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koganbotTake a very simple Wittgensteinian language-game, e.g., a bricklayer says "BRICK" and the bricklayer's assistant brings her the brick.* All of this is part of the language-game: not just the utterance "BRICK," but also the assistant bringing the brick — so the actions as well as the sound. You don't have one part being language and another part not. It's all language, and if you leave out the actions it's not complete.**
Of course, at times the assistant could understand that he's to bring a brick, yet he chooses not to, in defiance or as a joke; or he may be prevented from doing so, say by an injury; and that doesn't mean the language-game is incomplete in these instances. As long as the practice is there, the established practice of "BRICK" and an assistant bringing the brick, the language-game is in effect. And defiance and humor are expressible in this language, too, even though the language only contains one word, the command "BRICK." (Suppose, somehow, there's miscommunication in the game. Or some misunderstanding, the assistant incorrectly thinking that it's only when the bricklayer has her arm raised as she's uttering "BRICK" that he's to bring the brick. Or maybe sometimes the bricklayer doesn't mean it, and the assistant has to figure out when. A game doesn't have to be conducted with absolutely certainty to be a game; a language doesn't have to have absolute certainty and consistency to be a language.)
We can define "language-games" as being, more or less, "human social practices." The terms "language-game" and "social practice" are near synonyms, language being so ubiquitous. But let's see what happens if we go further. Let's get rid of "more or less." Let's say that all human social practices are language-games, whether or not any word is actually spoken in the practice, and whether or not all the parties even know a language. Yes, at least one of them — the parent of a baby, for instance — will have to know a language; but the other(s) won't have to. So parental action and baby wails and goos and parental response are all in the category "language-game." A baby being initiated into parent-child social behavior is a baby being initiated into language.***
By this definition, all musical events, including the "nonverbal," are nonetheless in some language-game or other. This doesn't mean "can be made part of a language-game by translating musical sounds into words or by describing the music in words." It means that the language-game includes musical sounds as they are, and we can take the sounds and see their role in particular games — particular social practices — just as we can take the utterances and actions in the "BRICK" language and see their roles in that particular practice. In any event, we refuse to give the social practices we call "music" the special status of being "nonverbal." They aren't.
My motive here is to prevent Mark Sinker — e.g. in an old conversation about the left being chumps about the charts — from simply assuming a special liberating potential in music, and from simply assuming, should such liberation ever seem to actually take place, that something nonlinguistic is central to its liberating character. (Maybe he can conclude such things, though I myself don't see a line of argument that gets him there.)
So, the liberating effects that, let's say, some music had for some people in 1967, or 1999, or ______, need to be given an actual social explanation: these social practices had these liberating consequences in these circumstances. But not all music has liberating potential in every circumstance. And future liberating practices modeled on these don't necessarily need as much, or any, music in them to replicate the liberation. In any event, one has to identify what's structurally oppressive in what people are being liberated from, and how the alternative practice breaks that oppression and doesn't impose that same oppression itself. Not that Mark is claiming that all music is always liberating. I think he's talking about potential, and he was pointing at the special learned techniques of music as being potentially liberating from the different special learned techniques of (for instance) alternative journalism. But this seems arbitrary to me. You could just as easily stick the work "stultification" in place of "freedom," or assign potential liberation to any learned technique — mathematics, car mechanics, structural engineering, cooking, bricklaying — on the mere basis of its being different from some other learned technique. Mark is leaning on the special magical character of "music" and the magic of its supposedly being nonlinguistic, but at least in this instance isn't willing to specify how the magic takes place, or demonstrate that it even has taken place, or what the magic consists of.
See my footnote on the chumps thread as to the lack of the word "music" in some African languages prior to European colonization, what we call "music" being so pervasive in those African societies and so embedded in lots of different social practices that it's not separated out as a practice(s) in itself, or even as the name of a component. Or think of ring tones. They're musical, but they're part of the language-game of telephones. (Which doesn't preclude their also being part of the social practice, "I'm displaying that I'm a fan of this particular hip-hop track, the one I'm using for my ringtone" — this being similar to someone's wearing a band T-shirt. (And I wouldn't say the contrast between the visual-verbal character of band shirts and the aural-verbal character of ringtones create spaces for freedom and lines of escape. Of course, a young child who doesn't know the genres and doesn't get that the picture is of a band can "escape" these social meanings, and an adult who does know these meanings, and knows what sort of people are likely to dress in band T-shirts and in what circumstances they're likely to, can nonetheless appreciate other aspects of the ringtones and the shirts. I don't think this is an example of what Mark means by "freedom" — if it is, he's not demanding much of freedom. And again, the fact of multiple uses of the same sound or pic or whatever is not music-specific, is a potential that can affix to anything, and so what? E.g., a colorist can be taken by the redness of a traffic light, can wonder about painting such a light at different times of day and so forth, but I'm not getting how the contrast between, on the one hand, this appreciation of redness and, on the other, the social practices of stopping and starting for traffic lights could lead to any meaningful lines of social escape or social freedom. I guess in some vague way my prejudice, like Mark's (probably), is that the more possibilities bubbling up, the better. See my Disco Tex essay. But I can't claim the bubbling is some sort of break into social freedom. And conversely, I can easily see how someone with strong ADHD who, precisely because of all the possibilities she's bombarded with, has trouble attending to the books she's reading, would find the ability to focus liberating. In any event, I'd think — though I guess I don't want be dogmatic about this — that if the "spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight" that Mark envisages aren't at some point put into words, no actual freedom, movement, or flight will ever truly emerge.
*This is a very simplified version of an already simple language that Wittgenstein introduced in §2 of Philosophical Investigations. "The language is meant to serve for communication between a Builder A and an Assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words 'block,' 'pillar,' 'slab,' 'beam.' A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language."
**We tend to use phrases such as "a language" to refer to English, Spanish, Korean, and the like, though we can refer to smaller though still broad collections of practices — "the language of poetry," "the language of physics" — or bring it down to even smaller bits; e.g., "I don't like your language," to refer to vocabulary choices. Whereas "language-game" can refer to simple practices, e.g. the "BRICK" language, that aren't normally called "a language." But Wittgenstein isn't talking about something different from language. What we work out using Wittgenstein's metaphor "language-game" applies to language, period. So that's why I didn't just say "all of this is part of the language-game," but rather that all of it is language.
***Er, what about the interplay between humans and cats? I think I'll bracket that question for the time being, though my only reason for not calling that a language-game is that I know the cat can't develop further language; conversely, my reason for calling the baby-parent interplay "language" is that I know the baby will develop further language, and I know that this is the early stages of that development.
Of course, at times the assistant could understand that he's to bring a brick, yet he chooses not to, in defiance or as a joke; or he may be prevented from doing so, say by an injury; and that doesn't mean the language-game is incomplete in these instances. As long as the practice is there, the established practice of "BRICK" and an assistant bringing the brick, the language-game is in effect. And defiance and humor are expressible in this language, too, even though the language only contains one word, the command "BRICK." (Suppose, somehow, there's miscommunication in the game. Or some misunderstanding, the assistant incorrectly thinking that it's only when the bricklayer has her arm raised as she's uttering "BRICK" that he's to bring the brick. Or maybe sometimes the bricklayer doesn't mean it, and the assistant has to figure out when. A game doesn't have to be conducted with absolutely certainty to be a game; a language doesn't have to have absolute certainty and consistency to be a language.)
We can define "language-games" as being, more or less, "human social practices." The terms "language-game" and "social practice" are near synonyms, language being so ubiquitous. But let's see what happens if we go further. Let's get rid of "more or less." Let's say that all human social practices are language-games, whether or not any word is actually spoken in the practice, and whether or not all the parties even know a language. Yes, at least one of them — the parent of a baby, for instance — will have to know a language; but the other(s) won't have to. So parental action and baby wails and goos and parental response are all in the category "language-game." A baby being initiated into parent-child social behavior is a baby being initiated into language.***
By this definition, all musical events, including the "nonverbal," are nonetheless in some language-game or other. This doesn't mean "can be made part of a language-game by translating musical sounds into words or by describing the music in words." It means that the language-game includes musical sounds as they are, and we can take the sounds and see their role in particular games — particular social practices — just as we can take the utterances and actions in the "BRICK" language and see their roles in that particular practice. In any event, we refuse to give the social practices we call "music" the special status of being "nonverbal." They aren't.
My motive here is to prevent Mark Sinker — e.g. in an old conversation about the left being chumps about the charts — from simply assuming a special liberating potential in music, and from simply assuming, should such liberation ever seem to actually take place, that something nonlinguistic is central to its liberating character. (Maybe he can conclude such things, though I myself don't see a line of argument that gets him there.)
So, the liberating effects that, let's say, some music had for some people in 1967, or 1999, or ______, need to be given an actual social explanation: these social practices had these liberating consequences in these circumstances. But not all music has liberating potential in every circumstance. And future liberating practices modeled on these don't necessarily need as much, or any, music in them to replicate the liberation. In any event, one has to identify what's structurally oppressive in what people are being liberated from, and how the alternative practice breaks that oppression and doesn't impose that same oppression itself. Not that Mark is claiming that all music is always liberating. I think he's talking about potential, and he was pointing at the special learned techniques of music as being potentially liberating from the different special learned techniques of (for instance) alternative journalism. But this seems arbitrary to me. You could just as easily stick the work "stultification" in place of "freedom," or assign potential liberation to any learned technique — mathematics, car mechanics, structural engineering, cooking, bricklaying — on the mere basis of its being different from some other learned technique. Mark is leaning on the special magical character of "music" and the magic of its supposedly being nonlinguistic, but at least in this instance isn't willing to specify how the magic takes place, or demonstrate that it even has taken place, or what the magic consists of.
See my footnote on the chumps thread as to the lack of the word "music" in some African languages prior to European colonization, what we call "music" being so pervasive in those African societies and so embedded in lots of different social practices that it's not separated out as a practice(s) in itself, or even as the name of a component. Or think of ring tones. They're musical, but they're part of the language-game of telephones. (Which doesn't preclude their also being part of the social practice, "I'm displaying that I'm a fan of this particular hip-hop track, the one I'm using for my ringtone" — this being similar to someone's wearing a band T-shirt. (And I wouldn't say the contrast between the visual-verbal character of band shirts and the aural-verbal character of ringtones create spaces for freedom and lines of escape. Of course, a young child who doesn't know the genres and doesn't get that the picture is of a band can "escape" these social meanings, and an adult who does know these meanings, and knows what sort of people are likely to dress in band T-shirts and in what circumstances they're likely to, can nonetheless appreciate other aspects of the ringtones and the shirts. I don't think this is an example of what Mark means by "freedom" — if it is, he's not demanding much of freedom. And again, the fact of multiple uses of the same sound or pic or whatever is not music-specific, is a potential that can affix to anything, and so what? E.g., a colorist can be taken by the redness of a traffic light, can wonder about painting such a light at different times of day and so forth, but I'm not getting how the contrast between, on the one hand, this appreciation of redness and, on the other, the social practices of stopping and starting for traffic lights could lead to any meaningful lines of social escape or social freedom. I guess in some vague way my prejudice, like Mark's (probably), is that the more possibilities bubbling up, the better. See my Disco Tex essay. But I can't claim the bubbling is some sort of break into social freedom. And conversely, I can easily see how someone with strong ADHD who, precisely because of all the possibilities she's bombarded with, has trouble attending to the books she's reading, would find the ability to focus liberating. In any event, I'd think — though I guess I don't want be dogmatic about this — that if the "spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight" that Mark envisages aren't at some point put into words, no actual freedom, movement, or flight will ever truly emerge.
*This is a very simplified version of an already simple language that Wittgenstein introduced in §2 of Philosophical Investigations. "The language is meant to serve for communication between a Builder A and an Assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words 'block,' 'pillar,' 'slab,' 'beam.' A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language."
**We tend to use phrases such as "a language" to refer to English, Spanish, Korean, and the like, though we can refer to smaller though still broad collections of practices — "the language of poetry," "the language of physics" — or bring it down to even smaller bits; e.g., "I don't like your language," to refer to vocabulary choices. Whereas "language-game" can refer to simple practices, e.g. the "BRICK" language, that aren't normally called "a language." But Wittgenstein isn't talking about something different from language. What we work out using Wittgenstein's metaphor "language-game" applies to language, period. So that's why I didn't just say "all of this is part of the language-game," but rather that all of it is language.
***Er, what about the interplay between humans and cats? I think I'll bracket that question for the time being, though my only reason for not calling that a language-game is that I know the cat can't develop further language; conversely, my reason for calling the baby-parent interplay "language" is that I know the baby will develop further language, and I know that this is the early stages of that development.
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no subject
Date: 2014-12-05 03:02 am (UTC)Sometimes, enough audio exposure to another language may enable you to somewhat comprehend listening to it, but unable to read or write it. If two people are like that with each others' languages, they can speaking their own languages and comprehend each other, interacting within the same language game, despite the technical presence of two "languages." (One case of this that actually happens would be an immigrant parent speaking their native language to their child, who responds in the language of their residing country.)
Is that any different from the way humans and animals can interpret each other? As long as that foundation of understanding and correlating actions/words to interpretations is present, hasn't the game been established?
The other reason being that, at least for the simple example of the game given, B's ability to also make the same actions A does to issue the "BRICK" command (in this case, making a sound with their mouth) is irrelevant, only that B knows what A means by "BRICK."
(Or more commonly for the case under discussion, "Sit!")
no subject
Date: 2014-12-07 03:20 pm (UTC)Horses would also be a good example for the point you're making, even if the communication is often by touch rather than by vocal command.
By the way, I think you'd get a big kick out of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein's most important work. For me, Wittgenstein is easily the most fun philosopher, as well as being the best of recent times.