Ex-pression

Re: Flusser's "Letters of the Alphabet - Does Writing Have a Future?"

Flusser notes the concrete significance of a word like "expression", denoting language as a filter through which thoughts are pushed through to create new concepts, new information. Throughout history, that is what writers have been doing – ex-pressing, 'ex' reffering to the pressing out or pressing through of language. I get the image of unthoughts or unmanifested thoughts being put through a language "meat" grinder and what comes out through the little grill at the end is thought, able then to be externalised, whether spoken or written. Throughout history, each time thought was produced, the language grinder changed in that the grill had an 'ex'tra hole for this 'ex'tra newly-made thought. Looking closely at my own pigeon attempt at 'ex'plaining (plaining out, flattening?) this etymology, I venture that a word like "impression", which ordinarily refers to an image or feeling left once something is gone, can be thought of using the same method. The 'im' prefix I would say is the antithesis of 'ex', and thus would mean pressing 'in' or 'inwards', so in the context of trying to impress someone, such as what I may be trying to do with this blog post, what that would mean along the lines of this thinking is that one person tries to press their own thoughts into another, implying (folding inwards?) there is an intention. The impression left by something or someone is the thought that has been inwardly projected upon the self. Thoughts thus can be said to have their own physics. Sometimes when there is philosophising going on, as there could be the case in this blog post, new words are made using the building blocks of older ones. Expression in the case of this blog post for example has (ab?)used morphemes to highlight certain things. What has been created though, is not 'new' per se, nor 'original', but rather an actualised possibility of what language all along could have done (and probably has, just without, and I speak for myself, my own notice).