Structured Visions
99 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago -Linguist Jodie Clark explores creative ways of imagining social transformation.
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Episodes
Episode 98 Linguistic singularities
April 25, 2024 16:09 - 50 minutes - 38.3 MBCounting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so. In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refe...
Episode 97 The intimacy of denial
March 28, 2024 04:10 - 59 minutes - 45.4 MBWhat’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.) What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘Negative space’ refers to...
Episode 96 The Earth’s language
February 29, 2024 05:04 - 56 minutes - 42.7 MBWe start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions: 1. What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language? 2. Where are you? There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true. Does that make spoken language more genuine? Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemera...
Episode 95 Your name without language
January 31, 2024 05:06 - 50 minutes - 38.6 MBWhat would your name be without language? In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’. What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated? Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the wo...
Episode 94 Language and the afterlife
December 28, 2023 05:00 - 53 minutes - 40.4 MBWhat happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience. The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the ...
Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?
November 30, 2023 05:01 - 49 minutes - 37.6 MBIs there a distinction between you and the rest of the world? Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin? What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’? The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness. The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous, which comes from the w...
Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions
October 25, 2023 14:47 - 39 minutes - 30.4 MBWhen was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.) I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths. It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my...
Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood
September 28, 2023 04:00 - 42 minutes - 32.1 MBLinguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out,...
Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism
August 31, 2023 07:37 - 42 minutes - 31.5 MBWhat’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in? What’s the difference between this and that? There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric. Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the risk and the challenge of human language. The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy. The risk: ...
Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery
July 27, 2023 06:18 - 50 minutes - 37 MB‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ —from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127 Can something be both practical and dreamy? Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to somet...
Episode 88 Grammar shame
June 29, 2023 09:52 - 40 minutes - 29.8 MBWhat’s your most mortifying experience of grammar shaming? Mine involved a misplaced apostrophe in an important email, and I still burn with shame to think of it. Grammar for many has a spectrum of negative associations, which ranges from the imposter syndrome you might get when you realise you can’t tell a preposition from a conjunction to more serious and oppressive forms of linguistic prejudice. An example of the latter can be found in Geneva Smitherman’s account of her childhood expe...
Episode 87 What if you’re an alien?
May 25, 2023 09:01 - 41 minutes - 31.4 MBIf you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home? If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language. The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is ...
Episode 86 Feelings are, like, inside things
April 26, 2023 12:45 - 47 minutes - 36.6 MBWhen you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you? Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently? For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, more personal, more enveloping. The word ‘like’ is a great example of that. The evolution of grammar is a move toward more personhood—which is...
Episode 85 How spooky is language?
March 29, 2023 18:39 - 48 minutes - 36.7 MBWhat makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out. Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all? In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’. We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood. As Chinese philosopher Zhu...
Episode 84 Language before language
February 23, 2023 20:45 - 40 minutes - 29.2 MBWhere’s home? What’s your first language? What was your language before your first language? Join me to explore linguistic frames of reference in Guugu Yimithirr, polyglot newborns and the beauty and tyranny of language, self and home. The story I read in this episode is ‘Poor Magellan’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com. Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebo...
Episode 83 Language goes viral
January 28, 2023 10:53 - 40 minutes - 29.9 MBHow often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job. In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as Michel Foucault might say, to become subjects. I prefer the word ‘self’ to ‘subject’, and I like to think of language as forming the membrane t...
Episode 82 The hills are alive
December 29, 2022 09:38 - 57 minutes - 41.6 MBA question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What’s your relationship with words? Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023? If so (and I hate to break this to you), you may be treating language like currency. And language will always resist that type of treatment. Despite your best intentions, one...
Episode 81 What are your pronouns?
November 29, 2022 14:38 - 47 minutes - 34.9 MB‘What are your pronouns?’ How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you? This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real educ...
Episode 80 Is nothing sacred?
October 27, 2022 04:24 - 52 minutes - 37.5 MBIs nothing sacred? What images or memories does this question conjure for you? Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.) When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge. The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t thi...
Episode 79 Possession, duality and other grammatical mysteries
September 29, 2022 04:30 - 1 hour - 44.6 MBIn this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy: Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world. What separates us is human language. The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evolution, the Earth’s next great experiment. And there are mysteries in the structure of language that can help us understand how the separati...
Episode 78 Love, language, music and aliens
August 31, 2022 04:30 - 1 hour - 42 MBHave you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation. The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body. The story I read in this episode is ‘Messages’, available on grammarfordreamers.com. Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of...
Episode 77 The erotic power of syllables
July 28, 2022 04:30 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBWhat propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation? And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable? In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’. We’re playing with these ideas: Human language gives the human body the experience of existing separately from the rest of the natural world. Human l...
Episode 76 Quantum linguistics
June 30, 2022 04:30 - 58 minutes - 39.5 MBWhere do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford. That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and desires. In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas: Ideas emerge from empty space. Language organises that ...
Episode 75 Accidentally born again
May 26, 2022 04:30 - 58 minutes - 42.1 MBWhat’s your relationship to religion? This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way. To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question. What’s your most embarrassing religious moment? Here’s mine: ...
Episode 74 Create nothing
April 28, 2022 04:30 - 53 minutes - 38.8 MBIs there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself? Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions. The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain to do my PhD and was regularly doling out guidance to my student housemates. One of them was convinced that I ‘got’ her in a way her boyfriend didn’t. I didn’t have the heart to...
Episode 73 The structure of selfhood
March 31, 2022 04:11 - 55 minutes - 39.4 MBHow is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about. Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called ‘hydr...
Episode 72 Apocalypse fantasies
February 24, 2022 08:25 - 54 minutes - 38.2 MBHave you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language. Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s the window to intimacy. But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we’ve seen in recent years? The production of selves increases to potentially catastrophic proportions. Here’s the link to Dr Debbie Reese’s excellent critique of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Do...
Episode 71 Good news and bad news
January 27, 2022 05:30 - 48 minutes - 34.5 MBFerdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it’s also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news? The story I discuss in this episode is ‘A day at the lake’. Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you: http://bit.ly/lensoflanguage Join my fr...
Episode 70 The meanings of life
December 30, 2021 05:30 - 35 minutes - 25 MBHappy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life? Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we’re assuming about life when we ask what it means. Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a narrative, so the...
Episode 69 Our relationship with our world
November 25, 2021 05:30 - 51 minutes - 35.4 MB‘It’s easy to forget,’ said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26, ‘that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.’ That one number, he goes on to say, ‘defines our relationship with our world.’ According to Attenborough’s framing, the story is a mathematical problem, with a mathematical solution. But how often, in your experience, are relationship problems genuinely reducible to mathematical equations? How oft...
Episode 68 Life, language and other mysteries
October 28, 2021 04:30 - 46 minutes - 32.6 MBIn this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When’s the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I’m going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other. I believe that thinking about words will give us a bit of insight about what it was like when life first emerged on the Earth. These two things – life and language – for me share two qualities: tha...
Episode 67 Imperative blessings
September 30, 2021 04:30 - 50 minutes - 35.5 MBWhen did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it’s reckless not to. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘Go’. It’s just been published in the Running Wild Antholo...
Episode 66 A more welcoming world
August 26, 2021 04:30 - 47 minutes - 33.4 MBIs an enlightened society a society without language? This episode explores what starlings can teach us about selves, the space that surrounds the experience of being, and how to create a more welcoming world. The story I discuss in this episode is called ‘The end of language’. The hack I mention for finding the subject and verb of a clause is called the question-tag probe. Here’s a video on how to use it to find the subject, and here’s one on how to find the verb. Have you ever seen a...
Episode 65 Psychedelic linguistics
July 29, 2021 04:10 - 44 minutes - 31.3 MBHave you ever repeated a word over and over again to yourself to experience the dissolution of its meaning? What if you were to do that with the word ‘me’? When I was a little kid, repeating the word ‘me’ became a doorway to a world where I was freed from the self that language had created. It was trippy. In this episode we’ll discuss the role of language in creating, dissolving and protecting selves. In my academic research I analyse transcripts of conversations to identify the shape of...
Episode 64 The intimacy embedded in language
July 01, 2021 10:00 - 35 minutes - 25.4 MBIn this episode we explore the idea that intimacy is embedded in the structure of language, and that this same intimacy is embedded in the structure of life. We challenge the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in issue 13 of After Happy Hour Review. We play the ‘think of a word’ game, which shows up on pages 7-8 of my screenplay, Grammar for Dreamers (http://eepurl.com/huKgbf). We learn from Ed Y...
Episode 63 Original scent
June 04, 2021 07:42 - 30 minutes - 21.6 MBHere’s how to get fascinated by language if you’re not already. This might even feel a little bit like a transcendent, or mystical experience. Find a window and look through it. Focus first on the scene outside the window. Then focus on the windowpane itself. Toggle your attention back forth between the windowpane and the landscape outside. Now think of a word, like cake. Thinking of the meaning of cake is like looking at the scene through the window. Thinking of the form of the word...
Episode 62 Who’s the boss?
April 18, 2021 13:51 - 28 minutes - 20.1 MBWhat we think about language reveals what we think about society. Will changing our ideas about language help us create a more welcoming world? In this episode we explore performative utterances like ‘You’re the boss’ or ‘You’re in charge’. These are more horrifying than you might think. Often we think of language and power as commodities that can be bestowed on individuals swimming around in the fish tank of social structure. What if instead we thought of language as a sustaining fluid ...
Episode 61 Echos and their others
April 04, 2021 14:19 - 22 minutes - 15.7 MBHow do we respond to knowing that we’re stuck in a language system that’s built to contradict itself, and a social structure built upon exchange? We have to find ways to outwit the confines of language. Read my very short story ‘Echos and their others’ on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers
Teaser for Season 2: Grammar for dreamers
April 02, 2021 15:26 - 8 minutes - 5.8 MBWhat’s new in Structured Visions, version 2.0? We’ll still be exploring social structure. We’ll still be geeking out about language. But now I’ll be linking up my discussions to my most recent experiment – combining creative writing with my love of linguistics. Find out more and read ‘Echos and their Others’ at grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I’m so glad you’re here! Find me on Twitter: @jodieclarkling And on Instagram: @grammarfordreamers
Episode 60 How linguistics can save the world
May 30, 2018 19:54 - 39 minutes - 28.4 MBWelcome back to the Structured Visions podcast! In this episode we save the world. For me, saving the world means identifying ‘new ways of thinking about social structure’. Here are the things that need rethinking: the inequitable distribution of resources the isolation and marginalisation of difference an impulse toward self-destruction, and a lack of respect for the natural world. We can tackle all of these from a range of different disciplines, but on the Structured Visions podcas...
Episode 59 Enquiry, imagination and action
January 29, 2017 18:18 - 25 minutes - 34.6 MBLinguist, communication expert and digital media scholar Erika Darics asks ‘Shouldn’t scholars in Critical Discourse Studies be political activists? What is the point of exposing injustice if we stop there?’ In this episode I address Erika’s question. Spoiler alert: the answer is a resounding YES. And I celebrate the question ‘What is the point?’ Please keep sending me suggestions for podcast topics. I welcome them with an open imagination and a commitment to enquiry and activism.
Episode 58 Communities of Sara Mills
January 14, 2017 08:30 - 30 minutes - 41.1 MBIn this episode I share the talk I gave at the Symposium at Sheffield Hallam University on January 12, 2017, in honour of Professor Sara Mills’s retirement. Many thanks to all who participated in the event, including fellow speakers, Chris Christie, Lucy Jones, Shân Wareing and Karen Grainger. Special thanks to Dave Sayers and Alice Bell for organising such a moving tribute to Sara. Is there something you’d like me to discuss in an upcoming podcast? Get in touch! Click here to access...
Episode 57 Redneck roots
September 01, 2016 12:12 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MBRemember Christina from Episode 7? She’s the one who spared no time at all in getting as far away from Awayville, USA as she could. This week we return to Christina, and we get introduced to her mom… the redneck. Not that Christina’s embarrassed about that, or anything. Revisiting Christina’s conversation gives me the opportunity to illustrate more specifically how my approach to discourse analysis both draws on and differs from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). (Episodes 55 and 56 provid...
Episode 56 A story about language
August 09, 2016 10:02 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBTo engage in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the linguistic methodology I discussed last week, requires understanding language primarily as a form of communication that can be manipulated to represent the world in different ways. Indeed, language is often understood as a form of communication that is unique to human beings, and linguists describe the specific ‘design features’ that make human languages different from forms of animal communication. (See George Yule’s textbook, The Study of...
Episode 55 Critical condition
August 04, 2016 12:32 - 27 minutes - 25.6 MBThis week I discuss the branch of linguistics – Critical Discourse Analysis, or CDA – that most informs my approach to grammatically analysing texts. It’s the ‘critical’ part of CDA that appeals to me most – an aim of most practitioners of CDA is to explore the role language plays in maintaining or challenging social injustices. To give you an idea of how CDA usually works, I analyse a recent news item from Fox News. (Click on the headline below for the full article.) Women train to becom...
Episode 54 I was so hungry
July 10, 2016 09:00 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MBOur explorations in phenomenology have led us to understand consciousness as submerged in the world of perception. I have made a case for understanding this phenomenological world not as material world, but as a social world. I keep drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s image of the blindfolded person who uses a stick to gain perceptual experience of the objects in a darkened room. In today’s episode I play with the idea that it is language, or grammar, that serves as the ‘stick’ by which social bod...
Episode 53 Submerged in the social world
July 07, 2016 12:39 - 23 minutes - 21.1 MBRemember Episode 51, when we made our way, blindfolded, around a room with nothing more than a cardboard tube to guide us? We delve deeper into the depths of phenomenology this week – almost literally – taking seriously Sara Ahmed’s description in her Queer Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, in which ‘bodies are submerged, such that they become the space they inhabit’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 53). Ahmed’s critique encourages us to reorient our phenomenologies, to understand the spaces in t...
Episode 52 I’m very grateful for you listening today
July 07, 2016 11:38 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBToday I celebrate 52 weeks of religiously produced Structured Visions episodes! Enjoy a glass of bubbly with me while I share with you some of the motivations behind making the podcast and what I find so enjoyable about it. I also express my gratitude some figures who have been inspirations for me along the way: Tara Mohr, whose work on callings, and whose dedication to promoting women’s Playing Big made me recognise this way of honing my voice, exploring ideas on the public stage and ‘shi...
Episode 51 A Message from the Emperor, part 2
June 30, 2016 16:35 - 23 minutes - 21.8 MBWe return to Kafka’s tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the ‘you’ in Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that’s attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, intent upon sending ‘you’ a message, were the human body? In this episode I invite listeners to imagine that between the social body and the human body is an insurmountable distance. To explore this idea requires us...
Episode 50 A Message from the Emperor, part 1
June 23, 2016 11:05 - 33 minutes - 31 MBWe’ve been building up to some exciting ideas in these podcasts, many of which came to a head in Episode 47. Here are some of the key points: I’ve been recommending that when we think about social structure we draw upon a different binary than those that are often used. Rather than individual-society, or self-body, I’ve proposed human body and social body. Thinking in terms of these two elements as two types of body makes it possible to explore how they interact with each other. It also en...