Structured Visions – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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

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In 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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What 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’.

Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

Check out my new course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths.

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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 alien world of the American high school. Eckert’s book, Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High analyses the links between class, gender and language in a high school in the Detroit area. Eckert describes a divide between ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ and shows how the kids create meaningful categories according to the things they do, not just what social class they come from.

Bucholtz’s article, ‘“Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls’ describes a group of self-proclaimed ‘nerds’ in another American high school. These girls, she explains, are constructing their own social category that subverts ‘cool’ identities.

I ask: how easy it is to subvert established social categories in a given social structure?

I ask: why are social categories – even subversive ones – based on acceptance/rejection? Can we imagine a social world where there’s nothing but acceptance?

I decide to move from being an objective anthropologist to a regular person, with subjective experiences. I time travel back to being a kid at school myself, sitting in the school lunchroom staring down my shyness, my peers and … my peas. Eureka! I discover the value of creating a new story.

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 African American Vernacular English (AAVE) forms in academic contexts.

I get called out of my scientific linguist mode when someone tells me I use the word ‘like’ a lot when I talk. Like, what? It turns out that the use of ‘like’ as a quotative has a particular function when you study it in relation to the structure of spoken narrative.

Grammatical structure, narrative structure – just the kind of structures I love. But the use of ‘like’ is often also studied in terms of its relation to aspects of social structure: which types of people are most likely to use it, and how it’s likely to be judged.

When I start thinking about the links between grammatical structure and social structure, I’m no longer thrilled about being objective and descriptive. I start to ask myself a few questions:

Can I study social structure objectively? Can I simply describe social structure? Can I treat social structure as if it were beautiful, the way I understand linguistic structure to be? And the answer was no, actually. Social structure really pisses me off. I hate the way society is structured. I don’t like the fact that society is structured according to a class system, or according to a race system or according to gender inequities. I don’t want to simply describe that. I really wanna judge that!

And I also want to find alternatives. More on that next week.

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 a fascination with the beauty of structure. When I was an undergraduate at Washington College I got to play with structure regularly as part of Bob Anderson’s class in symbolic logic.* Then in a music class taught by Amzie Parcell, I had a moment of synaesthesia where logical structure become not just an intellectual experience, but also an auditory and emotional one.

My introduction to the study of linguistics was with John Lyons’s book, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. I read the book as part of an MA in English Linguistics I did at the University of Strasbourg. I found Lyons’s words on misconceptions about grammar particularly inspiring:

There are all sorts of social and nationalistic prejudices associated with language, and many popular misconceptions fostered by the distorted version of traditional grammar that is frequently taught in the schools. To free one’s mind of these prejudices and misconceptions is indeed difficult; but it is both a necessary and a rewarding first step. (p. 2)

However, in spouting out my new ideas about freeing our minds of prejudices and misconceptions, I learned that the connection between people’s views about language and their internalised social structures are more intimate than I’d realised.

If we admit there’s an intimate connection between people’s sense of social structure and their sense of grammatical structure, what will that then reveal? What alternatives to unjust social structures can we find?

* Here’s Peter Suber’s solution to the logic problem I remember from college. Isn’t it beautiful? Delilah wore a ring on every finger and had a finger in every pie. (x)(y)[(Fxd · Ry)  (Oyx] · (x)(y)[(Fxd · Py)  Ixy]

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 numbered grids. What if ‘whiteness’ was the thing you were being graded on? (This is the question Cheryl Harris discusses in her article, ‘Whiteness as property’.) What if it you were graded on your level of ‘Americanness’? I talk about my feelings of not measuring up when I lived in France.

What does grammar have to do with any of this? I ask listeners to consider the difference between these three clauses, which come from a story that was told to me by an American student living in Strasbourg:

1. We are making a Christmas tree.
2. That is so American.
3. Jennifer is more American than me.

Clause 1 is an example of what in Systemic Functional Grammar is called a material process, realised by the verb phrase are making.

Clauses 2 and 3 are examples of relational processes, realised by the verb is.

Relational clauses sometimes put people on a Chutes and Ladders-type grid: they situate you, statically, in a particular social structure. (I am white. I am a lecturer. I am American.) In their most ‘normal’ form – that is, their unmarked form, they’re in the simple past or the simple present. What happens if you were to use the present-in-present form (otherwise known as present continuous or present progressive)? I am being American. I am being white. Does that upset the Chutes and Ladders board?

Next week I’ll talk more about these types of ‘grammatical intervention’.

The book I mentioned, cited in Cheryl Harris’s article, is Two Nations by Andrew Hacker.

The type of grammar I’m using is Systemic Functional Grammar, and my reference guide is Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar.

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 to start imagining new structures.

If we can start noticing social structures that lead to social injustice or are a result of social injustice, then we are also in a position to identify alternatives.

And I put forward this idea as a teaser:

The way we structure our worlds has its mirror in the grammatical structure of how we speak.

Tune in to the next episode to hear more about grammar and the structure of social worlds.

In this episode I mention Drs Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll test and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva‘s chapter in the book White Out, edited by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.

Is 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’.

Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

Check out my new course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths.

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

When 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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Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!