Join 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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Join 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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To 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.’

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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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Do 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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The 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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Conversations 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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The 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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Have 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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What 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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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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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

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What’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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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.’

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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.’

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Counting… 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.

What’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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We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions:

1. What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language?
2. 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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What 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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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’.

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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’.

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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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Linguistic 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 risk and the challenge of human language.

The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy.

The risk: Language can also create an obsession with the self, disavowal of the other, narcissism.

The challenge: To recognise that our selfhood is a gift of our evolving human language, which is a gift of the evolving Earth. With language we’re offered the opportunity to recognise the limitations of the self, and to be open to the mystery of the other.

The translation of the quote from Buddhist sutras about the finger pointing at the moon is from:

Ho, Chien-Hsing (2008). The finger pointing toward the moon: a philosophical analysis of the Chinese Buddhist thought of reference. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (1):159-177. https://philpapers.org/rec/CHITFP-2

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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‘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 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!

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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.

If 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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When 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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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.

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Where’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.

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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.

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A 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.

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‘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 society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real education in pronouns began.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Of prophets and pronouns’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, sign up for my newsletter, get my screenplay—do all the things, here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect  

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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 one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.

The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a better word.

Episode 80 explores the sociological phenomenon of sacredness. We discuss the importance of the sacred and profane dichotomy in Durkheim’s theory of religion. We draw upon Goffman to posit that uttering profanities might be part of a sacred ritual of drawing boundaries around self and other. And we explore the mysterious ways that language creates sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.

The story I read in this episode is ‘The Determiners’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

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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:

• Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world.
• What separates us is human language.
• The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evolution, the Earth’s next great experiment.
• And there are mysteries in the structure of language that can help us understand how the separation is shaped.

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 of you so that you can see it. Ask yourself the question: ‘Is this my hand?’

Did you entertain the possibility that your hand might be possessed? As we’ll discover, it is possessed. The possessive determiner my tells us so.

Possession gives us a mechanism for creating two things where before there was only unity or wholeness. It allows us to divide absolutely anything up. And it allows us to redraw the boundaries around our experience.

With language—not just possessive forms in language, but with language in general—you have the capacity to shape a self… and to make decisions about what belongs to that self.

Language constructs selfhood, which gives us the experience of separation from the world. But what we learn by studying the intricacies of language is how malleable this selfhood is. The dynamic of selfhood can change literally with every utterance. And I believe that close attention to language can show us new ways of shaping the self, and thus, of shaping our communities and our world.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Possessed’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Come to my free live online workshop on October 21^st! It’s called ‘The creative logic of language’, and it’s offered by Off the Shelf Festival of Words and Sheffield Hallam University.

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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 of music, language, mind and body.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Messages’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

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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’.

We’re playing with these ideas:

• Human language gives the human body the experience of existing separately from the rest of the natural world.
• Human language allows the human body to have a unique and specific experience of pleasure, joy, grief, loneliness—the whole range of human emotions.
• To inhabit language allows the body the pleasure of being embraced by a self.

The story I mention, ‘Syllables’, is available on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

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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 we communicate information or express our needs and desires.

In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas:

• Ideas emerge from empty space.
• Language organises that space to form selves.
• Selves are the spaces from which new ideas emerge.

Are these selves conscious?

Better to say that the whole space is conscious, the space is consciousness itself.

When language shapes space to create selves, it bequeaths them with a strange gift: the capacity not to know. The capacity to be unconscious. The capacity to be separated from the vast space of consciousness we’re swimming in.

Complex stuff! We may need some help from quantum physics (and a bit of liminal space) to open ourselves to these ideas.

The books I mention in this episode are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe.

The stories I mention are ‘YES/YES’ and ‘The woodcarver’.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

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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.

To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question.

What’s your most embarrassing religious moment?

Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12.

In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim.

In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions:

• When people worship, they’re connecting with something bigger than themselves
• This ‘bigger thing’ is society
• Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they’d have no sense of who they were in the world

These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices.

But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world.

When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture.

This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society.

The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle.

I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘First words’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self.

The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas.

Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

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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 to do my PhD and was regularly doling out guidance to my student housemates. One of them was convinced that I ‘got’ her in a way her boyfriend didn’t.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I don’t think anyone ever truly ‘gets’ anyone else.

Clearly ‘getting’ someone means to ‘understand’ them, but in the same way that you ‘get’ the punchline of a joke. To get a joke means that you have access to all the assumptions on which the joke is based. (In linguistics these are called implicatures.)

But jokes are simple, and people are vast and complex.

And you are not a joke. You are nothing less than a wild, mad-cap, unsolvable mystery. By definition, ungettable.

But that doesn’t stop us from longing to be seen, understood, to feel held, to resonate with someone. To experience that beautiful sense of freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself.

I believe that this longing, this loneliness, is part of the human condition, and I believe that what causes it is language. To illustrate this point, I’ve rewritten my favourite fairy tale, Rapunzel, in a story called ‘Longing’ (which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com).

According to my version of the story, the Earth once had a longing that only the Sorceress, Language, could fulfil.

What could the Earth possibly long for? The natural world is governed by interconnection and symbiosis. How could it possibly be lonely?

What if the Earth longs for longing itself? What if the Earth longs to experience the separateness that can only be experienced by a distinct, isolated self?

In my version of the Rapunzel story, I have the Earth abandon one of its beloved creatures (human beings) to the one magical being that could provide that (language).

Language creates the self.

What the self creates is, precisely, nothing.

If we see the self as a membrane (another of my favourite images), and when we look courageously at what’s inside that membrane, we see… nothing

Nothing we can grasp, nothing we can ‘get’, nothing fathomable.

Just a miraculously fertile void from which new ideas can emerge.

And when those new ideas emerge, we are in the privileged position of seeing them as other.

Like a magical doll in a fairy tale, or a wiser, more compassionate version of ourselves.

The Self and the Other allow us to experience mystery.

And through us, the Earth can experience mystery as well.

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

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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 charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called ‘hydrogen bonds’, and they make it possible for water to remain a liquid at room temperature, which in turn allows life to exist on Earth.

In this episode we explore the possibility that human language has a structuring quality, like the structuring mechanisms in the natural world. If the qualities of water are shaped by hydrogen bonds, what shapes the structure of human language?

I believe that the structuring principle of human language is selfhood.

We’re getting better at recognising the oppressive structures of our society, like structural racism, patriarchal systems, colonialism, cisheteronormativity, neurotypicality and ableism (to name a few).

But we might also take some time to acknowledge a more dynamic structuring principle: the self. Formed and re-formed by language, it dissolves and is produced anew in each moment. The self shapes itself like a membrane around spaces from which new experiences can emerge.

The challenge is to recognise the power of the dynamic structure of the self formed by language. The mission is to honour it, in ourselves and each other.

Curious about how linguists can find out what pre-verbal babies know about linguistic structure? Watch this great video on The Ling Space.

The story I discuss in this episode, ‘No and the ark’ is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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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 production of selves increases to potentially catastrophic proportions.

Here’s the link to Dr Debbie Reese’s excellent critique of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins: https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-critical-look-at-odells-island-of.html

The book that inspired my fascination with mycelium is Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World.

The stories I discuss in this episode, ‘Finite’ and ‘A remarkable outcome’, are both available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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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 episode is ‘A day at the lake’.

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

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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 linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when we ask what it means.

Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a narrative, so the ‘meaning of life’ becomes something like the ‘moral of the story’?

What if we thought about meaning of life from a biological perspective?

David Deamer, a biologist who explores the origin of life, gives this definition: ‘Life is an evolving system of polymers synthesized by chemical reactions (metabolism) that take place in membrane-bounded compartments called cells’ (2011, p. 3).

The image we have here is not one life, with one story and one meaning. Instead it’s a proliferation of discrete compartments – cells, surrounded by membranes, each containing its own unique strand of genetic information – in other words, strands of communicable meanings.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know I’m fascinated by the idea that the information contained in these membrane-bound compartments… indeed, that the membranes themselves, are a form of language.

This perspective would present human language as nothing more or less than a means for the Earth to produce new forms of membrane-bound compartments, with new forms of information within.

Human language creates the self, which serves as a membrane, that requires us to feel separate, divided, broken.

But it also offers us the experience uniqueness, individuality and the rare pleasure of co-creating something new, something meaningful, something that reconnects us to everything we once felt separate from.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution: rather than spending time trying to find out the meaning of life, let’s celebrate how we each individually contribute to life’s multitude of meanings.

The story I discuss in this episode is ‘The Mosaic Makers’.

Works cited

Deamer, D. (2011) First life: discovering the connections between stars, cells, and how life began. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lessing, D. (1979). Shikasta. New York: Knopf.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to the curious, intelligent, creative community who listen to this podcast. I have exciting new things in store for you. Stay tuned to future episodes to find out more.

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

Or connect with me in one or more of the following ways:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

‘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 problem, with a mathematical solution. But how often, in your experience, are relationship problems genuinely reducible to mathematical equations? How often are they genuinely ‘solved’ by a number?

I’ve often said that my creative and academic work are inspired by ‘the intimacy embedded in the structure of language.’ Intimacy requires selves, and selves are generated by language, by the stories we tell. Stories about the environmental crisis usually construct two distinct selves: us and the Earth.

In this episode we recognise that the relationship between us and the Earth would benefit from some couples therapy. In therapy it might be revealed that the thing that separates us from the Earth is language – the capacity to create and inhabit other worlds – fantasy, parallel existences – that keep us from putting any attention to our partner, the Earth. Language is a boundary that keeps the human species detached from the Earth.

But the thing that separates us does not have to be a boundary. It could be a membrane. Language may be unique to humans, but membranes are universal to all forms of life. Let’s explore the possibility that language is Earth’s newest form of membrane, one that creates spaces from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I discuss in this episode is ‘The Great Reversal.’

Many thanks to Dr Samantha Kies-Ryan for her work on storytelling and water management in the Solomon Islands.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

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.

I believe that thinking about words will give us a bit of insight about what it was like when life first emerged on the Earth. These two things – life and language – for me share two qualities: that they’re both incredibly commonplace, and they’re both overwhelmingly mysterious.

Also, both require boundary making, whether that takes the form of a cell membrane (life) or a self membrane (language). These boundaries cultivate a space in which new ideas can land.

For more about membranes and the origins of life, read Pier Luigi Luisi’s The emergence of life or David Deamer’s First life.

Read my story ‘Wordfall’ on my Grammar for Dreamers blog.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

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 than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it’s reckless not to.

The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘Go’. It’s just been published in the Running Wild Anthology of Stories, vol 5.

I learned about imperatives in Omotic languages from reading work by Alexandra Aikhenvald. (See reference list below.)

And the discussion of postmodernism is based on the following quote from Madan Sarup’s book, Identity, culture and the postmodern world:

‘Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud have all, in their different ways, decentred the human subject. By “decentering”, I mean that individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action.’ (Sarup, 1996, p. 46)

References

Aikhenvald, A. (2010). Imperatives and commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sarup, M. (1996). Identity, culture and the postmodern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

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 and verb of a clause is called the question-tag probe. Here’s a video on how to use it to find the subject, and here’s one on how to find the verb.

Have you ever seen a starling murmuration? Watch this video from the RSPB, and be prepared to be amazed (or even, enlightened).

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

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 had created. It was trippy.

In this episode we’ll discuss the role of language in creating, dissolving and protecting selves.

In my academic research I analyse transcripts of conversations to identify the shape of the social structures that emerges from people talking about everyday experiences. I look for grammatical patterns, asking these questions:

• What ‘selves’ are constructed here?
• What is the shape of the social structure here?
• What are the possibilities for transformation here?*

One transformative possibility that has emerged from this type of analysis is that selves need to be protected. Can language protect them?

Think about the work you own name does in constructing your social self. But an anthropological look at naming systems makes it clear that names are less about protecting selfhood, and more about establishing someone’s place in a social structure. Even the seemingly ordinary principle that there are girls’ names for girls and boys’ names for boys, for instance, lets us know that we live in a culture that positions us in a binary gender structure.

Having an established place in a social structure is not the same as knowing that your self is protected, revered, cherished. In my short story, ‘The Greenhouse’, I explore the idea that everything in the natural world has its own blueprint. – its chemical makeup, its DNA signature, etc. Everything in the natural world has something you could call a ‘name’. Or even a ‘self’.

The ‘selves’ are in relationship with each other – molecules combine to form new molecules, membranes form that allow life to emerge

What if the earth were to grant to one of its species the ability to play with these relationship-forming tools?

What if human beings were offered a device to do creativity in exactly the same way the earth does creativity?

Well so far, such a device has created social structures that produce division, hierarchy and exclusion. But there’s hope to be found in the etymology of the word ‘culture’.

Culture is what we cultivate.

Language is what we use to cultivate.

To make a more welcoming social structure, let’s cultivate selves that felt safe and protected, that are crucibles for creation. Let’s use language to form linguistic membranes around selves, create spaces for new experiences, feelings, thoughts and ideas to emerge.

*You can listen to me talk about this in more detail in Episode 58, which is a recording of the talk I gave at Sheffield Hallam University in 2017 in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. For an even more detailed version, have a look at my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds.

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

Follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers

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 issue 13 of After Happy Hour Review.

We play the ‘think of a word’ game, which shows up on pages 7-8 of my screenplay, Grammar for Dreamers.

We learn from Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic about the role of membranes in the origin of life.

And we hear how Coyote tricked human beings into believing that language started with them, and that they’re the only ones who possess it in my fable called ‘Coyote’s trick’.

We ask this question, which comes from Grammar for Dreamers (p. 36):

‘What if language was not the endpoint of the earth’s evolution, but rather, its starting point? What if language was what the earth has always been doing?’

And finally, we explore the flipside of intimacy: hierarchy, domination, colonisation.

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. For additional content, follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers

Listen to 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.

1. Find a window and look through it.
2. Focus first on the scene outside the window.
3. Then focus on the windowpane itself.
4. Toggle your attention back forth between the windowpane and the landscape outside.

Now think of a word, like cake. Thinking of the meaning of cake is like looking at the scene through the window. Thinking of the form of the word cake (the sounds, if it’s spoken, or the letters, if it’s written) is like looking at the windowpane.

When we toggle between form and meaning, we can play with words or phrases that have more than one meaning.

So you can play with phrases printed on ordinary objects, like a stick of deodorant. ‘Original scent’. What was the original scent? The big bang? The Garden of Eden?

What about ‘the first person’? What does that phrase conjure for you? A 3.2-million-year-old ape named Lucy? Or that guy in Eden called Adam?

Or maybe you’re so fascinated by language that you thought of grammatical personhood. First person: I, me. Second person: you. Third person: he, she it. Can a language have more than three persons?  

Yes! The Blackfoot language has five.

Read my short story ‘The first person’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

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 commodities that can be bestowed on individuals swimming around in the fish tank of social structure. What if instead we thought of language as a sustaining fluid that keeps our social selves safe? The call for all of us then would be to maintain the cleanliness of this fluid, so all are free to exist within it.

Read my very short story ‘In charge’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

Download 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: @grammarfordreamers

Download 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 glad you’re here!

Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling

And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers

Download the Season 2 Teaser: 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 for the natural world.

We can tackle all of these from a range of different disciplines, but on the Structured Visions podcast, we spend most of our time in the ‘linguistics’ section of the world library. If linguistics is going to change the world, we’ll need a new story about language. In the old story, language comes at the end of an evolutionary narrative – it’s a means by which complex organisms can communicate with their species. In the new story, language isn’t the newcomer – it was there from the beginning, approximately squillions of years ago. According to the new story, language is primarily a mechanism for producing structures. Like DNA, and RNA.

To explore this idea, we need to know something about how DNA and RNA produce structures. Thankfully, we have John Perry from Stated Clearly and Your genome to help us.

And we’ll have a look at a strand of language from Marcus, an American in Strasbourg. What structure is he producing when he says, about French people in the supermarket, ‘They’re all like, “Stupid American”’?

So here’s how to save the world with linguistics, in three simple steps:

• Put attention to the social structures produced in tiny strands of grammar
• Recognise any patterns that contribute to self-destruction
• Identify alternative patterns.

And then cultivate these alternative patterns. Imagine new structures, and cultivate them.

What ideas do you have about saving the world? Let me know in the comments. Or on twitter: @jodieclarkling

Can’t wait to hear from you.

Download 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 keep sending me suggestions for podcast topics. I welcome them with an open imagination and a commitment to enquiry and activism.

Download 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 Bell for organising such a moving tribute to Sara.

Is there something you’d like me to discuss in an upcoming podcast? Get in touch!

Click here to access the slides from the talk.

Download 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 to illustrate more specifically how my approach to discourse analysis both draws on and differs from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). (Episodes 55 and 56 provide a bit of background for this discussion, if you’d like to learn more.)

Get a copy of the transcripts here.

I first offer a CDA-style analysis of Christina’s remarks about Awayville. I’m using the approach to CDA developed in Norman Fairclough’s work (Language and Power is a good introduction) and Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough’s Discourse in Late Modernity.

I explain that a CDA approach would recognise this conversation as a text that was co-produced by three social actors. It might note that Christina’s representation of her hometown in Extract 1 draws upon two discourses – a discourse of socioeconomic pressure and a discourse of ‘rugged individualism’. One effect of her juxtaposing these is that it enables her to ‘blame the victims’. In other words, the people who suffer because of decisions made by local governments are blamed for not getting themselves out of a bad situation.

CDA contributes to social change through its consciousness-raising effects. In the example I’ve given, I’ve encouraged listeners to start paying attention to other texts in which individuals are implicitly blamed for what are, in effect, structural inequalities.

Then I move on to illustrate my own approach to discourse analysis. My perspective on texts is rather different. Instead of seeing texts (conversational, written, performed, etc.) as products of communication processes, I treat them as artefacts that reveal particular ways of structuring information.

I’m looking for patterns in the grammar. Look at this clause, for instance, from Extract 2 (line 1):

• they’re all into Nascars

Now compare it with this clause from lines 4-5:

• my mo:m is all about Nascar

There’s a repetition of grammatical and lexical structure here. The non-repeated elements show how this structure changes. It moves from the general (non-specific, third person plural they) to the unique, in the form of the specific referent, my mo:m.

Also, have a look at the ‘middle-o(f)-nowhere’ towns. These show up in both extracts.

In Extract 1, it takes this form:

• they closed it [the army depot] and so now all these people who live like in the little towns outside like in the middle o(f) nowhere (lines 13-15)

In Extract 2, it looks like this:

• she moved to this little like western North Carolina middle-o(f)-nowhere town and it’s like she belongs there (lines 34-35)

The movement in both clause complexes that mention middle-o(f)-nowhere towns is from a material action process (closed in Extract 1 and moved in Extract 2) to a relational process (live in Extract 1 and belongs in Extract 2). The pattern reveals a type of transformation that has to do with the relationship between people and their local economies and their socioeconomic status.

In the first extract, people only thrive when their local economies thrive – and later we learn it is their responsibility to divest themselves of their low socioeconomic status.

In the second extract, we have an image of an individual who thrives because she moves to an environment that supports and accepts her without requiring her to change her status.

Did you catch that? There’s a moment of transformation there – where we can begin to re-imagine social structure.

The old social structure looks something like this: generic groups of people move in and out of environments which are either supportive or hostile. The environment can change from being supportive to hostile at a moment’s notice, without any regard for the people affected.

The new social structure? An individual moves into a new environment that feels like a good match. The environment shapes itself to embrace this new person, such that she belongs. The individual and the environment are in a mutually beneficial relationship.

My approach to discourse analysis is one that begins by revealing the oppressive social structures that are often masked in discursive configurations. I use the tenets of CDA to help me with that. And then I move on to seek out new social structures – welcomed and welcoming alternatives to these hostile worlds. Where do I find these? In the patterns of the texts themselves.

Download 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, and linguists describe the specific ‘design features’ that make human languages different from forms of animal communication. (See George Yule’s textbook, The Study of Language, for a summary.)

I’ve said that my work differs slightly from CDA, one of these differences has to do with my particular take on language. For me, language is not first a foremost a form of communication. (Sperber and Wilson’s book on Relevance Theory is where that idea first sparked for me.) I see language instead as primarily a way of structuring information. And while human beings may be the only creatures who use this structuring device as a mechanism for communication, they are certainly not the only ones who have access to language. Drawing upon Alan Watts’s description of the earth ‘people-ing’, I paint a picture in which the earth has been structuring information for squillions of years, in the form of water molecules, single-celled organisms, mosses, DNA, etc. Human languages represent a new way of structuring information. Not only is it new, it’s also distinct – cut off – it’s a structure that does not allow immediate access to the other information structures the earth has produced. These information structures are stored in texts produced as conversational, written, performed or electronic forms.

Analysing these texts, then, gives us a way of identifying the new possibilities that are emerging from the earth’s new structuring system.

Remember last week when I said that my way of doing CDA is to consider the text as a mid-point, rather than an endpoint? What I meant is that we have the opportunity to explore incipient social structures in their processes of becoming.

And remember when I said CDA can be depressing? Well, my way of doing CDA can be depressing too, especially when you recognise that some of the social structures that are emerging have the power to destroy the earth’s own ecosystems and bring about violence to its inhabitants. But it’s not only a depressing story. Some of the new structures – especially the fleeting ones – offer real promise for more welcoming, integrated new ideas.

Download 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 challenging social injustices.

To give you an idea of how CDA usually works, I analyse a recent news item from Fox News. (Click on the headline below for the full article.)

Women train to become prospective firefighters

Doing CDA requires being explicit about what critical position you’re coming from when you interpret the text. The position I bring to my analysis of this piece is a feminist one. I put forward my view that the article (a) downplays the structural inequities in an institution in which there is a phenomenal gender gap and (b) draws implicitly upon the assumption that such inequities are ‘natural’, or to be expected.

The grammatical analysis of conversational texts that you’ve heard me do in these podcasts, though, is different from ‘traditional’ CDA in an important way. In CDA, the text is seen as an end product, and CDA explores the processes by which the text came into being. CDA is rooted in Marxist thought, and an analogy is helpful here. A Marxist perspective on a garment in a department store might raise questions like, what were the conditions under which this piece of clothing was manufactured, and how does it come to be priced so low? What workers were involved in producing this item? Were they treated fairly? How were the paid for their labour? A t-shirt is seen as the end of a long line of manufacturing process, and exploring those processes is likely to reveal systemic social injustices.

Similarly, Critical Discourse Analysts view a text as a product of a set of language processes that involve construing reality in a particular way and drawing upon assumptions that mask damaging ideologies about the social world.

It can get a little depressing.

How is my own work different?

I too, start from the position that social injustices structure the social world, and I too, want to do something about it. But rather than assuming that the text is the ‘end product’ and going backwards to look at the processes of its construction, I assume that the text is a ‘midpoint’. The work I do is looks forward, not back. My idea is that the analysis of the grammar of a text can generate new possibilities for more welcoming, inclusive social structures. If CDA reveals the sinister secrets hidden in the production of a text, my work reveals the germs of new, transformative ideas that I believe are also hidden there.

This perspective requires a radical new look at language and society. Join me in an upcoming podcast for more!

Download 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 the objects in a darkened room. In today’s episode I play with the idea that it is language, or grammar, that serves as the ‘stick’ by which social bodies move through and perceive the social world.

The episode moves from green coffee cups (not coffee green cups) to those blue suitcases, to the mainstream three pretty girls in a young woman’s account of being bullied at school. It’s the personal account that’s most important. My favourite way to explore the structure of the social body/world is to go megalocal: to examine personal, intimate accounts of people’s felt sense of belonging or not belonging.

Here’s a transcript of Maryam’s account:

Download 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 they become the space they inhabit’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 53). Ahmed’s critique encourages us to reorient our phenomenologies, to understand the spaces in terms not only of what is oriented to, but also in terms of what is backgrounded, what is beyond reach for certain bodies.

My own perspective on phenomenology is this: yes, consciousness is always embodied, and bodies are always submerged. But let us not assume that consciousness is embodied in human bodies and that these bodies are submerged in the material world. My take on human bodies and the material world is that these are always just beyond our reach – that consciousness rarely attaches itself to the human body, and that the human body and the material world are both inevitably other.

My idea is that consciousness instead attaches itself to a social body. Whether we navigate a room blindfolded with a cardboard tube to guide us or manipulate the perceptual field with our gaze, it is almost always a social world we are submerged in, and it is almost always a social body that our consciousness affixes itself to.

Download 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:

Tara Mohr, whose work on callings, and whose dedication to promoting women’s Playing Big made me recognise this way of honing my voice, exploring ideas on the public stage and ‘shipping’ my ideas (to use Seth Godin’s term).

Elizabeth Gilbert, whose ideas about creativity I’ve found to be remarkably helpful in my academic career. In Big Magic, her book on creativity, she writes ‘I’ve always found like this is so cruel to your work – to demand a regular paycheck from it, as it creativity were a government job, or a trust fund’. This podcast has been my attempt to serve creativity rather than asking it to serve me.

Caroline Casey of KPFA’s Visionary Activist Show, whose wisdom and enthusiasm are encapsulated in one oft-repeated quote: ‘Imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow.’ So many of my ideas are rooted in this principle – and I’m very grateful to Caroline Casey for giving such exuberant voice to her own ideas.

And speaking of religiously producing podcasts, I’m grateful to Rob Bell for his RobCast, and for his appreciation for the art form of the sermon. I reveal in this episode how my own love of the sermon nearly led me down the route of religious vocation.

Special thanks as well to Professor Sara Mills, Dr Liz Morrish, Dr Erika Darics and of course, my magnificent brother from the new world, Michael Clark – your retweets and comments are much appreciated!

Download 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, intent upon sending ‘you’ a message, were the human body?

In this episode I invite listeners to imagine that between the social body and the human body is an insurmountable distance.

To explore this idea requires us to delve into philosophical inquiry about consciousness and human bodies. For that, I rely upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there’s no distance between the body and consciousness.

I’m proposing not only is there a distance, but that distance is insurmountable. And I wonder aloud: what if the human body has some meaning, or some ‘message’ beyond being an instrument of consciousness or perception? What if we understood the human body to be the ‘other’ that Levinas tells us we have a responsibility to?

Download 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 body and social body. Thinking in terms of these two elements as two types of body makes it possible to explore how they interact with each other. It also enables us to focus in on to what extent this relationship shows what Emmanuel Levinas calls a responsibility to the other. To what extent do the human body and social body interact responsibly (in Levinas’s terms)? To what extent do they acknowledge each other’s otherness? To what extent are they witnesses to the ungraspable ‘beyond’ that each other represents?

For Levinas, this witnessing of the alterity of the other comes about through an encounter with the face. And I’ve proposed that the ‘face’ of a social body is the grammatical construction of descriptions of the social world.

But the image of the face may be a bit misleading. Talking to someone face to face is often understood as a way of understanding the ‘true meaning’ behind what they’re saying. It’s certainly not used (in everyday parlance, anyway) to mean something like ‘apprehending that which goes beyond meaning’ or ‘witnessing that which can never be understood’.

What we need, I’ve decided, is a fable – one that will give us a felt understanding of otherness. I draw upon Malcolm Pasley’s (1992) translation of Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ in The Transformation and Other Stories. At first glance, it seems to be a story of a message that never arrives. Instead, it’s a story of a message that could never arrive. If circumstances were different, it might be able to. Did you notice that we’ve moved into the realm of the irrealis? It’s in the irrealis that we begin to understand the other – a world that moves just beyond our view whenever we look at it. And yet somehow the irrealis encourages us to keep looking.

Tune in again next week for more on Kafka’s ‘Emperor’!

Download 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 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 I have a question. In regards to your concept that we try to figure out the problems by going beyond our own perceptions and experiences to solve social ills which takes a lot of work and intelligence. (If I interpreted that correctly). Have you thought about the idea that by the time we figure out a solution there is a whole new problem? Or that when we try to fix things they actually become worse. I think of the Arab Spring as an example. Any thoughts?

Hope you are well.

Love,

Mike

This episode is dedicated to my brother and to problem solvers everywhere.

Download 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 to be able to look at the face of that social body and see it as something completely other.

I also said this:

If I can interact with middle school face-to-face, then I have the possibility for opening into a world that I don’t know about yet.

But how do you look at the face of the social body? How do you find its eyes, ears, nose and mouth? I propose in this episode that grammatical analysis gives us access to the otherness of the social body. In other words, grammatical structure is the face of the social body.

For an example, consider what Ira Glass says in one segment of the middle school episode of This American Life. He’s talking about a seventh-grader’s experiences in the classroom. I’ve divided his comments into tone units, and underlined the noun phrases that serve as Themes (in some cases) and Subjects of clauses (in others):

a big problem for him

one reason that he was ostracized

he didn’t wash

kids would whisper about it

and when he would get mad

and then arguments would escalate

that is where it would go.

‘You’re dirty.’

‘You smell.’

The kids would say it right to his face.

Where are the grammatical selves in this text? Note that there are two selves here: the unique, individualised, embodied, singular ‘he’ and the collective, plural, non-embodied ‘kids’. ‘He’ is the one with the ‘big problem’ – and what is his ‘big problem’? His body. It’s dirty, it smells, he doesn’t wash it. If this non-individualised collective, the ‘kids’, is the social body here, the social body is doing something we see it do often: it’s bullying the individual human body.

What’s the possibility for transformation here? Well, seeing the social body configured in this way – that is, divided into the individual embodied self and the collective group self – opens the way for us to imagine a different configuration. What about one in which the collective were instead comprised of multiple unique, individual, embodied selves? And what if these human bodies were not seen as ‘problems’, but instead as singular, unique sites of new possibilities?

Download 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 don’t have to rely upon French social theory to find prison imagery applied to the social world.

What Annie doesn’t do is compare middle school to a body. Human bodies are mentioned several times in the show – Alex Blumberg, for instance, describes middle schoolers as having to learn ‘how their bodies are now working’, and other guests describe ‘raging hormones’. But middle school as a social body doesn’t enter into the repertoire of metaphors. Middle school is understood as a prison or a ‘social order’, but not as a body.

But you may remember that I’ve argued that the social body isn’t merely a metaphor, it’s a real thing. What is reality? we ask each other, trying to remember what we learned in undergraduate philosophy classes. After exploring where there’s any ontological basis for the social body, I conclude that we need less ontology and more alterity (otherness) – and we look to Emmanuel Levinas  for guidance. If ontological questions are a matter of philosophical debate, alterity – a relationship with the other – is a matter of ethical responsibility. For Levinas, the image of the encounter with the other is the face: when we come into relationship with the face of the other, we have the opportunity to encounter worlds beyond those that we currently have the power  to perceive, know or understand.

The reason why I say middle school and other social structures are social bodies is because bodies have faces. Coming face-to-face with the social body of middle school – or any other social structure – makes it possible to for us to enter into new worlds, beyond our current understandings, and to be surprised, challenged and delighted by what we may see there.

Download 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 you ever read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy? The characters in Pullman’s worlds each have a ‘daimon’ – an animal form that represents the character’s ‘self’. As fantastical as that idea seems, it reflects back a commonly held understanding of the self: that an integral, intimate part of each human body is a self, which cannot be separated from the body without dire consequences.

The idea I put forward today is that the self attaches/merges with/inhabits/identifies with bodies – but not necessarily with the human body, and certainly not in a sustained, stable way. Instead, the self attaches more frequently to the social body. I explain that looking at conversational data gives me access to the many incipient forms of the social body, and it allows me to see how the grammatically constructed self identifies with it.

Why this particular perspective on selves and bodies? I propose that if we start to see the self as no longer necessarily attached to the human body, we can start to see the human body as something that is in relationship with the human body. We can also recognise those moments – and they’re frequent – in which the human body is co-opted for the social body’s purposes. Situations in which the human body is simply seen as an instrument to carry out the social body’s demands. I compare these types of situations with my experiences of babysitting the grandchildren of a woman who couldn’t see me beyond my role as her hired help.

Is the social body treating the human body as ‘hired help’? What would it see if it were to enter into a more fulfilling relationship with the human body?

Oh, and I look at this transcript again (first seen in Episode 44):

Download 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 means for something to be ‘real’, but for my purposes ‘real’ is useful. If I decide the social body is something that’s real, that I don’t know much about yet, then I get to do research about it with a spirit of curiosity and discovery. Curiosity and discovery are more fun for me than argumentation and debate – though there’s plenty of room for argumentation and debate as well (preferably under the influence of our favourite substances).

• The social body has not yet formed.

I’m saying here that no one person will be able to describe the social body, because it is still in an incipient state. It’s emerging, it’s full of possibilities, and none of them have fully concretised yet. So the best we can do is to look at the many prototypes of the social body that are in the process of emerging. For me, that means I’m looking through a microscope at seemingly insignificant bits of language use, like snippets of conversation. This conversation between Maryam, Beth, Andrew and me is one example.

My claim is that the grammatical constructions in this conversation reveal an emergent social body. The body has unique, differentiated constituents – individuals – who are in relation to each other and in relation to the social body. In addition, we can see the social body being wounded here, and we can track how it organises its constituents in order to bring about healing.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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 or the other of these bodies. More often than not, in my experience analysing conversational data, it attaches to the social body, and the human body ends up oppressed.

Hold on! I can hear you saying. Can we really assume those terms have the same conceptual status? I mean, the human body is a real thing. The social body’s just a metaphor.

To which I reply, fair enough. Let’s play with the idea that they’re both metaphors.

To which you might say, how can the human body be a metaphor?

Good question. I take you back to a time in my personal memory when I didn’t have access to the concept ‘body’. And then to a time when I was imagining bodies lying over the ocean. When the idea of the body for me was similar to Yeats’s idea of ‘an aged man … A tattered coat upon a stick’.

But it might be even more fun to play with the idea that both the human body and the social body are real.

But Jodie, how can the social body be anything but a metaphor? How can the social body be real? I can’t touch it, like I can the human body.

To which I reply, let’s stop associating ‘real’ things with things you can touch. Let’s think in terms of images and prototypes. Let’s think about Beethoven composing when he can’t hear the music he’s writing, and three-year-old Aaron picturing a tree. These aren’t metaphors: they’re images of things that haven’t yet emerged into the world.

Let’s think of the social body as an image of society that hasn’t yet emerged into the world. This way of thinking makes it possible to identify many social bodies, many of them still at the prototype stage – some of them not oppressive. Some of them not bullies. Some of them in a mutually beneficial relationship with the human body.

Download 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 who’s the bully; there’s no child named ‘Charles’ in the class.

Another way of putting it is to say that Laurie has attached his ‘self’ to a bullying character called ‘Charles’.

Hold that thought.

Now back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. What this book does for me is make it possible to imagine a different dichotomy to one we’ve been exploring up to this point. Before we spoke of the individual and society. Now we get to think in terms of the social body and the human body and how they relate to each other. For Foucault the social body is the bully, the human body the victim.

In this episode I invite listeners to attach a self to one or the other of these types of bodies. Would you attach the self to the human body, or the social body?

My research involves poring over everyday conversational data, locating the way the self shows up in all its many grammatical forms. Focusing on grammatical construals of the self makes it easier for me to avoid the assumption that the self necessarily coincides with the human body.

In fact, in many instances, the self that shows up through grammatical analysis coincides with the social body. An oppressive social body, at that. One that bullies the human body. Remember ‘you just don’t do that at training’? The self we’ve been trying to protect from the kindergarten bully turns out to be the bully.

So what do we do? Try to get the self to stop bullying the human body? Tell it to detach itself from the social body? I propose instead that we research the possibilities that show up in everyday texts. Lots of social bodies show up when I do grammatical analysis of everyday conversations –  a whole range of possibilities, and not all of them are oppressive. Let’s start putting our attention to these non-oppressive social bodies.  Another possibility: let’s look at some of those instances in which the self attaches to the human body. My research shows that in these instances it’s less of an identification (I am my body) and more a co-creation, an integration that ends up being transformative.

We’ll explore all of this and more in upcoming episodes.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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 image we’re working with is of a social body that bullies human bodies in order to keep threats at bay. In a feudal system, a big threat is the loss of authority. In a capitalist system, the biggest threat is the loss of money and/or exchangeable goods.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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. It’s not just that Foucault uses what has become my favourite metaphor – the image of social structure as a body – but also that he makes it possible to conceive of the social body as in relationship with human bodies. This image has been a springboard for my own ideas – a jumping off place where I can start imagining new social structures – more open, inviting, welcoming ones.

That said, there’s an important difference between Foucault’s views and mine. Foucault’s image of the social body shows it as antagonistic toward the human body. The social body is always the bully, scaring the lights out of the human body in the same way that Tiffany Wood terrified me when I was five. In pre-Revolutionary France, for instance, the social body took the form of the reigning monarch, and it displayed its power over human bodies through ritual torture and execution.

Luckily, Tiffany never went to those kinds of extremes.

It’s hard to disagree with the idea that the social body bullies the human body. If you’ve ever felt guilty about something you should be doing, you have a good idea of one way that type of bullying operates – it’s an example of what Foucault calls ‘disciplinary techniques’ of power.

However, I have a new way of thinking about the relationship between the social body and the human body. I propose that the human body has the power to transform the social body. Yes, the social body might understand the human body as a threat. But the human body only need be a threat if the social body is averse to transformation. My idea it that if the social body were ready to change, the human body has the power to transform it.

Anybody wanna play with that idea for a while?

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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 (by setting up a binary opposition between in the game and out of the game) and inclusion/exclusion (by determining which constituents are in and which are out).

Now let’s take this personification and turn it into metaphor. First let’s use the metaphor I’ve been drawing upon in several past episodes: social structure as computer programme. The computer programme that is my nephew is setting up the IF-THEN statements that serve as parameters for inclusion: to be in the game, a constituent must (a) play by certain rules and (b) achieve certain demonstrable outcomes. Failure to fit within these criteria results in expulsion from the game. Nothing personal. (Or, as my nephew would say, ‘No offense’.)

But I promised that for this week’s podcast I’d try out a new metaphor. So this time let’s not see Lane, the Social Structure, as a computer, but as a squirming, four-year-old body. Here are some of the ways bodies aren’t like computer programmes:

• They’re not rational
• They have energy
• They have power
• They come into contact with other bodies
• They have emotions
• They have desires
• They’re unpredictable.

I could go on, but Social Structure – this time personified as my latte-drinking buddy, no longer as my nephew, tells me it’s not particularly comfortable with the new metaphor. It doesn’t want to be a smelly, farting, yawning  body. It wants to keep on being those cool characters from The Matrix.

But seeing social structure as a body has its benefits, as I try to explain through the grammatical analysis of an another account of exclusion, shown in the transcript below. Here Chrissy’s explaining the difference between inexperienced and experienced field hockey players:

Close attention to how the selves are construed in this transcript – particularly the two different roles played by the generic second-person (you) – shows social structure becoming embodied. In fact, it seems to take on a body that is remarkably similar in shape to Foucault’s Panopticon.

My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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, one that expects uniqueness, that allows itself to be transformed by each expression of a unique self.

Such a vision makes me dubious about all the imagery that’s been showing up in these podcasts. Comparing social structure to computer codes and choose-your-own-adventure novels makes it seem like the selves society constructs are all decided in advance, which furthers the idea of social structure as a closed system.

I also start to become a bit suspicious of the personified Society I keep talking to. Despite its claims to the contrary, I’m certain Society is perfectly capable of making space for unique selves. If I’m going to keep this dialogue going, I’m going to have to be more cunning in my cross-examination. I draw inspiration from – where else? – Reese Witherspoon’s performance  in the court scene of Legally Blonde. Like Witherspoon’s character, Elle, I’m going to have to catch Society in the act of making space for a unique self, even when making space takes the form of an attempt at exclusion.

I get my chance through an analysis of a conversation between three first-year university students, teammates on a field hockey team. Read the transcript and see if you notice anything about the selves that show up in the grammar of Sammy’s story:

Now have a look at the clauses of the narrative that are only Sammy’s:

1. today, when we came out of the athletics centre
2. it was eight-thirty in the morning
3. and she threw sand in my face
4. yeah and so she skimmed sand
5. chucking it at you
6. and it was like, ‘Nemo, no’
7. I had sand in my teeth
8. and it was disgusting
9. I had a good breakfast
10. and I had sand in my teeth
11. and she just ran off laughing
12. and I’m like- ‘oh, I’ve got sand on me’

Did you notice the shifts in Sammy’s story between the impersonal selves (the generic second person in clause 5, the impersonal dummy subject in clause 6), and the individual selves (such as the first-person singular and the third-person female singular in clauses 3 and 10)? What I find so interesting here is that the unique, individual selves show up – because they have to – whenever the body comes into the picture. It’s not possible, in other words, to throw sand into an impersonal, non-individualised face. It’s also pretty hard to imagine impersonal, non-individualised sandy teeth.

When unique selves show up, they’re represented as embodied.

It’s no good, then, thinking of social structure in terms of something disembodied, like computer code. We need a new metaphor for social structure. Maybe by next podcast we’ll have one.

My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download 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.)

Here’s the abstract of the talk:

Many strands of research in linguistics – including critical discursive and feminist approaches – orient toward social critique and social change. Most of these approaches adopt the perspective offered by practice theory, whereby individuals are understood as negotiating social structures through their engagement in a range of various practices. A major weakness of practice theory, however, especially as it has been applied in sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), is that it takes for granted the integrity of the self, the presence of the body, and the coincidence of self and body. Such a premise forecloses the possibility of critically investigating those social structures that disallow subjectivity and that erase the body.

In this talk I illustrate a method of CDA designed to reveal the social structures that emerge in everyday conversation. It looks specifically at structures of heteronormativity in accounts by two participants – Mary and Beth – who recount two very different types of troubling experience in adolescence. Mary’s account reveals a social structure in which entering heteronormativity requires the erasure of both self and body. In Beth’s account, the body serves as mediator of a heteronormative structure: it serves as a protective boundary to maintain the integrity of the self. I aim to show that the methods of CDA can be used to identify different configurations of social structures in everyday conversation, and more importantly, to imagine new, less oppressive structures. Specifically, it makes possible an understanding of self and body as integral – and potentially transformative – components of social structure.

Download 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 of whether your vocal cords vibrate when you pronounce the first consonant in each word. If you choose voiced (+voice), you get ‘bat’; voiceless (-voice) gives you ‘pat’. These tiny distinctions between phonemes make it possible for the phonemes to recombine in different ways to produce lots of different words.

How about the choices that can be made at higher levels of grammatical structure? What about the difference between active and passive voice in a clause? Think about Nicole’s story:

I had a car. It got wrecked. My dad wouldn’t get me another one.

Why wasn’t Nicole’s story something like this?

My dad gave me a car. I wrecked it. So he wouldn’t get me another one.

I argue that there’s more going on here than just two different construals of the same event. Consider this: using a voiceless bilabial stop (/p/), rather than a voiced bilabial stop (/b/) at the beginning of a word can produce a different word (‘pat’ rather than ‘bat’). Similarly, I’d say, the use of  the passive voice in Nicole’s story produces a different world. It produces, in other words, a slight but significant difference in how the social world is configured. The participants in the two stories appear in different positions, they relate to each other differently, their social responsibilities are different.

The idea that different grammatical choices can produce different worlds makes it possible to explore the many different configurations of social structure that might be possible. That’s an adventure worth choosing! Next week we’ll explore more of these differently structured worlds.

Download 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 of those computer hackers from The Matrix. (‘I don’t even see the code.’) The characters and scenes in The Matrix were formed out of bits of computer code – can we also imagine the characters and scenes of the social world to be made out of bits of grammar? We’d have to imagine grammar as a system, the way Halliday does, and at each level of complexity, a choice is made. Yes or no. One or zero. There are 10 types of people in the world, and at Girl Scout Camp, I became one of the ones who knows binary.

Out of all these choices, out of all these possible systemic systemic construals, one gets chosen at each point. Selves get made from sets of choices. Society personifies itself as a character in a context.

And then it identifies with that character.

And it can’t think outside itself itself.

Until something disrupts it. And it has to face itself – as an other – and new possibilities of social structure emerge.

Download 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 things I commented on in the book was that the team members I spoke to depicted their lesbian acquaintances as expressing sexual desire. Their straight teammates were never described in terms of their desires. Sexual desire became a dividing practice that separated out gay and straight.

OK, said my friend. I’ve got lots of lesbian friends. I’ll let them know to be careful about expressing lesbian desire.

Why would you do that?

I want to make sure they aren’t discriminated against even more than they already are. You’re telling me that talking about desire makes them vulnerable to exclusion. So I’ll make sure they know about that.

No, no, no! I said. I didn’t do this research to force individuals to change.  It’s the social structures that need to change.

But Jodie, said my friend, I can’t do anything about social structures. But I can talk to my friends – as individuals – and suggest things that will make their lives better.

Well, maybe my friend can’t do anything to change social structure. But I certainly can. I’ve spent several podcasts personifying Society, and now I have Society on speed dial. One quick phone call later, Society and I are having a conversation over lattes.

ME: Society, why don’t you allow for the possibility for uniqueness and individuality?

SOCIETY: Actually, I’m perfectly capable of doing individuality. But there’s a procedure for it. You can just go straight in when it comes to individuality.

ME: There’s a procedure?

SOCIETY: Yes. Look at this transcript of a conversation in which Ally, Sammy and Chrissy are talking about the trials for their hockey team:

SOCIETY: There’s all those people trying to get into the hockey team. You can’t instantly construe them all as individuals. It’s too complex. So you have to sort and filter. You separate out ‘the better players’ from those that aren’t very good ‘half of them…’ And then you can have your individuals. ‘I looked at you and thought…’

ME: Yeah, but the thought one individual is having about another here is that she’s a good hockey player. She’s not a unique individual there; she’s merely a token of a type of person, a ‘good hockey player’.

SOCIETY: Look, that’s the way I operate. I create categories. Individuality is then about identifying with one of the categories. Once I’ve identified with a category, I can’t think outside it. I can’t think the unthinkable.

ME: Levinas says ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks is a desire.’

SOCIETY: Stop throwing Levinas at me.

ME: Tell me a story about desire.

SOCIETY: OK. Here goes, if you’re so insistent. Here’s a story about one of the people who didn’t get into the hockey team, Jen. She’s construed by other members of the hockey team as expressing desire.

ME: Society, isn’t it interesting that the desiring character is the one who doesn’t fit in to the desirable category? If I’m going to convince you to make possible the idea of uniqueness and individuality, I’m going to have to look at the characters you imagine but then reject.

SOCIETY: I hate it when you start analysing those characters and categories I reject.

ME: Sorry about that. Next week the lattes are on me.

Download 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 given social structure make it for an individual to exist as a unique person?

The conversation is here:

And I also discuss it in my forthcoming book – anyone interested in pre-ordering?

Download 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 the ‘individual’ with anyone who’s ever told a story about entering into one. I use these stories to suggest a third way of understanding the individual in relation to society. Let’s personify both entities to produce characters in a drama, I say. And let’s see these characters as co-constituting, co-creating reality. Better yet, let’s envisage this relationship through the metaphor of a bar magnet surrounding by iron filings. The individual ‘magnetises’ the components of social structure, such that they form a pattern around the individual. How about that for a promising metaphor?

Download 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 we can study social structure while at the same time allowing for the idea that structures are variable, fluid and multitudinous. What’s more, with each new structure emerges a new possibilities for imagining structures – indeed, new ways of thinking about social structure.

I often claim I’m using grammar to identify possibilities for social structure. It would be more accurate to say that I’m using the principles of grammar (specifically, M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar) to identify the structural properties of texts. Halliday defines ‘text’ as ‘any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the language’ (Halliday 2014, p. 3) Studying texts allows me to stop time, and to explore the structural properties of conversations about or descriptions of the social world.

The conversational text I discuss in this episode is one in which Ally, a first-year university student, is talking about her course, which she’s not enjoying very much:

I explore what’s called the ‘thematic structure’ of the text. That means looking at each of the clauses, and identifying the ‘Themes’. A Theme is a point of departure – the first element of the clause, which sets the stage (as it were) for the message. The Theme of each clause is indicated in bold, below:

• the thing is
• you arrive at your lecture
• you sit down
• the lecturer goes on
• and then you leave
• there’s not really much change to like get to know people

The thematic organisation of this text presents a particular shape of a particular social world, one comprised of two entities: a unnamed, generic, unindividuated self (you) and a nameless lecturer. Reminds me of the scenario I painted last week of what it felt like to give lectures at the beginning of my teaching career! Next week I’d like to share some other structured images of classroom settings that emerge from other conversations with students. Is it really the case that each new structure presents new possibilities for transformation? Let’s see if I can convince you of that in Episode 29.

Download 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 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 seen as a David figure in relation to the Goliath of society. What if instead we saw society as itself a character in the drama, a character who wants to be transformed? I put forward a new myth of the relationship between the individual and society, where society wants to transform itself, and it sees possibilities for doing so by becoming embodied.

Download Episode 26: 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 time his book, Language and Symbolic Power. Bourdieu’s image of social structure is one in which individual agents negotiate their worlds by drawing upon different types of capital – economic, cultural, social and symbolic. The variety of any language that comes to be understood as the ‘Standard’ form is a form of symbolic capital. With his unkind comments, the man in the illustration is engaging in a form of ‘symbolic violence’ – attacking another’s use of a non-Standard variety of English by mocking it and deeming it worthless.

When discussing the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ with university students who hope to one day be teachers, I was told that kids have to learn to speak properly or they won’t get anywhere in life. In other words, they have to learn to value what the educational institution values or they’ll be in trouble later in life. But hold on, I responded, doesn’t that mean these kids have to submit to symbolic violence? Doesn’t it mean they have to devalue their own sense of self? Is it worth it?

As I’ve mentioned before, there are at least two ways of looking at grammar. Prescriptive approaches view grammar as something that is either right or wrong – it’s something to be policed by schoolteachers or by social media memes. Descriptive grammars explore the patterns and structures of any variety of language without making claims about which varieties are better or worse.

I have a perspective on grammar that is different from these two approaches. For me, grammar is the medium by which social structure becomes aware of itself.

When people use language, they produce spoken or written texts, and grammatical analysis reveals how social worlds and selves are constructed. Fascinating things happen when I explore the various selves that are grammatically constructed in texts – and often these fascinating things coincide with embodiment. The comments on the grammar meme revealed a good deal of embodiment in response to ‘I seen’: people cringed, they shuddered, their ears hurt, their ears folded up. These various forms of embodied disgusts remind me of a conversation I once had with an American student, Jeremy, who was learning French in Strasbourg:

(from Clark 2002)

In Jeremy’s account of his classmate’s poor French several different selves are produced: the first person singular (it just makes me, like my skin crawl), the generic third-person plural (they, like, make up a word) and the non-personal third-person singular (It’s like, what?). The they is the generic group of people speaking French badly. The it is the observing, objective, disembodied authority figure who has the power to evaluate others as incompetent. In Jeremy’s account, the first-person (me) shows up only briefly, as a singular embodied self having a negative experience in response to the negatively evaluated performance of others.

The idea that it is the embodied self who takes the hit in authoritative, draconian social structures shows up in one of the comments to the ‘I seen’ grammar meme.

Every time I hear it I get shivers and a headache. I don’t correct because I don’t want anyone to feel bad.

This commenter shows an awareness that to correct someone’s grammar is to engage in symbolic violence. The self constructed here is one that doesn’t want to impose that kind of violence. But violence happens, nevertheless: the text produces an embodied self that suffers – from shivers and a headache –  in the face of an authoritative social structure.

If grammar is the medium by which social structure becomes aware of itself, then the social structure here is committing acts of symbolic violence on… itself.

Is that the kind of social structure we want to imagine as we move into 2016? Can we imagine other types of social structure in which such symbolic violence isn’t required?

Download 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 individual and require people to support the collective. One of Mauss’s examples in his essay, The Gift, is of the kula of the peoples of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. The kula is an elaborate ritualised exchange of two types of object: mwali (carved bracelets) and soulava (mother-of-pearl necklaces). The kula produces a set of obligations for the societies in the Trobriand archipelago: the obligation to give these gifts, the obligation to receive them, and the obligation to pass them on to a third party. These are not mechanistic exchanges: the objects themselves become imbued with magical significance, attributes, names, ‘personalities’. Maybe the obligation a father feels when his little girls ask a magical person – Santa – for a magical, but impossible-to-get toy unicorn also counts as a social fact?

For Mauss and Durkheim, the point was to develop a science of the social world which would make it possible to investigate, objectively, those forces that hold societies, collectives and groups together.

I propose a new way of doing social science. Rather than looking at the social facts as they are, I propose that we look to the social world for evidence in everyday conversations, of people’s desires for different types of social world. A social science that looks to ‘real-world’ evidence for ideas about alternative social structures that don’t yet exist? That, to me, would be a gift.

Download 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 catch any of her friends doing it. These are her friends down south. If a girls was caught drinking a pint of lager, all the boys would just be like ‘What are you doing?’ She’s describing a social structure in which it is not appropriate for women to drink lager. The ‘self’ she constructs in this part of the conversation is the generic second-person – you – an observing, judging authority figure whose business it is to catch people out doing things they shouldn’t be.

Later, though, Chrissy questions her. Chrissy’s use of the second-person you is not generic, but specific – it’s directed at Ally herself. Would you drink it out of a bottle? When Ally is required to construct a self that corresponds to the first-person I or me, she comes up with a different reason for not drinking lager:

I just don’t enjoy the taste.

French theorist Pierre Bourdieu wrote a whole book on taste. Taste, he says, gives us insight into social structure:

this sense of the social structure […], put so well by the word taste – simultaneously ‘the faculty of perceiving flavours’ and ‘the capacity to discern aesthetic values’ – is social necessity made second nature, turned into muscular patterns and bodily automations. (1984, p. 474)

Social structure, Bourdieu explains, imprints itself on human beings through bodily dispositions – ways of carrying yourself, of speaking, moving, standing, dressing – and the things you find tasteful and distasteful. Taste may seem like a bodily response – unique to each individual’s preference, but really, he says, it’s social structure at its least conscious. The things you prefer, the things you enjoy, the things you desire – these are all likely to be social imprints, rather than expressions of some unique aspect of your individual body.

I too am fascinated by the relationship between social structure and the human body, but I have a different way of looking at it. My view of social structure is not one in which human beings negotiate their social worlds, with social structure imprinting itself on their bodies. Instead, I explore the many social structures that emerge from people’s everyday conversations, and the many versions of the self that emerge from these structures. When you listen carefully to enough conversations, you realise there are many, many social structures, and many, many selves.

And sometimes, in the course of the conversation, a self will become embodied. Like when Ally’s generic you (you’d never catch anyone) becomes a specific I (I don’t even drink like lager) – and then becomes an embodied I (I just don’t enjoy the taste). When the self becomes embodied in a conversation, possibilities for transformation often emerge. In Ally’s case, the transformation is this: the social structure makes its ideology explicit:

I’ve always thought of it as a guys’ drink.

The social structure speaks at this point, and it reveals to us not only its norms (lager is a guys’ drink), but also its instabilities – the relationship of the first-person to the idea is a mental process (thought), hedged by the adverb always. Once the social structure speaks, and makes its ideology explicit, it becomes clear that there’s room for the ideology to change.

And all that because the self became embodied in the course of a conversation.

Download 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 about is maintaining the consistency of the self. Why is that so impossible? Because, I argue, the concept of the self can only exist within a particular social structure. When the self gets offended, when its face is threatened, when it’s trying to keep up appearances or ‘fit in’, it’s actually carrying the burden of an entire social structure with it. Maintaining the stability of the social structure is an impossible task for one small self.

To illustrate this idea, I draw upon the concept of systems that are self-referential (an idea I learned about from Amit Goswami). Here’s an example of a self-referential component of a linguistic system:

This sentence has five words.

The sentence is referring to itself. It could, in principle, refer to itself using the first-person pronoun:

I have five words.

Or, more accurately,

I have four words.

But in order to understand these last two sentences as self-referential, we’d have to understand the ‘I’ as referring to a component of the system – the sentence itself.

Similarly, we might understand the ‘I’ in everyday usage as a system referring to itself: a component of a social structure referring to itself. The problem with that idea is that it can make you feel like you have no power to change anything – no power to change an oppressive social structure.

My work is about exploring the paradoxes, disruptions and contradictions in social structure as it shows up in everyday conversations. My view is that it’s observing these contradictions and disruptions that makes it possible to imagine new, less oppressive structures.

There’s a fascinating contradiction in Ally’s conversation about women drinking pints of lager – the conversation I talked about in Episode 20. I don’t quite get enough time in this episode to discuss the contradiction – look forward to that for next week! But I do discuss the way social structure unfolds here, and the various types of self that emerge.

Download 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, but which one? Me, I, my, mine, myself? It all depends on its position in the sentence. Also, using a pronoun is always unstable, because pronouns are deictic – that is, they change according to their context of use. The pronoun ‘I’ can mean Jodie Clark, Madonna, Henry IV or Kermit the Frog, depending on who’s speaking.

You might use your name to refer to yourself, but names aren’t that stable either. Besides, try referring to yourself using your own name in a business meeting.

Can Jodie ask for some clarification here? Jodie disagrees with some aspects of the proposal you’ve put forward.

Why is this so weird? It’s because in the language system, the ‘self’ has its meaning only in relation to other selves – the self is not some stable entity with a fixed term of reference.

If the meaning of the self in the language structure is relative, what about the meaning of the self in the social structure? To explore this question, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s work, which, he says, is oriented toward creating

a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects (Foucault 2000, p. 326)

‘Subject’ is a beautifully ambiguous word: it can mean the self, the subject of a sentence, or someone who is subject to another power, such as a monarch. Foucault was particularly interested in how it was possible for people to be subjected to power structures even in democratic societies.

One way to do it, he argues, is to make people constantly obsessed with their selves, to make them feel the need to be constantly vigilant about their behaviour and how well they fit in to society. In his History of Sexuality, volume 1 he discusses how well the ‘confession’ works to make people self-monitor. The confession shows up, he argues, in many different contexts – it’s not just for church anymore.

Once you confess to those behaviours, desires, thoughts and ways of being that are wrong, your self is safe and stable – it is welcomed back into the social structure that divides the world up into right and wrong desires, thoughts and ways of being. My own work, on the other hand, explores unsafe selves. I have the idea that it is those ‘selves’ that don’t fit in that carry with them the potential to transform social structures.

Download 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 as resulting from a ‘face-threatening act’ that wasn’t appropriately attenuated. The notion of ‘face’ has been criticised for depending unquestioningly upon a ‘Western’ notion of the individual: each individual person has a ‘face’ that can be threatened. Everyday interaction requires that people commit face-threatening acts; the trick is to attenuate them using politeness strategies. (Though no one seems to have told Aunt Cathy that.)

My own work on face appears in a book edited by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group. It explores the idea of face not as ‘belonging’ to an individual, but instead as a ‘boundary formed around different levels of social structure, with the individual as one (and only one) of these structures’ (Clark 2011, p 111). It would be more in line with my current thinking to say face is the manifestation of social structure itself. According to this line of thought, the conflict between Aunt Cathy and her nice is not so much two individual people with two different people expressing their ‘opinions’. It’s more that Aunt Cathy and her niece each locate their existence within a particular social structure. The conflict is not between two individuals, but two different social worlds.

I illustrate this notion by exploring a bit of conversation in which Ally, an 18-year-old uni student from the South of England, describes feeling offended when she discovers that the women in her hall of residence enjoy drinking beer by the pint.

Emmanual Levinas has a different idea about face. His idea is that if I encounter another person, and I do not merely reduce that person to my own, totalising version of the social world, then I am ‘faced’ with some other form of being that I can not understand. Levinas recommends embracing that not-understanding as a way of accessing the infinite – that is, the world beyond my finite understanding.

If we were to apply Levinas’s ideas about face to my idea that face is the manifestation of social structure, than when two social structures meet each other – face-to-face – the potential arises for social transformation. The encounter gives us access to a social world that has not yet been imagined.

And if we’re not quite ready for that as-yet-unimagined social structure, well, we can always find solace in Adele. Thanks, Adele!

Download 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 evidence comes in – that is, too much to be explained away – a crisis ensues and a new paradigm emerges.

‘Paradigm’ is a word that’s used in linguistics as well. It’s used in relation to the term ‘syntagm’. Syntagms are linear sequences of language – a string of words in a sentence, for instance. A syntagmatic analysis of the sentence I love broccoli might focus on the order of the words in that sentence. It might also look at ways in which that word order can be changed or added to and still produce a meaningful sentence in English. Add an auxiliary verb and a negative particle to the sequence and the sentence becomes negative: I do not like broccoli. Change the sequence using a cleft construction to alter the focus of the sentence: It’s broccoli I love. Add an auxiliary, change the word order and bingo! You’re Yoda: Love broccoli I do.

If syntagmatic analysis looks at the linear sequence – the ‘horizontal’ structure of a string of words, then paradigmatic analysis goes vertical. Imagine, for instance, a column of words or phrases that you could use to replace the final word in I love broccoli. I love cabbage. I love carrots. I love Tina. I love democracy. I love tree toads with big ideas. All the constituents in the broccoli slot share something with the word broccoli – they’re all nouns or noun phrases.

My research focuses on how close analysis of the grammatical descriptions of people’s social worlds can reveal new ways of thinking about social structure. In times of crisis, when the safe, dependable social structures seem no longer to be in place, descriptions of social worlds can reveal poignant new visions. Consider this courageous conversation between a little boy and his father after the Paris attacks last week. The boy explains to his father that they’ll have to move house because ‘there are bad guys’. His father’s response here represents a syntagmatic shift: ‘there are bad guys everywhere’. It’s a shift at the level of the sequence – a linear shift – he adds the adverb everywhere to his son’s remark, and his son doesn’t seem very comforted.

It’s the paradigmatic shift that changes the vision of the social structure.

‘Daddy, they have guns’.

‘They have guns. We have flowers.’

Now the shift is a shift in paradigm: the guns slot is replaced with another choice, flowers.

One piece of evidence is not enough to shift the paradigm, it would seem from the boy’s response.

‘Flowers don’t do anything’, he says.

‘Flowers are for fighting against guns’, says his father.

Now it’s the son’s turn to shift the paradigm: he replaces fighting with protecting.

‘Flowers are for protecting.’

And the paradigm keeps shifting:

‘Candles are for protecting.’

Let’s imagine a world in which flowers and candles – and the love and solidarity they represent – protect us from the world’s fear. Heartfelt thanks to Angel Le and his son Brandon for providing us with that vision.

Download 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 probably felt when I ripped through his carefully crafted web-home in the corner of the living room. On the other hand, we might feel a moment of poignant, freeing clarity, like an 8-year-old who learns that her classmates are lying when they tell her she’s ugly.

What  convinces us to participate in oppressive social structures, especially social structures in which we’re the ones who are oppressed? Karl Marx put it down to ‘false consciousness’: in a capitalist system, the working classes will continue to be ruled by the dominant classes as long as they cling to false ideas about how the system isn’t so bad, after all. For Marx, changing the world requires that people (a) recognise the ways in which these false ideas present an upside-down view of the world and (b) to take action through unification and revolution.

In this episode I speak about the value of prioritising imagination over immediate action when it comes to social change. Doing the research for the book I’m writing now has shown me that when people describe their troubled social worlds, their accounts reveal hints about alternative structures – desires for new, transformative social structures. Doing this work has brought to my attention the need to study these hints carefully, to engage in the work of re-imagining social structure, and to allow action to be led by these new visions of better social worlds.

Download 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 you saying: ‘But Jodie, I never felt constrained in that way! I was a girl and always wanted to roughhouse with the boys.’ Or: ‘I was a boy and liked to paint my fingernails.’ ‘It was never a problem. Every individual has a choice.’

When is a choice not really a choice? When none of the options you’re choosing from are particularly desirable. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, for instance, gave children the choice to have one marshmallow right away, or wait 10 minutes and get two.

But what if I want something other than marshmallows?

Or what if I want to enjoy my marshmallow now and spend the next 10 minutes doing something other than sitting in agony, waiting for more marshmallows?

I explore in this episode the tension between the idea of the individual, who goes through the world making choices and the idea of social structure, whereby choices seemed to be constrained. I mention the notion of the community of practice again, and talk about the various ways people can engage with, or adapt to particular communities. This week I propose the idea of a new type of social structure in which individuals would not be required to adapt to social structures. Instead, social structures would adapt to individuals – and recognise the possibility for transformation that each individual offers.

Download 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.

How might it become possible to think beyond the structures that structure thought? We’d have to think more than we can think. ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks,’ writes philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, ‘is a desire’. To imagine new possibilities within a structure requires moving beyond thought, into a different realm of experience.

But is it appropriate to call that realm of experience desire? Desire is a loaded term – just ask Banarama and U2. In fact, it is sexual desire that is at the heart of that compelling social structure in which human beings are divided into two – and only two – distinct groups: males and females. As part of this dividing practice comes the requirement that sexual desire only occur between the two groups, and not within them. This requirement starts early. Indeed, I remember participating in heterosexual matchup games – which boy do you like? which boy are you going to marry? which boy are you gonna chase on the playground? – from about the age of 5.

How do social requirements about desire shape social structures? I share some discoveries from my ethnographic study of a women’s field hockey team (detailed in my book, Language, Sex and Social Structure).  Anxious about the fact that there were lesbians on their team, the heterosexual women I spoke to made a point of distinguishing the hockey team from other university women’s teams, like rugby. There really aren’t that many lesbians in women’s hockey, I was told. Women’s rugby is where the real ‘problem’ is. One of the ways they depicted women’s rugby as a problem is by portraying rugby players as having desire for women. Hockey players might have sexual encounters with other women… but they don’t desire them (which by implication would mean they’re not really gay).

Clearly a desire that is entirely shaped by a closed social structure isn’t really a desire at all – or is it? It’s certainly not the type of desire that Emmanuel Levinas was writing about. What would it be like to experience the Levinas form of desire: to think beyond the thinkable, to imagine new possibilities for being?

Download Blank Boys and Blank Girls.