by hand

aside LANGUAGE AND SPEECH
(built on Ullman, 1962:19-21, 118-120 unless otherwise cited)

Language is potential, a system of signs stored in our memories, ready to be actualized. It does not consist of sounds but of sound-impressions left behind by the actual sounds we have pronounced or heard from others. It is a code, a vehicle of communication, whereas speech is encoding for decoding, use of the vehicle, actualized. Language is handed down discontinuously from generation to generation. As it slowly progresses it becomes substantially the same for all speakers (but every child must learn it afresh). Speech, crucially, remains the sole domain of the individual, who may use, abuse, deviate, or abstain from it as she desires. Grammar is followed as a way of continuing discourse with each other (Carse, 1986: 9 compare with debate). So when metamorphosis prohibits continuity of use-impressions and environments prohibit adaptation (in their physical form and the social psychology of their inhabitance) language breaks down and while use[1] may occur, engrams[2] – the residual traces of an adaptation made by the organism to a stimulus – cannot accrete. Use becomes staggered, stuttering; Increasingly immediate. Reference points vanish; life is ruled by the logic of the specific environment but not by the cultural(society vs culture in Carse 1986) properties of a language of places – The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but as they are not relinquished to a listener you say nothing at all (Carse, 1986:68). Control of meaning = control of users (Dick, 1978). The individual is no longer in sole control of her speech and the (mostly passive) recipient of a language but becomes the repeating box for syntax determined by commercial development – phrases and words which are not the linguistic systems in which individual members of the community carry their memories but are overly generic, storing up that which is stable, common and impersonal – crushing or at least overlaying the delicate and fleeting impressions of our consciousness[3], that layering and plasticity of ordinary language, with its almost orchestral combinations of logical elements… whose dominants are determined in turn by circumstances and conjunctural demands (Certeau, 1984:xvi).

Table: Language, Speech, and Radical Monopoly of Space

Adapted from Ullman (1962:21)

Read in context of networks/markets/hierarchy and also Stigeler (2010) comments on commerce.

Meaning is Lost. Living in space is (like language) a joint game against the forces of confusion.[4] Similar to basic animals, however, structures and spaces under the logic of radical monopoly convey emotions first, things next and more complicated relations not at all. Emotions reach their momentary peak and quickly dissipate (Tuan, 1977:107). Content (see Ashihara) is surrendered to form (see also Bookchin, 1974:89). That is, their existence is overly phonetic, sloganistic and technical functions are branded as “poetic”[5]. For example, the gibberish obtained from taking a sequence of words, pairs of words or triads of words according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language (similar to the design algorithms of commercioinstitutionalism) will be remarkably similar to a the language from a phonetic point of view (buildings that resemble buildings – WSIWG architecture, commercial residential developments) yet useless from the more vital semantic one (concerned with meaning, use, life)[6] – The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you[7] – These recombinant[8], closed[9] environments defy attachment; defy long life, continuity, communication and feedback while being ruled by equilibrium and integration that in fact bedevil coherence (Sennett, 2006b). Without participation, action, relation, memory, learning, and the long delays that they involve, semantic place – an idea-by-idea, asynchronous, or even more general form which is not purely literal – cannot develop, resulting in space which has no power to call on the whole of past experience in its transformations (Ullman, 1962; Wiener, 1954:81). These concrete chimpanzees and their creators lack the mechanisms to translate use into the basis (memory, engram) with which to unite their own ideas or develop into a complex mode of form, place (Ullman, 1962; Wiener, 1954:84). Through successive implementation of market based, institutional and centrally planned and administered developments our cities and spaces have lost the ability to speak and their learning of the language is now limited, slow, and highly imperfect, resulting in the abortion of the social aspect (Wiener, 1954:85).

[1] Superficial, obedient, receptive.

[2] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_%28neuropsychology%29

[3] Bergson, quoted in Ullman (1962:119).

[4] Wiener (1954:92) citing a ‘cybernetically-minded philologist’ discussing language.

[5] Cacciari (1980:6)

[6] Wiener (1954:79)

[7] Ai Wei Wei (2011)

[8] Not closely connected to a particular industrial application, but can be easily transferred from one to another, from one sector of economic activity to another and so on (Berardi, 2009a:78-9).

[9] Sennett (2006b)