The European vowel creates the illusion of conceptual independence

Evidence

The movement, however, is not the equivalent of a vowel. As the Tunisian linguist Monçef Chelli has pointed out, the movement cannot be produced independently of the letter and a letter cannot be produced without a movement, whereas vowels and consonants seem to exist independently of each other. This independence, Chelli suggests, gives words in European languages a peculiar appearance of fixedness, as opposed to the movement of Arabic words. In treating words as moving combinations of letters, Arabic writing remains closer to the play of differences that produces meaning. Seen in this way, the vowel is not something missing in Arabic. It is a strange artifice, whose presence in European writing masks the relations of difference between words, giving the individual word the apparent independence of a sign. Chelli goes on to argue that this apparent independence endows words with an object-quality. As sign-objects they seem to exist independently of their being said. Their existence appears as something apart from the material repetition of the word, and seems to precede such repetition. The realm of this prior and separate existence is labelled the ‘conceptual’, the independent realm of meaning. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 466

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, paradigm-shifting argument: the vowel is not a neutral notational device but the very mechanism that manufactures the appearance of words as fixed, concept-like objects existing prior to their utterance — a structural origin of the conceptual/sensory split.
• XREF: Connects to Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, and to Mitchell’s broader argument about representation (the map, the exhibit) as creating an external ‘interior’ of meaning.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ only loosely, but resonates strongly with the recurring theme across the reader’s library of how material practices (writing, dress, ritual) manufacture metaphysical categories.