The extreme “breathlessness” of the Creole folktale leaves no room for quiet rest. No time to gaze at things. The relationship with one’s surroundings is always dramatic and suspicious. The tale is breathless, but it is because it has chosen not to waste time. Just as it does not describe, it hardly concerns itself with appreciating the world. There are no soothing shadows or moments of sweet [languor]. You must run without stopping, from a past order that is rejected to an absurd present. The land that has been suffered is not yet the land that is offered, made accessible. National consciousness is budding in the tale, but it does not burst into bloom.

Reading is an isolated, individualistic expression. The oral tradition, on the other hand, makes demands not only on the poet but also on the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the poet makes are responded to by the audience and returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where the meaning truly resides. And this total expression comes about because people live in the open air, because people live in conditions of poverty, because people come from a historical experience where they had to rely on their own breath patterns rather than on paraphernalia like books and museums. They had to depend on immanence, the power within themselves, rather than the technology outside themselves.

Thinking—like understanding—is a particular ability. It is a skill for drawing distinctions, for fracturing the arbitrary unities we construct, and thereby making new ones. Thinking is not a matter of possessing and cataloguing knowledge. To teach [Wittgenstein’s] work, then, is not just to teach what he said, though that’s important. It’s to teach how to extrapolate what he would say, and to formulate further questions that would extend beyond his. That is to teach teaching. Or in my case, to learn it. Or, moreover, to create circumstances where teaching and learning are indistinguishable.

In state departments and corporate networks, devices such as chatbots and phone message systems are meticulous patterns that people must navigate, within which they become demoralized, preventing them from obtaining the information that they need. The design of a chatbot mirrors bureaucracy on a micro-level. Composed of thousands of individual tags, [Artificial Intelligence Markup Language] serves to capture specific input and output a response. Each tag functions similarly to a bureaucrat within bureaucracy, working together to create an opaque and inaccessible administration.