20: ‘To remove a word from its referent, what would happen then?’
The experimental botanist Wurlitzer spent many years in the laboratory attempting to remove a word from the object to which it belongs. He finally attained his goal when he managed to extract the word ‘toothbrush’ from a toothbrush. Upon removal, the toothbrush diffused into its constituent parts then melded with its context. Wurlitzer realised this separation of the word/ referent relationship by surrounding the toothbrush with massive amounts of potassium; he then teased out the word after several hours of socratic monologue. Contemporary thinkers recognise that this phenomenological displacement affirms form as transcendental parenthesis rather than merely an extension of immanence and, as a corollary, that this asserts the primacy of reason over the senses.
Wurlitzer’s methodological approach now seems somewhat unsophisticated. Now, of course, we know that even scientifically illiterate laymen can remove a word from its object by simply oscillating an item gently on its axis in an elliptical fashion.
