"We will have to reach down into the taken-for-granted machinery of language,” writes Bronislaw Szerszynski, a scholar of technology and history, in Critical Zones. His brilliant piece explores the parallels between grammatical structures and the worldviews they express. For example, the imperfect verb tense of constructions like “You were reading this book” allows potentiality and actualization to coexist and interdepend—in other words, it creates a grammatical space where action and achievement let go some of their primacy. Similarly, the “middle voice”—between passive and active, as in “I soothe myself”—implies an immersion in action that transcends the binary of acting or being acted upon. “You are doing something, but in a way that opens you up to alterity, to the wider situation,” Szerszynski writes, and then adds this startling statement: “In such activities we become more like plants.”" Erika Howsare Boston Review

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