To every one out there, I'm still alive, just busy.
So busy in fact that I missed the free White Stripes concert here in town, literally two blocks away from my work. I'll be uploading some pictures that Robin, the official photographer of the territory took. At least someone I know got to see them.
Right now the bakery is the first priority. I spend around 10 hours a day at the bakery working, and usually a couple more at home researching recipes and making lists, etc. Fortunately, I don't find it stressful (yet) for some reason. Probably because it's not my money being sucked into the startup costs. Thank god for the partners! I'm actually getting more and more excited about it. At first I thought I'd want to work up front with the public in order to meet people, but now I realize that no I don't. I would much rather work behind the scenes at the bakery and meet people during bannock baking contests and the like. I like separate work and private lifes.
See? now that I've got my degree in linguistics I feel I can abuse the language with impunity.
Speaking of language, I'm getting to speak French with the cook at the Bakery, Karen. She is great, and a good cook! She made the most amazing chocolate mousse the other day with coconut milk. The Bakery is going to be dessert-rich, rich dessert-rich in fact!
But I can't write any more without pictures, so that is it for now. There's always way more to say than I have patience to post. If you want to phone me, email me and I'll give you the number where I am currently staying.
I'm off to cuddle cats, read cookbooks and drink wine!
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
Ol' Solstice Night
Later that night, Karyn and I went for a walk around the block, and I took some pictures for y'all of Whitehorse. Above is what the sky looked like over us around midnight.
Below is the view to the west:
and this is the view to the east:
Ol' Solstice Day
Yesterday was Summer Solstice, and National Aboriginal Day, so there was lots going on in downtown Whitehorse. I went down first thing in the morning, got my new $10 bike ready to ride, then went over to the government offices on main street.
This is the Head Chief for the Yukon Territory.
This is another important person, with Robin taking her picture.
The GG again.
Okay, then the bizarre portion of the day commenced. Right off the bat, there was a bannock baking contest. Somehow, and I really don't know how, my hosts convinced me to enter. I've eaten bannock maybe a half dozen times, and never ever baked it. My first experience with a deep fryer had been the night before when we had made some delicious curry coconut giant shrimp that required they be deep fried. So, bannock is definitely not my forte. After a few seconds of scrabbling around, finding someone who had a recipe, and memorizing it, I found myself equipped with measuring cups, a bowl, a spoon, and that is all.
Here's me learning the recipe. No crib notes were allowed, it had to come straight out of your head.
Moments later... Many of the people you see in this lineup of contestants are related to each other, strangely. This one family decided they'd all give it a whirl. I'm standing between family members here, and the woman to the left of the man beside me is his mother, I think. Talk about stacking the odds!
The chaos ensues!
The GG getting in on the action
A hilarious time for all. See that little piece of dough on the plate? That is one of my attempts at bannock.
Getting ready, getting ready!
Dropping the little guys to the judges. Here I am praying that my bannock doesn't make them ill.
The brave judges. Look at the expressions of delight on their faces!
The intrepid GG trying it out.
You can tell she loves it.
The judges deliberating. I have no idea what the criteria are for bannock, which may be why mine turned out looking like a deep fried raisin biscuit and the others looked more like fritters or doughnuts.
Everybody's a winner in the bannock baking contest!
See? I got a prize too, another one for my also-ran collection! This side says National Aboriginal Day.
Yup. "Bannock Baking" Contest indeed. I wonder if those scare quotes are there on the winners' medallions.
For those of you who have stumbled on to this site and don't know me, the whole prospect that I would enter a public contest to do something I have no clue how to do is really bizarre. I have to admit that once the nerves calmed down, it was pretty fun!
But that was only the beginning of the day. I still haven't taken any pictures of 2 mile hill, generally because I'm too busy trying to breathe and keep my heart in my chest to think of it, but I will. Anyway, after bannock came the hill on my new bike. Low blood sugar, the hill and jangled nerves were no match for my new bike. It should have go-faster stripes on it, it was so fantastic to ride.
Speaking of stripes, the White Stripes are coming to Whitehorse next friday. Why? I don't know, but I figured I'd put my name in the hat to see if I could win tickets to go. It would be fun even if I'm not the biggest fan. I might go anyway, just to photograph the hullaballoo outside the Arts Centre before they start.
This is the Head Chief for the Yukon Territory.
This is another important person, with Robin taking her picture.
The GG again.Okay, then the bizarre portion of the day commenced. Right off the bat, there was a bannock baking contest. Somehow, and I really don't know how, my hosts convinced me to enter. I've eaten bannock maybe a half dozen times, and never ever baked it. My first experience with a deep fryer had been the night before when we had made some delicious curry coconut giant shrimp that required they be deep fried. So, bannock is definitely not my forte. After a few seconds of scrabbling around, finding someone who had a recipe, and memorizing it, I found myself equipped with measuring cups, a bowl, a spoon, and that is all.
Here's me learning the recipe. No crib notes were allowed, it had to come straight out of your head.
Moments later... Many of the people you see in this lineup of contestants are related to each other, strangely. This one family decided they'd all give it a whirl. I'm standing between family members here, and the woman to the left of the man beside me is his mother, I think. Talk about stacking the odds!
The chaos ensues!
The GG getting in on the action
A hilarious time for all. See that little piece of dough on the plate? That is one of my attempts at bannock.
Getting ready, getting ready!
Dropping the little guys to the judges. Here I am praying that my bannock doesn't make them ill.
The brave judges. Look at the expressions of delight on their faces!
The intrepid GG trying it out.
You can tell she loves it.
The judges deliberating. I have no idea what the criteria are for bannock, which may be why mine turned out looking like a deep fried raisin biscuit and the others looked more like fritters or doughnuts.
Everybody's a winner in the bannock baking contest!
See? I got a prize too, another one for my also-ran collection! This side says National Aboriginal Day.
Yup. "Bannock Baking" Contest indeed. I wonder if those scare quotes are there on the winners' medallions.For those of you who have stumbled on to this site and don't know me, the whole prospect that I would enter a public contest to do something I have no clue how to do is really bizarre. I have to admit that once the nerves calmed down, it was pretty fun!
But that was only the beginning of the day. I still haven't taken any pictures of 2 mile hill, generally because I'm too busy trying to breathe and keep my heart in my chest to think of it, but I will. Anyway, after bannock came the hill on my new bike. Low blood sugar, the hill and jangled nerves were no match for my new bike. It should have go-faster stripes on it, it was so fantastic to ride.
Speaking of stripes, the White Stripes are coming to Whitehorse next friday. Why? I don't know, but I figured I'd put my name in the hat to see if I could win tickets to go. It would be fun even if I'm not the biggest fan. I might go anyway, just to photograph the hullaballoo outside the Arts Centre before they start.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Gee! Gee!
Ok, so I've been really busy finishing off my thesis and finding a job and all that, but today we (Karyn and I) took some time off to go to the drugstore and return a cracked watergarden pot, and Hey Presto! the Governor General was in town so we waited around for her to arrive with all the pomp and circumstance that Whitehorse could muster on a really beautiful afternoon. Unlike the truly dedicated, we didn't sit inside the auditorium for an hour or so to hear what she had to say. No, we more casual (some might unkindly say shallow) just waited curbside and watched. Security was very very lax; a pop can abandoned on the bus stop bench in front of the legislature buildings was not safely detonated at a secure distance in case it was a bomb of some kind; amateur photographers such as myself were not pushed back with billy clubs in our throats or pepper spray in our eyes; streetfolks were not mysteriously disappeared in order to not "create a scene" (of reality). Yes, all in all it was completely civilized.
The GG, as she is affectionately known, inspected the Rangers, the old guard of the North who defend the land from those pesky invaders from Russia (...waitaminit, isn't Alaska to the immediate left of our cartographically represented territory?). Gracious as she was--bringing the G quotient up to triple-G--she talked with everyone, including the motley crew of cadets who were experiencing different stages of puberty, and probably the hooligan boy scout crew who disappeared en masse shortly before her arrival.
Ok, enough text. Bring on the pictures!
This is the Rangers, in formation for the GG's visit. She is standing off to the left behind the woman in a white shirt & body armour. Check it out.
Here you see the GG actually having a conversation with each of the Rangers. To the left in traditional blue blazer and grey flannels is my host Robin doing his part as official photographer for the territory (!). The GG is wearing a very stylish suit with a gorgeous scarf.
The GG talking to all the veterans. Apparently she took her time speaking with everyone all night long and was very gracious the entire evening.
The GG, as she is affectionately known, inspected the Rangers, the old guard of the North who defend the land from those pesky invaders from Russia (...waitaminit, isn't Alaska to the immediate left of our cartographically represented territory?). Gracious as she was--bringing the G quotient up to triple-G--she talked with everyone, including the motley crew of cadets who were experiencing different stages of puberty, and probably the hooligan boy scout crew who disappeared en masse shortly before her arrival.
Ok, enough text. Bring on the pictures!
This is the Rangers, in formation for the GG's visit. She is standing off to the left behind the woman in a white shirt & body armour. Check it out.
Here you see the GG actually having a conversation with each of the Rangers. To the left in traditional blue blazer and grey flannels is my host Robin doing his part as official photographer for the territory (!). The GG is wearing a very stylish suit with a gorgeous scarf.
The GG talking to all the veterans. Apparently she took her time speaking with everyone all night long and was very gracious the entire evening.
Friday, June 15, 2007
The Thesis
Language, Identity and Power
The term language is used in many ways, depending on the context under discussion. In a narrow theoretical sense, language is the mental module responsible for the construction and parsing of natural language. For sociolinguists, it is how this module is used to represent reality in the course of conversation that is of interest. In this context, language has everything to do with a speech community, or a group of linguistic peers that “share a language”. What “sharing a language” means is both controversial and intellectually interesting.
This paper focuses on the concept of a speech community and how concepts of power come into being regarding individual and group identities. Comparing so-called natural language communities against standardized curricula, as well as natural language communities versus technical language communities reveals fundamental issues surrounding the exercise of power through language.
What does it mean that language can be shared by more than one person? All human children, given the condition that they are around someone who speaks a language, will acquire a language. This is so ordinary as to pass outside of the interest of all except the linguistically minded. When children acquire speech, they learn what they are exposed to, the syntax and vocabulary that their language-providers speak in front of them. Somehow, children can pick out speech sounds from an environment filled with signals and noise. This has been going on for all of recorded history and probably even before. This means that the language-acquiring child learns the language that is being spoken around her, with whatever changes she makes through misperception of sound, etc.
The question of how language came into being is unsolved, and may be unsolvable until we are able to invent time machines in order to travel back and witness the first moment of language creation and transmission. Of course, we may not be able to recognize it for what it is. Modern-day researchers have a hard enough time trying to figure out contemporary acquisition, resulting in some linguists positing a child-specific phonology as opposed to recognizing that kids’ poor muscle control may be responsible for their strange way of speaking . The big question remains, which came first, language or acquisition?
To say that acquisition came first is to claim that there were some sounds that were produced that humans used to create systematic reference between things and words, and our logical minds are able to infer the rest. If language came first, this indicates that there is something in our minds that is able to symbolically encode perceptions and create language out of them, perhaps first through direct reference to concrete objects. But because there is no evidence either way, this debate could continue on forever, and is fundamentally unimportant to the key question of what language is.
The fact that any child can acquire any language does show that a child learns the arbitrary signs afforded to them at the time. Children do not learn the entire history of their language; they only acquire the immediate words and grammar to which they are exposed. The nature or name of the surrounding language doesn’t seem to matter as long as it is a human language. Any etymological information about a word is learned after the acquisition of the word; history is separate from contemporary language in this sense.
Linguistically, this is old news. What is interesting, however, is the historical import this holds for the child, which is none at all. Although the speech from which the child extracts components for acquisition is the product of historical changes which took place through person to person, history in itself means nothing: children have no knowledge of the etymology of words, or attitudes towards the particular speech pattern they are hearing. In short, children are undiscriminating language consumers when acquiring a language. They accept whatever they hear, at least at first. Whatever they hear, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard it.
Therefore children likewise have no idea that they are destined to be part of a linguistic community when they are learning the fundamentals of their language. Linguistic identity is being formed at this point; analyses and comparisons between speech community histories are unlikely if even possible in the primary language learner. The linguistic legacy a child may be born into is not immediately present to the young acquirer. It must be taught to the child after he has learned enough language to understand. What is interesting is the perceived necessity of educating a child about history, both linguistic and worldly. This is closely tied to widely held ideas of knowledge and its relationship to language.
In a way, children are inculcated with a history that they are not consciously aware of, and may never become aware of, but still affects them profoundly. A version of this idea is found in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
This statement has been taken to mean different things, including a kind of sociolinguistic determination of perception. Strong adherents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claim that language restricts the mind to ideas that can be articulated in a particular language. Although this is an interesting thought, it cannot possibly be true. It neither accounts for the fact that we continually learn new vocabulary items and linguistic structures as we get older, nor that people are expressing new strings of words all the time. It also makes it difficult to explain how people ever deal with new and previously unseen technologies, implying that without the word ipod, no one would be able to see an mp3 player.
A softer form of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis simply claims that there is a link between language and thought. This allows for the influence of culture to affect individuals’ thought through language without making too-stringent claims about what this implies with regards to the perceptions of the speakers. We can see that this is true, and that people do learn attitudes carried over from previous generations in many ways, from familial attitudes to legal precedents. Adopting the soft version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis means admitting the influence of history without damning people to repeating exactly what they happen to acquire. Individuals are more than robots fed input and producing output; they have a creative role in the use of language and are therefore responsible for how they use it. Of course, the young language acquirer has no choice but to acquire the language spoken around them, but once that mysterious act is accomplished, they can manipulate their language in whatever fashion they can conceive.
But this does lead to questions about historical knowledge, and what the nature is of the relationship between language and knowledge is in western culture ( The two are often yoked together, and the topic remains alive in serious philosophical treatises and popular thought alike. See, for example, Michel Foucault’s Power/Knowledge). For example, if language is arbitrarily acquired with the historical significance of the tokens unknown by the children (such as the etymological and historical background of certain words or grammatical structures), then is knowledge also acquired in a likewise fashion? Facts presented to children are uncritically accepted by them, potentially shaping how they collect new information and what new information is acceptable, or in concert with their current knowledge paradigm. New experiences may cause a shift in their amassed knowledge, and if the new knowledge or experience is radical enough, it may cause an epistemological upheaval that requires a shift of paradigm. This process is very similar to Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. Both systems of knowledge acquisition need to examine the primary assumptions made before actual learning takes place, and then how new knowledge is built in relation to the old.
There are two ways in which this topic is integral to the discussion of language and power. First, the claim to have knowledge of some kind, particularly knowledge of the truth, is a fundamental part of the use of language as a system of power. This is fairly self-explanatory, but I will be addressing it in more detail because it is foundational to the main argument of this paper. Secondly, the objects of language are learned, as are historical facts. Whether it is the history of a word or the history of a nation that is learned, both rely on the experiential participation of the speaker for their verification and are key to building identity relationships in the mind of the speaker. The processes that accomplish this identity building can be characterized by logical operations. The conceptual objects manipulated by these logical processes are the unexamined assumptions acquired by individuals. This claim will require a little more explanation. It, like the first point, is critical to this examination of the relationship between language and power, but is also not the intended focus. However, it reveals the type of analysis this author will be using. All concepts of power and even language communities will be seen as being concepts existing in the minds of individuals.
Language, Identity & Power
Our discussion on the topic of power requires a look at the conditions under which power can be exercised.
Power is generally envisioned in situations of “power over”, particularly in situations of one having power over another. For example, individuals or classes of individuals faced with violent oppression seem to be clear cases of an exercise of power. Acts of torture, violence and murder by the aggressor on the body of the oppressed look to the eye to be cases of unequal power dynamics. Crucially, without an idea of identity, that is, an identity in relation to someone or something else, there can be no motivation to act. In these situations, it is a case of the aggressor seeing the oppressed as being “out of line” or having a will that is non-identical to the oppressor. In these extreme situations, this difference of identity is seen as completely unacceptable, and force is used to try to bring the external world in line with the mind. This difference is constructed in the mind, but results in actions carried out by the body.
What about cases where there is no violence but only the threat of violence? And is power only involved in acts of oppression? When we talk of a movie being “powerful”, we don’t (often) mean that it was torturous to sit through. Perhaps the idea of power is more complex than the idea of “power over”. But it is clear that examining power is meaningless without the concept of identity; thinking that we are one thing or another, that we have an identity, places us in relation to everything else in the world. The mere act of saying “I am” separates an individual from the environment they are part of.
The exercise of building identity is manifestly apparent in language. Building identity requires the ability to construct relationships between concepts, all of which is done explicitly in language. Language appears to have a logical structure, which is not surprising considering the study of logic first used natural language before it moved on into straight symbols (Read, 1994)(It’s an interesting question as to which came first, logic or language and how this is related to the question as to the causal relationship between language and acquisition, but one that goes way beyond the scope of this paper). The ability to discriminate and name objects is the foundation to building identity. Objects are then put into relations of equivalence, negation or causation to one another, which creates identity. This is the domain studied by semanticians and logicians, but is also relevant to sociolinguists.
This conceptual identity gives individuals identity in the world, informing how they act, what they say, and who they think they are. In fact, every utterance could be seen as an act of identity that allies the speaker with some particular existential identity, and reveals their beliefs about the world. This also implies that identity could be created moment by moment, with the context motivating the existential identity that is articulated. In this way, identity is constantly being articulated and re-articulated as the situation around the speaker changes. This is very normal in some traditions such as psychology or Buddhist philosophy. Forensic linguists, lawyers, police officers and actors all rely on this quality of language as a revealer of identity as well.
Identity is an interesting mental construct. In some schools of thought, isolating one particular object implies the negation of everything else, that is: I am X, and therefore I am not non-X (Stcherbatskoi, 1962)(Namely the great Buddhist scholar, Dharmakirti). The two are not seen as being logically equivalent or logical implications of one another, but as being part of the same assertion. In this view, identity itself is a relation of difference, a way of distinguishing one object from another through negation. This idea is in harmony with the unintuitive findings of particle physics that there are no such things as discrete objects in the world, that matter and energy are constantly in motion, coalescing in forms then disbanding and reforming into others. In order to zero in on an object, all other things, which are in reality connected to the object, must be given the name of the negated object: “X” and “not X”.
Likewise, identity is created in groups. A group is given identity in language through sentential relationships, such as “my family is crazy”, so that every member in the category “my family” has the quality of being “crazy”. This is in opposition to all other objects that are “not my family” and “not crazy”. Linguistic groups invoke linguistic differences to create identity. This can be done through vocabulary usage or differing phonemic contrasts; whatever is the relevant perceptible parameter for creating that difference. In different circumstances, different identities are articulated. Groups, like individuals, can be thrown into chaos if they are confronted by circumstances for which they have not articulated an identity. In that case, identity needs to be built, and possibly checked against the definitions of others in order to pass through the moment of crisis when no identity exists for certain.
Sometimes, this language difference can expose people to harm when they are unable to hide their identities linguistically. The shibboleth is a phrase, password or characteristic speech sound that clearly demarks the limits of a community, and is used to separate those who belong from those who do not. Historically the shibboleth has been consciously used in times of great conflict, and has been the last word spoken by some before they were slaughtered (It’s a good Biblical word). The use of shibboleth in this sense is an extreme example of how the exercise of power relates to identity.
But not all acts of identity are so dramatically linked to power. Let’s return to the idea that everyone identifies himself or herself as occupying a specific existential position every time they use language. Identity gives the world definition, and allows the construction of relations between objects, or different conceptual configurations. Even something as simple as saying, “Hi my name is Waldo” is a strong identity claim. Most identity claims made about the self are extremely strong, and any conflict in that identity can cause major trauma to the person holding that identity.
Looking at the previous example, power is the ability to maintain identity. That is, power is the exercise of creating the difference between objects. The shibboleth is a very extreme example of this, but power can be seen in much more subdued forms. As demonstrated earlier, identity requires the distinction of objects in the mind. Power can be seen as the constant reinstitution of an identity construction. For example, if a group is seen as being powerful, it is generally because their identity as a group is very entrenched. To say that the mafia has a lot of power in Sicily is to say that there is a highly identifiable group (whether or not they admit they are part of this group is another matter), the mafia, which strenuously maintains its existence as a group. You could say the same thing about apple juice; if I say the apple juice is strong, I’m saying that whatever identity I’ve ascribed to apple juice is very present in the apple juice I’m drinking. So, whether the exercise of power is taking place physically in the world or not, it most definitely is taking place in the mind of whoever is thinking in terms of identity (which is at least the people thinking in language, and possibly everyone else besides).
This is not to belittle the real effects of physical power, but rather to point to the origins in the mind of this power, and how power relations depends upon propositional relationships. Power can also be a very positive force. Philanthropy relies upon individuals building identity relations of equivalence between themselves and other people, and is a very powerful position. The point here is that power is fundamentally about identity relations that occur as concepts within the minds of individuals, whether or not manifest themselves in action. Of course, these concepts aren’t necessarily abstract. The formulation of “When the stove is on it is hot. If you put your hand on a hot thing it will burn. Getting burned hurts.” requires the ability to figure out what the identity of “stove”, “hand”, “hot” and “burn” are but doesn’t result in any profound abstraction.
Truth
In the real world, statements are said to have more power if they are true. Of course, no one really discusses what “true” means. To claim that something is true is to make a claim about the power of its identity. Putting aside the characterization of the world as fundamentally continuous, truth is a claim about the way things are with respect to the relations that hold between objects. In the framework developed so far, truth could be seen as an almost irrefutable and very powerful identity relation. So, X is X is a convincing identity argument because its members are the same. However, it has little power because its identity is assured, and power is the active building or preservation of identity. Something like X is Y is more powerful. This identity relation could become more powerful if the construct has been made more than once, or is weighted more heavily in some way . Truth, under these conditions, would be a very powerful identity relation reinforced either by a lack of proof to the contrary or the repeated correlation of identity. Although this theory of truth seems unwieldy, reference theories of truth are far worse. There are objections to a subjective view of truth, but there can be no objection to the claim that truth is represented within individual minds. The locus of the desire to form groups and exercise power is located in human minds.
However, owing to the nature of mental representation, it is very unlikely that truth can ever be captured by the human mind. If defining any object requires that we split reality into artificial zones of being and non-being which are wholly dependent upon our minds, it is highly unlikely that we will ever articulate truth through language. That being said, this is what we attempt to do all the time. Language is use to present the world “as it is”, generally without the caveat that human articulation is limited by human perception first, and human language second. When we throw “facts” around, it is with the assumption that they are true, without examining how we actually measure the truth. This is not to say that any proposition is true, because that results in absolute inarticulacy, but rather that truth is relative to human existence. Even logic, a tool considered vital in the quest for discovering the truth, is a human construction. A very useful human construction; it is logic that is responsible for the notion of the non-discrete, continuous world at odds with our intuitive conviction of a world filled with space and concrete things.
Science, for example
Science is seen as the investigation of the way things are, or the truth. This has caused all kinds of problems for philosophers, notably Thomas Kuhn, who recognized that the researcher’s mind might paradoxically get in the way of the research itself. This observation attracted the criticism of philosophers and scientists alike who claimed that his argument threatened devolution into subjectivity and inarticulacy. He himself wrote a prologue to later printings of his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions stressing that this was not his aim. Arguably, his book precipitated the growing awareness of and interest in the scientific methodology and cognitive science within both scientific and lay communities.
Science, which is a tool to study the way things are, which in turn employs the tool of logic, claims to study the truth of things, a very powerful claim. In terms of identity relations, claiming identity to truth is probably the most powerful that can be made. This claim is an underlying assumption in science, and leads to the idea that science can come up with knowledge about the world that is unchanged by context or situation. In real scientific research, this does not mean that identity relations made at one moment are absolutely assured and might not be ratified or rejected the next moment, but it does lend scientific inquiry legitimacy greater than that given to other disciplines. Whether or not it deserves such high estimation is another question.
The philosophy of logic, something unfortunately not taught in most introductory logic classes, examines the assumptions over which logic functions. The philosophy of science attempts to do the same, but often the results of this examination do not reach scientists or scientific writers, the people who communicate with the public at large. In general, science has an exalted position, due no doubt to its claims to be discovering the truths of the universe. But an impersonal science, like any concept, does not actually exist. Scientific fields are populated with human beings who are driven by human desires.
Science is far from objective, and the best scientists are very aware of this fact. They may or may not be aware of the philosophical underpinnings that direct their research. Technological zeitgeist is definitely something that influences the research going on in any period of time, as do lingering atavistic ideas such as the incompatibility of science and religion. And of course, the personal bias of the research can also influence research. Aside from these more pragmatic considerations, the very fact that the isolation of the research question is an unreal abstraction may wreak havoc with research that aims to examine “the way things are” or objective existence.
The philosophical assumptions underlying science are not that difficult to see. For example, science clearly relies on the idea of a historical accrual of information: when learning a science, it is a historical review of the reasons and people that produced modern science presented in pageant form from the beginning of the Enlightenment to present day. Ideas are seen as being built upon by the next generation of researchers, with the occasional upset when someone like Newton or Einstein comes along (Einstein was himself skeptical about the capability of science to reinvigorate itself from generation. He is recorded as saying: “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”). This is the picture of science that Thomas Kuhn paints in The Theory of Scientific Revolutions.
What science less obviously relies upon is a notion of progress. There is a lot of hope that research projects now being engaged in with little success will one day contribute to further scientific understanding. These hopes are not without focus. For example, in the realm of physics, there was a huge amount of effort to reconcile classical physics with relativism, just as there is a big push to find evidence of the legitimacy of string theory. The desire to accomplish either of these goals relies upon the legitimacy of science as a discipline that is trying to map out a true picture of the universe. Fortunately, this is pretty assured in our science-philic society.
But whether progress is really a legitimate goal is a good question, as is whether it is a coherent one. Much is made of progress, especially technological development. Technology has been named as the cause for many improvements in the world in terms of the reduction of human suffering due to sickness and disease. Fundamentally, this shows that one of the underlying motivations is alleviation of human suffering. Again, like philanthropy, this shows at the least an identity relation of equivalence and maybe even an understanding of the inseparable nature of things. But whether or not technology is changing the world for the better is not certain, as we are now seeing and questioning the effects of previous technologies. It appears to some that the solution to the problems that have been created is more technologies, but better ones (Although I only mention it here, this is a huge debate that rages on, and one that cannot be addressed with any degree of thoroughness in this paper).
Even so, the popular influence of science can be seen everywhere. Books, magazines and websites concern themselves with “the science of yoga” or publish articles fortified by facts or statistics touted as being scientific. Science has huge cachet all over the world. This in itself is not a problem, but the willingness of people to adopt any view dubbed “scientific” in order to prop up their own identity relation-induced beliefs about the world is no better or worse than uncritically believing in anything else. Science, to the popular imagination is powerful enough for people to have unskeptical faith in it, a very unscientific but very human viewpoint.
Standardization
Unfortunately, these fundamentalist beliefs are frequently reinforced by the impenetrability of the technical language that surrounds most published science. Technical terms become the shibboleths that separate the technicians of science from the laity. Sensing that these technicians have access to the Truth but being unable to understand what they say, people accord them near divine powers. But science is not alone in this, it is a fundamental problem found with any technical language.
Technical languages come from the desire for standardization and universality within a realm of study, and theoretically allow researchers to communicate clearly with each other. This seems like a very good idea, but now that we are interested in finding out underlying assumptions, what is behind this idea? Certainly, standardization must rely upon the assumption of universality of knowledge and the universality of training; otherwise standardization of a technical language is meant only for the class of technocrats and no one else . Without the idea of universality, technical language becomes an exercise in creating a code to encrypt rather than an effort to add to a body of knowledge. In most societies, the majority of people enter some kind of technical field that uses a standardized technical language. Plumbers, bakers, farmers, beekeepers and neuroscientists: all have a technical language that they use with their colleagues.
How is standardization implemented? There must be a single official version developed and distributed. In order for this to work, the standardized version must be accepted by enough people for it to have power. That is, enough people must be able to identify with (build an identity relation to) enough of the version for it to be acceptable. Of course, not everyone believes in all aspects of the official version. Attempts are constantly being made to make it closer to the truth, or the identity that individuals with differing versions know (Obviously, there is a bias in the standardization with regards to power relations; the nations with the most international influence (usually due to war or organized violence of some sort) set the standard. But wars are not fought by nations, but by people. People fight them because they have a fundamental identity they believe in, (e.g. I am a North American (Mexicans refer to Americans and Canadians but not themselves as North Americans, by the way), I live the best kind of life in the world, I am free, My nation is under threat (therefore I am under threat because I am my nation), The people who threaten me are wrong, therefore I will kill to preserve my lifestyle)
But, we are all born into systems that we don’t necessarily agree with. It’s not like we can undo what has happened before, just like we don’t choose the language we acquire. What we can do is understand the difference between an assumption and a logical conclusion in order to be able to make better use of the tool of logic and make “freer” decisions in our lives. That is, decisions that rely on our own thinking more and involve fewer prefabricated assumptions.
).
Fundamentally, this relies on the intertranslatability of concepts of identity between individuals. In terms of language, this probably means that the words do not have exactly the same meaning in the separate minds of two individuals, but enough that functional communication can take place. If there is question about the true meaning of a word or phrase, dictionaries and grammars can provide a standardized source of information. Ironically, this source comes from the same process of figuring out the most common individual usages and compiling them. Standardization is similar to the pragmatic functionalism of an international authority set up to mediate between nations. In our case, the authority is the commonly believed fiction of “language” as a real & authoritative entity. This ties in directly with ideas of literacy and curriculum building.
Curriculum is standardized, and also a force of standardization. It is the job of the curriculum to teach young people what knowledge they are seen as needing to know in a particular society.
This knowledge is intimately connected to the identity constructed within each child through the use of standardized language. Indeed, standardized language itself is a source of identity that can be used to demonstrate identity to some segment of the world. Curriculum is ideally distributed throughout a region that has some identity, that is, an area that contains people willing to defend a common identity against dissolution. This standardized knowledge will perpetuate its identity by building identity in the learners, generally children still partially suffering from the effects of youth and unable to be skeptical about the information they receive. In this dynamic, the basic tensions between institutions and revolutionary paradigm shift can clearly be seen: standardization perpetuates the same knowledge, and only a break with the paradigm allows new information in to the standardized identity. The break with the paradigm destabilizes the identity or truth-value of the standardized knowledge, allowing people to rethink their adherence to it.
Standardization in language can be very important because language is the medium through which all other knowledge is taught. Having access to the official version is important if its legitimacy is to be examined critically and then accepted or refuted. Language teachers who teach in a community where the dominant or standardized language is not primarily spoken face a great challenge. They must try to maintain the identity of the nonstandard community while still creating opportunities for their students to access the standardized world, to teach them the shibboleths of power. Pluralistic, egalitarian societies see the potential benefit of preserving nonstandard languages and cultures in that they create a sense of inclusion and therefore identity within subgroups, and may be the source of an advantageous paradigm shift. But just as this is a strength, it can also be a weakness if the subgroups build an insular identity that does not become contiguous with the dominant identity in some way. These are curriculum-building’s inherent tensions: inclusion of other approaches (heterodoxy) versus dilution of the standard.
Of course, most societies are not absolutely pluralistic and egalitarian. Groups form identity from the negation of everything else, so the individual will find himself or herself excluded by those who believe the individual does not have identity with the group. If the individual admits that this is what happening, he or she will understand he or she is being rejected. If the individual doesn’t see or identify what is happening, then he or she will not understand and will have to build some other story as to why he or she was not included. Individuals act individually in accordance with the identity they have built for themselves. This can mean that they can conform to a type or stereotype identity or they can create a more “authentic” identity for themselves (See Charles Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity or the more in depth Sources of the Self for a lively and enlightening discussion of the concept of authenticity in the modern world. ). For example, in Marxist thought, the lower middle class may identify with the lifestyle of the middle class, one which they do not actually materially enjoy but would like to, and this will cause them to support the status quo as opposed to revolutionary actions. Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony is also another example of the sometimes unbelievably chimerical quality of identity. The drive for standardization reflects the belief in a homogenous and universal identity, or the truth of reality.
The idea of standardization in language comes with a concept of literacy as the benchmark for the possession of adequate standardized knowledge. Under this view, literacy is clearly a marker of group identity:
The standardized language is a shibboleth dialect, which is a second language to some. It points to where the power lies, i.e. with the dominant or standardized speech community. Those who are born part of the shibboleth dialect are those who already identify with the dominant identity class. All others learn the dominant dialect through the standard curriculum.
In some ways, this dialect can be easier to adapt to than say trying to change skin colour or gender. And depending on where you are, even if the dialect is spoken with an accent, it still is accepted. Examples of the standard shibboleth include Britain’s Received Pronunciation, or any of the official languages set up by institutional bodies (such as the Académie française, Real Academia Española, or Nederlandse Taalunie). Literacy traditionally includes written language as the shibboleth, and this is most definitely still true. Poor, or more properly nonstandard, spelling continues to be viewed as a sign of low intelligence, when it generally indicates a lack of access to standardized curriculum. And it is not a huge stretch to see how this concept can be extended to the technical language question: the technician is the literate, versed in the language of the field. In this case, being literate means knowing the shibboleth that gives access to power in the technical community.
What makes a shibboleth dialect distinct? It cannot be strict phonemic adherence, as an accent is ok. Is it always a difference in vocabulary, or can it involve different grammatical structures? This is what sociolinguists are set to discover. What they are searching for are the assumptions we for the most part have accepted uncritically as being normal. It is an interesting question as to whether or not sociolinguistics would exist without curriculum, or whether any specialized field of knowledge would. Would the same assumptions that exist around language and knowledge be so widespread, and would university education exist the way it does now? Perhaps of the assumptions we possess should be examined in order to come up with a better way of approaching research questions. But perhaps this would involve asking larger teleological and ontological questions about the role of identity, language and power in each individual person, the answering of which could comfortably occupy an entire lifetime.
Literacy versus Advocacy
Let’s review what we know so far:
A language community is made up of individuals that have constructed a relationship of identity between themselves and their concept of the community. This concept may not be identical, and in fact probably isn’t, but is functionally sufficient for the individuals to accept that their definition of the community is still accurate (i.e. there are no glaring discrepancies between individual definitions that result in communication disasters), and their identity construction still legitimate. Identity relations are built through language, which allows the symbolic naming, building, and articulating of identity relations. Power comes about from building and preserving these identity relations. If the majority of people claim the same identity, it will be powerful, and could be exclusionary in nature. Strong identity relations could result in individuals choosing to employ physical violence in order to protect their identity relations. With or without the presence of physical violence, a more powerful dominant language group comes into being thanks to identity relations. The identity of the dominant group is preserved through the standardization of the identity and its dissemination, particularly through the education of the next generation.
In this way, curriculum is vital to the perpetuation of the speech community identity. Likewise, technical languages rely on a group identity and education to preserve themselves. The group with the most power is able to preserve its group identity by having people join the group in order to get whatever benefits go along with the power. These benefits could be as simple as inclusion. The group therefore continues to have membership, and its identity is retained or even enlarged. The dominant group faces the tension of not including new information if it does not embrace its plurality and allow the active contribution of its constituent members. In an egalitarian and pluralistic society, standardizing forces such as curriculum building must be flexible enough to permit the participation of subgroups so that they bond in identity to the dominant group.
For a very long time, advocacy was seen as being a feasible approach for ensuring that the nonstandard and relatively powerless could gain equanimity within a group. In fact, this is not a true solution, but only a stopgap measure. Advocacy allows disenfranchised subgroups representation to the powerful dominant group, but it is not an egalitarian solution. What advocacy can do is ensure the protection of the subgroup within the identity of the dominant group, but it does not provide the two groups with equal standing. Like technical languages, the community survives by the innovation and desire of individuals to be members of the group.
Instead of an advocacy model which presumes the inferiority of identity of a subgroup, a group within another group, a model based on multiliteracy more accurately reflects the identity of an egalitarian idea. What this entails is the interpenetrability of individual dialects; that is, learning on all sides. In a community, the more powerful language group has less translating to do than the less powerful. That is, the dominant language is the language of currency, as Bourdieu would put it. In a multiliterate community, the dominant group would be engaged in learning the dialects of the subgroups, instead of the subgroups “studying up”.
In a way, this is what actually happens in the real world. Humans, who seem to be instinctively social, learn the dialect of other people when they speak to them even though each individual has their own version of their acquired language. Of course, the closer they appear to be in linguistic identity, the easier it is for us to understand them. This ability to understand is aided by our concepts of identity; if we look for similarity as opposed to difference, we are far more likely to find it (This statement is born out in many psycholinguistic and psychological studies that show the effects that priming has on perception. Identity is definitely a kind of priming in that is prepares the thinker for what he or she is going to perceive. For example, if a person thinks, “We have a lot in common”, they are more likely to see what is common instead of what is different. This is basically priming). Fundamentally, this is an identity relation.
Throughout this paper we have observed that language and power are most intimately connected through the process of identity building. What the origin is of this human compulsion to name and compare everything is still completely mysterious, but that it occurs cannot be debated. The issues surrounding power and language in terms of standardization are particularly fascinating when examining curriculum-building and technical languages. Both share in the same strengths and problems that standardization brings. Of course, standardization rests upon some fundamental assumptions that are not generally part of any analysis. Fundamentally, identity is responsible for the desire for standardization (the preservation of group identity) as well as the fight against it (the preservation of individual or subgroup identity). Addressing the problems of standardization appears daunting at best and impossible at worst. By remembering that one’s conceptual foundation lies in identity, the solution is readily apparent: generosity of one’s own identity.
Bibliography
Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/knowledge. Toronto, ON: Random House of Canada Limited.
Huxley, Aldous (1954). The Doors of Perception. London, UK: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
McDermott, Ray (2005). Commentary on Part 1 “An Entry Into Further Language”: Contra Mystification by Language Hierarchies. In T. McCarty (Ed.), Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling. (pp. 111-124).Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Read, Stephen (1994). Thinking about Logic: an introduction to the philosophy of logic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Stcherbatskoi, F.I. (1962). Buddhist Logic. Dover, UK: Dover Publications.
Taylor, Charles (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto, ON: House of Anasi Press Ltd.
“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things”.
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
The term language is used in many ways, depending on the context under discussion. In a narrow theoretical sense, language is the mental module responsible for the construction and parsing of natural language. For sociolinguists, it is how this module is used to represent reality in the course of conversation that is of interest. In this context, language has everything to do with a speech community, or a group of linguistic peers that “share a language”. What “sharing a language” means is both controversial and intellectually interesting.
This paper focuses on the concept of a speech community and how concepts of power come into being regarding individual and group identities. Comparing so-called natural language communities against standardized curricula, as well as natural language communities versus technical language communities reveals fundamental issues surrounding the exercise of power through language.
Language communities
What does it mean that language can be shared by more than one person? All human children, given the condition that they are around someone who speaks a language, will acquire a language. This is so ordinary as to pass outside of the interest of all except the linguistically minded. When children acquire speech, they learn what they are exposed to, the syntax and vocabulary that their language-providers speak in front of them. Somehow, children can pick out speech sounds from an environment filled with signals and noise. This has been going on for all of recorded history and probably even before. This means that the language-acquiring child learns the language that is being spoken around her, with whatever changes she makes through misperception of sound, etc.
The question of how language came into being is unsolved, and may be unsolvable until we are able to invent time machines in order to travel back and witness the first moment of language creation and transmission. Of course, we may not be able to recognize it for what it is. Modern-day researchers have a hard enough time trying to figure out contemporary acquisition, resulting in some linguists positing a child-specific phonology as opposed to recognizing that kids’ poor muscle control may be responsible for their strange way of speaking . The big question remains, which came first, language or acquisition?
To say that acquisition came first is to claim that there were some sounds that were produced that humans used to create systematic reference between things and words, and our logical minds are able to infer the rest. If language came first, this indicates that there is something in our minds that is able to symbolically encode perceptions and create language out of them, perhaps first through direct reference to concrete objects. But because there is no evidence either way, this debate could continue on forever, and is fundamentally unimportant to the key question of what language is.
The fact that any child can acquire any language does show that a child learns the arbitrary signs afforded to them at the time. Children do not learn the entire history of their language; they only acquire the immediate words and grammar to which they are exposed. The nature or name of the surrounding language doesn’t seem to matter as long as it is a human language. Any etymological information about a word is learned after the acquisition of the word; history is separate from contemporary language in this sense.
Linguistically, this is old news. What is interesting, however, is the historical import this holds for the child, which is none at all. Although the speech from which the child extracts components for acquisition is the product of historical changes which took place through person to person, history in itself means nothing: children have no knowledge of the etymology of words, or attitudes towards the particular speech pattern they are hearing. In short, children are undiscriminating language consumers when acquiring a language. They accept whatever they hear, at least at first. Whatever they hear, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard it.
Therefore children likewise have no idea that they are destined to be part of a linguistic community when they are learning the fundamentals of their language. Linguistic identity is being formed at this point; analyses and comparisons between speech community histories are unlikely if even possible in the primary language learner. The linguistic legacy a child may be born into is not immediately present to the young acquirer. It must be taught to the child after he has learned enough language to understand. What is interesting is the perceived necessity of educating a child about history, both linguistic and worldly. This is closely tied to widely held ideas of knowledge and its relationship to language.
In a way, children are inculcated with a history that they are not consciously aware of, and may never become aware of, but still affects them profoundly. A version of this idea is found in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language […] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."— (Language, Thought and Reality pp. 212–214).
This statement has been taken to mean different things, including a kind of sociolinguistic determination of perception. Strong adherents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claim that language restricts the mind to ideas that can be articulated in a particular language. Although this is an interesting thought, it cannot possibly be true. It neither accounts for the fact that we continually learn new vocabulary items and linguistic structures as we get older, nor that people are expressing new strings of words all the time. It also makes it difficult to explain how people ever deal with new and previously unseen technologies, implying that without the word ipod, no one would be able to see an mp3 player.
A softer form of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis simply claims that there is a link between language and thought. This allows for the influence of culture to affect individuals’ thought through language without making too-stringent claims about what this implies with regards to the perceptions of the speakers. We can see that this is true, and that people do learn attitudes carried over from previous generations in many ways, from familial attitudes to legal precedents. Adopting the soft version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis means admitting the influence of history without damning people to repeating exactly what they happen to acquire. Individuals are more than robots fed input and producing output; they have a creative role in the use of language and are therefore responsible for how they use it. Of course, the young language acquirer has no choice but to acquire the language spoken around them, but once that mysterious act is accomplished, they can manipulate their language in whatever fashion they can conceive.
But this does lead to questions about historical knowledge, and what the nature is of the relationship between language and knowledge is in western culture ( The two are often yoked together, and the topic remains alive in serious philosophical treatises and popular thought alike. See, for example, Michel Foucault’s Power/Knowledge). For example, if language is arbitrarily acquired with the historical significance of the tokens unknown by the children (such as the etymological and historical background of certain words or grammatical structures), then is knowledge also acquired in a likewise fashion? Facts presented to children are uncritically accepted by them, potentially shaping how they collect new information and what new information is acceptable, or in concert with their current knowledge paradigm. New experiences may cause a shift in their amassed knowledge, and if the new knowledge or experience is radical enough, it may cause an epistemological upheaval that requires a shift of paradigm. This process is very similar to Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. Both systems of knowledge acquisition need to examine the primary assumptions made before actual learning takes place, and then how new knowledge is built in relation to the old.
There are two ways in which this topic is integral to the discussion of language and power. First, the claim to have knowledge of some kind, particularly knowledge of the truth, is a fundamental part of the use of language as a system of power. This is fairly self-explanatory, but I will be addressing it in more detail because it is foundational to the main argument of this paper. Secondly, the objects of language are learned, as are historical facts. Whether it is the history of a word or the history of a nation that is learned, both rely on the experiential participation of the speaker for their verification and are key to building identity relationships in the mind of the speaker. The processes that accomplish this identity building can be characterized by logical operations. The conceptual objects manipulated by these logical processes are the unexamined assumptions acquired by individuals. This claim will require a little more explanation. It, like the first point, is critical to this examination of the relationship between language and power, but is also not the intended focus. However, it reveals the type of analysis this author will be using. All concepts of power and even language communities will be seen as being concepts existing in the minds of individuals.
Language, Identity & Power
Our discussion on the topic of power requires a look at the conditions under which power can be exercised.
Power is generally envisioned in situations of “power over”, particularly in situations of one having power over another. For example, individuals or classes of individuals faced with violent oppression seem to be clear cases of an exercise of power. Acts of torture, violence and murder by the aggressor on the body of the oppressed look to the eye to be cases of unequal power dynamics. Crucially, without an idea of identity, that is, an identity in relation to someone or something else, there can be no motivation to act. In these situations, it is a case of the aggressor seeing the oppressed as being “out of line” or having a will that is non-identical to the oppressor. In these extreme situations, this difference of identity is seen as completely unacceptable, and force is used to try to bring the external world in line with the mind. This difference is constructed in the mind, but results in actions carried out by the body.
What about cases where there is no violence but only the threat of violence? And is power only involved in acts of oppression? When we talk of a movie being “powerful”, we don’t (often) mean that it was torturous to sit through. Perhaps the idea of power is more complex than the idea of “power over”. But it is clear that examining power is meaningless without the concept of identity; thinking that we are one thing or another, that we have an identity, places us in relation to everything else in the world. The mere act of saying “I am” separates an individual from the environment they are part of.
The exercise of building identity is manifestly apparent in language. Building identity requires the ability to construct relationships between concepts, all of which is done explicitly in language. Language appears to have a logical structure, which is not surprising considering the study of logic first used natural language before it moved on into straight symbols (Read, 1994)(It’s an interesting question as to which came first, logic or language and how this is related to the question as to the causal relationship between language and acquisition, but one that goes way beyond the scope of this paper). The ability to discriminate and name objects is the foundation to building identity. Objects are then put into relations of equivalence, negation or causation to one another, which creates identity. This is the domain studied by semanticians and logicians, but is also relevant to sociolinguists.
This conceptual identity gives individuals identity in the world, informing how they act, what they say, and who they think they are. In fact, every utterance could be seen as an act of identity that allies the speaker with some particular existential identity, and reveals their beliefs about the world. This also implies that identity could be created moment by moment, with the context motivating the existential identity that is articulated. In this way, identity is constantly being articulated and re-articulated as the situation around the speaker changes. This is very normal in some traditions such as psychology or Buddhist philosophy. Forensic linguists, lawyers, police officers and actors all rely on this quality of language as a revealer of identity as well.
Identity is an interesting mental construct. In some schools of thought, isolating one particular object implies the negation of everything else, that is: I am X, and therefore I am not non-X (Stcherbatskoi, 1962)(Namely the great Buddhist scholar, Dharmakirti). The two are not seen as being logically equivalent or logical implications of one another, but as being part of the same assertion. In this view, identity itself is a relation of difference, a way of distinguishing one object from another through negation. This idea is in harmony with the unintuitive findings of particle physics that there are no such things as discrete objects in the world, that matter and energy are constantly in motion, coalescing in forms then disbanding and reforming into others. In order to zero in on an object, all other things, which are in reality connected to the object, must be given the name of the negated object: “X” and “not X”.
Likewise, identity is created in groups. A group is given identity in language through sentential relationships, such as “my family is crazy”, so that every member in the category “my family” has the quality of being “crazy”. This is in opposition to all other objects that are “not my family” and “not crazy”. Linguistic groups invoke linguistic differences to create identity. This can be done through vocabulary usage or differing phonemic contrasts; whatever is the relevant perceptible parameter for creating that difference. In different circumstances, different identities are articulated. Groups, like individuals, can be thrown into chaos if they are confronted by circumstances for which they have not articulated an identity. In that case, identity needs to be built, and possibly checked against the definitions of others in order to pass through the moment of crisis when no identity exists for certain.
Sometimes, this language difference can expose people to harm when they are unable to hide their identities linguistically. The shibboleth is a phrase, password or characteristic speech sound that clearly demarks the limits of a community, and is used to separate those who belong from those who do not. Historically the shibboleth has been consciously used in times of great conflict, and has been the last word spoken by some before they were slaughtered (It’s a good Biblical word). The use of shibboleth in this sense is an extreme example of how the exercise of power relates to identity.
But not all acts of identity are so dramatically linked to power. Let’s return to the idea that everyone identifies himself or herself as occupying a specific existential position every time they use language. Identity gives the world definition, and allows the construction of relations between objects, or different conceptual configurations. Even something as simple as saying, “Hi my name is Waldo” is a strong identity claim. Most identity claims made about the self are extremely strong, and any conflict in that identity can cause major trauma to the person holding that identity.
Looking at the previous example, power is the ability to maintain identity. That is, power is the exercise of creating the difference between objects. The shibboleth is a very extreme example of this, but power can be seen in much more subdued forms. As demonstrated earlier, identity requires the distinction of objects in the mind. Power can be seen as the constant reinstitution of an identity construction. For example, if a group is seen as being powerful, it is generally because their identity as a group is very entrenched. To say that the mafia has a lot of power in Sicily is to say that there is a highly identifiable group (whether or not they admit they are part of this group is another matter), the mafia, which strenuously maintains its existence as a group. You could say the same thing about apple juice; if I say the apple juice is strong, I’m saying that whatever identity I’ve ascribed to apple juice is very present in the apple juice I’m drinking. So, whether the exercise of power is taking place physically in the world or not, it most definitely is taking place in the mind of whoever is thinking in terms of identity (which is at least the people thinking in language, and possibly everyone else besides).
This is not to belittle the real effects of physical power, but rather to point to the origins in the mind of this power, and how power relations depends upon propositional relationships. Power can also be a very positive force. Philanthropy relies upon individuals building identity relations of equivalence between themselves and other people, and is a very powerful position. The point here is that power is fundamentally about identity relations that occur as concepts within the minds of individuals, whether or not manifest themselves in action. Of course, these concepts aren’t necessarily abstract. The formulation of “When the stove is on it is hot. If you put your hand on a hot thing it will burn. Getting burned hurts.” requires the ability to figure out what the identity of “stove”, “hand”, “hot” and “burn” are but doesn’t result in any profound abstraction.
Truth
In the real world, statements are said to have more power if they are true. Of course, no one really discusses what “true” means. To claim that something is true is to make a claim about the power of its identity. Putting aside the characterization of the world as fundamentally continuous, truth is a claim about the way things are with respect to the relations that hold between objects. In the framework developed so far, truth could be seen as an almost irrefutable and very powerful identity relation. So, X is X is a convincing identity argument because its members are the same. However, it has little power because its identity is assured, and power is the active building or preservation of identity. Something like X is Y is more powerful. This identity relation could become more powerful if the construct has been made more than once, or is weighted more heavily in some way . Truth, under these conditions, would be a very powerful identity relation reinforced either by a lack of proof to the contrary or the repeated correlation of identity. Although this theory of truth seems unwieldy, reference theories of truth are far worse. There are objections to a subjective view of truth, but there can be no objection to the claim that truth is represented within individual minds. The locus of the desire to form groups and exercise power is located in human minds.
However, owing to the nature of mental representation, it is very unlikely that truth can ever be captured by the human mind. If defining any object requires that we split reality into artificial zones of being and non-being which are wholly dependent upon our minds, it is highly unlikely that we will ever articulate truth through language. That being said, this is what we attempt to do all the time. Language is use to present the world “as it is”, generally without the caveat that human articulation is limited by human perception first, and human language second. When we throw “facts” around, it is with the assumption that they are true, without examining how we actually measure the truth. This is not to say that any proposition is true, because that results in absolute inarticulacy, but rather that truth is relative to human existence. Even logic, a tool considered vital in the quest for discovering the truth, is a human construction. A very useful human construction; it is logic that is responsible for the notion of the non-discrete, continuous world at odds with our intuitive conviction of a world filled with space and concrete things.
Science, for example
Science is seen as the investigation of the way things are, or the truth. This has caused all kinds of problems for philosophers, notably Thomas Kuhn, who recognized that the researcher’s mind might paradoxically get in the way of the research itself. This observation attracted the criticism of philosophers and scientists alike who claimed that his argument threatened devolution into subjectivity and inarticulacy. He himself wrote a prologue to later printings of his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions stressing that this was not his aim. Arguably, his book precipitated the growing awareness of and interest in the scientific methodology and cognitive science within both scientific and lay communities.
Science, which is a tool to study the way things are, which in turn employs the tool of logic, claims to study the truth of things, a very powerful claim. In terms of identity relations, claiming identity to truth is probably the most powerful that can be made. This claim is an underlying assumption in science, and leads to the idea that science can come up with knowledge about the world that is unchanged by context or situation. In real scientific research, this does not mean that identity relations made at one moment are absolutely assured and might not be ratified or rejected the next moment, but it does lend scientific inquiry legitimacy greater than that given to other disciplines. Whether or not it deserves such high estimation is another question.
The philosophy of logic, something unfortunately not taught in most introductory logic classes, examines the assumptions over which logic functions. The philosophy of science attempts to do the same, but often the results of this examination do not reach scientists or scientific writers, the people who communicate with the public at large. In general, science has an exalted position, due no doubt to its claims to be discovering the truths of the universe. But an impersonal science, like any concept, does not actually exist. Scientific fields are populated with human beings who are driven by human desires.
Science is far from objective, and the best scientists are very aware of this fact. They may or may not be aware of the philosophical underpinnings that direct their research. Technological zeitgeist is definitely something that influences the research going on in any period of time, as do lingering atavistic ideas such as the incompatibility of science and religion. And of course, the personal bias of the research can also influence research. Aside from these more pragmatic considerations, the very fact that the isolation of the research question is an unreal abstraction may wreak havoc with research that aims to examine “the way things are” or objective existence.
The philosophical assumptions underlying science are not that difficult to see. For example, science clearly relies on the idea of a historical accrual of information: when learning a science, it is a historical review of the reasons and people that produced modern science presented in pageant form from the beginning of the Enlightenment to present day. Ideas are seen as being built upon by the next generation of researchers, with the occasional upset when someone like Newton or Einstein comes along (Einstein was himself skeptical about the capability of science to reinvigorate itself from generation. He is recorded as saying: “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”). This is the picture of science that Thomas Kuhn paints in The Theory of Scientific Revolutions.
What science less obviously relies upon is a notion of progress. There is a lot of hope that research projects now being engaged in with little success will one day contribute to further scientific understanding. These hopes are not without focus. For example, in the realm of physics, there was a huge amount of effort to reconcile classical physics with relativism, just as there is a big push to find evidence of the legitimacy of string theory. The desire to accomplish either of these goals relies upon the legitimacy of science as a discipline that is trying to map out a true picture of the universe. Fortunately, this is pretty assured in our science-philic society.
But whether progress is really a legitimate goal is a good question, as is whether it is a coherent one. Much is made of progress, especially technological development. Technology has been named as the cause for many improvements in the world in terms of the reduction of human suffering due to sickness and disease. Fundamentally, this shows that one of the underlying motivations is alleviation of human suffering. Again, like philanthropy, this shows at the least an identity relation of equivalence and maybe even an understanding of the inseparable nature of things. But whether or not technology is changing the world for the better is not certain, as we are now seeing and questioning the effects of previous technologies. It appears to some that the solution to the problems that have been created is more technologies, but better ones (Although I only mention it here, this is a huge debate that rages on, and one that cannot be addressed with any degree of thoroughness in this paper).
Even so, the popular influence of science can be seen everywhere. Books, magazines and websites concern themselves with “the science of yoga” or publish articles fortified by facts or statistics touted as being scientific. Science has huge cachet all over the world. This in itself is not a problem, but the willingness of people to adopt any view dubbed “scientific” in order to prop up their own identity relation-induced beliefs about the world is no better or worse than uncritically believing in anything else. Science, to the popular imagination is powerful enough for people to have unskeptical faith in it, a very unscientific but very human viewpoint.
Standardization
Unfortunately, these fundamentalist beliefs are frequently reinforced by the impenetrability of the technical language that surrounds most published science. Technical terms become the shibboleths that separate the technicians of science from the laity. Sensing that these technicians have access to the Truth but being unable to understand what they say, people accord them near divine powers. But science is not alone in this, it is a fundamental problem found with any technical language.
Technical languages come from the desire for standardization and universality within a realm of study, and theoretically allow researchers to communicate clearly with each other. This seems like a very good idea, but now that we are interested in finding out underlying assumptions, what is behind this idea? Certainly, standardization must rely upon the assumption of universality of knowledge and the universality of training; otherwise standardization of a technical language is meant only for the class of technocrats and no one else . Without the idea of universality, technical language becomes an exercise in creating a code to encrypt rather than an effort to add to a body of knowledge. In most societies, the majority of people enter some kind of technical field that uses a standardized technical language. Plumbers, bakers, farmers, beekeepers and neuroscientists: all have a technical language that they use with their colleagues.
How is standardization implemented? There must be a single official version developed and distributed. In order for this to work, the standardized version must be accepted by enough people for it to have power. That is, enough people must be able to identify with (build an identity relation to) enough of the version for it to be acceptable. Of course, not everyone believes in all aspects of the official version. Attempts are constantly being made to make it closer to the truth, or the identity that individuals with differing versions know (Obviously, there is a bias in the standardization with regards to power relations; the nations with the most international influence (usually due to war or organized violence of some sort) set the standard. But wars are not fought by nations, but by people. People fight them because they have a fundamental identity they believe in, (e.g. I am a North American (Mexicans refer to Americans and Canadians but not themselves as North Americans, by the way), I live the best kind of life in the world, I am free, My nation is under threat (therefore I am under threat because I am my nation), The people who threaten me are wrong, therefore I will kill to preserve my lifestyle)
But, we are all born into systems that we don’t necessarily agree with. It’s not like we can undo what has happened before, just like we don’t choose the language we acquire. What we can do is understand the difference between an assumption and a logical conclusion in order to be able to make better use of the tool of logic and make “freer” decisions in our lives. That is, decisions that rely on our own thinking more and involve fewer prefabricated assumptions.
).
Fundamentally, this relies on the intertranslatability of concepts of identity between individuals. In terms of language, this probably means that the words do not have exactly the same meaning in the separate minds of two individuals, but enough that functional communication can take place. If there is question about the true meaning of a word or phrase, dictionaries and grammars can provide a standardized source of information. Ironically, this source comes from the same process of figuring out the most common individual usages and compiling them. Standardization is similar to the pragmatic functionalism of an international authority set up to mediate between nations. In our case, the authority is the commonly believed fiction of “language” as a real & authoritative entity. This ties in directly with ideas of literacy and curriculum building.
Curriculum is standardized, and also a force of standardization. It is the job of the curriculum to teach young people what knowledge they are seen as needing to know in a particular society.
This knowledge is intimately connected to the identity constructed within each child through the use of standardized language. Indeed, standardized language itself is a source of identity that can be used to demonstrate identity to some segment of the world. Curriculum is ideally distributed throughout a region that has some identity, that is, an area that contains people willing to defend a common identity against dissolution. This standardized knowledge will perpetuate its identity by building identity in the learners, generally children still partially suffering from the effects of youth and unable to be skeptical about the information they receive. In this dynamic, the basic tensions between institutions and revolutionary paradigm shift can clearly be seen: standardization perpetuates the same knowledge, and only a break with the paradigm allows new information in to the standardized identity. The break with the paradigm destabilizes the identity or truth-value of the standardized knowledge, allowing people to rethink their adherence to it.
Standardization in language can be very important because language is the medium through which all other knowledge is taught. Having access to the official version is important if its legitimacy is to be examined critically and then accepted or refuted. Language teachers who teach in a community where the dominant or standardized language is not primarily spoken face a great challenge. They must try to maintain the identity of the nonstandard community while still creating opportunities for their students to access the standardized world, to teach them the shibboleths of power. Pluralistic, egalitarian societies see the potential benefit of preserving nonstandard languages and cultures in that they create a sense of inclusion and therefore identity within subgroups, and may be the source of an advantageous paradigm shift. But just as this is a strength, it can also be a weakness if the subgroups build an insular identity that does not become contiguous with the dominant identity in some way. These are curriculum-building’s inherent tensions: inclusion of other approaches (heterodoxy) versus dilution of the standard.
Of course, most societies are not absolutely pluralistic and egalitarian. Groups form identity from the negation of everything else, so the individual will find himself or herself excluded by those who believe the individual does not have identity with the group. If the individual admits that this is what happening, he or she will understand he or she is being rejected. If the individual doesn’t see or identify what is happening, then he or she will not understand and will have to build some other story as to why he or she was not included. Individuals act individually in accordance with the identity they have built for themselves. This can mean that they can conform to a type or stereotype identity or they can create a more “authentic” identity for themselves (See Charles Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity or the more in depth Sources of the Self for a lively and enlightening discussion of the concept of authenticity in the modern world. ). For example, in Marxist thought, the lower middle class may identify with the lifestyle of the middle class, one which they do not actually materially enjoy but would like to, and this will cause them to support the status quo as opposed to revolutionary actions. Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony is also another example of the sometimes unbelievably chimerical quality of identity. The drive for standardization reflects the belief in a homogenous and universal identity, or the truth of reality.
The idea of standardization in language comes with a concept of literacy as the benchmark for the possession of adequate standardized knowledge. Under this view, literacy is clearly a marker of group identity:
"[L] iteracy is no magic technology of the mind that however difficult to acquire, transforms people from cognitively simple to complex. Rather, literacy is a tool used in specific ways to do the institutional bidding of the wider culture. Literacy refers less crucially to a set of skills than to a medium of participation…If there is a differential in reading and writing competencies across subgroups in a population, this is better understood as an index of how much people have had access to the institutions requiring literacy than as an index of their mental skills. If differential access leads to a reification of persons into literate and illiterate camps over generations, then it is best understood that this is what the culture in question does: It divides people into classes and uses literacy as one of the dividing lines .
In this view, literacy is seen as something produced by exposure to standardization, which in turn is measured as a degree of competence within the standardized world."
- McDermott, Ray (2005). Commentary on Part 1 “An Entry Into Further Language”: Contra Mystification by Language Hierarchies.
In this view, literacy is seen as something produced by exposure to standardization, which in turn is measured as a degree of competence within the standardized world."
- McDermott, Ray (2005). Commentary on Part 1 “An Entry Into Further Language”: Contra Mystification by Language Hierarchies.
The standardized language is a shibboleth dialect, which is a second language to some. It points to where the power lies, i.e. with the dominant or standardized speech community. Those who are born part of the shibboleth dialect are those who already identify with the dominant identity class. All others learn the dominant dialect through the standard curriculum.
In some ways, this dialect can be easier to adapt to than say trying to change skin colour or gender. And depending on where you are, even if the dialect is spoken with an accent, it still is accepted. Examples of the standard shibboleth include Britain’s Received Pronunciation, or any of the official languages set up by institutional bodies (such as the Académie française, Real Academia Española, or Nederlandse Taalunie). Literacy traditionally includes written language as the shibboleth, and this is most definitely still true. Poor, or more properly nonstandard, spelling continues to be viewed as a sign of low intelligence, when it generally indicates a lack of access to standardized curriculum. And it is not a huge stretch to see how this concept can be extended to the technical language question: the technician is the literate, versed in the language of the field. In this case, being literate means knowing the shibboleth that gives access to power in the technical community.
What makes a shibboleth dialect distinct? It cannot be strict phonemic adherence, as an accent is ok. Is it always a difference in vocabulary, or can it involve different grammatical structures? This is what sociolinguists are set to discover. What they are searching for are the assumptions we for the most part have accepted uncritically as being normal. It is an interesting question as to whether or not sociolinguistics would exist without curriculum, or whether any specialized field of knowledge would. Would the same assumptions that exist around language and knowledge be so widespread, and would university education exist the way it does now? Perhaps of the assumptions we possess should be examined in order to come up with a better way of approaching research questions. But perhaps this would involve asking larger teleological and ontological questions about the role of identity, language and power in each individual person, the answering of which could comfortably occupy an entire lifetime.
Literacy versus Advocacy
Let’s review what we know so far:
A language community is made up of individuals that have constructed a relationship of identity between themselves and their concept of the community. This concept may not be identical, and in fact probably isn’t, but is functionally sufficient for the individuals to accept that their definition of the community is still accurate (i.e. there are no glaring discrepancies between individual definitions that result in communication disasters), and their identity construction still legitimate. Identity relations are built through language, which allows the symbolic naming, building, and articulating of identity relations. Power comes about from building and preserving these identity relations. If the majority of people claim the same identity, it will be powerful, and could be exclusionary in nature. Strong identity relations could result in individuals choosing to employ physical violence in order to protect their identity relations. With or without the presence of physical violence, a more powerful dominant language group comes into being thanks to identity relations. The identity of the dominant group is preserved through the standardization of the identity and its dissemination, particularly through the education of the next generation.
In this way, curriculum is vital to the perpetuation of the speech community identity. Likewise, technical languages rely on a group identity and education to preserve themselves. The group with the most power is able to preserve its group identity by having people join the group in order to get whatever benefits go along with the power. These benefits could be as simple as inclusion. The group therefore continues to have membership, and its identity is retained or even enlarged. The dominant group faces the tension of not including new information if it does not embrace its plurality and allow the active contribution of its constituent members. In an egalitarian and pluralistic society, standardizing forces such as curriculum building must be flexible enough to permit the participation of subgroups so that they bond in identity to the dominant group.
For a very long time, advocacy was seen as being a feasible approach for ensuring that the nonstandard and relatively powerless could gain equanimity within a group. In fact, this is not a true solution, but only a stopgap measure. Advocacy allows disenfranchised subgroups representation to the powerful dominant group, but it is not an egalitarian solution. What advocacy can do is ensure the protection of the subgroup within the identity of the dominant group, but it does not provide the two groups with equal standing. Like technical languages, the community survives by the innovation and desire of individuals to be members of the group.
Instead of an advocacy model which presumes the inferiority of identity of a subgroup, a group within another group, a model based on multiliteracy more accurately reflects the identity of an egalitarian idea. What this entails is the interpenetrability of individual dialects; that is, learning on all sides. In a community, the more powerful language group has less translating to do than the less powerful. That is, the dominant language is the language of currency, as Bourdieu would put it. In a multiliterate community, the dominant group would be engaged in learning the dialects of the subgroups, instead of the subgroups “studying up”.
In a way, this is what actually happens in the real world. Humans, who seem to be instinctively social, learn the dialect of other people when they speak to them even though each individual has their own version of their acquired language. Of course, the closer they appear to be in linguistic identity, the easier it is for us to understand them. This ability to understand is aided by our concepts of identity; if we look for similarity as opposed to difference, we are far more likely to find it (This statement is born out in many psycholinguistic and psychological studies that show the effects that priming has on perception. Identity is definitely a kind of priming in that is prepares the thinker for what he or she is going to perceive. For example, if a person thinks, “We have a lot in common”, they are more likely to see what is common instead of what is different. This is basically priming). Fundamentally, this is an identity relation.
Throughout this paper we have observed that language and power are most intimately connected through the process of identity building. What the origin is of this human compulsion to name and compare everything is still completely mysterious, but that it occurs cannot be debated. The issues surrounding power and language in terms of standardization are particularly fascinating when examining curriculum-building and technical languages. Both share in the same strengths and problems that standardization brings. Of course, standardization rests upon some fundamental assumptions that are not generally part of any analysis. Fundamentally, identity is responsible for the desire for standardization (the preservation of group identity) as well as the fight against it (the preservation of individual or subgroup identity). Addressing the problems of standardization appears daunting at best and impossible at worst. By remembering that one’s conceptual foundation lies in identity, the solution is readily apparent: generosity of one’s own identity.
Bibliography
Foucault, Michel (1980). Power/knowledge. Toronto, ON: Random House of Canada Limited.
Huxley, Aldous (1954). The Doors of Perception. London, UK: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
McDermott, Ray (2005). Commentary on Part 1 “An Entry Into Further Language”: Contra Mystification by Language Hierarchies. In T. McCarty (Ed.), Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling. (pp. 111-124).Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Read, Stephen (1994). Thinking about Logic: an introduction to the philosophy of logic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Stcherbatskoi, F.I. (1962). Buddhist Logic. Dover, UK: Dover Publications.
Taylor, Charles (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto, ON: House of Anasi Press Ltd.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Whitehorse, 5 a.m.
This is deceptively dark. In this picture, it looks like the darkest part of night we are experiencing right now, but that's only because it's overcast.
Mainstreet Whitehorse, facing west
Mainstreet Whitehorse, facing east
So, what was I doing downtown Whitehorse at 5 a.m.? Well, I was watching a baker at his trade with the intention of taking over some if not all of his duties in the bakery. It is a long, complicated and tenuous story, so no details for now. All I can say is if this works out, I won't have to make more than one Soapy Smith t-shirt so that I can put a little cash in my pocket.
One thing you cannot see is the literally-named Two-Mile Hill, which I ride down to get into town and up to get back to Karyn & Robin's. I will have buns o' steel, if this keeps up. There is also a huge new sports complex here, the spoils from a recent visit from the Canada Games this past winter. They have an Olympic-sized pool, a weight room, couple of rinks, and they even had red-clad mounties when I was there. It is a treat, and probably a great joy in the winter, with its steamroom and sauna. It's about half way up Two-Mile Hill, so it makes a great pause in the journey back to the house.
I also have tons of other stories, but no time to post them. I am finishing up my thesis, with my eye on the new prize to work like a newly-employed demon in the bakery. Goodbye theory, hello pastry!
Even with all the goings on, I think about and miss all you people in the South (you know who you are!) and I promise to get cracking on those postcards & letters as soon as humanly possible. Oh yeah, and when I get an address for y'all to send replies to! (by the way, no complaints about the dangling preposition--I defy Strunk & White!)
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Soap me up
You'll have to click on this to enlarge it enough to read it.
Can you believe there were no Soapy Smith t-shirts for sale in Skagway? Karyn and I speculated that maybe he was too scandalous a character to promote in t-shirt form, but there were tons of pirate-themed shirts everywhere. I guess abstract historical badguys are more acceptable that the real thing. This is the world we live in.
Miscellaneous wonders
[to The Ramones]We're a happy family, we're a happy family, we're a happy family
Me! Mom! and Dad!
Hey Misty, check it out!
Skagway
Today I went back one more time zone than I've ever been. I didn't even know that was possible. Then Karyn & I went all the way back to the late 1800s in Skagway, legendary mudhole where Soapy Smith had his heyday until he was shot down in the street. An early entrepreneur, Soapy was a cutthroat businessman who took his work literally, and ruled Skagway's boardwalk. He delighted both the citizens & himself by parading down the streets mounted on a sin-free white steed.
Here's Skagway
That's the ocean there. Can you see the giant cruise ship fruitlessly trying to hide behind that tree?
The old driftwood-covered A & B building in downtown Skagway
Here's Skagway
That's the ocean there. Can you see the giant cruise ship fruitlessly trying to hide behind that tree?
The old driftwood-covered A & B building in downtown Skagway
Alaska Highway, ho!
Today my wonderful hostess Karyn drove us to Skagway. Having had enough of Canada and all its jazz, we headed Southwest today, through BC to Alaska. I am terrible for not taking pictures, but here are a few along our trip.This is Emerald Lake, above with said wonderful hostess, and nude of humans below.
Here's another photo just for good measure.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
You asked for it
So, here it is. Even though it will probably increase my time in front of the computer, and definitely increase my time drunk, here is my blog.
But, because nothing of interest has happened since I created it, I've got nothing to say.
Other than: I've travelled from Montreal to Whitehorse on a wing and a prayer with very little idea if this is a vacation or a permanent-type move.
More after naptime.
But, because nothing of interest has happened since I created it, I've got nothing to say.
Other than: I've travelled from Montreal to Whitehorse on a wing and a prayer with very little idea if this is a vacation or a permanent-type move.
More after naptime.
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