[Xmca-l] Re: language and music

Thu Dec 13 16:09:43 PST 2018

Hi Julian,

Thanks for the post - it certainly has got me thinking. This won't be a theoretical response - just my ideas as a music fan and someone who dabbles in guitar, bass and drums.

I think it depends on which came first, the music or the lyrics. Taking the Beatles as an example, if you took away the music to say 'She Loves You', the lyrics wouldn't have a chance of standing on their own (they don't even with the music, but the music and the melody carry the lyrics). A point of note, however, is the use of 'she' rather than 'I' which for the Beatles at that time was a bit of a creative revolution (reporting a conversation rather than telling it directly).

However, a song like 'Across the Universe', whose lyric I believe was written before the music, can stand on its own, and also has many features (such as simile, metaphor, etc) associated with poetry.

In some instances, the lyrics inspire the music. A case in point, 'In my Life' by the Beatles again (sorry, they are my favourite band!) which deals with memory as embodied in people and places. There is a lyric that goes 'all my life, though some have changed'. The chords change from a D to a D minor on the word 'life', which to me suggests the ambivalence of memory and nostalgia. In this instance, music does not demean the lyrics but provides an additional modality of meaning that enhances them. Music is another form of language.

This also raises an issue about the status of poetry and lyrics, but that is something that we might explore if this conversation takes off.

Anyway, just some ideas as I sit at my desk on a Friday morning.

Best,

Adam Poole

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Julian Williams <julian.williams@manchester.ac.uk>
Sent: 14 December 2018 05:55:22
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: language and music

David et al

I don¡¯t want to distract you too much, but there was a really interesting programme on BBC radio 4 today about the relation/distinction between ¡®song¡¯ and ¡®poetry¡¯, and some discourses about nobel lauriat Bob Dylan, ¡ or  Leonard Cohen¡¯s poetry (it seems he has a book of ¡®poetry¡¯ that didn¡¯t get to music¡, etc.

What would their songs consist of if you took out the music ¡ ?

It was suggested that poems have an ¡®internal music¡¯ that means they don¡¯t need to be put to song ¡ but that popular culture is demeaned by the music, so that it becomes accessible ¡

Sorry this may not be helpful: I just caught the edge of this programme but thought it might be of interest¡

Julian

From: <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, 11 December 2018 at 23:46
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: language and music

(I wrote this a week ago and didn't post it--we've been having the Moscow Summer School down here in Sydney, where the summers come around Christmastime and you can lecture in your bare feet....there is a little post scriptum to try to make it relevant to what Andy's thinking. But right now it seems to me the most pressing issue is to come back to music....)

Hallidayans would say that "interpretant" is as good as a Subject, because we don't really distinguish between reception and production of signs. (The model has to be kept neutral, in order to be parsimonious.) Is that Peircean, or Saussurean?

Peirce says that a pencil line is an icon (because it is a sign without an object, since Euclidean lines that have no width and infinite extension do not actually exist). Then he says that a bullet hole in piece of moulding (he has in mind the sort of thing you see on nineteenth century buildings) is an index (because it is a sign without an interpretant).

I guess that means that music is icon, and not index?

David Kellogg

Sangmyung University

PS: One difference between scientific concepts and everyday ones is that the former develop through differentiation rather than just adding once generalized representation to another through experience. I don't think it's an absolute difference: I think that differentiation is often a product of reflection (refraction, perezhivanie, rising to the concrete) and that is, after all, one kind of representation and one kind of experience, but it's a special kind.

Differentiation is finding differences that make a difference (Bateson). Both Vygotsky and Peirce differentiate signs, but in somewhat different ways, and it seems to me that it's a difference that makes a difference.

Vygotsky differentiates signs into signals (the red leaves are a signal of winter) and symbols (the red light is a traffic light symbol). The difference is whether consciousness is involved or not. I think that Vygotsky would reject the idea that consciousness can be reduced to a "second signal system": that was a tactical maneuver to try to make his work compatible with vulgar behaviorism in the fifties. Note that even the idea that consciousness is a "reaction to a reaction" or a "perezhivanie of a perezhivanie" is not reducible to a "second signal system" so long as you understand that signals do not involve consciousness.

Peirce differentiates signs into firstness, secondness, and thirdness: icons (where no object is required), indexes (where no interpretant is required) and symbols (where alll three are present and accounted for in the meaning). I think this is a logical rather than a psychological distinction, and it needs to be interpreted psychologically before we can talk about language. But there are a lot of linguists who would disagree with that, because there is a strong desire to abolish psychology in linguistics (c.f. Jim Martin).

Music education has struggled with this for a long time: is music icon, index, or symbol? Orff (the Nazi) believed it was an icon, and you teach children to imagine their bodies as a drum. Suzuki believed it was an index, and you teach it as result of a practice which can be interpersonal or individual. Only Kodaly treats music as language and taught us to teach music as a literacy. But of course then music is meaning, not sounding.

dk

On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 12:14 PM Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com<mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>> wrote:

(and, to be sure, on this listserve I'm really the one playing the "different" game/tune)

On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 7:44 PM Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com<mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>> wrote:

Not "behind" Andy - you're playing a different game!

(And it happens to be one in which I am terribly "behind"!)

And I generally agree with your appraisal, but it makes me wonder what you've concluded with regard to Colapietro's characterization of Peirce's notion of the self? I believe you were the one who shared it with me but from your tone here I assume that you feel that it falls short in theorizing a "subject"/self. Care to expand on that any? Particularly with regard to the shortcomings of the theory?

-greg

[p.s. And perhaps instead of "playing games" we might turn the metaphor back to the original thread by noting(!) that we are simply "playing different tunes"?

Often discordant but occasionally resonant...]

On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 6:16 PM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:

Thanks Greg. It's good to hear that I am thoroughly behind the game! :) Thank you.

I think Peirce's semiotics has the great advantage in that it does not include the category of Subject in its triads (e.g. sign | interpretant | object). This means that it can be used for the analysis of objective processes. When used in this way it does not imply "thinking" at all. That virtue of Peirce's semiotics was the basis of my objection to James's observation. Speech and gesture has a subject.

The other minor point I would make about your very erudite response is that I think we should not be too apologetic about using the concept of "mind." True, mind is not a sensible entity, but in all human interactions we deduce the state of minds from the observable behaviour, and in fact (scientific or everyday) human behaviour is incomprehensible without the presumption that it is mindful to this or that extent. Otherwise, we become Behaviourists, and Chomsky would murder us! :)

Andy

________________________________

Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm

On 3/12/2018 11:53 am, Greg Thompson wrote:

Andy,

My short response would depend on whether you'd prefer to be critical or charitable toward linguistic anthropologists.

The critical approach would say that with a few exceptions (e.g., Elinor Ochs, Paul Kockelman, Elizabeth Mertz, John Lucy, among others), you are right.

The charitable approach would say that linguistic anthropologists are in fact dealing with precisely the things that you are talking about. Most of the ones that I know are anti-Chomskyian, to say the least. Most of them are grappling with issues of practice, not just studying formal structures that exist in someplace called "the mind" (where is that exactly?). In fact, one of the greatest insults to the linguistic anthropologists that I know is to call them a "butterfly collector" - that is to say, a mere documenter of language variation across the globe. Most of the ones I know are in fact very mindful of understanding the practical consequences of semiotic forms. In his book Talking Heads Benjamin Lee makes precisely the point that you are making through his deployment of Peirce to Critique Saussure. Peirce offers a means of grasping semiosis as a lived practice rather than one that exists only in the "mind" (as Saussure's approach to semiotics would suggest).

The critical approach is nice because you can just dispense with linguistic anthropology and all their gobbly-gook jargon as irrelevant. The charitable approach might suggest that we should at least acknowledge their project. That's all I was hoping to do. I figured that there might be a few who are interested, but most on the listserve will find that it wasn't worth investing the time - and I don't blame them! (as someone in this goofy world of academia, I'm very sensitive to the fact that learning the language of an entirely new system is a major time commitment and only worth it in rare cases).

I think things get a bit more complicated when we get to the issue of the semiosis of non-human agents that you seemed to be poking at (e.g., Eduardo Kohn's book How Forests Think). I understand that you are very much a humanist and don't like this approach for some very fundamental reasons. I'm not entirely committed to this position (Kohn's) and so I'm not the best person to make the case for this position - unless you are really genuinely interested. And besides, I'm already well beyond your one screen rule!

Cheers,

greg

On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 5:28 PM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:

So I gather confirmation from your message, Greg: "most of the anthropologists I know, linguistic or otherwise, don't have much interest in talking about such things as psychological functioning" and therefore, it seems to me, little interest in what people do as well as what they think. In other words, the turn to seeing language as a system of Peircean signs is an entirely formal project. Yes, the babbling of a brook or the babbling of a band of monkeys can be formally analysed with the same set of concepts as the babbling of a group of humans in conversation. But this is purely formal, superficial and obscures what is expressed and transacted in the human babble.

I can understand the fascination in such formal disciplines, I accept that Peircean Semiotics can be a tool of analysis, and often insights come out from such formal disciplines relevant to the real world (mathematics being the supreme example), but ....! One really has to keep in mind that words are not Peircean signs. To answer the question of how it is that humans alone have language by saying that everything has language, even inanimate processes (and this is how I interpret the equation of language with Peircean signs), is somewhat more than missing the point.

As an example of how such formal processes lead to grave errors is the Language Acquisition Device "proved" to exist by Chomsky's formal analysis of language. And yet to hold that an actual biological, neuronal formation as a LAD exists in all human beings in quite inconsistent with the foundations of biology, i.e., Darwinian evolution. Either Darwin or Chomsky, but not both. Which tells me that there is a problem with this formal analysis, even though I gasp in wonder every time Google manages to correctly parse an ordinary language question I ask it and deliver very relevant answers.

Andy

________________________________

Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm

On 2/12/2018 2:51 am, Greg Thompson wrote:

[I hesitate to send a post like this to this group for precisely the reasons Helena mentioned previously (the proliferation of technical languages in different fields and the time-intensive labor of translating terms/meanings of entire systems of thinking from one of these fields to the next). Add the fact that there are few who have much interest in one of the field of linguistic anthropology (and esp. how ling anthro has taken up Peicean semiotics - a tangle of words in its own right), and this means the following post will likely remain an orphan (not at all because of anyone's ill intentions but simply because this is an impossible situation for anyone to commit to learning an entirely new language for talking about language!).]

Yes James, as a Peircean, I assume that you would point to (!) the indexical and iconic potentials of SPOKEN language while noting that this flattens the oft-made distinction between gesture and the spoken word? Our dominant ideology of language tends to assume that spoken language is (only?) symbolic and gesture is only indexical and iconic. Peirce's notion of indexical and iconic functions offers us a way into seeing how spoken language is also indexical and iconic (as opposed to Saussure who dismissed them out of hand - e.g., in the Course he dismisses onomatopoeia (iconic) and "shifters" (indexical) as irrelevant to his project).

Following Peirce's vision, Roman Jakobson was one of the first to point to the problem of this dominant ideology of language, and Michael Silverstein has made a rather substantial career off of this simple point, first elaborated in his famous 1976 paper on "shifters" and since then in numerous other works. Many others working in linguistic anthropology have spent the last 40 years expanding on this project by exploring the indexical and iconic nature of spoken language in the concepts of "indexicality" and "iconization". More recently linguistic anthropologists have considered the processes by which sign-functions can shift from one function to another - e.g., rhematization - from indexical or symbolic to iconic (see Susan Gal and Judy Irvine's work), and iconization - from symbolic or iconic to indexical (see Webb Keane's and Chris Ball's work). And others have looked at more basic features of sign-functioning such as the realization of qualia (see Lily Chumley and Nicholas Harkness' special issue in Anthro theory).

The relevance of all this for the present list serve is that the processes being described by these linguistic anthropologists are fundamental to understanding human psychological functioning and yet most of the anthropologists I know, linguistic or otherwise, don't have much interest in talking about such things as psychological functioning (one exception here is Paul Kockelman, e.g., in his book Person, Agent, Subject, Self - although beware that his writing is just as dense as Peirce's!). Anyway, I suspect that this could be a particularly productive intersection for development.

Cheers,

-greg

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 8:40 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com<mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> wrote:

Right on, James!

On Nov 30, 2018, at 12:16 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com<mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>> wrote:

Henry, personally I prefer Xmca-I discussion to be exploratory and free style, allowing for the coexistence of subjectness and subjectless. When it comes to scholarly writing, we know we will switch the code.

James

HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com<mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> ÓÚ 2018Äê11ÔÂ29ÈÕÖÜËÄ 18:58Ð´µÀ£º

James,

This conversation has been so satisfying I don¡¯t want to let go of it, so I hope I am not tiring you or others with all the connections I find. But, in the spirit of Alfredo¡¯s post, I¡¯ll just keep on talking and remark on how the duck tail hair cut is a rich gesture, an important concept in this subject line. Gesture is an aspect of communication present in many species. Hence, the importance of gesture as a rudimentary form of language with evolutionary results in human language. Maybe this is a reach, but I see the business of quotes in the subject line now taking place (Anna Stetsenko and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, contributing right now) on the last chapter of Vygotsky¡¯s Speech and Language as an issue of gesture. Language, written language in this case, is limited in its ability to provide nuance. Writing without quotes ¡°gestured¡±, pointed to to author sources familar in the day that Vygotsky wrote, such that quotes were not necessary. Dan Slobin, psycholinguist at Univ of Calf, wrote that two charges of language where in ¡°tension¡±: 1) make yourself clear and 2) get it said before losing the thread of thinking and talking. Gesture, I would like to argue, is an aspect of discourse that helps to address this tension. A turn (in discourse) is a gesture, with temporal constraints that belie the idea that a single turn can ever be totally clear in and of itself. Writing, as we are doing now, is always dialogic, even a whole book, is a turn in discourse. And we keep on posting our turns.

Henry

On Nov 29, 2018, at 8:56 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com<mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>> wrote:

Henry, Elvis Presley is spot on for this subject line!

The ducktail hairstyle is fabulous. Funnily enough, it is what my brother would always like his 9-year-old son to have because he has much thicker hair than most boys. Unfortunately last year the boy had a one-day show off in the classroom and was ticked off by the school authority (in China). However, my brother has managed to restore the ducktail twice a year during the boy's long school holiday in winter and summer!

I suppose the outlines of conversation are predictable due to participants' intersubjective awareness of the subject. Yet, the nuances of conversation (just like each individual's ducktail unique to himself) are unpredictable because of the waywardness of our mind. What's more, such nuances create the fluidity of conversation which makes it difficult (or even unnecessary) to predict what comes next - this is perhaps the whole point that keeps us talking, as Alfredo pointed out earlier.

James

On Wed, 28 Nov 2018 at 22:19, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com<mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> wrote:

Back at you, James. The images of the mandarin drake reminded me of a hair style popularin the late 50s when I was in high school (grades 9-12): ducktail haircuts images<https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=ducktail+haircuts+images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8>. One of the photos in the link is of Elvis Presley, an alpha male high school boys sought to emulate. Note that some of the photos are of women, interesting in light of issues of gender fluidity these days. I don¡¯t remember when women started taking on the hair style. Since I mentioned Elvis Presley, this post counts as relevant to the subject line! Ha!

Henry

On Nov 28, 2018, at 7:39 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com<mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>> wrote:

Thank you Henry.

More on mandarin duck, just thought you might like to see:

https://www.livingwithbirds.com/tweetapedia/21-facts-on-mandarin-duck

HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com<mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> ÓÚ 2018Äê11ÔÂ27ÈÕÖÜ¶þ 19:30Ð´µÀ£º

What a beautiful photo, James, and providing it is a move on this subject line that instantiates nicely Gee¡¯s conception of discourse. Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful response.

Henry

On Nov 27, 2018, at 11:11 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com<mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>> wrote:

Henry, thanks for the info on Derek Bickerton. One of the interesting things is his conception of displacement as the hallmark of language, whether iconic, indexical or symbolic. In the case of Chinese language, the sounds are decontextualised or sublimated over time to become something more integrated into the words themselves as ideographs. Some of Bickerton's ideas are suggestive of the study of protolanguage as an a priori process, involving scrupulous deduction. This reminds me of methods used in diachronic linguistics, which I felt are relevant to CHAT just as much as those used in synchronic linguistics.

Regarding "intermental" and "intramental", I can see your point. In fact I don't take Vygotsky's "interpsychological" and "intrapsychological" categories to be dichotomies or binary opposites. Whenever it comes to their relationship, I tend to have a post-structuralism imagery present in my mind, particularly related to a Derridean stance for the conception of ideas (i.e. any idea is not entirely distinct from other ideas in terms of the "thing itself"; rather, it entails a supplement of the other idea which is already embedded in the self). Vygotsky's two categories are relational (dialectical); they are somehow like a pair of mandarin ducks (see attached image). I also like to think that each of these categories is both "discourse-in-context" and "context-for-discourse" (here discourse is in tune with James Gee's conception of discourse as a patchwork of actions, interactions, thoughts, feelings etc). I recall Barbara Rogoff talking about there being no boundary between the external and the internal or the boundary being blurred (during her seminar in the Graduate School of Education at Bristol in 2001 while I was doing my PhD).

James

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 23:14, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com<mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> wrote:

James,

I think it was Derek Bickerton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Bickerton) who argued that ¡°formal syntax¡± developed from stringing together turns in verbal interaction. The wiki on Bickerton I have linked is short and raises issues discussed in this subject line and in the subject line on Corballis. Bickerton brings me back to the circularity of discourse and the development of discourse competence. Usage-based grammar. Bickerton¡¯s idea that complex grammar developed out of the pidgins of our ancestors is interesting. Do I see a chicken/egg problem that for Vygotsky, ¡°¡the intramental forms of semiotic mediation is better understood by examining the types of intermental processes¡±? I don¡¯t know. Could one say that inner speech is the vehicle for turning discourse into grammar? Bickerton claimed a strong biological component to human language, though I don¡¯t remember if he was a Chomskian. I hope this is coherent thinking in the context of our conversation. All that jazz.

Henry

On Nov 21, 2018, at 3:22 PM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com<mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>> wrote:

Alfredo, I'd agree with Greg - intersubjectivity is relevant and pertinent here.

As I see it, intersubjectivity transcends "outlines" or perhaps sublimates the "muddledness" and "unpredictability" of a conversation (as in Bateson's metalogue) into what Rommetveit termed the "draft of a contract". This is because shared understanding makes explicit and external what would otherwise remain implicit and internal. Rommetveit argues that private worlds can only be transcended up to a certain level and interlocutors need to agree upon the draft of a contract with which the communication can be initiated. In the spirit of Vygotsky, he uses a "pluralistic" and "social-cognitive" approach to human communication - and especially to the problem of linguistic mediation and regulation in interpsychological functioning, with reference to semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. For him, the intramental forms of semiotic mediation is better understood by examining the types of intermental processes.

I think these intermental processes (just like intramental ones) can be boiled down or distilled to signs and symbols with which interlocutors are in harmony during a conversation or any other joint activities.

James

________________________________________________

James Ma  Independent Scholar https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 08:09, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no<mailto:a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>> wrote:

Henry's remarks about no directors and symphonic potential of conversation reminded me of G. Bateson's metalogue "why do things have outlines" (attached). Implicitly, it raises the question of units and elements, of how a song, a dance, a poem, a conversation, to make sense, they must have a recognizable outline, even in improvisation; they must be wholes, or suggest wholes. That makes them "predictable". And yet, when you are immersed in a conversation, the fact that you can never exactly predict what comes next is the whole point that keep us talking, dancing, drawing, etc!

Alfredo

________________________________

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com<mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>>
Sent: 21 November 2018 06:22
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: language and music

I¡¯d like to add to the call and response conversation that discourse, this conversation itself, is staged. There are performers and and an audience made up partly of performers themselves. How many are lurkers, as I am usually? This conversation has no director, but there are leaders. There is symphonic potential. And even gestural potential, making the chat a dance. All on line.:)

Henry

On Nov 20, 2018, at 9:05 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu<mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> wrote:

For many years I used the work of Ellen Dissenyake to teach comm classes about language/music/development. She is quite unusual in ways that might find interest here.

https://ellendissanayake.com/

mike

On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 2:16 PM James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com<mailto:jamesma320@gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello Simangele,

In semiotic terms, whatever each of the participants has constructed internally is the signified, i.e. his or her understanding and interpretation. When it is vocalised (spoken out), it becomes the signifier to the listener. What's more, when the participants work together to compose a story impromptu, each of their signifiers turns into a new signified ¨C a shared, newly-established understanding, woven into the fabric of meaning making.

By the way, in Chinese language, words for singing and dancing have long been used inseparably. As I see it, they are semiotically indexed to, or adjusted to allow for, the feelings, emotions, actions and interactions of a consciousness who is experiencing the singing and dancing. Here are some idioms:

º¨¸è×íÎè - singing and dancing rapturously

´å¸èÉçÎè - dancing village and singing club

Ñà¸èÕÔÎè - citizens of ancient

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