Is there such a thing as "good English" or "un buon italiano"?

Photo Credit: Romain Vignes on Unsplash

A friend of mine recently wrote in to an Italian network to discuss a "lady" who had been complaining about the lack of "good Italian" being spoken generally, and "slipping standards" is a topic that comes up frequently particularly in letters to newspapers etc. Readers bemoan the misuse of apostrophes or the splitting of infinitives and other stylistic features. Such criticism, particularly when considering the young or students, and the idea that language is "in decline" has been around for at least 4000 years or more as a Sumerian scribe complained as cited in an article by Johnson in The Economist:

"A junior scribe is too concerned with feeding his hunger... He does not pay enough attention to the scribal art" 

What is language?

It seems to me, however, that this is based on a false premise of what language is. It is basically a semiotic system of meaning making and not a "thing". Reifying a process such as creating meaning through signs will lead us into a mistaken view. We are surrounded by language from the moment we wake until the moment we drift into sleep and it may well invade our dreams too. We use language with ourselves and each other and negotiate meanings and our very reality in social interactions. The teaching of language. however, has bought into the idea of language as a "thing". Structuralist accounts of grammatical systems dating back to Saussure, who saw language as arbitrary signs, yes, but once assigned to a signified they became relatively stable. Influential bodies such as the Council of Europe or Examination boards also create a series of measures and descriptors of this thing called language and even the Common European Framework, building on Hymes' (1972) notions of communicative competence, with its "can do" statements, see language as a tool that you have to acquire to be able to do something else: yes, once again it is seen as a "thing".  This is echoed by the American ACTFL guidelines as well, which measure proficiency as something that you "can do" with a language. The glaring question that is facing us, however, is this: is language a tool? Is it a thing? or should we rather be considering it a process, more akin to languaging, a social semiotic that creates our very reality on a whole series of levels. 

Language as languaging

Poststructuralists, influenced by the thinking of philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault see language as being the dough we use to create our reality. Foucault sees this as inextricably linked to specific moments in history, where the conditions that exist lead to dominant discourses which mould our reality and knowledge, and where power is the means to create new discourses by means of new discourses. From this viewpoint the world we are living in now, for instance, at least here in Northern Italy is one of surveillance, for example, where we buy into the arguments we are surrounded by and further their effectiveness by the fact that we actually monitor ourselves. One example of this is the diet discourse, for instance, where we monitor carefully what we eat because of the messages we receive from those around us in our particular historical moment. These are not necessarily the messages that were sent in the past, nor may they be the same in the future, and often they are not necessarily based on fact. Intermittent fasting is one such discourse within the diet culture, where it is said to be good to starve yourself, but is it true? Well, it doesn't actually matter whether it is "true" or not. If the message is spread by enough people then others will "buy into it" and it will become a reality. Power from a foucauldian viewpoint emerges from contrasting discourses. Another example, to return to language learning is our examination system, which is obsessed with measuring and accountability. We measure the level of a language learner... but how do we know that your language level one day is the same as it is the next? Once again we return to the reification of language as a tool to use to do something else, when it is, in fact, probably closer to a process.

Baynham (2015) cited in Kramsch (2017) refers to language as "a process in which identities are constructed through "repeated positionings" according to the demands of the situation. Language is flexible, it is a part of us, subjective and reaching out to the other at the same time and the meanings I attribute to one word may not be the same ones you do. By negotiating and "expressing ourselves" we reach new meanings and work together with our linguistic dough to create different types of bread. Kramsch (2009) looks at multilinguals coming to grips with new languages and the way a knowledge of differing languages can interweave our awareness both of the new and the old language. There are those who are excited by the prospect of "escaping" from the ritualistic, formulaic nature of the everyday phrase in their first language into the mystery of the new one. It carries with it adventure and the chance to broaden your horizons, learn new sounds, new visual shapes such as the beauty of Chinese characters, with their connotations of wisdom or the intricacy of Arabic writing, reminiscent of the exotic desert and the Arabian nights. Other learners, on the other hand, cling to their familiar first language and are afraid to leave the comfort of their own identities, they do not dare to pronounce the new sounds in the same way as a native speaker would and they may even impose their own grammar rules or collocations on the new language. A friend of mine, for instance, who speaks good Italian, still talks about traffic lights being "open" instead of saying the "light is green" and when challenged, says: "Well, that's how we say it in Albanian." Neither of these positions is wrong or right but they serve to show how closely our language is a part of us and is far more than a "tool" to be used to do something with.

So, what about error, then?

Of course, communication is difficult at the best of times, and it involves good faith and at least an attempt to stick to the Gricean maxims, and some skill in pragmatics. We must assign at least some elements of meaning to the same things or, like the old man in Peter Bichsel's story "A table is a table", who decided to randomly assign his own words to things, we may end up being socially isolated and unable to communicate with anyone else.  Given, however, that we do share basic meanings of words the question of error is more subtle. Error is the "abnormal" but it is also the creative, the unusual and exists on a range of levels. When you approach a new language it becomes a lens through which you then view your first language and associations arise on intra and interlinguistic levels that mean that your experience of that language will be unique and this, in turn, is part of making it your own. The name "Heidelberg" in German, is to me, forever bound up with the idea of woods and fruit because something in my mind associates it with "Heidelbeere" or blueberries. I don't know why this happens but it makes for a very positive image of the name. In Kramsch's account of a Japanese learner of German, however, the same name was completely different. The "Hei" was likened to "Hai" or shark and "del" was similar to the Japanese verb for to "emerge" so the name for this learner was associated to an image of a shark emerging from a mountain. These images are incredibly rich and Kramsch, in fact, argues for the multilingual subjectivity of language learning. Language, she says is symbolic on the level of signs but also indexical, in that it may point to a whole series of other referents that exist in our consciousness, or in the outside world, so that a house for one person may be completely different from a house for another. On yet another level it is iconic. We are attracted to the images of the written form, the letters or characters as mentioned above. 

Bringing all this together into the language that each and every one of us shares with each other (and ourselves) every day is a magical process of transformation and the art of listening to others and entering their worlds immensely rewarding. New meanings are created and new realities forged, new discourses created and identities changed. Reducing language to the level of the apostrophe in the wrong place seems to be such a sad reduction of what language might be. So, to answer my initial question, I would say that there is no such thing as "Good English" because English is a process which is in constant flux. There are shared meanings and new ones which emerge from particular interactions and particular historical moments.  COVID-19 is possibly one of the most memorable terms to emerge over the past year and yet it did not exist at the beginning of 2019. Trump's discourse around "the steal" is another example of language in context. So let's celebrate the creativity of the process and go with the magic of the word.

Reference

Hymes, D. H. (1972). On Communicative Competence. In Pride, J. B., & Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, 269-293. Baltimore, USA: Penguin Education, Penguin Books Ltd.

Another Brick in the Wall

Welcome to a new Reality

I was in a supermarket the other day when I heard Pink Floyd ringing out boldly with:

"We don't need no education"

I had just seen thousands of Italian high school students demonstrating for the right to go back to school physically and it made me think about discourse and how rapidly change can actually happen. 

Of course it is sad to think that we need a pandemic to understand how important education is, and how the social, interactional aspect is what the students miss more than anything. In any case, however, this incident made me reflect on the importance of discourse and how constructs such as education are socially created by the world we live in. Being forced to stay at home, spending hours on end in front of a screen is certainly a wake up call for those who want to "get back to normal". 

Protest in the past: "Teacher, leave them kids alone"

Whereas not very long ago the sentiments in the Pink Floyd album were quite widespread and ideas of education as being thought control, cruelty and "dark sarcasm in the classroom" were an attack on the power of the teacher in the classroom, and the education system as being just a conveyor belt that created workers who were to be fed into the "system".

Of course, it is undeniable that the traditional models of Western education systems were designed to create model citizens, who complied with the social norms of the time, it is also true that not having an education has never been an advantage. The myth of the uneducated, self-made man may hold true for a few but for many the road to future work, future social acceptance and a modicum of prosperity is certainly through education. Whilst the privileged regarded school complacently as "a bore", the less fortunate were crying out for access to school which is seen as a key to success.

How things have changed

It takes very little, however, for new discourses to appear on the scene and thanks to COVID-19 the discourse of positive education in the classroom is now coming to the fore. Students and teachers are united against the situation and what is fairly clear is the social nature of education. We don't go to school only to "acquire knowledge" which, after all we could do in a variety of ways. We go to school to interact, to learn, but to make friends and to partake of life itself. The social nature of the classroom underlined by Piaget and the constructivists is being tested in a crucible of fire and is proving to be essential. We are social beings. Take physical interaction away from us and we wilt. 

Rather than being just "another brick in the wall" you as a student are a thriving member of a social community where you have the opportunity to exercise your own agency in creating your own world.

Let's hope that we can all get back into the classroom soon, and that it will be a nurturing space where students can learn to be creative and critical as they acquire knowledge and build it in a continuing discourse. It's time to create a new educational reality.

Looking for a new year

Looking for a new year

Today was New Year's Eve traditionally a moment in the year when we feel the need to welcome in something new, something better a chance for redemption and fresh beginnings, but this evening looked sombre, grey and uninspiring as countless news channels almost seemed to be savouring the empty squares around Italy.

photocredit@Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

31st December 2020 at about 11.30 pm

This year, in fact, celebrations would be different. We were in lockdown with a curfew at 10pm and there was a strange silence in the streets as the evening wore on. I had decided to go to bed early but somehow found myself, as midnight approached, overtaken by a sense of expectancy and suddenly there it was: lights in the inky sky, coloured kites floating above the roofs of Verona and fireworks being launched from balconies and windows. From my bedroom I saw stars and lights of all kinds colour the night, something that I had never seen before and the magic of those lights in the sky seemed to be full of promise: much more so than the official offerings in streaming.

Official celebrations

Fireworks and shows had been promised in streaming all over the world and I had half thought that this might be the beginning of new rituals, new ways of communicating and celebrating our hope for the future in new multimodal languages. I had seen that various cities, such as Paris and Milan had organised extravagant son et lumière shows and so as midnight approached I turned on my computer hopefully to see what creativity was on offer. The idea behind the Milan celebrations was inspired: people had been asked to write their messages for the new year on Twitter and the words would be projected onto the cathedral, but the messages were quite long at times and it was hard to take them all in. Perhaps words rather than messages would have been more effective. This was followed by the most amazing, coloured images projected onto the cathedral but I felt that once I had got over the wow effect I was left wanting something more... 

The Dubai celebration spoke to me on a deeper level with images and video footage projected onto the Burj Khalifa tower. These had a greater impact perhaps because they were combined with music and spoke their own language. My thoughts, however, were more related to what technology could do and what we as humans are capable of. The wow moment here was that we were actually looking to the future and celebrating our world.

Lessons to learn from 2020

One of my favourite rituals at the end of a year, of course, is to look back and take stock, see what we have learned. Coronavirus has challenged is in so many ways and one thing that this year keeps reminding me of is the 'Allegory of the Long Spoons'. In this tale we visit Hell and see everyone seated at a table full of an abundance of food and drink but each person has a long wooden spoon and cannot these spoons are too long for them to bend and feed themselves, so they are starving surrounded by food. 

Heaven is the same scenario with one difference. The people there do not try to feed themselves but to feed each other. I realise that this is highly altruistic but it underlines the fact that the pandemic requires us to communicate with and support each other. When countries try to 'grab everything' for themselves, whether it be oxygen tanks, other medical supplies or vaccines, and when they do not help each other but build walls to shut one another out and every state plays by a different rule book, then the problem just becomes that much harder to solve.

A New Year

To return to Verona, the simple stars in the sky said more to me than the official celebrations because they were almost like a cry from individuals looking for hope in what has been a miserable end to a very had year. My hope is that we find a way to foster that hope and to talk to each other, to find the time to stop and listen to each other and to use the technology we have not to create wow effects but to feed each other with our own 'long spoons'.

In any case, I am a firm believer in rituals and mine involves, as I said, taking stock. I hope you find your own new rituals and that we can share in finding our way together.

What is incandescent thinking?

 Welcome to a new blog: incandescent thinking

“Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential."  Michel Foucault "The Masked Philosopher"

Incandescence is usually related to that brightly burning light at the centre of a flame or filament.

According to the Oxford Lexico Dictionary it may mean:

 Photo by JF Martin on Unsplash

1) emitting light as a result of being heated;

2) full of emotion or passionate;

3) extremely angry.

To combine these three things, therefore, would mean a type of thinking that is extreme, that questions something and that is related to passion or perhaps anger but some emotional response and that ultimately sheds light on whatever is being investigated. In fact thinking, talking and writing incandescently does not mean to be unnecessarily emotive but to hone emotion into a critical response to an issue or topic. This kind of thinking is the reasoning that takes a problem, turns it upside down and  focuses its beam on it until it burns away all the hype and gets to the core. It is the type of thinking that has us sitting on the edge of our seats wanting more, and energizes us, changing our worldview and inspiring us to indulge in our own brand of incandescent thinking. 

In a world where we are surrounded by mis- and disinformation it can be hard to know what to believe and in our "age of information" the borders between real and artificial are becoming increasingly blurred. In this world, even more then, do we need to be curious digging down to get to the origin of what is said. This is not a case of taking polemical positions and then defending them, it is rather the quest to understand. It means respecting your interlocutor, even when you really disagree with them, and trying to  find common ground rather than to engage in battle. Of course, to do this is easier said than done, but the longest journey, as they say, starts with the first step so here goes.

Creativity, imagination and incandescent thinking

Creativity involves taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary and it is linked to imagination. Many of us protest vociferously when asked to use our imaginations, saying that we done have much, but if you did not have any imagination you would not be able to even get out of bed in the morning and start your day. Imagination means walking up and visualizing yourself going into the kitchen and putting the kettle on, or thinking about the power of the water jet in your shower. It means deciding in advance what you want to eat for breakfast or what you are going to say in your meeting later that day. We all use it constantly and it is an essential part of what makes us human. If we had had no imagination we would never have gone to the Moon.

Creativity, on the other hand, means taking things, concepts, insights, and using this imagination to link them until something new is created. In a nutshell it is about linking seemingly unrelated things and finding new, even strange, outlandish connections between them until something new is created. This may also seem to be rather abstract but is actually a very normal part of the way our minds work. If I say the word "green" and "bank" you will probably start thinking about connections straight away. This could be the green bank of a river, which is covered in grass, or it could be a green bottle bank, where empty bottles are stored or even bank in the sense of a financial institution which invests some of its earnings in "green" or ecological initiatives. The list continues (You might like to try and brainstorm how many different links you can find) and to associate ideas like this in different contexts is a very natural thing to do. It is creativity on a day to day level. Thinking creatively by creating links like this is one route into incandescent thinking. It gives us the chance to question things or to look at them in a new light but this is only the first step.

Using imagination creatively

Using imagination creatively involves associating two or more usually unrelated things such as "water" and "market". Perhaps the two associations that spring immediately to mind are water or floating markets, where produce is sold from boats. 

another association may focus on "water" as the product" and the "market" as a sider concept, referring to all those transactions where water as energy is sold or exchanged. Creating something new from this involves going even deeper into the nouns themselves or maybe changing the part of speech. "Water" as a verb, for instance, may be associated with plants but if we say the heavens opened and watered the fragile market stalls below, then we are creating a new agent, not the human one but one related to weather. 

This was a creative "play" with words and ideas but the next step is to take this further and to look at the way people perhaps use those words and ideas and what is subconsciously associated with them. 

A rapid google search for water and market led me to this site: https://water-market-europe-2020.b2match.io/

This "Water Market Europe" is a conference which showcases and develops methods of providing water as a resource. Other results show the water market being presented as a highly lucrative market ripe for investment. Water, in fact, in 2020 is considered to be similar to gold and oil as a commodity which will be profitable https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/water-futures-to-trade-on-wall-street-first-time-ever-2020-12-1029870836

From this very fast reading of the water market discourse we can already see the emergence of investment, business and water as a source of wealth, rather than the basis of life. A Google search for water market investment, in fact, returned 802, 000,000results in less than 60 seconds. Of course the idea of water as the source of life is what is actually being promoted here, and a search for "water", "source of life" returned many more results: 3,590,000,000 in just over a minute. 

What we have done here is to take seemingly unrelated ideas, to associate them and then to search the Internet to explore the discourse around them (very briefly).

The next step is to determine a problem which can be explored. In this case it is the problem of water as a commodity and how this might impact us.

Jaron Lanier: a scary digital prospect for the future

Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality is now one of those who seeks to underline its dangers. In his 2014 book "Who owns the future"  he outlines a frightening prospect for the future. On page 13 he warns that although so many digital tools and content are free, other things may become increasingly scarce until we may, in his words:

"You sit at the edge of the ocean, wherever the coast will be after Miami is abandoned to the waves. You are thirsty. Random little clots of dusts are full-on robotic interactive devices, since advertising companies long ago released plagues of smart dust on the world. That means you can always speak and some machine will be listening. "I'm thirsty. I need water." The seagull responds. 'You are not rated as enough of a commercial prospect for any of our sponsors to pay for freshwater for you.' You say, 'But, I have a penny.' 'Water costs two pennies'. 'There's an ocean three feet away! Just desalinate some water!' 'Desalinization is licensed to water carriers. You need to subscribe. However, you can enjoy free access to any movie ever made, or pornography or a simulation of a deceased family member for you to interact with as you die from dehydration..."

This is an extreme vision and does not necessarily mean that this will happen, just that it is one possible future scenario. It might happen. Looking at what is happening around us and where the actions being taken may lead is one way of exploring our world and developing our own knowledge.

We have come a long way from our initial association or "water" and "market" but going beyond the simple association and looking at the discourse itself has taken us to a whole other problem that we could perhaps investigate in greater depth. 

Curiosity and Foucault

At the beginning of this blogpost I cited Foucault because I am so indebted to him and his approach to discourse. To look at that quotation in a little more depth we can deconstruct it:

1. “Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; this means, in the example above, being curious and reading around what people are saying which leads to a problem. Of course that is only one way into the discourse. You may begin with the problem and look at the surrounding discourse as a result of this.

2. it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; this leads us to create associations. In the example above the associations were between "water" as a source of life and "water" as a commodity. This led us to the idea expressed by Lanier, a little earlier in his book, that whenever something , such as video or music content online, is free, something else will become more expensive. The videos may be free but the cost of subscribing to the channel increases, for instance. This is a situation which is already beginning to exist and could become more extreme in the future, until little by little we find ourselves on the beach with no water.

 3. a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; this means to question things that we take for granted perhaps, the fact that already in 2020 it is not considered to be strange that "water" should be thought of as a commodity like gold to invest in.

4. a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities in the Western world business and investment is very familiar to us and is considered to be normal, as is the commercial spread of the digital world. It would be advisable perhaps, however, to stop and to consider this "normality", where it comes from, who plays the different roles in these domains and whose discourse is more powerful.

5. and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.

This final step involves stepping to one side and imagining things as being different. What would our world be like if business and investment were not so central? What and who makes them so? Who or what might determine or point to other things that are important or essential?

Welcome to the world of incandescent thinking. I hope it had you on the edge of your seat. :-)