Episode 87 What if you’re an alien?

If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home?

If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language.

The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language.

The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes.

In this episode I discuss these ideas in relation to my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds: reimagining social change. We’re looking at Chapter 8, ‘Openings,’ which is about social transformation through language and embodied creativity. It’s also about fursuiting.

The transcript and table I refer to can be found here.

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