Structured Visions

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.' Check out my new free course, Grammar for Dreamers. All the grammar you need, plus a touch of mystery in under 30 minutes. Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Check out my new free course, Grammar for Dreamers. All the grammar you need, plus a touch of mystery in under 30 minutes. Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Check out my new free course, Grammar for Dreamers. Check out my old free course, Writing through the Lens of Language. Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter 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 Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

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.' Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!