Articulation — to ar-tic-u-late, to express and make meaningful.
We articulate our words when we want to be heard and understood. We articulate so as to distinguish the words but in that distinguishing we are also threading them together in their temporal, syntactic and semantic relations to one another.
It is like the practice of articulating bones — Mr Venus, the articulator of bones and taxidermist, in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend — reconstructing the skeleton so that it is fluent, intelligible, regular and rhythmic in its interconnections.
Even pronouncing the word ‘ar-tic-u-late’ or ‘ar-tic-u-la-tion’, the phonemes become bones or sounds, threaded together to become explicit and be made intelligible. Just like the bones, the sounds lack meaning until they are articulated, until they are threaded together in regular, fluent and intelligible ways.
Our enkinaesthetic entanglement has its own articulation and its own articulacy. Its articulacy is affective and non-mediated; its intelligibility is immanent, articulated through the entwined co-constituing lived experience, of the agent with other agents and other objects. Agents and things have no meaning unless they are threaded together, articulated in the community and reciprocity of our affective co-consituting enculturation.
