Words grow like plants

Gerardo Petsaín Sharup, Cosmovisión Wampís

They find a niche where they have a function that allows them to persist. They live from energy drawn from the sun and the ground. On the burnt grounds where the amazon once flourished, the soybean grows and takes its nutrients from the soil. Say it is picked and packed into a refrigerated container, and a plane or perhaps a ship brings it to a different country for processing. It becomes a product. It is packaged again. After a long journey through factories and distribution centres, the soybean product is mediated to you by all the materials and stories woven together in the concept and physical place of a supermarket. Now at last the soybean gets to sublimate itself; fulfil its life’s destiny – albeit not to flower and bear fruit; it passes your lips and makes acquaintance with the grinding power of your molars. 

This is the soybean’s transition ritual into a new society with a logic of its own, or perhaps many logics interacting: the subsistence and desires of each of its cells and particles. Cast into neat rows, the epithelial cells of the intestinal lining function like a port, taking in the imports from far overseas. The delivery from the Amazon forest grounds is sent on its merry way through the body’s distributional infrastructure.  Our soybean is deconstructed into building materials and fuel. Through the red canals of the internal inferno the fuel flows on its way back up to the site of the original transition, where the tongue and lips now propelled by its fire shake and obstruct the air flow coming through the lungs and past the larynx. Fricative then resounding and approximating, a bilabial stop is followed slightly later by a nasal sound: soybean, says the mouth. 

Depending on what mouth and what context, the air vibrations may have different effects. The sound travels into the tables and the teacups as much as it travels into a present ear. In what seems fast to us but an eternity to a mouse, the nerve nodes attached to said receptacle dissect the sound sequence. Soybean? A host of associations are called up. Memory drawers made up of nerve cells full of encoded references for textures, flavours, contexts and historical and geographical understanding are activated, some of the information even pushing its way into the consciousness. We are in luck: this person understands English and they have had tofu before. The sound sequence seems to have successfully transferred a concept from one human body to the next. Although the listener’s experiences with soybeans occurred in rather different settings from where the speaker has encountered them, and although there are many separate but alike entities which are referred to in this way, they both appear to agree about what part of the universe is worthy of this name. And so the word has yet again proved its usefulness at being used as a shorthand for the pulse from the lea of its mother plant.

Just as the plant is one iteration of a tradition with a long history, similar to but not the same as her many ancestors, so the uttered word is one instance of a “family” of very similar utterances which are however each entirely unique in their own right – not just each context being different from the next (each sentence, page, situation) but in spoken language the voice onset, vowel fronting and the shape of the mouth cavity all resulting in something as singularly matchless as a fingerprint. And yet we can understand the word as belonging to a family of such words just as we can recognise a hydrangea as being a hydrangea.

The University and the World Out There

Egon Schiele, Stein on the Danube, 1913 

 

A reflection on the class and text “From Unwanted to So-Called Expertise:

Ideologizing Sociolinguistics in Mainstream Media” by Jürgen Jaspers.

Written 21 April 2016

For the visit of Jürgen Jaspers the professors decided on a set-up whereby he would start the class by talking about his own trajectory, as tried and tested at the Mondorf conference. Some of the academics who have been asked to talk about themselves at such length in front of our class have reflected on it as saying it was somewhat unprecedented and weird for them (I would use the word onwennig in Dutch). Yet I think it is a great idea, as we are all about to launch into our post-academic or continuation-academic careers, and it helps greatly to know what choices led people to where they are. Moreover, it is interesting to see how their interests develop over time. 

The first question he tried to answer about his trajectory that I find interesting to discuss here, is: Why did he take the decision to stay in academia? He said that about ten years ago he had decided he wanted to get out of the university world. He undertook some steps to get extra education (theatre teacher training) so as to be able to find non-academic work, but then found that in doing so he was still thinking about the same academic questions. He ended up realising it wasn’t so bad in academia after all, though I didn’t fully get why he came to that conclusion – maybe he just found out the theatre world was just as bad. 

I’ve also been thinking that I want to move out of academia. I have been in some form of education or another since I was 3 or even before that in the crèche. Increasingly it starts to feel problematic – there seems to be a big gap between the university and the people not in university; there is a lot of internal competition in the university which is not per se promoting a thorough approach to science; academics are often in insecure jobs with a lot of stress; and it’s all to write studies that are hardly read by the rest of the world. (-> Jaspers said that with all of our class reading his papers, his readership was suddenly ten times as big). 

I am starting to see that the university is a system to reproduce privilege, with or at the cost of the individual researchers who are just dedicated to their topic. This is partially a linguistic point: through teaching the students the correct language and formats to write their academic texts in, certain forms of knowledge are empowered: if you write it like this it has status, it has to be taken serious. Yet as always it is a selective process, of inclusion and exclusion: the texts not written like that are not seen as valid knowledge. About this Jaspers himself said a nice quotable quote, “If we don’t produce failed students we don’t recognize the ones who are successful”. In other words, by defining conditions for success you are automatically setting up a process of inclusion and exclusion. He said another thing, while talking about how sociolinguists are seen as hippies who don’t believe in norms, namely that he does believe in “some” norms but he just wants ones that aren’t exclusive. I was wondering about that (maybe I should have asked on but I felt I’d already said a lot) – do non-exclusive norms actually exist? What is his understanding of “norms”? Because maybe it is in the basis of a “norm” that it creates a division of people who do and who do not act accordingly. Either way, it feels like it’s time for me to step out of the university and find out if everything in the world reproduces privilege, or if there are ways to stop reproducing it. 

In his text about the challenges of communication between academics and journalists, Jaspers is thinking about how an academic, as an expert on a particular issue, can take agency over the discourse on their topic and get the story “out there”, the way they think about it. Firstly, it demonstrates the gap between what the people at the university are doing and the way the outside world perceives them – or in fact the way the academics perceive the “outside world”. In this case, the “outside world” believes that Standard Dutch should be taught at schools and that youths on the street are speaking a new language out of respect for foreign newcomers. Jaspers’ story actually contradicts my point in the previous paragraph in that sense, that the journalists and the people writing letters to the newspaper and whoever else reacted are not in fact taking his text as the authority that he wants it to be. They think of him as a hippie, he says, an arrogant Antwerpenaar in an ivory tower without a shred of sense of reality. The privilege reproduction of the university is apparently not carrying over into his statements actually being taken as more valid knowledge than lay sociolinguistics. This could be an issue of the discipline itself. 

The question of how you can change a discourse as an individual is one that I think is very important. Of course every time you say something that challenges the status quo, you are changing the discourse in a small way: that opinion, that way of viewing things has now been uttered and is in that sense “existent”; there is not nobody who thinks that. But it is not micro-changes we are after: the question is how one individual point of view can be spread and become more of a mainstream view (rather than that of hippies in an ivory tower).

I asked Jaspers what he thought was the best way to promote one’s view or how to take agency over the discourse. He said the most important thing is to seek a basis of other people who agree. A micro-scale change can gather momentum, ever more people join and eventually the dominant system topples in favour of the new idea (In this aspect his ideas were clearly influenced by Blommaert and chaos theory, I thought). His example of how that works in practice, that he gave later, was that instead of talking to the journalist one-on-one, after which they publish an article (the academic is taken into the world of the press) it could be better to invite the journalist to the academic conference, where under the enjoyment of some Pain de Surprise and nice free wine, the journalist is taken into the world of academics: the whole research team is there and they all think the same way, so that the academic’s weird ivory tower assertions are suddenly the normal situation and the journalist is the outlier. 

Professor Budach also suggested ways of toppling the system: she said that rather than talk to journalists or try to lobby politicians about new approaches to sociolinguistics, she had found it more rewarding to talk directly to the teachers, who are right at the place of implementation of the language policies. When they are convinced by new ideas, they can bring them directly into practice. When politicians are convinced by new ideas (when and if), they still have to elbow their way through the hedge of opposition and checks and balances before a shred of the original idea can find its way into policy, which then still has to be communicated with those who are to implement it – exactly – the teachers – presumably already tired of so many attempts to regulate their behaviour from the top. 

In summary, this article and class led me to ponder the reproduction of privilege, the exclusionary nature of norms, the perpetuation of discourse, and ways of toppling it and replacing it with one’s own perspective. I think that’s a quare lot for two pages and will therefore leave it at this.