A language can achieve enduring fixity through rapid self-change

Evidence

One can imagine language diasporas that would change so rapidly within themselves and with such feedback, so many turnarounds of norms (deviations and back and forth) that their fixity would lie in that change. Their ability to endure would not be accessible through deepening but through the shimmer of variety. It would be a fluid equilibrium. This linguistic sparkle, 50 far removed from the mechanics of sabirs and codes, is still inconceivable for us, but only because we are paralyzed to this day by monolingual prejudice (“my language is my root”). — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 513

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s search for a mechanism by which identity/relation is held fluidly without collapsing into either fixed essentialism or diffusion — a linguistic analogue of a rhizome identity held open through variation rather than root. — connects to: Dismantling progress extends to language itself, not just physical structures — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 656; Rapid adaptive change can preserve an underlying fixed identity — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 649
• DEFINE: Captures the precise Glissantian sense in which ‘fixity lies in change’ — an equilibrium of shimmer, not of stability rooted in depth.

Broader Connections

• Dismantling progress extends to language itself, not just physical structures #corroborates (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 656