Kielen materiaalinen toiminta Raisa Marjamäen runoteoksessa Ei kenenkään laituri

• Miikka Laihinen Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.75006

Abstract

The Material Operation of Language in Raisa Marjamäki’s Ei kenenkään laituri

In my article I scrutinize the materiality of language in a recent collection of poems Ei kenenkään laituri (No-Man’s Wharf, 2014) by a Finnish writer Raisa Marjamäki. By taking a closer look at three autonomous texts I outline the way in which language operates in Marjamäki’s oeuvre. Instead of asking the meaning of the poems, I focus on the ways in which the texts work. I analyze the material intensity – immanent differing – of the poems; the intensive dynamics of ink and paper as the basis of a reading experience.

I conceptualize my point of view by approaching Marjamäki’s poems as assemblages consisting of corporeal words, which, in themselves, consist of corporeal graphemes. I examine the immanent relations of the poems’ words as a movement between material and expressive levels of language. In my analysis I conclude that the corporeal words and their intensive relations actualize the material, metamorphic and/or transformative processes of becoming, central in the philosophical corpus of the late French thinker Gilles Deleuze.

The theoretical background of my article is based on new materialist theory and philosophy. In addition to those of Deleuze, I also apply the conceptualizations of the American new materialist (deleuzian) thinker Manuel DeLanda.