Class Notes 1025
Class Notes 10/25 long / parole “the system of language” / “language in use"
“ideal speaker/listener part of an ideal speech community" Within anthropology, you have the disavowal of looking at language ideologically (Boaz). “People’s ideas about language are distortions, secondary rationalizations"
Within sociolinguistics (mid-late 20C), an attempt to study language in everyday practice. “language attitudes,” subjective beliefs about language. But distinguish between attitudes and practices—practices are more real. How to analyze naturally-occuring speech that represents an authentic projection of self. When we are studying naturally occurring language, we need to use techniques to make sure the performance does not interfere with an authentic presentation of self. (Chompsky: We’re studying competence, not performance.)
Goughman: disrupting the speaker as the locus of performance. Author/Animator/Principle. Disrupt the idea of authenticity, of univocality. So the question is how your self gets constituted through others. The terms of relationality get really interesting when you bring modernity into the question. What happens when the voices that constitute the self in fact overdetermine the self?
A language ideologies perspective is trying to reject the division between performance and authenticity. “The total linguistic fact: form, function, ideology, domain” Kroskriti [See Duranti handbook article] Multiple, contested Link societal structure to linguistic structure
Boundary-making, Irving & Gel: Iconoicity: Rhenatization. (Co-naturalization of stereotypes about language and identity) Stereotypes about language are mapped onto populations. Fractal recursivity: Patterns re-occuring across scales re-iteration of a pattern across scales. (The point is that nothing is fundamentally public or private: The distinction itself is what we should study, not what it is applied to. ) Erasure: How is it that certain forms of homogeneity or heterogeneity are mapped onto people, and others are not?
How are things made to feel phenomenologically present?
SO MODERNITY. What do we do with that? The importance of subjectivity and subject-formation. What are the conditions of possibility for one’s personhood? The universalizing claims about subjects that are part of modernity? contingent on a specific historical moment
scale as a technology of differentiation. Bringing anything into comparison with anything else, based on some terms of comparison. Kroskriti: Some ideologies are above consciousness; some are below consciousness
Why would Japanese women’s language reach ideological consciousness at this historical moment?
“The experience of going to school and be told that my family was stupid."
Inoue How does my discipline define modernity? I want to think now about computational literacy and how we might start a productive critique of the STEM pipeline. To start: “computational thinking” Percian model: sign, object, interpretant. Practice: Analyze the sign, discover the object to which it points. From a particular perspective, an interpretant can create a sign. Analyze the indexicality of the category. Why does it exist? Why do we need it? How Presentations of self are overdetermined; they precede the presentation.
Sausserian model: Sign: signifier/signified. Negative definition. The meaningfulness of any sign is only constituted negatively; by defining what it is not. Only as part of a system of difference. How does the deferral of other signs end up haunting another sign?
What you excluded, what you made abject.
Multilectalism and multilingualism
Emma: Other categorical multiplicity.
Notes for nsf writing.
Ground my proposal in social learning, distributed cognition: CS learning as a group project. CS, again is a medium potentially extremely well-suited for this kind of study. Where here might I find a distinction as applied, rather than the distinction itself.
Interface ideologies Professional vision, Goodwin: Ideology based in professional community. Discursive practices. Agha: what is the enregisterment of
We must not allow code to become a power relation in which the interface becomes the boundary of the community holding power.
Study hackers.
Orient the professional vision of computer science teachers