Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The ethical stance is not so much learning the language of the other, or teaching the other one’s own language, because “language” is not a static entity that can stand still long enough for it to be the same language once it has been learned as it was when it began being taught. Rather, ethics involves learning the emergent language that arises at the margin or rough edges of the convergent idioms. Joint attention is always liable to lapse, prey to distraction and fixation, must always be checked and re-engaged—when we mistake ourselves and each other we realize that we have not been attending to the same thing after all, and our recourse is to attend to what we normally attend from: language. We have to check our use of words and expressions, to inform one another that I meant this word in that sense, or that I meant it figuratively or ironically rather than literally, or that I was alluding to what I thought was a common reference, or even just to pronounce the same word with a slightly different emphasis so as to distinguish it from a homonym, and so on. And from there attention can perhaps be redirected back to some signified. Explaining and justifying our actions to each other—the traditional content of ethics—is itself such an engagement with signs (our actions and bodies along with words) that threaten to fray some shared attention.”

— Adam Katz, Flipping the Conference · May 2013 · GABlog