Hello, and welcome to Episode 63 of Structure Admissions. Structure Admissions is a space where exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is J.D. Clark, and I'm very grateful that you're listening to me.
You are very welcome here. I have no idea how you came up on this podcast episode today, but I am thrilled you're here with me, and I'm wondering if you've been drawn in because you, like me, are fascinated with language. Now, sometimes I don't believe there's anybody else out there who's as fascinated by language as I am, but then I keep reading things that fascinate me even more, which means there must be other people out there who are fascinated with language. So you might be one of them.
If you're not, you might be in the wrong place, but or you might have one of those love-hate relationships with language, where you might be fascinated by it, but you might have been sort of vaguely traumatized by it, like, you know, maybe you weren't very good at English, or you kept getting papers back from features telling you that you hadn't written properly, and that you wouldn't be able to spot a proposition if it bit you somewhere. So there's all kinds of, or people tell you that you're using slang, or they don't like the way you speak, or who knows what. There's all sorts of ways in which people get criticized or traumatized, or they're told their language isn't correct in some ways. So language is one of these things that, again, you can have a real sort of love-hate relationship with it, and it's one of the things I find even more fascinating by it.
So here's a way. If you're not somebody who's massively fascinated by language, I'm going to give you a little strategy to kind of get you there. I'm going to give you something that, when I do this, it feels a little bit like a mystical experience, but then I think I'm a little bit that way inclined anyway. So give this a try.
You might think that I'm a crazy person, but here's what you do. So wherever you are listening to this, hopefully you're in a room or on a moving vehicle or something like that, where there's a window, hopefully you're not driving. So look at the window, and I'm going to ask you to shift your perspective. So I want you to first start by looking at what you can see through the window.
So when I look out through my window, I can see some rooftops. I've just seen a magpie fly up onto a roof. It's raining, so there's some rain outside, there's clouds in the sky, that type of thing. So that's what I see when I look out my window.
So think about what you see when you look out your window. You might even paint a little word picture of it, so you're already kind of playing with language there, right? Okay, now shift your perspective. So rather than looking outside at the scene, outside the window, focus now on the window pane.
Okay, and what you can see when you're looking at the window pane, on my window pane, I can see like some of the drops of rain, but interestingly, I can see how it's transparent, right? So when I'm just looking at the window pane, I can see its transparency, if that makes sense. So transparency isn't normally something that I can see, but when I'm focusing on the window pane, I can actually see the transparency. Okay, so then just toggle back and forth.
So you're looking at the window pane now, and now you're looking at the scene behind it, and then window pane again, and then scene behind it. Now, I don't know about you, but when I do that little exercise, just the toggling between the two perspectives, it does send me into a slightly altered state. This is why I'm a very cheap date, I'm endlessly entertained by these types of things. But this is a kind of exercise that I've developed.
I'll tell you the relevance of it in a second, but I got it from a French philosopher called Rolling about in a book called Mythologies. And so he's talking about, he's actually talking about cultural mythologies, but he's drawing upon structural linguistics of structuralist linguistics, and he's thinking about the difference between form and meaning. So effectively, when you're looking at the window pane, you're focusing on the form, and when you're looking through the window pane at the scene behind it, you're looking at the meaning. So let's think about this in more concrete terms.
Let's think of a word. So I'm going to use the word cake, the favorite word in structural linguistics is tree, but I'm a bit of a cake kind of music, a word cake. And if you like me, are thinking of this beautiful, buoy chocolate thing with a lovely, beautiful ganache icing on it that you can cut into, and it's just going to have all this wonderful chocolateness coming out of my mouth is watering up. So that's you thinking about the meaning of the word cake.
So that was us looking through the window pane and seeing that cake there. Now, now think of the form of the word cake. So I'd be curious to know where you went first. Did you think about the sounds that made up the word cake?
That's the form. So you can think about the ck sound that you get that twice, you get that at the beginning and at the end, ck. And then in the middle, you get this sort of what's called a diphthong, which is sort of two vowel sounds that go together and a which makes an a sound. So you get a right.
So that's your form when you start sort of thinking about that the sounds that the that that make up the word cake, you could think about, you know, what does that sound like? Sounds like something knocking, sounds like, you know, a bird calling, who knows. But in any case, this is the form of the word, or you might have focused in on the you might have a little you might be a little bit more literacy minded, you might have thought of the shapes of the letters that make up that word. So you've got a sort of curly, curly C at the beginning and then some form of an a, as you might have thought of the individual printed letters, you might have thought about like, whether it was a Sarah for a sense, Sarah font if you're more typographically inclined.
And that's you focusing on the form. So that's you thinking about the the window pane. And if you're involved in any kind of creative writing, you'll be toggling regularly between form and meaning, because or any and I said creative writing, I mean, anything at all, even if you're writing creative copy for advertising, you know, you might think about the word cake and thinking, oh, it sounds a little bit like cake, maybe I should start a business called cakes and cakes. Right.
So that's you toggling between form and meaning. And this is endlessly fascinating, I promise you, right. So this business of moving between the form and the meaning. Here's what Roland Bart says about it.
And if you're not, if you weren't fascinated already, then you'll probably be fascinated after this quote. He says, if I'm in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can, it will focus on the scenery or on the window pane. Right. So that's what we just been doing.
At one moment, Bart's writes, I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape. And another, on the contrary, the trans-parents of the glass and the depth of the landscape. But the result of this alternation is constant. The glass is at once present and empty to me.
And the landscape unreal and full. It's not an interesting contradiction, the glass, the form is present. It's there, but it's also empty. It's transparent.
The landscape, you can't touch it because you're in a car going past or like me, you're in a window, I can't reach out. I'm on the second floor. So, so the landscape, I can't touch, but it's full. It has all of this meaning forming, right.
So this business of going from form to meaning honestly, it feels like we're touching on the mysteries of the universe somehow. So here's another way we can get fascinated language. You imagine Bart's example was in a car. So his landscape is constantly changing.
So this is interesting. He's got one window pane, but lots and lots of different shapes to the landscape. So one way we could play with this is we think about words or phrases that have more than one meaning. So this was an endless source of entertainment for me when I was at college or you need for my British listeners.
So I was with my boyfriend at the time, we were in the supermarket. We used to just go to the supermarket. Like we didn't have any money. We didn't have like, we couldn't afford anything.
Like not even at the supermarket. So this time we must have needed some kind of like soap or something hygiene products because we were in that section, the personal care section of the supermarket. And we just used to have a ball of a time because we were both fascinated by language. And so he picked up a stick of deodorant and showed it to me and he said, mmm, original scent.
Now this is this is such a common thing that we did, which is to just play with our new exactly what what he was asking, which was what was the original scent, which is a fantastic question because we all know what original scent means. It means that the original scent that sure deodorant thought up before it came up with island breeze or whatever. But he asked the question, he shows this original scent. And then the way we responded, like we responded in chorus to answer the unasked question, which was what was the original scent?
Like what was the first scent that ever was? I instantly shouted out smells like the garden of Eden. And he shouted something out too. But what he said was smells like the big bang.
So we were instantly confronted with two totally different cosmologies. But it didn't matter because we were clearly both fascinated by language. But we were looking through the same window and we were even doing that sort of toggle form meaning thing. And we still were seeing two totally different things, one based on a sort of scientific perspective and one based on a deodorant upbringing.
So this is so this is another way that you can play with language and be endlessly fascinated by language. And more recently, I've been working on fiction pieces that explore linguistic facts of quirky facts about linguistics or for not linguistic phenomena, etc. And I because I'm writing fiction about them, I always want to do that little toggle thing, where it's like, well, I know it means this thing in linguistics. But what if it weren't a linguistic concept?
What would it mean then? So the one that I've been working on recently is the idea of the first person. Okay, so I'm just going to throw that phrase out the first person. And what's the first thing that comes to your mind?
The first person. Okay, so if you remind boyfriend in college, maybe the first person for you would be like that that that skeleton of the 32 3.2 million year old ape called Lucy. So who was an early ancestor of humans and so they found her skeleton back in the 70s and they named her Lucy after Lucy in the sky with diamonds. So that's probably what he would have come up with with the first person.
And as you can imagine, if you're me and you say the first person based on my deodorant upbringing, I think of the Garden of Eden yet again. So we've got the original scent with the first person in it. So I wrote this story, I'm going to write a story about the first person. So I've got this little girl called Zoe and she's been told by a friend of first Holly at school who clearly also met a deodorant of Christian upbringing that the first person was this guy called Adam and you know that he lived in the Garden of Eden etc.
So the little girl has never heard this before. She's like what's this all about? This seems to be strange. She asks her mom about it.
She says who was the first person? Now her mom's response is not to think religiously or mythologically or scientifically. What she thinks very practically. She says the first person to do what?
Like what? The first person to walk on the moon? The first person to bake a cake without eggs? The back of cakes again.
And when her daughter says no, the first person that ever was, she says, you know what? Your uncle's visiting. Your uncle Joe is visiting. Why don't you ask him?
Okay, so the little girl is happy about her uncle Joe because she says she writes about him. Uncle Joe, this is the description of him. Uncle Joe was the best person she knew. He was big and furry like a bear.
He was also a little bit mad but not in a scary way. Okay, so we've got this character Uncle Joe who's mad but not in a scary way. So this is what we're happy about that. So when she what she does is she says to her uncle okay well who was the first person?
And her uncle says the first person isn't an actual person. It's a concept. So what we have is her uncle thinking about the linguistic definition of the first person. And this has to do with grammatical personhood.
Okay, so if you want to read this story, you can find it on my blog where I put all these quirky little stories about quirky linguistic items. It's called Grammar for Dreamers. You can find it on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. And so this particular story called first person is about grammatical personhood.
And so the little quote, the little linguistic principle is this grammatical personhood has to do with levels of involvement in a linguistic expression. English and many other languages have three levels of personhood. Okay, so to think about this you just think in terms of like your pronouns. Okay, so sorry if you've ever been traumatized by language because we're going to get a little bit nitty gritty with language here with grammar.
So you get your first person, second person, third person. And you can think in terms of your first person pronouns. I mean we, your second person pronouns, you, your, and then your third person pronouns he sheet it. Okay, so and then if you ask yourself, okay, well that's the first second and third person.
What actually are they? And the and the and it's kind of hard to do because it's a little hard to do that form meaning thing with the pronouns with first person, second person, we use them so often. So with the first person, you know, I, I, what is I mean? I is always the person who is presumed to be speaking or who is presumed to be the producer of the language, right?
Whether maybe they're writing it or texting it. So I is the person who produces the language. And then the second person is the person is the one being spoken to or being written to, right? So those are our sort of two people.
There are two people in the conversation, first person and second person. And then the third person is who or what is being spoken about. So I like you, you're not like him. So I am the person speaking, you were the person I'm speaking to and him is the person outside of the conversation.
So when you get, they're called personhood. But when you get to the third person, you realize personhood isn't is a bit of a misnomer because you can use the third person to talk about something, something that isn't a person. So you could, you know, I like cupcakes and cupcakes isn't the third person. I like them.
It's in the third person. But cupcakes aren't a person, right? They're a thing. But you the third person isn't the only place where person hood or the word person is a misnomer because you can, you know, when you're using the second person, the you, you don't have to address another person either.
You can address your dog, you're such a cutie pie or you get a dress, you know, really anything. I mean, if you're me, you pretty much talk to all the objects in your house because you're a little bit mad but not a scary way, you know, you cup of tea, you look so warm and inviting, right? And you can also, you know, use the first person to talk about something that's not a person. So, you know, I can put myself in the perspective of my dog and say, I am so happy to be your dog or I could put myself in the perspective of my petal and say, I am feeling a little overused these days and under loved.
I don't know. But the person thing is, is the terminology, but it doesn't necessarily map onto what we think of in everyday discourse as a person. Okay. So, this leads me to ask the question, okay, you've got, you know, English and these other languages you do first, second and third person.
So, can you do fourth, fifth and sixth person? Okay. So, again, if you're me, this starts to feel a little bit like, how could that be? Like, this is like, when somebody told me there are more than three dimensions, it's just like, oh, no, I'm blown.
How do I go with this? There, you can. An example of a language that has more than three language that has more than three persons is Blackfoot, which is a Native American language and it has five levels of personhood. So, it's got first person, second person, third person, fourth person and fifth person.
And so, you might say yourself, okay, well, what more can there be? There's I, there's you and there's he, she, it. He, she is outside of the conversation. You know, what, what, what, like far they're outside the conversation?
Like, what are we doing when we're getting to fourth, fifth and et cetera person? And how come there aren't like six billion persons? They're having to keep on on the earth. Well, what is actually happening in Blackfoot is it has to do with focus.
So, if you're telling a story about, let's say, your uncle Joe, you might put Uncle Joe in the third person, but then there might be another character who isn't as prominent as Uncle Joe, like Aunt Sally. And so, you might put Uncle Joe in the third person and Aunt Sally in the fourth person. And then when Aunt Sally becomes prominent, you put her in the third person and Uncle Joe goes into the fourth person. So, you've got this way of shifting focus where you can, your audience automatically knows who's the most important person that you're talking about.
And, and they can tell by the fact that you've subtly shifted in terms of the personhood. So, it's almost like you're making a movie and, you know, you're behind the camera of a movie. And the audience watching the movie knows that the person in the center of the screen or sometimes you've got this, there's two people, two characters talking to each other and you fade out of one. You put one in focus and the other blurry and you know the one that's just going into focus is the important one.
So, again, this is about focus and personhood is how you shift focus at least in Blackfoot. Okay. So, that image of the camera, again, it's us sort of toggling from form to meaning. We're being fascinated with language, we're toggling between form and meaning.
So, for instance, if we think about a person like Aunt Sally, I don't have an Aunt Sally, but you might. And you can think about her in terms of looking through the window pane and think, okay, here's what I know about Aunt Sally. But the way you describe your Aunt Sally changes, and in fact, she changes based on the words that you use, the window pane that you're looking through, the camera lens you're looking through, however you want to look at it. So, if you're thinking about her in the second person, hi Aunt Sally, it's been a long time since I've read for you, right?
It's the second person that's me thinking about Sally is something I'm talking to. I might be thinking about the third person. She's my Aunt Sally, she's the best. I could also talk about her in the first person like me and Aunt Sally, we love strawberries.
You know, so I'm thinking of her as part of my we. I could put myself in her shoes and say, you know, if I find Aunt Sally, I'm thinking, why hasn't dirty written me? You know, I could put myself in her shoes. If I were speaking Blackfoot, which I can't do, I could simply shift her prominence in the story by using the various different levels of personhood.
So, I can, my perception and my presentation and Aunt Sally herself changes based on the lens and the lens's language, the lens is the form of language. Okay, so the podcast is that when you're listening to this called Structured Visions, and it's a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. So, this next bit is going to be the social structure bit. Okay, so this business of toggling between form and meaning, this business of the grammatical notion of personhood.
So, stick with me here. Just a little, another experiment with me and think about all of the people on Earth. Okay, so just, and think about what you pictured when I said all the people on Earth. And you might be able to pay attention to which personhood, which level of personhood you used when you were thinking about all the people on Earth.
So, for me, what I see is like a globe with lots of little dots to represent all these people. So, that's me looking down at the globe. And so, all of those people are in the third person, right? So, they're all sort of them separate from you.
Like I'm looking down at all those people, them, third person. Now, what you might have done is you might have actually sort of entered into every single person's subjectivity, right? You might have recognized that the world is different from everybody else's every single person's eyes. You know, their literal eyes and their eye, me and their pronoun eye.
And you might have actually seen it from the first person, like, oh my gosh, there's all these people with all these different perspectives. You might have actually done that. You might have thought about all the people on Earth and you might have thought of yourself as belonging to that group, in which case you were looking at all the people on the Earth from a first person plural perspective, where everybody on the Earth, every single person on the Earth, forms a collective we. And so, that might be something else that you did.
So, that's first person plural. And then, if you did that, if you sort of considered yourself as part of the group of all the people on the Earth, and that's the we, because the personhood is always in relation to something else, I could always then ask you, if you are part of the we, who is the they? And the they might be everybody or everything that's on the Earth, that isn't a person, right? So, the reason I bring this up is because, you know, philosophers, scientists, thinkers, they spent a lot of time thinking about what separates people from animals.
And I asked you to think about the people on the Earth and you might have thought of yourself as one of them. But when the, when philosophers and scientists, et cetera, think about what separates people from plants and animals and living things and non-living things, et cetera, we're thinking in terms of what separates us, people from what, from them, for instance, animals, okay? And very often, what comes to mind is, well, people are a lot smarter, people have big brains, people are the most involved, people have language, right? So, and interestingly, when we think about people being a lot smarter, it's like, well, how do we really know?
And it's just like, oh, because we wrote all these books and we can make movies and we can talk to each other, and we can win an argument, you know, when's the last time, you know, your, you saw chaffinch win an argument? I was like, well, we don't know if each other, what, how can we know? We don't know what their level of language is, because we have focused on what human language looks like. So, okay, so we've got this idea that there's all these people, and what separates people from everything else on the earth is that they have language.
So, now I'm going to take you back to Zoe, and I'm going to take you back, so, Ramaphore Dreamer's first person, the story about Zoe, asking her uncle Joe who the first person was. So, tell me about the first person, Zoe said, and here's what Uncle Joe says. The first person is a linguistic construct. Linguistic means language, you remember to tell her.
In the beginning, language flowed over the earth like the weather. It passed over everything, living and non-living, like the wind and rain, always in motion, always changing. So, when he tells her that the first person is a concept, you might be forgiven for thinking that he's about to give her very logical, sort of linguistic, maybe even a little bit of a scientificy, philosophical definition of the first person, but then with his next line, the next thing he says, in the beginning, language flowed over the earth. It sounds like it came out of the genesis, right?
So, it ends up being a very mythological description of what's actually a linguistic phenomenon. In the beginning, language flowed over the earth like the weather, it passed over everything, living and non-living, like the wind and rain, always in motion, always changing. So, it's got a sort of biblical quality to it. So, he's, so, so, now Uncle Joe is treating language in a mythological way.
And just like in Genesis, if you're familiar with the story in Genesis, you know, there is a fall, you know, there's something that kind of goes wrong with creation. And here's the way Joe describes it. Uncle Joe describes it. He says, then one day, language got stuck.
It got sucked into a human body, and the language thought that body was its own. The body and the language together began to imagine that they were a person. Me, me, me, me, they said. They thought they were the first person.
So, he asks, so who was the second person? There were lots of second persons, Uncle Joe said. Every time the language bodies saw another human body, it called that human body, you, you, you, you, you. And each time that happened, a little bit of language would enter into the second person, and they would believe they were the first person.
Me, me, me, me. Zoe wondered what it would be like to think you were the first person, when you weren't. So, how did language get unstuck, she asked? It didn't, Uncle Joe said.
Language stayed stuck. A heavy sorrow passed over his face like a dark cloud unmoving. Oh, said Zoe. For a brief moment, she knew how her uncle felt, like something exquisitely precious had been lost, like the only hope of retreating it would be for everyone to go a little mad.
So, the thing that Uncle Joe expresses in this story is something that I've been playing with for years, and then I will probably continue to play with for years, which is a way of thinking about language where it isn't something that is in the control of individual people. In fact, there is no individual person without language. Language sort of moves around us. It gives us all these levels of personhood, right?
The notion of its language that gives us the notion of the self. And so, it has this shaping quality. It has this way of shaping us so that what? So that we think we are the first person, so that we believe that we are I, I, I, I, me, me, me, and that you too are you, you, you.
And so, when he describes language getting stuck, this is when we become obsessed with controlling our image of who we are, like I'm in charge, I speak a language in order to express meanings that are inside me. And you are who you are, and I'm going to decide who you are and who I am, and I'm going to evaluate my own value in my own worth, and I'm going to evaluate your value in your worth. And all this comes out of, in my opinion, language, us getting stuck within a particular configuration of language. And when I think of language as something that flows, like the weather, that sort of wraps itself around individual selves and gives that consciousness the experience of being a self.
But that the self doesn't get stuck. That to me feels like a very freeing image, right? Language gives you a self, but it doesn't force you to stay in that self. You do not have to remain stuck in that self.
Language moves around us, it allows us to change, to experience subjectivity in a different way. And so I've got this sense in which if we can think of language as being something that moves around outside of us, rather than sort of within us, then we can cooperate with it. We can experience the dynamist, this dynamicity, whatever that word is, the dynamicness of language. We can play with personhood.
We can play with subjectivity. We can think about things differently. We can see the way our world is structured differently. We can look at the pain of the window and at the world behind it and realize that we can toggle back and forth between them.
And we do not have to imagine that we are the first and only person. And that's why I wrote that story is because I want to play with that idea. I hope you enjoyed it. You can read the story in its entirety on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.
You can also get a copy of a screenplay I wrote several years ago called Grammar for Dreamers. And in that screenplay, you'll find a character who's traumatized by a language which I talked about and a character who's got some pretty mad ideas about language which are very similar to the mad ideas that I share on this podcast. And it also has a unicorn because why would that have a unicorn? If you'd like to follow me on Instagram, I'm at grammarfordreamers.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I am at Jodi Clark-Langy. Thank you so much for listening. It's great to have you.