Language is an evolving medium we collectively inhabit

While individual speech acts are surely guided by the structured lattice of the language, that lattice is nothing other than the sedimented result of all previous acts of speech, and will itself be altered by the very expressive activity it now guides. Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Our bodies are the products of semiosis

Symbolic thought run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are the products of semiosis. Our sensory experiences, even our most basic cellular and metabolic processes, are mediated by representational – though not necessarily symbolic – relations. But symbolic thought run wild can make us experience "ourselves" as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground this special kind of symbolic thinking in "our" bodies, bodies that are themselves indexically grounded in the worlds beyond them: I think therefore I doubt that I am.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p. 49

Det mäktigaste av alla narkotika

Vilken lycka att arbeta från tidiga morgonen till sena kvällen för sig och sin familj, att ordna tak över huvudet, att odla upp jord för att sörja för födan, att likt Robinson bygga upp sin egen värld, imitera skaparen då han skapade universum, att i sin egen moders efterföljelse gång på gång återföds sig till världen!

Så många tankar som går genom medvetandet, så mycket nytt man kommer att fundera över när armmusklerna är upptagna av kroppsarbete, av grovarbete eller timmermansjobb, när man tar itu med förnuftiga uppgifter, som man kan lösa genom fysiskt arbete och som skänker belöning genom den glädje och den framgång deras lösande innebär, eller när man sex timmar i sträck håller på att yxa till någonting eller att gräva i jorden ute under en öppen himmel som genomtränger en med sin heta och välgörande andedräkt. Och just detta, att dessa tankar, dessa aningar och denna närhet inte låter sig överföra till papperet utan glöms bort där de hastigt fladdrar förbi är inte en förlust utan en vinning. Du stadens eremit, som med starkt svart kaffe eller tobak piskar på dina slappnade nerver och din försvagade inbillningskraft, du känner inte det mäktigaste av alla narkotika, det som ligger inneslutet i verklig nöd och en god hälsa.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 305

The scope and manner of the mind's attention are social facts

The disequilibrium of the boat [...] is only a dialectical response, a fun-house mirror reflection of an initial disfiguration or mutilation inflicted under capitalism: the closure of fields of socially available perception, the reduction not only of the environment of freedom but also of the very desire for and memory of that environment. Familiarity with capitalist culture persuades us that this limitation – the specific way people, their bodies, and their physical perceptions are organized within capitalism – is not historical but natural and physical. Yet the scope and manner of the mind's attention, or of the body's capacity for sensation, are social facts – and it is precisely the blindness and dullness peculiar to social relation in market society that enable us to deny the social and allow it to be subsumed in the biological.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 120

My body is a thing that reveals other things

My body is a thing that reveals other things, and can do so only because it is of the same fabric as they. My flesh is where the lines of direction of the world are inscribed on a fold in their midst. The movements of the eye and hand that are not desultory, are movements where – like the red that precipitates because the red of bishop’s robes, gypsies’ dresses, flags of linemen and of the revolution, lips of lovers haunts it – each phase of the movement recalls and refers to the eyes and hands that folded over or will fold over those robes, dresses, flags, lips. Its tissue, like that of the structured layout of a world, is made of these cross-references.

Alphonso Lingis, 'Bodies That Touch Us' in Thesis Eleven no 36 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993) p. 163

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract individuation, and the voice acts against the recombinant desensualization of language.
Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability: the road of excess, says William Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the creation of sensuous meaning.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 22

I myten dröjer en aning om den gestlika kommunikationen kvar, ett minne av en tid i vilken kommunikationen skedde med våra kroppar som aktiva agenter, inte som passiva kärl. Föreställningen om en sådan kommunikation som primitiv och fattig vittnar snarast om vår egen kulturs sinnliga armod.

Den kultiverade jorden, den kultiverade människan, är den underordnade, välordnade, produktiva. Den som alstrar värden, men som i sig är utan värde.

Nedtoningen av språkets gestlika funktioner är ytterligare ett uttryck för den civiliserade kulturens iscensättning av separation. Språket konstrueras och framhålls som formellt system för att utgöra en unikt mänsklig egenskap, något som skiljer oss från och lyfter oss över vår icke-mänskliga omgivning.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 86-87

Language originates from the mouth. It comes from within, obeying the speed of the body, the dexterity of hand and the formation of the palette. But whereas the voice, the organic form of language, has the power to connect bodies at the site of their juncture with the outside world – ears and mouth – language as an abstract and totalising system enacts a kind of conceptual violence apart from the body. Far from being the primary grid of things, the nominalist fantasy, language is revealed as a historical construct coherent only with the density of its own past.

Neville Wakefield, 'Ann Hamilton: between words and things' in Mneme (Tate Gallery Publications, 1994) p. 25

In normal contexts the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world yet in in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move into that world and allows the world to enter.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985) p. 38

As money is not the measure of money but all else, so humanity is not the measure of itself but something that is measured and measures everything else.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 49