Archive for October, 2006

Scott Eric Kaufman over at Acephalous is gearing up for his MLA panel on blogging and, having asked his regular readers to email or post on their academic or professional backgrounds, has learned some surprising things: specifically, he was startled at how many people were committed enough to the site to email, even though they had never posted publicly, and he was particularly startled at how many of his lurkers are female, given that public posters are largely male. He is currently asking for theories about why people read blogs without posting, and for theories about the causes of the gender disparity between posters and readers.

It’s always an interesting issue, who reads a blog. This blog has always had regular readers who know me in person (it was originally developed to communicate with my somewhat dispersed research group, as well as to keep in touch with people who knew me from when I was working outside the academy). The blog’s origin meant, among other things, that I never had to worry that I was writing for absolutely no one. Along the way, the blog picked up other regular readers - local readers who prefer to drop into my office for a chat, instead of posting; distant and local readers who email their reactions; and the occasional public poster. And then there are the mysterious recurrent IP addresses - people who seem to find it worthwhile to visit, but who haven’t made themselves known in any way.

I’ve already posted a few thoughts over at Acephalous about why I comment on some blogs, and only lurk on others. For me, commenting at someone else’s blog reflects the feeling that it would be an interesting place to have some kind of ongoing discussion - not just in one thread, but in a number of threads over time. I therefore comment on a very small number of blogs - and generally only after lurking for some time, to get a feel for the community and the conventions of discussion. I almost never post one-off, issue-driven comments on any blog, even if I have relevant expertise in a topic - for me, blogging is a medium for ongoing discussion, and a one-off post doesn’t satisfy that interest.

At the same time, I don’t tend ever to become an all-purpose commentator at any blog - I seem to “specialise” the sorts of comments I make, based on the “relationship” I have to that blogging community - and the patterns of my comments often have very little to do with the patterns of my reading: I like Acephalous for many reasons, but am generally particularly struck by Scott’s theoretical, historical and dissertation-related posts. Perversely, however, I almost never contribute to discussions on these kinds of posts - instead, I tend to respond mainly to more “social” threads… At Savage Minds, by contrast, I respond almost exclusively to theoretical posts - and therefore often go long stints without posting, effectively waiting for an appropriate topic to arise. And yet I read the blog regularly, rather than selectively reading only the sorts of posts to which I tend to reply…

In describing my own commenting style, I’m not at all suggesting that I think this is what everyone else does, or should do: I know people who are clear single-issue (or, in most cases, multiple-issue) posters, who will happily join the fray at any blog if they have expertise on a topic, regardless of whether they’ve spent much time lurking in that blogging community. I know others who never, ever post on any blog, although they read far more blogs than I do… Commenting, like blogging itself, serves a range of interests, and falls into a range of styles. Scott is in the process of trying to theorise some of the commenting trends he sees on his blog - if anyone here is an Acephalous lurker, and hasn’t yet noticed the thread, perhaps head over and contribute to the discussion - if, that is, you comment on this sort of thing… ;-P

Being an inaugural guest’s post, I hope that, while not up to the usual standards of this blog, the following content is not too far short either. By way of introduction: I am involved in the same reading group as N Pepperell, and have been invited to write some notes on several of the texts we cover. Our reading so far has aimed at doing a potted history of 20th century linguistics, and our path has arrived at Chomsky’s “Language and Mind”.

My apologies in advance for what might seem a naive and anachronistic take - none of our group are linguists by training, and therefore we have stumbling through what is no doubt a fragmentary and selected course. And I apologise for the prolixity of this, an inaugural guest’s post… In any case, what Chomsky presents in this 1968 version of his account of language is roughly as follows: there are 6 lectures, split into 2 groups of 3. The first group of 3 were based on lectures delivered at Berkeley in ‘67; the second group were delivered to different audiences at different times. In this light, the didactic purpose of the book becomes clear in moving through it: Chomksy is presenting, to different audiences, in more or less technical detail, 3 distinct ideas.

Firstly, he presents in a number of guises the idea of universal grammar - where grammar is a set of rules which determine the matching of a given sound to a given meaning. Meanings belong, according to the universal grammar thesis, to a deep semantic structure; sounds belong to a surface phonological structure; and what connects the two are syntactic rules.

Secondly, he presents the related but not, in my view, essential idea that such a system is both required by all human languages, and acquired too quickly by human individuals to be accounted for by a range of cultural, social or environmental stimuli. Instead, using the Poverty of the Stimulus argument commented upon elsewhere in this blog, this system must be innate.

Thirdly, the “innateness” thesis connects his, that is to say Chomsky’s view, with a broad, important but largely forgotten tradition of rationalism (long since eclipsed by the rise of empiricism in general, and behavioralism in particular, in the human sciences).

At this stage I want to comment about one aspect of Chomsky’s argument: that semantic deep structures exist prior to their transformation into phonological surface structures. At least in his account here, it seems that every sentence - even assuming for now that in a normative account, sentences can be taken for meaning “informational statements” - must exist in some ready-made semantic form before it can go through some transformational process. However this account seems to me to miss a key aspect of language production - that most sentences develop in time. While a well-formed sentence may be reverse-engineered into into its constituent parts - into noun phrases, verb phrases and so on - it seems unlikely to me that this is how such sentences are always generated in the first place. Such analysis misses the essential fact of language utterances - that they exhibit a linearity, insofar as the start of a sentence is always before the end of the sentence. The following is a tentative stab at how I think this argument could unfold:

When I make a sentence, I can proceed in a number of ways. I can start with some logical proposition I wish to convey, then determine which is the best form for the conveyance (moulding some semantic content into phonetic or othographic form via syntactic transformations, in the Chomskyan way). But this is only one of a number of ways I can proceed. I can start with a particular phrase (”Notwithstanding Chomsky’s insightful analysis…”), then proceed with what may seem a logical extension (”… I disagree with his theory of the innateness of language”). I can also recant: “… well, actually, I agree with his analysis”). I can also forget where I ‘was’, or simply allow my semantic content to remain, perhaps wistfully, unexpressed: “…”. I can perform a number of acts, but none of those acts are irrevocably determined by some original semantic content which remains intact throughout the duration of the act. Even the original phase (”Notwithstanding Chomsky’s insightful analysis…”) does not establish a determinate meaning for the sentence in which it is found - my subsequent words can serve to undercut - with sarcasm or irony; to frame - by quoting or paraphrasing; to emphasise, castigate, or perform a number of acts which alter the meaning of an existing phrase or sentence. Chomsky’s examples always assume that a speaker who has considered what she or he wants to say before saying it, and remains committed to the saying of it at least until the saying is said - but of course there are many examples, mundane and famous, which run counter to this.

It might seem that this sort of criticism echoes those of pragmatists generally, and Searle in particular. However what is striking to me is not that sentences can do things other than make statements of fact, but rather that even when making a statement of fact, I can alter the meaning of the statement significantly at any time during its utterance. This is trivially true, in that I can always proceed as teenagers do when they append “…not!” at the end of sentence. So the point would be that it is empirically contingent for any given well-formed sentence as to whether its meaning had been determined entirely in advance of its utterance - and therefore could have undergone the sorts of sentence-wide syntactic transformations (active to passive, and so on) that Chomsky proposes. On the other hand, it seems equally plausible that for a number of sentences the syntactic form is prior to the semantic content - as in question-and-answers routines, where the answer’s syntax mirrors that of the question (”who saw Bill” - “John saw Bill” versus “who was Bill seen by?” - “Bill was seen by John“). Of particular importance in this regard is that it is possible for me to be committed to the syntax of a sentence I am about to make, before I know what I am going to say. How could I then, consciously or otherwise, apply rules to get to a known syntactic construction (for instance, a passive construction) from some as-yet unknown semantic meaning?

This is not to say, at the level of a phrase, and indeed for many sentences, there may not be processes at work transforming meaning into sound the way Chomsky describes - indeed this may even be the normative case. However it seems to me that there are many other ways sentences can be formed, and these show that a more complex relationship exists between the semantic, syntactic and phonological parts of a sentence than what Chomsky - circa 1968 - will allow.

Quite possibly, later Chomsky or other more recent accounts resolve this problem in some way - if indeed it is a problem. Meanwhile, we are now moving on to How to do Things with Words…

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (from Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”)

For a change, I thought I might actually write something on planning…

The always-amazing BLDGBLOG has an article up on the demolition of the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. I’ve mentioned in other contexts that ruins feature somewhat prominently in my memories of Chicago. In a past life, I did some work in and around the Cabrini Green development, so I also have memories of the residents beginning to mobilise as they realised that the housing estate’s proximity to high-value land in Chicago’s North Shore would lead to pressures to displace their community. The BLDGBLOG story prompted me to backtrack through the recent history of the development, with which I had lost touch in the intervening years.

One of the things I always found most striking about the administration of public housing in the US was the way in which the system seemed structurally geared to penalise intact families. To obtain access to public housing, families were often in the position of either hiding the ongoing family involvement of a male partner - or, alternatively, of electing divorce and separation in order to secure stable housing for the mother and children. I notice that similar choices are still being made by families caught up in the Cabrini redevelopment. To qualify for residence in the mixed-income North Town Village development that would be built on some of the housing estate land, Cabrini residents had to pass drug and criminal background tests and agree to complete a “good neighbour” seminar program designed to help them “fit in” in a community they’ll share with much wealthier neighbours. For some families, these requirements have entailed a choice between keeping the family together (and having to choose housing options outside their long-term local community), or excising family members who can’t make the cut. As Vicki Mabrev reports:

Sheri Wade was desperate for a safer community. A run of bad luck landed her at Cabrini-Green eight years ago. And for her two youngest children – Travis, 12, and Jamilla, 9 – the projects have been a prison. In fact, Wade says, she had to keep them indoors in order to keep them safe.

Sargent and Wade both made it to the next stage of the application process, which included attending a meeting with some of the buyers.

Wade seemed a shoo-in, but her application hit a snag. Her on-again off-again husband wouldn’t pass the drug test, and she knew it.

So she found herself in a difficult position: her husband on one hand, a brand-new home on the other, and Howell in the middle. Wade made a wrenching choice. She and her children would leave her husband behind.

“I couldn’t keep having it happen to the whole family,” says Wade. “It wasn’t just affecting him. It affected the whole house.” From Vicki Mabrev (2003) “Tearing Down Cabrini Green”, CBS News, 23 July

The other thing that struck me, from my admittedly very brief look at the Chicago Housing Authority plans for the redevelopment, is the rather narrow and technocratic understanding of “sustaining viable communities”. In my current work, I often express some scepticism about the tacit (and sometimes not-so-tacit) romantic notion of “community” that underlies some community development projects. Reading the CHA document, I found myself reacting even more strongly to the singular focus on physical asset management and top-heavy managerialism, in what is apparently the section of the CHA plan most directly relevant to community building. I’ve been reminded that it is, in fact, possible for something to be too… non-romantic for my taste.

The redevelopment plans for the Cabrini Green site can be found online at the Chicago Housing Authority website.

Some of the backhistory for the redevelopment is provided in articles assembled at the Chicago Tribune, while the Cabrini Green article at Wikipedia, though a bit rough, has a nice list of further resources on the estate and the redevelopment process.

Readers interested in some of the more complex dimensions of Chicago’s public housing history, including particularly the complex intersection of racial segregation and public housing policy, might be interested in the background material on the Gautreaux case - a case that also occupies an interesting place in the sociological literature, for its role in making possible a “natural” sociological experiment into whether dispersing poor households into mixed neighbourhoods would itself have a positive impact on poverty.

I’ve been meaning for some time to write something on research supervision, but haven’t quite gathered my thoughts for anything comprehensive. Because this post is more of a placeholder than a developed set of thoughts, I’ll place the content below the fold.

Just a quick note that we’ve decided to engage in a miniature group blogging experiment during the reading group’s diaspora. Different members of the group will alternate introducing specific texts, so that I don’t monopolise the “framing” of our discussions, and so that the workload of preparing introductory posts (which, at least for me, are generally harder to write than responses) is spread out. Depending on their mood and inclination, perhaps some of the group members can be enticed to branch out a bit - conference blogging? PhD-related thoughts?

But small steps… small steps… ;-P

Since we haven’t completely clarified how anonymous, etc., our guest bloggers want to be, I’ll allow them to introduce themselves as and when they’re ready. Just wanted to explain for regular readers why you may finally see some variety of authors cropping up on the blog over the next month or so.