Structured Visions

Is 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...

Have 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 sel...

In 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 pa...

Here'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...

What 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...

How 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

What'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:  @jodi...

Welcome 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...

Linguist, 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 to...

In 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....

Remember 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 analy...

To 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...

This 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...

Our 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...

Remember 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...

Today 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  Playin...

We 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 so...

We'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...

What do you do when your social vision doesn't match that of those around you? Or if you come from a planet where the social world is a lot more harmonious than the one you're noticing on earth? You could try ethnography. Ethnography and the spirit of exploration in today's episode.

I reached into my mailbag during today's podcast and found this letter from a faithful listener. OK, it was my brother. Or, as he likes to call himself, 'the magnificent brother from the new world'. Jodie, I'm catching up on podcasts and am in the middle of listening to #47. I hope you don't mind but I have a question. In regards to your concept that we try to figure out the problems by going beyo...

We  go back to middle school  this week, looking once more at the  This American Life episode dedicated to the subject , and taking up once again Levinas's notions of alterity and face. Here's what I said last week about middle school: Middle school is a social body that has a face. … I want us to be able to look at the face of that social body and see it as something completely  other . I also sa...

In  an episode of This American Life , 14-year-old Annie relates middle school to a 'whitewashed, brick-walled, iron-gated prison' that she finally escapes from. Annie's description gives us a good excuse to revisit the use of prison metaphors to describe oppressive social structures.  Foucault's Panopticon  will spring to mind for many Structured Visions listeners, but we don't have to rely upon...

More this week on the human body and the social body. What about the self? In this episode I go against the idea that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the self and the human body – that each time we see a human body there's a singular self/mind/consciousness that is attached to/merged with/inhabiting it. Did you ever read  Philip Pullman's  His Dark Materials  trilogy ? The characters i...

Today I explore in a bit more detail these two potentially provocative premises: that the social body is real, and that it hasn't yet been formed. Let's take them each in turn: The social body is real. We can spend all day under the influence of our favourite substances (beer, wine, Haribo sweets) what it means for something to be 'real', but for my purposes 'real' is useful. If I decide the socia...

There's a new binary opposition in town! Instead of thinking, as we have been in Structured Visions, about the individual in relation to society, I've proposed we begin to think in terms of two types of  body . The human body and the social body. The self, as I said in  Episode 42 , attaches to one or the other of these bodies. More often than not, in my experience analysing conversational data, i...