclusive of (digital) “logging” that auto-feeds the increasingly datafied world today, all of which forces us to rethink the very concept of “communication,” a discursive territory once kind of familiar to us homo lingua politus. With border wars and material exploitations unfolding everywhere on the planetary scale, from global terrorism to environmental crisis, I find myself turning, for an anchor, towards a matrixial eco-echography of interspecies interstitiality where one does not come to “have,” control or even “experience” dialogs but rather constantly, contextually passes through synaesthetic networks of communication as an inter-being, a cosmic switchboard operator, a multi-nodal mobile point of multi-mediation as well as meditation. How could “you,” an old-fashioned thou of Buber’s I-Thou, be really faced, not just placed?