(Current Studies, by blog description (2015-16)) - Click on each label to see corresponding posts!

Tuesday 9 February 2016

The Linguistic Turn, (part 2), via the on-going Book Review of "Rethinking Art" (2008) by Steve Shipps Part 5b

Because our various languages throughout the globe have been with us for many years, the accumulated precedents have separated into their various linguistic classifications such as English, Spanish, French, Italian, (mostly from Latin) or Arabic (from Hebrew / Sanskrit & so on) and so on.

These are our formal languages, but there are many informal languages, still very much based on a mutually agreed and, therefore, understood, set of rules within a specific or particular community. In fact by analysing these small (or perhaps a better phrase might be eclectic) communities, special signs can be found that are unique to it, together with the rules in which those signs are used.

Shipps also points out that the difference between these formal and informal languages, which is manifest in the fact that the formal ones must have adherence to an agreed syntax and order of each sign in their relationships with one another, in order, to be understood. He also points out that it is possible for a language to describe itself, through the correct use of it, and the term he uses for this is "reflexive".

In contrast to this, Shipps outlines that the informal languages tend to use signs that we perceive as being "descriptive". He also explains that the rules of grammar and syntax in informal languages are much less important to be followed, as the descriptive inference of the signs provide a certain level of understanding of themselves.

He uses a classic example of "fashion" and the way that we dress ourselves to conform to a certain symbolic or'linguistically' accepted convention, or signs, which, in particular environments or communities, or just groups of people, can be understood by one another to show that the wearer of such clothes, has a particular status or identity within such an environment. For example, a bank manager tends to wear a suit and tie. It's likely that he will also drive a more expensive car or automobile, which in itself is a kind of fashion accessory and status symbol. This language or symbology can be exemplified if, as a potential bank customer was to be waiting for an important meeting to collect a loan, but the bank manager drives up to his place of work in a dustbin lorry wearing a T-shirt and Hawaiian pants, with flip-flops, unshaven and unclean. It's likely that the potential customer would be extremely confused and unlikely to proceed with any loan or perhaps even use the services of that bank again!

So fashion is in itself, a kind of language which has systems of various significations, which in a particular community there is an adherence to a certain conventionality.  It should be pointed out, though, that just as in a formal language, informal language must share itself within a group of people who mutually agree to the conventions of it. Likewise, when the signs of a informal language are isolated from others in which it usually resides (and here I can draw on my own experience in computing, where a series of specific words, sometimes known in programming 'languages' as classes), - if isolated in itself whilst it may describe something inherent to it, it does not necessarily make sense on its own.

Nevertheless, when the right informal linguistic signs are observed within the right context, or the environment, or what one could describe as 'culture', they do make sense. Take for instance an example of English football culture, where supporters might don themselves in particular scarves, tee-shirts and hats with a uniform combination of colours, to signify collectively, support for the football team that they wish to encourage; when these garments are worn on a Saturday afternoon in the United Kingdom, everybody knows pretty much what it means, and those signs are readily understood.

The swiss linguistics professor, Ferdinand Saussure recognised this in 1916 and went on to point out the infinitely complex linguistic systems that human beings are immersed within, as a culture.

Saussure went on to propose that everything that we do as humans is understood by us through a series of signs and "infinitely intertwined systems of linguistic relationships". Everything that we do, therefore, we think about in linguistic terms.
Steve Shipps makes the three propositions

  1. that language is something we used to describe our world;
  2. a language is a description of the world; 
  3. language, therefore, is our world.

How we as humans describe our world, provides us with our own unique sense of reality. For example, my reality of the world around me is limited to how I can describe it linguistically through English. However for an Eskimo (now more correctly called the Inuit), they can describe their world or reality, in a much richer and deeper perceptual explanation, particularly when it comes to the idea of "snow" because they have so many more words (or signifiers) for the various types of snow, than English does. An Inuit experience of snow, would, therefore, be different from my experience of it. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf in the early 1930s recognised that our experience is therefore limited by our linguistic description of it. They came up in perhaps typical American way with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that if a language does not have a specific word to describe a particular thing, then the speakers of that language cannot experience it as such. Whilst this might be considered rather extreme, current day proponents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have modified it slightly by saying that "the way that we describe a thing determine how we experience it to a large degree".

As an example, which I have Anglicised from the American version by Steve Shipps, if one was to be handed a cricket ball, it might be possible to feel that the leather and the stitching of the palm-sized red sphere that has been presented, and one may be able to describe it as a cricket ball, but unless you have been immersed in a culture in which you experienced the whole game of cricket together with the associated memories of sitting on wooden benches on hot summer days, with the smell of beer and mown grass, together with an understanding of what a googly is. If you handed a cricket ball to an Amazonian Indian, he might recognise the red pigment and draw a similarity to the red pigment used in his face, but it is more likely that he would use the palm-sized sphere as a weapon to stun a peccary or knock an Amazonian grey parrot off its perch. My perception and his perception of the object would, therefore, have completely different potential experiences of it. Language, therefore, is our reality as we understand it.

However, Shipps also points out again, that our descriptions of our world, in essence, our reality, therefore, seem to conform to conventions, as expectations. If we detract from those expectations when describing something, or explaining something, the listener can quickly become confused and not understand an intended meaning.

Conclusions;

To summarise, if we remind ourselves of the work by Ferdinand Saussure, that everything is a sign, but these signs only function as such when they are correctly used in a precedented order, which we know as a language. In isolation, a sign needs to have a signifier, and one without the other may be considered meaningless.

  • Signs, therefore, have to have a context in order to function.
  • Therefore, meaning is relative and lies within the context in which a sign is perceived.
  • Because we look, therefore, within an environment, culture, or context a sign helps us to establish meaning, through its conventionality and generally accepted precedents and usage.


Therefore in this case, Shipps points out that meaning is not something that we find in our reality or sense of the world, but draws upon this important distinction that "meaning is something that we make of our experience of that world" (page 92) and meaning is gained, we make sense of it through the correct arrangement and manipulation of the signs and hence our ideas, based on our experience having lived through all the complex witnessing of the various relationships of the signs that we perceive.

So to conclude, to find a meaning for art, as Steve Shipps has put it, is arguably misguided; and what in fact, we should be doing, rather than trying to find a meaning, is to make our own meaning, based on our own unique experiential perceptions of the signs and signifiers, of any piece of art.

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