*This article provides a detailed guideline in deconstructing language; this is to be used both as an offering to ongoing discussions and as an interpretive tool to reshape how we interact with language*
I.
What is language? As the facilitator at the “social center of gravity,” language functions as an intersubjective process of articulating one’s relationship to the world, thereby producing a unique, autonomous identity–a requisite for resistance.
II.
One remarkable aspect of algorithmic technology is its aptitude to shatter tradition: the amazing pace at which images are uprooted from its soil and spread to a global audience creates a haze of multiplicities that drown out the origin. The doors to the past are closed; shut out, one must start anew.
III.
A walk through modern history illustrates the continuous commodification of afrikan bodies. From the enslavement of afrikan bodies through sharecropping and up to mass incarceration, the physical commodification of the afrikan body is a tale inseparable from the modern era. What about the often overlooked image: commodification facilitated not through physical bodies, but through representations?
IV.
As far as the jurisdiction of digital spaces stretches, the image reigns supreme as the chief manifestation of commodification, whether it be through fashion, music, or, most importantly, language. It is the image of afrikan language, that articulation of a unique existential experience, that becomes commodified in digital spaces. Here, one enters a practice of fetishization–a process of obsessive consumption of images that, while exploiting the represented bodies, simultaneously frames the viewer’s experiences–a natural consequence of commodifying images. The simple act of consuming such images situates the viewer–who may be Afrikan as well as non-Afrikan–as an agent of fetishization.
V.
One does not need to spend much time on social media to get acquainted with the “ironization” of AAVE: between phrases such as “type shit” and “woke,” it is not uncommon to find another deploying such phrases for a purely humorous effect. This “ironization” is effectively an alien encounter: with the pace of algorithmic technologies bent on uprooting, to encounter AAVE in digital spaces is to “translate” it to one’s own language, to attribute it a fresh meaning, divorcing race from language, shattering the tradition of language–that unique articulation of one’s relationship with the world, that autonomous identity melts away (generalized as “Gen-Z slang”), along with the potential of resistance.
VI.
With the doors to the past now sealed, without that autonomous identity offered by language, and without appealing to an origin, how are we to start anew? What new language can be articulated to regain an autonomous identity necessary for resistance? These are the discussions we must enter in our struggle toward reimagining a liberated world.
