Structured Visions: Recent Episodes
Jodie Clark
Photo by Jonatán BecerraJoin me on a journey from humanism to posthumanism with a focus on how we understand language, more-than-human communication, semiosis and information theory.
We discuss Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, specifically his ideas about the Earth’s open and emergent semiotic system, of which human meaning-making is a subset.
We explore the idea of human language as a unidimensional system for organising information within the multidimensional information systems of the Earth and the cosmos. Inhabiting human language means we stay separate from the wisdom of the Earth, which makes us lost.
We visit our panicky and devastating experiences of loss, recalling that the Earth offers gateways to re-belonging (sometimes in the form of psilocybin mushrooms).
I ask to join in the conversations that James Glattfelder is having about idealism and information theory, especially his interview with Stuart Preston in The Consciousness Podcast
The story I read is ‘Momento mori.’
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Photo by Volodymyr HryshchenkoJoin me in the pleasure of observing conversation, particularly times when people report the speech of others. They can do this using direct speech, indirect speech or narrative reports of speech events. Here are examples of all three:
Mrs Jenkins told the class shat she was cancelling the field trip (indirect)
There was a roar of protest (narrative report of a speech event)
‘It’s just not fair,’ said Jenny. ‘We’ve been so looking forward to this trip.’ (direct)
In fiction, you could try free indirect discourse, which is mostly indirect with some touches of direct. Here’s an example:
Mrs. Jenkins told the class she was cancelling the field trip. There was a roar of protest. It just wasn’t fair. They’d been so looking forward to the trip.
To convert direct speech into indirect speech requires a little grammatical finagling. The point of view shifts from the person speaking to the person talking about the person speaking, so pronouns, tense and other deictics might change.
Indirect speech, I say in this episode, requires a certain grammatical distancing.
And then, after all that logical discussion of the linguistics and stylistics of speech reporting, I go a little mystical.
What if all human language keeps us at a grammatical distance from the here, the now, the magical mystery tour of multidimensional consciousness that is the Earth? What if ‘mundane reality’ were the astronomical opposite of mundane? What if what keeps us from seeing this mysterious reality is the shroud of language?
Key takeaways:
- We’re not the only conscious beings on the planet
- The Earth is teeming with multidimensional consciousness—of the kind some folks have ascribed to ‘God’, ‘the Divine’, ‘the universe’
- If you get the feeling that it’s hard to be on this planet—don’t blame the planet
- Blame language. But don’t really blame it. Simply recognise that it’s restricting your consciousness
- Whatever you create from within that position of restrictedness—is one of the Earth’s great achievements
Here is the transcript of the conversation with Rachel and Mary I discuss in the episode:
Rachel: Or, like, like when she told me, when she told me that Marilyn was- she’s more American than me? We’re like- we’re like, “OK, both of us have light skin, blue eyes freckles, one of us happens to have blonde hair, one of us has- happens to have brown hair,” like
Mary: does that make you, y’know-
Jodie: No, the only thing is that you’ve been in France before, so, y’know you’re probably more comfortable with the language
Mary: right
Jodie: and that’s probably why she thought
Rachel: But she said we look. She’s like, “Oh, you look more American” (.) and Marilyn was like really offended
Mary: Well, what di- wha- did you ask her what- what you look like? like, “What do I look like?”
Rachel: No, because we were trying to get her to go away.
Mary: I would’ve had to ask her though, I would’ve been, “W(e)ll, what do I look like?”
Rachel: That was, like 45 minutes into the one-sided conversation.
The stories I read are ‘Point of view’ and ‘The effects of language on the body.’
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Photo by Nathan DumlaoTo what extent is who(m) you’re allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure?
In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into language, surrender the higher consciousness that the rest of the non-human world enjoys.
This is a problem when it comes to love. If we see the world in terms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, then love becomes part of a transitive syntactical arrangement which requires a subject that is separate from an object.
But it’s worth considering the distinct pleasure of separation. It makes it possible to experience the uniqueness of being loved, of being unknown, of being a mystery. As I always say, intimacy is embedded in the structure of language.
The research I discuss comes from Chapter 8 of The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. You can get a copy from Sheffield Hallam University’s institutional repository.
Here are the transcripts.
The story I read is ‘A glimpse.’
Check out my new free course, Grammar for Dreamers. Check out my old free course, Writing through the Lens of Language.
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Photo by 莎莉 彭What’s your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inherent contradiction that your body ends up resolving for you.
When we tap into (pardon the pun) the world beyond language—our bodies, the earth—we access the worlds ‘created from silence’, the mystery, and the spaces where something new can emerge.
The stories I read in this episode are The origin of all destruction and Vasilisa.
My favourite EFT resource is The Tapping Solution.
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The Fairies by Adolphe MonticelliDo you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be examined ‘just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology’ (pp. xvi-xvii).
In this episode I put forward my own hypothesis: that human language is what keeps us from seeing fairies… and all the other multidimensional mysteries of the material world.
What is it about language that so comprehensively excludes us from a more expansive experience of the world? I draw upon principles from M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to explain what aspects of the ‘architecture of language’ keep us confined within the dark prison of selfhood. Each of Halliday’s metafunctions contribute, I posit, to how selfhood confines us, through the linear experience of time (the textual metafunction), the need to vie for social status (the interpersonal metafunction) and the assumption of separate worldviews (the ideational metafunction).
We can learn about the world we can’t access by examining the restrictive shapes of selfhood that human language produces. We can also imagine the possibility that our experience is restrictive by design—that the Earth developed a means to create separate consciousnesses so that it could experience the mystery of intimacy.
The story I read in this episode is ‘F in the ELLPH.’
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Photo by Natalia LuchankoThe paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special.
It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special.
Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption.
My position is that language does make humans exceptional, but not exceptional in the sense of ‘better.’ I think language makes us less conscious than the material world.
A lot less conscious.
Find out what I mean through an exploration of nouns and copular verbs.
The stories I read in this episode are ‘Possessive’ and ‘The problem with talking to trees.’
If you enjoyed the ‘think of a word’ exercise, you can do it again in Episode 64, ‘The intimacy embedded in language.’
If you’d like to hear more about how language makes humans less conscious than the rest of the world, listen to Episode 94, ‘Language and the afterlife’ and Episode 104 ‘Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie.’ If you’d like to hear about the Earth’s language, try Episode 96.
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You can see what I did with the words my History of English students wrote on scraps of paper in Grammar for Dreamers, the screenplay, available here: jodieclark.com/screenplay
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Photo by gaspar zaldoConversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders).
If you’re curious about what made me want to investigate American speakers’ use of like in conversation, have a listen to Episode 86 (Feelings are, like, inside things).
In this episode I discuss general extenders, which take the form CONJUNCTION + PROFORM + (optional) MODIFER: and stuff (like that), and things (like that), and everything (like that), and all (that), or something (like that), or anything (like that). I discuss an article by Maryann Overstreet that examines how general extenders have become grammaticalized over time. They have followed a common pattern in grammaticalization, where linguistic elements go from being mostly propositional or ideational, to mostly interpersonal. In other words, when bits of language become more incorporated into grammatical structure, they become more subjective, more oriented to self.
But my obsession with the mysteries of language, which was sparked in my terrifying early adulthood, has led me to wonder if all the grammar of human languages is oriented to self—organised around the principle of selfhood.
The assumption that human beings are more conscious because they have language often remains unquestioned. But what if human beings—limited as they are by a self-producing human language—are less conscious than the rest of the material world? In this episode I propose that the more-than-human-world is organised according to principles other than selfhood. There is no division. There may be layers of perspectives, but not the division of selfhood that requires perspectives be separate from each other.
Here’s the transcript I was reading from.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The Earth’s boast.’
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Photo by Davide CantelliThe idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct.
In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings is the Earth itself. If the Earth is speaking, perhaps we are part of its verbiage.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Logogenesis.’
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Photo by Haley RiveraHave you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice?
If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic).
If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, The singing Neanderthals (which I also discussed in Episode 78 of Structured Visions). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is!
In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in Religions, values and peak-experiences, is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self.
And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow.
That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it.
What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery?
Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others.
Have you ever had a peak experience? Tell me all about it.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The luthier.’
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Photo by Etienne BoulangerWhat if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowledge state, orienting what they say to make a distinction between given and new information. All human languages start from the assumption that human beings in interaction know different things, or are putting their attention to different things.
In this episode we play with the idea that individual minds, with different states of knowledge, didn’t precede, but are produced by language. We pose the hypothesis that human language shapes the experience of selfhood—which therefore restricts our capacity to know everything.
We also talk about Ted Chiang’s brilliant novella, The story of your life. But if you want to know what will happen in the future, you’re out of luck, because the future is a projection of the self, moving in a linear way through time.
What are your thoughts about the ideas discussed in this episode? Because I have a self, I can’t know until you tell me.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The dark art of world-building.’
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Photo by Zakaria AhadaDo human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time.
To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre.
What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time?
The story I read in this episode is ‘The end.’
Some time sensitive things to act on now:
Refreshing Grammar (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse) will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time.
To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre.
What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time?
The story I read in this episode is ‘The end.’
Some time sensitive things to act on now:
Refreshing Grammar (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse) will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Photo by Erlend EksethIn this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self).
The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates.
On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘What’s up?’ by Elaine Hodgson.
The story I read is ‘The Museum of Language.’
Lots of things going on…
Refreshing Grammar is open now (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist’s Cure for Writer’s Block.
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Photo by Tim MossholderHave you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself.
The story I read is ‘The last stage of the Earth’s evolution.’ I also mentioned my story ‘Summers with Mad Gran.’
Connect with me on jodieclark.com. Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself.
The story I read is ‘The last stage of the Earth’s evolution.’ I also mentioned my story ‘Summers with Mad Gran.’
Connect with me on jodieclark.com. Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Photo by Annie SprattWhat’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Ego angels.’
The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is:
Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds.) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press.
It’s available on Internet Archive.
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Photo by Saad ChaudhryWhat are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?
As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.
In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.
The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.
The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’
Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?
As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.
In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.
The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.
The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’
Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Photo by Josh RangelWhat new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list?
Does astrology count as a language?
Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers.
But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages.
If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us:
- You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name
- You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you…or that you say about yourself
- You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos.
Get your birth chart on astro.com.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Pidgin.’
Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com
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What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list?
Does astrology count as a language?
Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers.
But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages.
If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us:
- You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name
- You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you...or that you say about yourself
- You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos.
Get your birth chart on astro.com.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Pidgin.’
Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com
Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Photo by Chrissy JarvisCounting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so.
In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to things in the world, they explain. Language is not, as Wallis Reid (1991, p. 54) explains, a ‘mirror of nature.’
My own perspective on the objectivist paradigm resonates with these, but it’s less rational, more mystical and speculative. What if we experience the world in many dimensions, and language is the most restrictive of these dimensions, as I discussed in Episode 95, ‘Your name without language?’ What if language restricts us from fully accessing the other dimensions?
Here are my radical, irrational views in a nutshell: Language is a way of structuring information. Human language structures information according to a particular organising principle—the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects a self. And we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar.
The structure of grammar we’re looking at in this episode is grammatical number. We’ll discover that different languages have different grammatical number systems. Many have singular and plural. Some have singular, dual and plural. Some have singular, dual, trial and plural. Some have singular, dual, paucal and plural.
One thing all these languages have in common is ‘singular’. Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Fairest.’
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Work cited: Reid, W. (1991). Verb and noun number in English. Longman.
Photo by Drew HaysWhat’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.)
What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘Negative space’ refers to an (imaginary?) alien language where everything is expressed in the affirmative. Closer to home, we could speculate about the Earth’s own language.
If languages are ways of structuring information, then human languages are uniquely structured around selfhood. Negative polarity works to structure the relationship between self and other, which sometimes means denying the other, sometimes affirming them. Either way it’s a route to intimacy. If human language draws a boundary or a membrane around the distinct self, then the intimacy of negation can be a way of acknowledging and celebrating those boundaries.
The other story I mention in this episode is ‘Lessons in Latin’.
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Image by Elena MozhviloWe start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions:
- What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language?
- Where are you?
There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true.
Does that make spoken language more genuine?
Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemeral? (‘Put it in writing.’)
We explore questions around spoken/written language in relation to what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. And also in relation to a quite touching France Télécom advert from the ’90s.
The discussion leads to a conversation about non-human language, specifically, the language of the Earth itself. Both human language and the Earth’s language are systems for structuring information. Human language is structured around the principle of selfhood, which leads us to the whimsical fancy that the separate, distinct self exists prior to the grammar that created it.
The story I read in Episode 96 is ‘The loneliness of the literate species’.
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Image by Reid ZuraWhat would your name be without language?
In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’.
What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated?
Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the world and language are on two different planes of existence? What if language is a one-dimensional phenomenon attempting to delineate multidimensional experience?
The most fascinating aspects of language (to me) is that it presumes and thereby constructs a self. But a one-dimensional language, it would seem, would produce very limited, superficial selves. Does inhabiting language keep us from experiencing the vastness of other dimensions? (If this question sounds familiar, you might be remembering playing with it in Episode 94, Language and the Afterlife.)
It turns out that the linearity of language offers possibilities not available in other dimensions. Language, being one-dimensional, can (and does) shape itself in constantly changing ways to create new selves. The selves form spaces from which new ideas can emerge.
The story I read in Episode 95 is ‘The brutal linearity of language’.
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Photo by Christopher WindusWhat happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience.
The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language.
The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience.
If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more?
The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions.
But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint.
The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘Moving language’.
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Photo by Emiliano VittoriosiIs there a distinction between you and the rest of the world?
Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?
What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’?
The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness.
The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous, which comes from the word numen, meaning divinity, god or spirit.
Language gives you access to divinity.
But it requires first that you disown the divine aspects of the self, so that you can experience the joy of reunion.
The story I read in Episode 93 is ‘Salesman to the gods’. The other story I mention in ‘Ghosts’.
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Check out my new course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths.
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Photo by K. Mitch HodgeWhen was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths. It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my writing practice.
In designing the course, I discovered the ways that writers grammatically shape their characters’ emotions. I look specifically at fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage.
In this episode we explore sorrow as a felt experience with a grammatical shape. (Ugly crying entirely optional.)
The story I read in Episode 92 is ‘Death of a grammarian’.
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Photo by Shane RounceLinguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out, its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world.
The story I read in Episode 91 is ‘Nonna’s prophecy’.
Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter
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What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the … Continue reading Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism
‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ (from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127) Can something be … Continue reading Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery
‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’
—from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127
Can something be both practical and dreamy?
Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to something new. Can grammar be a gateway to mystery?
We explore this question by thinking about out of body experiences. And what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow.
The mystery of being human is that we exist grammatically, which means we constantly shift our point of reference outside of our own body.
How can the self exist outside the body?
How can experience exist outside of the world?
This is the mystery: grammar is creative—and what it creates is space from which new ideas can emerge.
The story I read in this episode is ‘In plain sight’, and it’s available at grammarfordreamers.com.
Check out my new website, jodieclark.com, for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course.
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What’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it. Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a … Continue reading Episode 88 Grammar shame
What’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it.
Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more serious and oppressive forms of linguistic prejudice.
An example of the latter can be found in Geneva Smitherman’s account of her childhood experiences in her book Talkin That Talk. After her family moved from rural Tennessee to Detroit, Smitherman’s teachers decided that the way she spoke indicated a lack of intelligence and put her back a year in school. Later she was placed in speech therapy because the educators didn’t recognise her linguistic variety, African-American Vernacular English, as a legitimate form of English.
Ann Phoenix’s work describes similar racism encountered by Afro-Caribbean children in British schools, who spoke perfectly grammatically in a variety that was not White enough for their teachers and peers.
As I’ve written, ‘To be grammar shamed is to be told there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way you’ve expressed yourself. The implication is often that there’s something wrong with you: you’re not smart enough, you’re not well educated enough, you’re not savvy enough, you’re not “in the know,” you don’t have the right kind of cultural capital and/or you shouldn’t be taking up space on whatever platform you’re using.’ (Clark, 2023, pp. 5-6)
The story I read in this episode, ‘Little red grammar hood’, hints at a deeper grammar, a welcoming grammar, one that is not shamed.
Clues about such a grammar can be found through an exploration of what babies know about the grammar of the language that surrounds them, before they’ve even begun to speak themselves.
In my forthcoming book, Refreshing Grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people, I offer ways to tap into what you’ve known about grammar since you were a little cutie pie. Before you even knew you knew it.
Check out my new website, jodieclark.com, for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Prepare to be refreshed!
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Works I discuss in the podcast
Clark, J. (2023). Refreshing grammar: an easy-going guide for teachers, writers and other creative people. GFD.
Naigles, L. R. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition, 86(2), 157–199.
Phoenix, A. (2009). De-colonising practices: negotiating narratives from racialised and gendered experiences of education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 12(1), 101–114.
Smitherman, G. (2000). Talkin that talk: language, culture, and education in African America. Routledge.
Image by Miriam EspacioIf you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home?
If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language.
The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language.
The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes.
In this episode I discuss these ideas in relation to my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds: reimagining social change. We’re looking at Chapter 8, ‘Openings,’ which is about social transformation through language and embodied creativity. It’s also about fursuiting.
The transcript and table I refer to can be found here.
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Image by Jeff SheldonWhen you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you?
Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently?
For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, more personal, more enveloping. The word ‘like’ is a great example of that.
The evolution of grammar is a move toward more personhood—which is a way of creating the experience of a self, with an inside and an outside.
Maybe the self is one expression of the Earth’s evolution, and language—specifically grammar—is the mechanism by which the self comes into being.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The multidimensional language learners’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.
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Image by Photo by ViennaWhat makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out.
Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all?
In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’.
We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood.
As Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou writes, ‘The point of a fish trap is the fish. The point of the word is the idea. Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word.’
What if language is a net that shapes itself around an idea to bring it into a different plane of existence?
In this episode I share my own spooky idea: that human language is the Earth’s way of creating nets of selfhood from which new ideas emerge.
The story I read is ‘My late grandmother’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.
Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect
Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
What makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out.
Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all?
In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’.
We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood.
As Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou writes, ‘The point of a fish trap is the fish. The point of the word is the idea. Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word.’
What if language is a net that shapes itself around an idea to bring it into a different plane of existence?
In this episode I share my own spooky idea: that human language is the Earth’s way of creating nets of selfhood from which new ideas emerge.
The story I read is ‘My late grandmother’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.
Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect
Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Image by Annie SprattWhere’s home?
What’s your first language?
What was your language before your first language?
Join me to explore linguistic frames of reference in Guugu Yimithirr, polyglot newborns and the beauty and tyranny of language, self and home.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Poor Magellan’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.
Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect
Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling
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Image by Marjan BlanHow often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job.
In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as Michel Foucault might say, to become subjects.
I prefer the word ‘self’ to ‘subject’, and I like to think of language as forming the membrane that constitutes the self. An oppressive society requires a rigid membrane. A welcoming society respects the membrane, and honours the opportunities for intimacy inherent in the language-created notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’.
The natural world provides illustrative examples of the types of symbiotic relationships that membranes offer. We even have, I was surprised to discover, a symbiotic relationship with viruses. Eight percent of the human genome has its origin in DNA from viruses. Our relationship and understanding of viruses can give us ideas about how to integrate those aspects of self and world that we’d prefer to keep distant.
The book I mention in this episode is Frank Ryan’s Virolution.
The story I read in this episode is ‘To meet you’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.
Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect
Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
How often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job.
In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as Michel Foucault might say, to become subjects.
I prefer the word ‘self’ to ‘subject’, and I like to think of language as forming the membrane that constitutes the self. An oppressive society requires a rigid membrane. A welcoming society respects the membrane, and honours the opportunities for intimacy inherent in the language-created notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’.
The natural world provides illustrative examples of the types of symbiotic relationships that membranes offer. We even have, I was surprised to discover, a symbiotic relationship with viruses. Eight percent of the human genome has its origin in DNA from viruses. Our relationship and understanding of viruses can give us ideas about how to integrate those aspects of self and world that we’d prefer to keep distant.
The book I mention in this episode is Frank Ryan’s Virolution.
The story I read in this episode is ‘To meet you’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.
Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect
Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
Photo by Tom DefA question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What’s your relationship with words?
Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023?
If so (and I hate to break this to you), you may be treating language like currency. And language will always resist that type of treatment. Despite your best intentions, one day soon the words may simply dry up, leaving you to face the blinking cursor of doom.
Rather than understanding language as divisible into quantifiable chunks (words), I think of language as fluid, a membrane in constant flux, forming and reforming around different imaginings of the self, the other, the world. When writers are in a flow state, I believe it’s because they’re allowing language to work its magic of shaping and reshaping selves.
Join me to discuss writer’s block, life purpose and (why not?) The Sound of Music.
I mention two of my stories in this episode, ‘The words of your language,’ and ‘Coming true’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.
Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect
Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling
Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!
‘What are your pronouns?’ How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you? This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and … Continue reading Episode 81 What are your pronouns?
Is nothing sacred? What images or memories does this question conjure for you? Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.) When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have … Continue reading Episode 80 Is nothing sacred?
In this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy: We’ll talk about some of those mysteries, specifically the grammatical principle of possession. To get a flavour of what’s in store, hold up one of your hands in front … Continue reading Episode 79 Possession, duality and other grammatical mysteries
Have you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation. The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins … Continue reading Episode 78 Love, language, music and aliens
What propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation? And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable? In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’. … Continue reading Episode 77 The erotic power of syllables
Where do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford. That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which … Continue reading Episode 76 Quantum linguistics
What’s your relationship to religion? This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way. … Continue reading Episode 75 Accidentally born again
Is there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself? Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions. The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain … Continue reading Episode 74 Create nothing
How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about. Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite … Continue reading Episode 73 The structure of selfhood
Have you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language. Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to intimacy. But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we’ve seen in recent years? The … Continue reading Episode 72 Apocalypse fantasies
Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news? The story I discuss in this … Continue reading Episode 71 Good news and bad news
Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life? Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as … Continue reading Episode 70 The meanings of life
‘It’s easy to forget,’ said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26, ‘that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’ According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical … Continue reading Episode 69 Our relationship with our world
In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other. … Continue reading Episode 68 Life, language and other mysteries
When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser … Continue reading Episode 67 Imperative blessings
Is an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’. The hack I mention for finding the subject … Continue reading Episode 66 A more welcoming world
Have you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language … Continue reading Episode 65 Psychedelic linguistics
In this episode we explore the idea that intimacy is embedded in the structure of language, and that this same intimacy is embedded in the structure of life. We challenge the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in … Continue reading Episode 64 The intimacy embedded in language
Here’s how to get fascinated by language if you’re not already. This might even feel a little bit like a transcendent, or mystical experience. Find a window and look through it. Focus first on the scene outside the window. Then focus on the windowpane itself. Toggle your attention back forth between the windowpane and the … Continue reading Episode 63 Original scent
What we think about language reveals what we think about society. Will changing our ideas about language help us create a more welcoming world? In this episode we explore performative utterances like ‘You’re the boss’ or ‘You’re in charge’. These are more horrifying than you might think. Often we think of language and power as … Continue reading Episode 62 Who’s the boss?
How do we respond to knowing that we’re stuck in a language system that’s built to contradict itself, and a social structure built upon exchange? We have to find ways to outwit the confines of language. Read my very short story ‘Echos and their others’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling And on Instagram: … Continue reading Episode 61: Echos and their others
What’s new in Structured Visions, version 2.0? We’ll still be exploring social structure. We’ll still be geeking out about language. But now I’ll be linking up my discussions to my most recent experiment – combining creative writing with my love of linguistics. Find out more and read ‘Echos and their Others’ at grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I’m so … Continue reading Teaser for Season 2: Grammar for dreamers
Welcome back to the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode we save the world. For me, saving the world means identifying ‘new ways of thinking about social structure’. Here are the things that need rethinking: the inequitable distribution of resources the isolation and marginalisation of difference an impulse toward self-destruction, and a lack of respect … Continue reading Episode 60: How linguistics can save the world
Linguist, communication expert and digital media scholar Erika Darics asks ‘Shouldn’t scholars in Critical Discourse Studies be political activists? What is the point of exposing injustice if we stop there?’ In this episode I address Erika’s question. Spoiler alert: the answer is a resounding YES. And I celebrate the question ‘What is the point?’ Please … Continue reading Episode 59: Enquiry, imagination and action
In this episode I share the talk I gave at the Symposium at Sheffield Hallam University on January 12, 2017, in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. Many thanks to all who participated in the event, including fellow speakers, Chris Christie, Lucy Jones, Shân Wareing and Karen Grainger. Special thanks to Dave Sayers and Alice … Continue reading Episode 58: Communities of Sara Mills
Remember Christina from Episode 7? She’s the one who spared no time at all in getting as far away from Awayville, USA as she could. This week we return to Christina, and we get introduced to her mom… the redneck. Not that Christina’s embarrassed about that, or anything. Revisiting Christina’s conversation gives me the opportunity … Continue reading Episode 57: Redneck roots
artwork © Nico Vassilakis 2012 To engage in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the linguistic methodology I discussed last week, requires understanding language primarily as a form of communication that can be manipulated to represent the world in different ways. Indeed, language is often understood as a form of communication that is unique to human beings, … Continue reading Episode 56: A story about language
The Oregonian/2003 This week I discuss the branch of linguistics – Critical Discourse Analysis, or CDA – that most informs my approach to grammatically analysing texts. It’s the ‘critical’ part of CDA that appeals to me most – an aim of most practitioners of CDA is to explore the role language plays in maintaining or … Continue reading Episode 55: Critical condition
Our explorations in phenomenology have led us to understand consciousness as submerged in the world of perception. I have made a case for understanding this phenomenological world not as material world, but as a social world. I keep drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s image of the blindfolded person who uses a stick to gain perceptual experience of … Continue reading Episode 54: I was so hungry
Remember Episode 51, when we made our way, blindfolded, around a room with nothing more than a cardboard tube to guide us? We delve deeper into the depths of phenomenology this week – almost literally – taking seriously Sara Ahmed’s description in her Queer Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, in which ‘bodies are submerged, such that … Continue reading Episode 53: Submerged in the social world
Today I celebrate 52 weeks of religiously produced Structured Visions episodes! Enjoy a glass of bubbly with me while I share with you some of the motivations behind making the podcast and what I find so enjoyable about it. I also express my gratitude some figures who have been inspirations for me along the way: … Continue reading Episode 52: I’m very grateful for you listening today
We return to Kafka’s tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the ‘you’ in Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that’s attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, … Continue reading Episode 51: A Message from the Emperor, Part 2
We’ve been building up to some exciting ideas in these podcasts, many of which came to a head in Episode 47. Here are some of the key points: I’ve been recommending that when we think about social structure we draw upon a different binary than those that are often used. Rather than individual-society, or self-body, I’ve proposed human … Continue reading Episode 50: A Message from the Emperor, Part 1
What do you do when your social vision doesn’t match that of those around you? Or if you come from a planet where the social world is a lot more harmonious than the one you’re noticing on earth? You could try ethnography. Ethnography and the spirit of exploration in today’s episode. Download Episode 49: Calling … Continue reading Episode 49: Calling all ethnographers
I reached into my mailbag during today’s podcast and found this letter from a faithful listener. OK, it was my brother. Or, as he likes to call himself, ‘the magnificent brother from the new world’. Jodie, I’m catching up on podcasts and am in the middle of listening to #47. I hope you don’t mind but … Continue reading Episode 48: The magnificent brother from the new world
We go back to middle school this week, looking once more at the This American Life episode dedicated to the subject, and taking up once again Levinas’s notions of alterity and face. Here’s what I said last week about middle school: Middle school is a social body that has a face. … I want us … Continue reading Episode 47: The grammatical face of the other
In an episode of This American Life, 14-year-old Annie relates middle school to a ‘whitewashed, brick-walled, iron-gated prison’ that she finally escapes from. Annie’s description gives us a good excuse to revisit the use of prison metaphors to describe oppressive social structures. Foucault’s Panopticon will spring to mind for many Structured Visions listeners, but we … Continue reading Episode 46: Middle school, embodied
More this week on the human body and the social body. What about the self? In this episode I go against the idea that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the self and the human body – that each time we see a human body there’s a singular self/mind/consciousness that is attached to/merged with/inhabiting it. Did … Continue reading Episode 45: Can’t you do something with her?
Today I explore in a bit more detail these two potentially provocative premises: that the social body is real, and that it hasn’t yet been formed. Let’s take them each in turn: The social body is real. We can spend all day under the influence of our favourite substances (beer, wine, Haribo sweets) what it … Continue reading Episode 44: We got everything back
There’s a new binary opposition in town! Instead of thinking, as we have been in Structured Visions, about the individual in relation to society, I’ve proposed we begin to think in terms of two types of body. The human body and the social body. The self, as I said in Episode 42, attaches to one … Continue reading Episode 43: Bye bye body metaphor
Be prepared in this episode for a bit of dramatic irony – a term I learned when I read Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘Charles’. A little boy, Laurie, comes home every day from kindergarten with stories about a classroom bully named Charles. At the end of the book the parents find out that it’s Laurie … Continue reading Episode 42: Discipline and Punish, part 3
We’re still on Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish: what kinds of punitive techniques are needed to keep in place different social structures? I use the Penelope Soto story to illustrate Foucault’s comments about punishment under a feudal system. And reflections on Wal-Mart and shoplifting give us insights about punishment under a capitalist system. The … Continue reading Episode 41: Discipline and Punish, part 2
The first few pages of Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish, describe (in gory detail) a ritual execution from pre-Revolutionary France. I tend to be very squeamish about these things, so it’s a miracle I kept reading. Somehow I did, and in this episode I describe what it is in this book that inspires me. … Continue reading Episode 40: Discipline and Punish, part 1
Tumble dryers, the musical beat, computers, bodies, black holes, hairy black holes, information, desire, French laundromats, homeless soothsayers and Maya Angelou. Welcoming, adapting, embodied social structures. What more could you want from a Structured Visions podcast? Download Episode 39: The path of least relevance
Picture the scene: my nephew, Lane, at four years old, at Christmas, playing with his new racetrack, shouting ‘You’re outta the game!’ to anyone whose car comes off the track. Now let’s imagine that Lane is the personification of a social structure. He is, in fact, doing what social structures seem to do – classifying … Continue reading Episode 38: You’re outta the game!
I’m still dreaming, in this episode, of a society in which unique selves are possible. Such a dream goes beyond ideas about social inclusion. Inclusion is about fitting in to a pre-existing system – with all the rules and prescriptions such a system holds. My vision is of a social structure that welcomes uniqueness, indeed, … Continue reading Episode 37: Sand in my teeth
More about how social structures close down any notion of the unique, transformative individual. When openings occur, they show up as disruptions, problems or embarrassments, as I explain in my analysis of two accounts of walking into a lecture room. Here’s the transcript: My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: … Continue reading Episode 36: Anybody else know her?
In this week’s podcast I’m sharing a talk I gave as part of the English seminar series at the University of Liverpool. Here are the slides if you’d like to follow along. (Slides 17 and 18 were missing from the original presentation, so you’ll hear me stumbling a little as I try to sort that out.) … Continue reading Episode 35: Language and the gendered body
I move from computer programmes to choose-your-own-adventure novels this week: metaphors abound to explore the idea of language/grammar as a system. Systems can be understood as complex matrices of choices at various levels of complexity. At the phonological level of a language, you can understand the difference between the words pat and bat in terms … Continue reading Episode 34: Choose Your Own Adventure
M.A.K. Halliday has this (and a whole lot more) to say about grammar: Grammar is the central processing processing unit of language, the powerhouse where meanings are created. (2014, p. 22). In this episode I take the CPU metaphor to new extremes. I claim I’m able to converse with society because I’m just like one … Continue reading Episode 33: The Grammar Matrix
Last week I staged a tug-of-war between Society and The Individual, and I let Society win. This week I explain why with reference to a friend’s response to my first book. As I said to my friend, the book analyses homophobic attitudes in a women’s university field hockey club. I told him one of the … Continue reading Episode 32: A Thought That Thinks More Than It Thinks
The conceptual tug-of-war between Society and Individual ends in this week’s podcast! The Individual surrenders, leaving Society to dream up and personify possibilities for a world in which individual might be possible. Watch what happens when Society dreams up a Hollie Phillips: Download Episode 31: Figments of Society’s Imagination.
More this week on the idea that social structure might be personified – and embodied. I analyse a conversation between three students whose identities have been challenged in the classroom setting. Their discussion with me reveals that the relationship between individual and society might be seen in a new way. Specifically, how easy does a … Continue reading Episode 30: Plastic Automatons… and Other Personifications of Social Structure
Is the individual determined by society? Or is the individual an autonomous actor, making the most of structural resources to navigate through society? These questions are familiar to Structured Visions listeners, but this week I attempt to make the debate a little less abstract. I replace the notion of ‘society’ with the image of the classroom, and … Continue reading Episode 29: Class(room) struggle
In this episode I discuss… yup, you guessed it! Structure. I’ve been bandying that word around for quite some time without offering a clear definition. I don’t offer any clear definitions here, either, but I do make some associations. Does the word ‘structure’ conjure up ideas about stability, regularity, consistency permanence? I suggest today that … Continue reading Episode 28: Architects, Astronomers and Grammarians
Why am I so fascinated by social structure? Perhaps because it helps me to articulate my experience of the world. In this episode I share some of my experiences from my career in higher education in France and Britain. I discuss some students’ responses to Mary Bucholtz’s sociolinguistic research on nerds. Download Episode 27: The … Continue reading Episode 27: The battleground, the dojo and the lab
In this episode I explore the relationship between these sets of concepts: bodies/selves, bodies/souls, selves/individuals, individuals/society. Do we need to understand the self as separate from society – as autonomous – in order to be imagine social change? I review the work of two different theorists’ perspectives on these concepts: Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Often the individual is … Continue reading Bodies and selves and structures, oh my!
Happy New Year from Structured Visions! Today I discuss a grammar meme that my brother pointed out to me – an illustration of a stern old man saying: When you say ‘I seen,’ I assume you won’t finish that sentence with ‘the inside of a book.’ I draw once more upon Pierre Bourdieu’s work, this … Continue reading Episode 25: It makes my skin crawl
A story of a Christmas miracle involving a pink Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle leads to a discussion of whether Santa Claus is a social fact. According to French anthropologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, ‘social facts’ are those forces that maintain the integrity of societies – forces that transcend the needs and desires of the … Continue reading Episode 24: The Gift
Last week I promised I’d explore a paradox in Ally’s comments about the ‘brazen’ women in her halls. To do so, we need the continuation of the transcript of the conversation I discussed in Episode 22: (Clark 2011, p. 129-30) Here’s the contradiction: at one point, Ally says drinking pints is wrong because you’d never … Continue reading Episode 23: I just don’t enjoy the taste
This week I give some advice about how to control someone: give them an impossible task to do – like keeping an ice cube from melting on a hot, sunny beach. Then make them think it’s actually possible to do that task, and make sure they’re invested in doing it. The ‘impossible task’ I’m talking … Continue reading Episode 22: You’d never catch anyone
This week I question whether the notion of the ‘self’ is as stable as people seem to want it to be. The instability of the self might be explored in terms of how it is situated within the language system. What words do you use to refer to your self? You might use a pronoun, … Continue reading Episode 21: Where are you? Who are you?
As a great sage (a scriptwriter for Saturday Night Live) once wrote, Thanksgiving with the family can be hard. Everyone has different opinions and beliefs. The aftermath of people expressing their different opinions and beliefs at a family meal is beautifully parodied in the sketch, A Thanksgiving Miracle. In Politeness Theory, personal offence is understood … Continue reading Episode 20: Facing Thanksgiving
The notion of the ‘paradigm shift’ originates from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion: if new evidence comes in that upsets an established paradigm, it is described as an anomaly and often explained away as human error or flawed research design. When enough new … Continue reading Episode 19: Paradigms
Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider … Continue reading Episode 18: They Lied to Us
All this talk of social structure and how it could be better: does it match your own experience? Last week I talked about a social structure that is divided along gender, and requires boys and men to behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear … Continue reading From Paperclips to Marshmallows: False Promises of Individual Choice
I’ve been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those categories. What doesn’t ‘fit’ within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist. … Continue reading Blank Boys and Blank Girls
When I was teaching conversation classes in France I invented a game designed to encourage students to speak more English to each other. Each player started with 12 paperclips, and they’d have to forfeit one each time another player caught them speaking a language other than English. The goal was to acquire as many paperclips … Continue reading The Paperclip Game
How do you know if a social structure is having an impact on you? Have a look around and notice if there’s anything you recognise. If you’re using language to label the things in the room, for instance, you’re participating in a linguistic structure. A language structure is a social structure inasmuch as it is … Continue reading Liza Got Hair: Thwarting Recognisability
Last week I talked about how bodies are disciplined to conform to societal norms. This week I discuss the pressure to conform to a consistent identity. I explore this idea in relation to two renowned scholarly figures – Michel Foucault and Monica from Friends. I get curious about how the enjoyment of the body might … Continue reading Let’s Dance!
We’re still talking about bodies but this week the focus is on how they’re disciplined. I explain some of the ideas in Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish. An important component of Foucault’s work is the mechanisms that keep societal structures in place. In a feudal society, structured hierarchically according to the birthright of the … Continue reading Episode 12: Foucault, the Panopticon and the Tyranny of Cartwheels
If you were in a position to make a judgement about someone – in a job interview, for instance – would you take into account what their body looked like? One widespread societal message is that the uniqueness, the individuality, the ‘personhood’ of a person has nothing to do with what their body looks like. … Continue reading Episode 11: I’m So Fat and So Short. The Fragmented Body
‘Fairness’ and ‘equality’ are at the heart of the modern justice system, as I explained in last week’s episode. This week’s idea is that basing notions of justice on fairness and equality will never work. Why not? Because such a justice system requires us to think in terms of disembodied individuals – and we simply … Continue reading Episode 10: Potties and Bodies
This week I turn to the concept of individual that’s produced by the legal system: the ‘rational person’. The rational person is a disembodied individual, who is stripped away of all uniqueness, embodiment, emotion and desire. It turns out that a justice system, like the modern one, based upon the idea of ‘fairness’ requires us … Continue reading Episode 9: It’s Not Fair! The Rational, Disembodied Person
In the past two episodes, I’ve been talking about how society needs to be structured in order for particular types of individuality to exist. In this episode I discuss two types of social structure: the system of traffic laws and culturally specific politeness norms. My interest in traffic laws comes from spending lots of time … Continue reading Episode 8: The Model Person: Traffic, Politeness, French Kissing and Fingernails
With each new story is a different – but familiar – way of understanding how different types of social structure produce different types of individual. Mary’s story, in last week’s episode, illustrated the notion of the individual as a token of a particular, recognisable type: ‘I was one of those…’ This week we hear from … Continue reading Episode 7: ‘I Left, Like, That Night’: The Isolated Individual
I tell more stories about my experiences in Strasbourg and American students doing their best to fit in. Often fitting in to aspects of French culture, and learning French, was made difficult because of how much they enjoyed being in the company of other English-language speakers. Thinking about them as a ‘community of practice’ – … Continue reading Episode 6: ‘I Was One of Those’ – Uniqueness and Community
Last week I said I hated social structure? I need an attitude adjustment. When is thinking about social structure fun for me? When we’re imagining new ones: flower worlds, sock worlds, bubble words, underground worlds, for instance. I discuss the work of two sociolinguists, Penelope Eckert and Mary Bucholtz, who did ethnographic work in the … Continue reading Episode 5: Kill Your Peas and Other Stories from Alien Worlds
Linguistic description gets messy. The scientific description of language starts from the idea that no one variety is intrinsically better than any other variety, then why do linguists always only use the Standard to describe other varieties? Well, not every linguist. In her book, Talking that Talk, Geneva Smitherman upsets the apple cart by using … Continue reading Episode 4: I’m Like, Social Structure Really Pisses Me Off!
What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘grammar’? Red pen marks all over your assignments? Being told there’s something wrong with the way you speak or write? A disgruntled feeling when you see a misplaced apostrophe? My love of grammar has never been about recognising ‘errors’ in speech or writing. For me it’s … Continue reading Episode 3: ‘Objective’, ‘Descriptive’ and Other Broken Promises in Linguistics
In this episode I talk about the experience of internalising a judgmental, hierarchical social structure. In my case it was like living by the rules of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders). Some arbitrary set of characteristics is graded on a scale of 1 to 100 and you find yourself landed on one of the … Continue reading Episode 2: Chutes and Ladders, or I Am Being So American
Welcome to the very first episode of the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode I look at aspects of racial injustice. I share some perspectives from my five-year-old self to show how certain logical structures enabled me to cope when I first noticed racial inequality. I talk more about what it means to understand racism, or any other form of social injustice, as structured. I invite listeners … Continue reading Episode 1: The Mystery of the Little Black Baby Dolls
