A Final Essay for the Problem of Language..
The Problem of Language Final Paper
This paper will rely on class discussions and readings to explore speech genres (categories of speech-events) and registers (the way words are arranged to accomplish a particular aim of a speech-event) as differentiated, intersecting semiotic planes involving context-based linguistic elements to investigate the extent to which music and language may also serve as differentiated, intersecting semiotic mediums. Working from a definition of music as a time-based organization of sound, and language as a complex structured system of communication, this paper will engage language and music as subsystems that play a role in the formation, maintenance, and development of an embodied, underlying, and organic social system that relies on linguistic, musical, and (but not limited to) visual systems to produce culture. By situating the bodies of individuals engaged in speech and musical behaviors at the center of this exploration, this paper will argue for a recognition of the role fetishized indexicality, the commodified stereotyped co-occurrence between an index and its referent, plays in understanding how bodies, objects, and spaces are subject to notions of ability, gender, race, and class. As such, this work calls for a recognition of (sub)systemic socio-cultural function as the intersection between aesthetic values and their emergence through musical and linguistic systems.
Due to the interdisciplinary goals of this paper, it will include work by linguistic anthropologists and sociologists like Asif Agha, Miyako Inoue, and Michael Silverstein in order to outline some of the components that give shape to lived social systems. I will build my own theories with writing by music scholars like Matthew D. Morrison and Tricia Rose in addition to systems scholar Donella H. Meadows to confront how history is commodified to undergird systemic indexical orders. I seek to understand how such orders are utilized by ideological and cultural institutions among Western and Western-influenced societies to exploit aesthetic differences between sonic, linguistic, and visual media; bringing musical genres like hip-hop and Western classical music to contrast against one another at the benefit of hegemonic and hierarchical systems of value that construct a collective and cultural sense of class, ability, and temporality. It is my hope that this essay will cover some of the similarities between language, music, and visual media—three semiotic systems of communication that contribute to a greater economy of perceptive modes.
This essay will avoid upholding language as, “a kind of exemplar for the nature of all things cultural,” (Silverstein 187). To accomplish this, I will first use Donella H. Meadows’ book, Thinking in Systems, and Miyako Inoue’s essay, “What Does Language Remember? : Indexical Inversion and the Naturalized History of Japanese Women,” to survey language as a system that relies on the iconic commodification of human beings to reify its ritualistic cultural practice. Meadows’ description of systems can help us understand how language, as a system, contains its own set of reactionary subsystems that behave according to its goals. She defines a system as,
A set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world. (Meadows 2).
Language can be considered a system because of the way its structures comprise grammatical, lexical, and semiotic elements that lend themselves toward communication. Meadows’ description of systems succeeds in providing a more generalized outline of the dialectic that mediates and sustains shifting relationships between language and culture; identifying a way in which each provides structure and substance for the (re)assembly of the other. Inoue’s essay titled, “What Does Language Remember?: Indexical Inversion and the Naturalized History of Japanese Women,” provides an excellent case study regarding the systemic relationship between speech behavior and personal experience; contributing a language to continue developing this dialectic. Inoue’s essay outlines the phenomena of teyo-dawa speech which emerged in 19th century Japan as a gendered index of cultural regression among Japanese school girls. Inoue recalls some of the earliest documented responses to teyo-dawa speech as she writes,
“Japanese intellectuals and educators deplored schoolgirls’ moral corruption and their language use as “vulgar.” The concerned commentators identified such “vulgar” speech forms as emblematic of schoolgirls and their moral corruption, and they called such speech “schoolgirl speech” or “teyo-dawa speech,” because of the impression that schoolgirls frequently used verb-ending forms such as teyo and dawa. Speech forms such as teyo and dawa were then accorded certain indexical values, such as vulgarity and commonness.” (Inoue 43).
By identifying the verb-endings that characterize teyo-dawa speech as vulgar and morally corrupt, Inoue’s delineation of the text-type speech register provides a foundational insight into a relationship between the metapragmatic gendering of language and its ability to index a problem in social system/society. Teyo-dawa speech is an example of a cultural deviation from respectful speech-behavior. It calls our attention to the gender and language-based systemic processes that cast linguistic structures into the genre of teyo-dawaspeech by its presence as a text-type indication that is the use of the teyo-dawa verb endings by girls and women. In the context of its greater socio-linguistic system, girls’ and women’s use of this “vulgar” speech-type is a simultaneous rejection and development in the cultural system in which it was born and exists—indicating a non-speech semiotic that may index the (un)wellness of Japanese society depending on how those girls and/or women interact with “women’s speech”.
This notion of “women’s speech,” leaves one to wonder the possibilities of men’s speech due to its binaural implications. Inoue remarks that the maintenance of a “women’s only” speech-type also maintains its antithesis.
“Women’s language is an emergent norm, and it requires a normalizing discipline deployed by a range of cultural agents (writers, teachers, scholars) to institute and maintain it as a norm even if not as a statistical pattern. Discipline always involves the discursive marginalization of the less-than-normal; discipline presupposes the identification of the “deviant” for purposes of excluding it. In other words, the birth of women’s language was also the birth of the corruption of women’s language.” (Inoue 50)
The social conditions that obligate Japanese women to speak within a particular gender-based register might give rise to an array of negative reactions if the social norm is transgressed. Inoue goes on to write about the inherent contradiction drawn by the dichotomy between “women’s speech,” and teyo-dawa speech by virtue of the fact that each are indexed to a girl or woman participating in the linguistic temporality of Japanese history in a way that either upholds or, to those in power, desecrates it. She notes,
“Thus, iconization, as in the case of the claimed omission of honorifics and phonological contraction, is another attempt to establish the foundational order of teyo-dawa speech: sloppiness is no longer represented through the actual behavior of school-girls but through the speech forms that allegedly index them, as if they inherited in some intrinsic quality of sloppiness. The imaginary origin—discovered in speech forms themselves in the form of fetish—thus is the consequence of iconization; the fetishized signs collapse the original cause–effect relationship and invert the original temporal order.” (Inoue 48).
In this sense, what Inoue describes as the (lack of) honorifics becomes a gendered metapragmatic that simultaneously reifies the institution of gender and sustains the gendered labor of maintaining cultural memory and performance as the responsibility of girls and women. Reference to linguistic shifts brought about by increased access to education and economic opportunity as a, “desecration of “women’s language,” then, becomes a way to uphold a sense of culture that remains central and forever held in the past. From this lens, the fetishized sign of school girls obtains a non-linguistic indexicality that signals the possible cue of (dis)honorific registers and uncultured speech genres. We may use the writings of Asif Agha to better understand why it is that honorific registers are so essential to the maintenance of systems of speech behavior and culture. Agha states,
Language users tend to view the lexical forms of an honorific register as potent symbols of status and politeness, inherently endowed with social meaning. Much of this ideological sense of the inherent power of words is shaped by metapragmatic constructs to which language users are exposed in the ordinary course of language socialization…Such stereotypes are easily reproduced in the speech of adults as nomic-universalizing truths about the nature of deference and demeanor in their society/language/culture as a whole. (Agha 303)
Agha’s discussion of honorific registers confirms Inoue’s outline of, “women’s speech,” there is a gendered implication that women must uphold traditional structures of honorifics despite their “equal role,” as educated and financially independent members of Japanese society while Japanese men are not. It becomes clear that neither the value of women nor their roles within the Japanese cultural system are entirely dependent upon their ability to be educated or financially independent. Instead, reference to teyo-dawa speech as a girl or woman’s linguistic act of cultural transgression confirms the opposite—that women’s ability to be educated and financially independent is the index of a systemic problem that can only be resolved through a return to culturally “traditional” gender roles. Meadows’ writing on systems analysis provides us with a means to understand how we may begin identifying the vulgarity of “schoolgirl speech,” as a result of girls’ and women’s increased access to independent financial security and institutions that traditionally provided boys and men with socio-economic opportunity. Inoue’s case study provides a way to understand how cultural behaviors can become fetishized signs—linguistic commodities—that collapse the humanity of behaving individuals and the cause of said behaviors into an inverted index, wherein the behavior becomes the reason for the cause. Such a collapse may be used to objectify a person in a stereotyped co-occurrence, a kind of ideologized sign-object relationship, that is ritualized by repeated speech to uphold it as a particular cultural history/memory. Teyo-gawa speech, schoolgirls, and economically independent women become scapegoats for systemic problems that are innate to Japanese cultural patriarchy; also reflected in the Japanese language. Agha also writes about the repeated use and commodification of particular registers. He states,
Here the speech pattern is more than a counter in the game of other-deference; it is valued as a commodity that must be possessed and, once possessed, displayed as often as possible, such displays themselves constituting significant moves in the second-order game of self- presentation. (Agha 302).
Men’s condemnation of teyo-gawa speech thus becomes a performance of continued Japanese traditionalism—indexing all perceived deviations from this tradition as the cause of the systemic failures inherent to its cultural patriarchy.
Teyo-gawa speech provides a way to understand how people may exist contemporarily, but their representative condition may depend on how or whether they adhere to notions of traditionalism/conservatism in ways that are perceived as positive or negative. A similar temporal dynamic can be identified within the field of music. Genres and registers in the discipline of music, or among musical systems, are established by a different set of semiotic values that may include, but are not limited to melody and pitch, rhythmic variation, tempo, and harmonic progression. The genre of Western classical music, for example, may often be identified by its narrative progression—a direct manifestation of western cultural priorities of using time to move away from an initial point. It is often arranged according to values of constant change; a sort of motion toward a “pinnacle”. The polyrhythms characteristic to African diasporic music, on the other hand, demonstrate a value for rhythmic stasis or steady transformation (Rose 69). While the two genres maintain similar origins and have provided much influence to one another, the musics of the African Diaspora are often indexical to primitivity, low-class, and laziness due to the means by which Western Colonial powers utilize depictions of African people to justify the continued exploitation of their land and labor. Matthew D. Morrison’s essay, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse” outlines the process by which the ritualized repetition of minstrel performances came to uphold such referents of Black people, allowing them to become ingrained in U.S. considerations of Black cultural expressions like music—fetishized to index a source of entertainment, poor character, hypersexuality, and violence among other co-occurring stereotypes. Morrison writes,
[M]ostly white music industrialists capitalized upon the (unrecognized) intellectual performance property of [B]lack Americans, both in and out of blackface, throughout the nineteenth century. This process helped to define and liberate imagined visions of whiteness through black popular aesthetics scripted into sheet music and other tangible forms subject to legal protection. This scripting also occurred through the racialization of black aesthetics (either delimited as being black or neutralized as “popular” for primarily white/mass music makers and consumers) and actual African Americans, even while the latter group largely had limited property claims over their personhood or personal creations throughout most of the nineteenth century. (Morrison 2019; 793).
In addition to minstrelsy, racist stereotypes of Black people were also popularized through white media channels. Much like what Inoue articulates as the, “collapse the original cause–effect relationship and invert the original temporal order,” (Inoue 48), Black people and their cultural expressions were collapsed by whiteness into a fetishistic index of subhumanity in order to maintain a systemic power structure that claimed white moral and intellectual superiority over subjugated Black contemporaries. By indexing racial identifications of Blackness as inferior in the “unbiased” realm of the sciences, the performance of race as a dichotomized standard of good and bad finds its embodiment in even the most mundane social exchanges. As a semiotic cultural behavior, music is no exception to this. Black musical genres come to index the stereotyped co-occurrence of Black dialects, fashion styles, and intellectual traditions which are celebrated among certain cultural communities. Black music maintains no inherent genre, but the relationship between American Blackness and music to may be met with a variety of speech-registers depending on the culture in which it is invoked. Spaces that once barred Black people from entering might register a kind of upperclassness that was (is) inherent to being non-Black/brown.
On these grounds we may acknowledge that both audience members and musical performers are engaged in the greater index of the concert hall itself; signing that music has or will take place and that one should behave and communicate by non-linguistic means. Each of the instruments, the architecture, the geometric arrangement of the seats, the presence of curtains, the ticketing ushers, and (but not limited to) the ticket booth serve as signs that play a role in establishing both a behavioral genre and register. The performance space itself becomes a kind of honorific register with its raised floor or distance from the audience. Its visitors, whether participating as performers or audience members, must play certain roles within the performance space in order to be affirmed as part of that cultural system and ritual.
This paper has attempted to begin outlining the means by which language and musical systems may serve as continuations of one another in the greater context of a cultural system. While the semiotic capabilities of music and language differ in that they have different kinds of communicative priorities—wherein music conveys feeling through temporal experience and language seeks to communicate information—the two intersect at their relationship to temporality in addition to organic and man-made material. Music is incapable of discussing itself with language, and therefore cannot access any kind of metapragmatic, whereas language can. Each possess their own semiotic values that communicate narrative, but each maintain separate means of signifying. Music’s signifying capabilities are seldom standardized, often used to cue behaviors in public and private spaces or to convey information like the reception of a message or the confirmation of a calendar event on a phone. Music can be referential, but only through the imitation of other (musical) sounds. Musical and linguistic genres may index racial, gender, and (but not limited to) class categories, but they differ in that language is capable of informing about them.
Works Cited
Agha, Asif. “Honorific Registers.” Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 301–339. Print. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language.
Inoue, Miyako. “What Does Language Remember?: Indexical Inversion and the Naturalized History of Japanese Women.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (2004): 39-56.
Morrison, Matthew D. “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2019. pp 781–823.
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise : Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH :University Press of New England, 1994.
Silverstein, Michael. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. Meaning in anthropology, 187-221
