Structured Visions

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).

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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 structure that emerges from people talking about everyday experiences. I look for grammatical patterns in the transcripts, 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 (http://eepurl.com/huKgbf).

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 (http://eepurl.com/huKgbf):

'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?' (p. 36)

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.