Rock On, Structuralism

1. Rock on Professor Phillips for scaffolding our week topics so well.

2. Rock on Gertrude Stein and the James Brothers for being champions of lingustic thought.

3. Rock on Lerer for writing a clear an interesting article on a subject that has potential to be confusing and boring.

I totally dig the Structuralist idea of signifier/signified. They expose the arbitrariness of language, something A LOT of my classes have rolled with. There is absolutely NOTHING in the word grapefruit that is particularly round, pinkish, sour and sweet (I dunno how they really taste, the last time I come into contact with one was at 5 in the morning in Africa after throwing up for two days straight.) But you get what I mean. In French, grapefruit is pomplemousse. Yeah, French doesn't do much better at explaining the concept of the object. Well what about a word like vomit. Latin past tense is vomi, French is vomi and English is vomited. Well, that doesn't work because they share roots which does not actually reflect the act of tossing one's cookies, or perhaps in Rome tossing one's grapes.

Alright, so we have that down. Words does not equal objects. But at the same time, they do. The final argument and ultimate failure of Stein is that she failed to remove meaning from language. Because language is so deeply rooted in our brain, we cannot step out of our language. The reason we know her sentences are nonsense is because we automatically make meaning, no matter what our brain tells us.

I think one thing that was alluded to but not really mentioned was how we think. I believe the human brain doesn't function in words, like a rolling teleprompter during the Grammys. Instead, it's this odd mix of feelings, fleeting images, concrete images and colors. Language is an attempt to unify and successfully communicate the mess that is our thoughts. Thus arises the need for a structure that will ensure success, which is grammar. However, as Stein and Chomsky demonstrated, we don't really need to think in words. We need the signifier that is the word to trigger the image/feeling in our brain. In this distinction is the failure of Stein; our imagination. Stein underestimates the ability of humans to make meaning from images.

 There is also the aesthetic quality mentioned in the Lerer reading, which is another factor of language. I really can't concretely say this with science backing, but there is something in "In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michaelangelo." The rhyme nicely encapsulates the couplet, but I just love the way it sounds. I think the Stephen Fry phrase is "trippingly off the tongue." We bathe in our language. We eat words, taste and digest them in our brain and excrete meaning. Why do we like rhyme? That's a French thing; Anglo-Saxon poetry is based in meters, French did rhyme schemes in poetry first. So we have a tendency, as demonstrated last week, to make meaning as first as a self-preservation activity, but we have developed it past that, I think. It's become a way of life, speaking.

So in Tender Buttons (talk about great titles) under the "Food" section we have the following sentence: Room to comb chickens and feathers and ripe purple, room to curve single plates and large sets and second silver, room to send everything away, room to save heat and distemper, room to search a light that is simpler, all room has no shadow.

1. We don't comb chickens. When is the last time you saw a farmer catch and comb a chicken? No. But we can imagine it.
He thought with a despairing thought, it's time to comb the chickens. For fifteen minutes he would battle against the Henrietta, the lead hen. Upon grasping her fat body with his calloused hands, he would have to fight another five minutes to calm her down. But he always forgets about the pleasure of combing Henrietta because of the long fight that precedes. He takes out the chipped wooden comb, missing a few teeth, not unlike himself. The hen settles down between his legs, fluffing her feathers out with pride, attempting to retain dignity in spite of her captivity. The farmer strokes her sides intentionally at first. But as the pair settle into one another, the process becomes more unconscious. He hums the song his mother sang when she made summer blueberry scones.  He sings the Beach Boys' Don't Worry Baby  as Henrietta drifts into a waking reverie, basking in the afternoon sun and combing. In the prime of their matronly and fatherly years, they make peace for ten minutes.

So while I take artistic liberty, I can make meaning from nonsense because I can subvert the nonsense. As an English speaker, I am aware that these are not conventional sentences or word usage. But that doesn't mean they cannot work.

The rest of the phrase is a lot more abstract and I think we make meaning from the action implied. There is always the remembrance of things when experiencing things. So the "room to curve" reminds me of a sort of silversmith, a person who needs space to actually make plates and heat the fire that will help the construction.

There is always weight of words. I have a theory that there is no such thing as a synonym; all words have a specific context. We can never depart from the issues of audience, rules and predictions. Our brain also resists degradation. Stein does an excellent job of making the basis of structuralism by showcasing grammar but she just underestimated our ability to abstract. On the same point, we also becomes very frustrated by her dense poetry and prosody because we have to constantly abstract meaning.

Theories of Language and Writing show how complicated communication is. While we try and try to explain everything, there will always be dissonance because there is no absolute unity and congruity in all aspects of our language. Of course we shall never give up the fight to find ourselves, but perhaps we could be less cutthroat about it and remember the enjoyment of language.