A left review of J. K. Rowling’s (2012) The Casual Vacancy

To declare possible bias first: I have never read any of her Harry Potter books simply because this genre doesn’t interest me at my advanced age. When I was a teenager in Germany, I devoured Karl May’s Wild West and Oriental adventure books, some 20 volumes in all. Our son was a great fan of Raymond E. Feist’s fantasy fiction and no doubt was instrumental in what authors like Rowling, May and Feist do so well, namely to instil a capacity if not love for reading in young people. Reading large amounts of text, fictional or non-fictional, invariably leads to an extensive knowledge base, to literary refinement and aids the development of one’s own writing skills. Of course some of us harbour the dream that, like J.K. Rowling, our manuscript(s) will be accepted by a major publisher and henceforth sell millions of our books, to be turned into blockbuster movies and commercial accessories, and to become super rich and famous like J.K. My personal connection goes as far as having been an ESOL teacher for some time, just like J.K. in her youth teaching ESOL in Portugal – me in Asia and the Middle East - all the while making notes on Harry Potter, while over the years I only managed to have a couple of academic treatises (one on Noam Chomsky) published – and my novella lingering undiscovered as a self-publication with Lulu.com. Naturally as an average news and literature junkie I have occasionally followed J.K’s progress and when news reached the world that she was writing an ‘adult’ novel, I was intrigued enough to check out what the fuss was all about. When the launch became a major media event, I saw an interview clip on the Guardian website where she amicably chatted with a journalist dressed up as a literary agent for cook books. My wife who monitors my media interests jumped the gun and bought a hardcopy of The Casual Vacancy, a week or so after the launch. Having by then already learnt about the plot and what the major media literary critics thought of the book – mainly OK but not high-brow literature – I was of course wondering if my reading of it would concur with the initial reviews. (I will first present my review independent of any references to any other reviews and only then make some comparative comments).

Having had only time to read the book on my way to and from work (sadly still teaching ESOL) – on a ferry – it took quite a while to get through; however, it was always with anticipation as to what would happen next. A good sign! The main characters and their families were quickly established and the drama, if not the tragedy, unfolded, with some clever backwards and forwards narrative, in the contemporary timeline of a small British town, thinly disguised as fictional, for what was unfolding is in essence a grim social realism prevalent in Britain as much as in the Western World generally. Rowling describes the whole strata of contemporary society in no uncertain terms, from the local grandee cum London banker down to the junkie mother and her two children, teenager Krystal and toddler Robbie living in a dingy council flat at the border of Pagford (the fictional name of the town). Krystal Weedon, as the other high school teenagers in the play – I say ‘play’ both because the novel has Shakespearean qualities as well as being a good script for a movie – Stuart ‘Fats’ Wall, Andrew Price, Sukhvinder Jawanda and Gaia Bawden (and few lesser ones) are really the heart of the novel and as such eminently suitable for reading material for young adults, if indeed not adolescents at High School.

Given that there is quite a lot of teenage sex involved – not to speak of the sex between some of the adults, and most notoriously the rape of Krystal by her mother’s drug supplier – there is of course the immediate question of the novel’s suitability for youngsters below a certain age. This conundrum of the ‘suitable age’ has always been hotly debated as if adolescents have to be protected from the depraved aspects of sex, be it rape or paedophilia (as a nightmare scenario for Fat’s father ‘Cubby’, the deputy principal of the local high school) by not talking or reading about it. After all modern schools have ‘sex education’ on their curriculum, albeit in the most sanitized version of sex being a biological act that is best accompanied by genuine love – the latter a nebulous term for many a teenager – so Rowling’s treatment of sex as social reality must come with its teenage angst and most of all with its crude language. Maybe there is something innately British about the term ‘shagging’ which is used frequently as an intermediate term somewhere between ‘fuck’ and ‘have sex’ and ‘make love’. When Fats ‘shags’ Krystal one does get the impression – as a non-British speaker of English – that the act is something akin to coming under friendly fire.

Another term used as pre-eminently British, is ‘slapper’ which is of interest to New Zealand readers inasmuch the term surfaced as a highly unusual epithet in a recent murder case whereby the accused had scrawled the word on a wall, denouncing his brother-in-law’s wife as such and standing accused of murdering his brother-in-law. People had to consult their dictionaries to determine the meaning of ‘slapper’.

In any case the heavy dose of graphic sex, amongst teenagers and adults, running the gambit from rape to ‘making love’ is of course questionable. Sure, nobody can deny that it isn’t happening, especially the low-down abuse of sex as violence but is it the domain of literature as we’d like to know it? How much of it is voyeurism that attracts readers with unstable minds – yes, even readers and writers are not immune from insane acts like rape – and how much is it gritty realism, designed to forewarn the reader of the awful consequences of  depraved sex, like the rape of Krystal ultimately contributing to her suicide. In this The Casual Vacancy is very similar to a notorious New Zealand novel called Once were Warriors (by Alan Duff) which was made into a grim movie detailing the low-down Maori gang culture, also resulting in a teenage girl’s suicide due to rape by a relative. Some people saw it as a powerful tale to make people aware of the dreadful consequences of a macho culture that regaled in mindless violence, while others denounced it as voyeurism that invited sick minds to watch a simulated rape scene. Whilst the Once were Warriors  novel could be critiqued as presenting perversity and violence – with doses of relatively harmless sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – as being inherently low-class Maori, without considering the societal conditions which drive sections of society into underground squalor and misery – with attendant crime and violence – the same cannot then be said of The casual Vacancy precisely because Rowling presents the whole picture, and in no uncertain terms blames the British middle and upper classes for what goes on in the down-and-out sections of Pagford.

The prime vehicle  is the Mollison family: Howard as the obese, ageing businessman and Pagford councillor, his weird wife Shirley who worships the local grandee and the Queen, their lawyer son Miles who plays the theme of ‘as father as son’ and who unfortunately married a class down to a buxom blonde who causes much consternation for her mother-in-law Shirley. The senior Mollisons also have a lesbian daughter who has been sidelined but occasionally surfaces as a minor character – in my opinion as a bit of a cliché and as a flaw in Rowling’s overall attempt to cram in all the middleclass scenarios known to British mankind. Howard represents the silent majority of ‘decent’ burghers who just want the problem of low class people to go away – literally. Out of sight out of mind. Helping low class people like Terri (Krystal’s junkie mother) to get out of their squalid condition, is written off as pointless, as these people have only themselves to blame. It is their choice to take drugs and rape each other. Just don’t do it in our backyard. One might think that this is a cliché not worthy of the middle classes who after all just do the bidding of the upper classes – the Fawleys in the novel – but this is exactly the strength of the argument in The casual Vacancy, namely the denunciation of the upper and middle classes together, as perpetrators of social disintegration for those on the low and lowest socio-economic ladder. Without the help of the bourgeoisie the ruling class cannot function as a model of the Westminster Parliamentary system (read: constitutional monarchy): they would have to revert to feudal absolutism (read: monarchy).

The other central character in the novel, Barry Fairbrother (sometimes Rowling is a bit clichéd with her choice of names, as if the name itself indicates as to who we are) is of course already dead at the beginning of the novel and plays his role mainly as the ‘ghost-of-Barry-Fairbrother’ (for his life, we are filled in by various flashback scenes). He took on the role of lower-class man made good through education, having been brought up in the low-class council flats of the Fields within the border of Pagford, and having made it through university (the first in his family) and become the local banker (he presumably being a ‘good’ banker as opposed to the local aristocrat who is the ‘bad’ London banker). In any case Barry takes Krystal under his wings and just about transforms the troublesome teenager into a champion rower – the sort of saga whereby athletic talent exhibited unexpectedly by the lower classes is seen as the bootstrap by which you can pull yourself up into the big league. Gaia, as the alternative teenage character, just arrived from London with her social worker mother, has or had after all a boyfriend who already was training for the British football league, Chelsea maybe. In any case Krystal, as an unlikely rowing champion with a team of others from the local high school, winning a match against the snobby private school in the area, is a highlight of the sporting kind. Rowling’s descriptive powers and sense of irony work best in such scenes. Kay, Gaia’s mother, as the social worker fresh from London in pursuit of a gutless lover (a lawyer called Gavin), is the only other really sympathetic character in the book, meaning ‘sympathetic’ as a social worker who takes her job seriously and treats Terri quite successfully to the degree that Terri gives up heroin, at least for a while, and looks after her toddler son Robbie better than before. Redemption is possible with the genuine help of those who see the worth in each individual – a powerful message delivered by Rowling, quite possibly echoing her own situation when she was a young solo-mother on welfare in Edinburgh, poor but never down-and-out.

Which brings us to the other flawed family, the Sikh Jawanda family, where the mother Parminder is the local GP, and her husband, the good looking Vikram playing the surgeon in the district hospital. Parminder as a fellow councillor (together with Howard, Barry and a few others) is an admirer of Barry, inasmuch as he seemed to do what others only preach, like her Guru’s saying of ‘the light of God shines from every soul’. Parminder hates Howard for his insipid racism against her family, even though it is the son of the deputy principal, Fats, who torments their daughter Sukhvinder with primitive racial and sexual taunts. Howard’s on the other hand is the wholesome racism of the British race which has a noble and long history wedded to a place like Pagford and no immigrants – especially of colour - can possibly usurp this legacy and tradition, no matter how qualified they are and how well-off they are. There is even some ambivalence in Rowling’s apparent attitude, as she paints Parminder in particular as a somewhat unstable character who is obsessed with a personal hatred of Howard, so much so that she commits a professional indiscretion by publicly admonishing Howard as a cost to the British health system, due to his gross obesity. Of course she is right but in polite society one cannot say so – and there is no doubt that J.K. is now also a member of the polite society.

Which brings us in turn to the interesting question as to why Rowling wrote the book in the first place. Had she written it as her first effort, she would not have found a major publisher for it. After all the publishing industry has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo for British and world society. Having reached the pinnacle of publishing success with her Harry Potter books, she could dictate the ‘next’ book whatever its theme. Maybe she wanted to give the fingers to all those middle and upper class twats who ignored her so cruelly when she was a young and very good writer of fiction – just because she didn’t belong to the right class of Oxbridge people who publish successful books. I would do the same if I had the chance – or so I keep telling myself. There is something very incongruous in having her mug shot at the back of the book jacket, looking ever so glamorous, looking so totally disconnected from the book she just wrote. Presumably aged 47 in the photograph, she exhibits a cleavage she decries so humorously as ‘cracked’ in The Casual Vacancy for elderly women. Of course she can now afford the very best the beauty industry has on offer and she will look forever young and beautiful, cleavage and all. Can Rowling be a social activist? A recent report from the British Commission on Living Standards says that ‘Britain faces a choice between a generation of stagnant living standards for millions of lower-income households, or an alternative that tackles low pay, low skills, and childcare costs’; so, can Rowling be an influential advocate for the ‘alternative’? Will Britain descend to Dickensian conditions and is Rowling the new Dickens? Dickens famously campaigned for children’s rights in many of his novels, and Rowling in The Casual Vacancy can be compared to this noble aim. She obviously has a knack to describe the lives of dispossessed children and adolescents and make us painfully aware that the children – like Robbie and Krystal – are the ones who pay the price with their lives.

Maybe Rowling has the hope that a new generation, spawned by the working and middle classes, can become the new and follow-up rebels of the 60s generation, in open conflict with their miserable parents’ generation. Unfortunately she focuses too much on generational differences that stem from idiosyncratic conditions rather than universal themes (e.g. make love not war) – only Fats is described as having some philosophical thoughts, like wanting to be ‘authentic’. 

As such, the theme in The Casual Vacancy as a conflict of generations, is somewhat overdone. All the teenage characters are in conflict with their parents, one way or the other. Andrew Price gets regularly beaten up by this dumb working class dad who is given to mindless violence as much as being mindless generally. His wife gets the occasional fist as well. Rowling sometimes uses the word ‘pummelling’ as if she wants to downplay the physical family violence as not that bad, contrasting it with the far worse psychological violence visited upon Fats by his psychotic father, the deputy principal who imagines himself as a paedophile in disguise, and the somewhat clichéd terror of the strict traditional Sikh family values which demand educational success from their offspring at all costs. The unfortunate youngest daughter is therefore given to self-harm.

Then there is the verbal violence – if that’s what it is - played out between Krystal and her mother. As opposed to the other teenage-parent relationships, Krystal is the real mother figure (and in the end tragically wanting to become a mother herself) doing her best to save her mother from heroin induced oblivion. There is a bit of the 70s iconic ‘teach your parents well’ song lyric in all of this, as well as the age old observation that in very poor societies the young look after the old (and not so old).So why in this Orwellian down-and-out scenario do we have this low-down language to contend with? Many a sociolinguist has grappled with this question  which pains the polite middle classes in particular. Maybe poverty breeds not only crime but also a language dialect that bestows an unmistakable identity, a kind of verbal revenge visited upon polite society.

Rowling’s use of the vernacular, like the drug dealer’s request for Terri to keep some goods stashed away ‘Jus’ keep ‘em ‘ere fer us, Ter, fer a coupla days?’, or like Krystal’s vernacular anguish when she finds out her mother is shooting up again ‘You stupid fuckin’ junkie bitch, they’ll kick yer ou’ the fuckin’ clinic again’ - this sounds slightly laboured inasmuch all the other characters’ dialogue is rendered in conventional spelling form. To have sections of dialogue (or thoughts) in the vernacular for the down-and-out but not for all the others is a problem for social realism, inasmuch all people of all classes have sociolects, be it the Queen or be it the Terri, the junkie. As we know, the conventional written word is an abstraction of the spoken word, and as such cannot render the true spirit of a dialogue unless we employ phonetic script or other devices such as the liberal use of the apostrophe to indicate dropped consonants and vowels. Of course Rowling wants to demonstrate that so-called bad and/or obscene language as a dialect of certain sub-cultures is as neutral as BBC English is for the daily news. The well-known sociolinguist William Labov in his (1972) Language in the Inner City portrays black American inner city vernacular as a perfectly formed language dialect, transcribing recorded text with normal spelling (e.g. ‘Well, you must can’t fuck good then.’) but of course also detailing the particular prosody that goes with it in a separate chapter. Rowling could have adopted a similar scheme, thereby also being able to poke some fun at the affected accents the middle classes often adopt (à la Mrs Bucket in the old BBC comedy series).

As mentioned above, Krystal is the only ‘young’ character who, from the beginning, tries to looks after the ‘old’, i.e. her mother Terri, thereby alerting us to the role reversal that is necessary for any generational conflict to resolve itself. Rowling indicates something like that also for the Sikh family in that their youngest daughter changes from a Cinderella character into an assertive young woman who tells her mother what is what. Perhaps Rowling is pessimistic about wholesale generational change as the other teenage protagonists don’t seem to progress, stuck in teenage angst and sexual inadequacy.

I’ll resist the ‘how many points out of 10’ to give the novel, and instead check out what some of the mainstream reviewers have to say, and how much I agree or disagree. Much of the semi-intelligent British media is dominated by the Guardian empire these days – what with the BBC rapidly falling into everlasting disgrace over the Savile scandal – so the review by the Guardian’s Theo Tait must come first, giving a cautious thumbs up with various misgivings:

But if The Casual Vacancy is ambitious in its scope and themes, it is determinedly unadventurous in its style and mode. It's a book that wrestles honourably and intelligently with big moral and political questions, but does so in a slightly clunky and convention-bound way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/28/casual-vacancy-jk-rowling-review

In other words it sounds a bit boring. Wrestling with ‘political questions’ should best be left to the Guardian, it seems. A clearly disingenuous ruse to keep readers away from anything approaching social realism. One item of agreement lies in the reviewer’s observation of the use of the vernacular:

Perhaps that's partly because the Fields characters are handled with the tweezers of old-fashioned literary convention: whereas the others speak in rounded standard English, they use a kind of generalised, Dickensian lower-order-speak, that owes more to written convention than anything real: "I takes Robbie to the nurs'ry"; "Tha's norra fuckin' crime"; "No, shurrup, righ'?" (ibid.)

           

So what do the mighty say across the mighty Atlantic? The New York Times – in a recent NZ National Radio talk show identified as the best newspaper in the world, or thereabouts – as a counterpart to the Guardian is, perhaps not surprisingly, saying much the same, like it’s good but on the whole you don’t have to read it. At least the NYT reviewer Amanda Foreman opens with some compliments:

“The Casual Vacancy,” Rowling’s much-­anticipated departure from the genre of children’s fantasy, is a sprawling homage to the Victorian protest novel as typified by Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy. Like them, Rowling wishes to engage and enrage her readers, inspiring them to take socially conscious action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/books/review/the-casual-vacancy-by-j-k-rowling.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

While everyone seems to agree that Dickens was influential in highlighting Victorian degradation, and bringing about some social change for the better, both the Guardian and the NYT don’t want to accord any such possibility to Rowling, mainly because this is where the media calls the shots and ‘manufactures consent’ ( à la Chomsky and Herman). The NYT readers are warned that

Rowling has always harbored a particular loathing for middle-class smugness and self-congratulation — the kind Dickens so effectively satirized in “Oliver Twist … The unattractive sneer at middlebrow taste could have been toned down too. Few, if any, will share Rowling’s notion that a weakness for royal-themed tchotchkes and chenille robes is a sign of moral turpitude. (ibid.)

One also detects here the warning that Rowling seems to attack sacrosanct authorities like the ‘royals’ and as such cannot be tolerated as a social reformer, unlike good old Dickens (who never seemed to criticise Queen Victoria). Anyway, I must be one of the ‘few, if any; that share Rowling’s notion. The NYT in the end delivers the coup de grace:

A thoughtful edit might have removed many of the stylistic slippages that mar “The Casual Vacancy.” Rowling is at the height of her creative powers: there might have been a good, possibly even great, 300-page social novel inside the 500-page tear-­jerker we have instead. Let’s hope it will be different next time. (ibid.)

Subtext: write more Harry Potter novels and don’t meddle with the powers-to-be. Of course the NYT had also presented an earlier review, by one Michiko Kakutani, which totally rubbished the novel.

So what about a review from a bit on the left side? One cannot find them as easily as the ones from the right wing – naturally (as search engines deliver the conservative diet ad nauseam). One from a Yale (sic) college kid who is a bit of a lefty:

This is a book about class. The central battle of the book is one over the merits of government intervention and the meaning of responsibility — the battle between rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots. Rowling, who once described herself as being as “poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless,” is exposing her readers to the miseries of poverty that they never saw even in a cupboard bedroom or second-hand wands. She is arguing powerfully for the responsibility we have to help the least among us. There is no magic spell to cure heroin addicts or uplift downtrodden children, and Rowling does not sugarcoat. This will not be a book with a happy ending. Yet it is an important one, from perhaps the world’s most important living author.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/oct/12/rowling-gets-real/

The kid writes very badly but at least honestly. If we were to apply a Marxist analysis, or something along the lines that it is a crime to own assets and wealth, which adds up to more than ten times the average wage of the workers, we would have to dismiss Rowling as a criminal, never mind her insipid analysis of the class struggle. Revolution cannot come from above as ‘government intervention’. However, since contemporary society has regressed to the point where ‘revolution’ is a cosmetics brand, one cannot be surprised that the reactionaries view Rowling as a real threat to the Tories:

I do not agree with the claim that this book is a "500 page long Socialist manifesto" masquerading as a novel. It's much too negative and depressing to be a manifesto of any kind.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/localgovernment/2012/10/review-of-jk-rowlings-the-casual-vacancy.html

Obviously Rowling is no revolutionary, after all it is reported that she donated a million Pounds to the Labour Party. How could she?

Perhaps there is a deep irony in that Rowling’s erstwhile success with the Harry Potter books is rooted in a neo-feudal magic mysticism – of the nicest kind of course – which was ordained by the ruling classes as suitable reading material for youngsters (unlike the young, 10-year old, Noam Chomsky reading socialist pamphlets and copies of the Freie Arbeiterstimme) but when she turned to writing in a mildly social realist mode in The Casual Vacancy, she must be stopped in her tracks, especially as her younger readership might be tempted to read it too. Doesn’t she know that richesse oblige? Imagine if Karl May had written Das Kapital as a postlude to his magic adventure stories! So, compared to Karl May, who never quite escaped his fantastic imaginations (he did however become a pacifist in his later years), J.K. Rowling did reasonably well.

ZAC

ZAC ATTACK

You were highly bred, a show cat

We rescued you after use by date

With your female companion

From life in a cage

You lived with us for ten years or so

Noble as a lion, as our best friend

Maybe you were too well bred

What with many an ailment

Born stoically

We loved you for your beauty and loyalty

Snuggling up in bed without fail

Pushing your wet nose against our faces

Then you got asthma

And one day you heaved and heaved

We took you to the vet

Who gave you the wrong medicine

Then it was all too late

Your respiratory system collapsed

You were put to eternal sleep

And we cried and cried

We buried you under the trees in our garden

With two little sandalwood gods

To protect you in your next life

And then look upon us

Who will never forget you

Until the day we also die

UNIVERSALS OF GRAMMAR (UG) AND CULTURE (UC)

CLESOL Palmerston-North, 4-7 Oct. 2012

Universals of Grammar (UG) and Culture (UC) – implications for TESOL

Wolfgang B. Sperlich, PhD

 

ABSTRACT

The prominent linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky made the analogy that when little green men from Mars arrive on earth, they will quickly acquire all human languages as they will crack the code of Universal Grammar (UG), thus having to learn only the minor surface features that differentiate human languages. In other words, languages have far more in common than divides them. Indeed this is the reason why we can learn, with relative ease, any other language(s) not our native tongue. Language teachers who engage in linguistic relativism – in tandem with cultural relativism – promote irrational modes of learning, including the much vaunted ‘necessary talent’ to become a polyglot. Universals of Grammar (UG) are well known to theoretical linguists but appear to have had only limited impact on TESOL, despite seminal works like Lydia White’s (2003) Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Perhaps the most common distracter is the current fashion to integrate culture (C) and language (L) as if L2 = C2. This paper argues against culture studies as a necessary or even desirable complement to language learning. If we apply Chomsky’s analogy to ‘culture’ – and especially to modern culture – it becomes apparent that cultures differ less and less in surface features, with the Universals of Culture (UC) finding expression in the global villages – and quite unrelated to language per se. Cross-cultural communication is not a skill that needs to be acquired via language learning: it is a skill inherent in our common humanity. Language teachers should concentrate on UG and desist from engaging in cultural relativism that gives rise to unnecessary conflict. For example a recent AKTESOL newsletter (March 2012) showcases a ‘set of picture cards to prompt conversations about cultural diversity’ one of which poses the contrary prompts ‘Living together before marriage is …’ and ‘Who can you marry?’. These are worn old hats from Victorian times, quite unrelated to TESOL.

The Future

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D97OxHZzBeQ

by Leonard Cohen

Give me back my broken night

my mirrored room, my secret life

it's lonely here,

there's no one left to torture

Give me absolute control

over every living soul

And lie beside me, baby,

that's an order!

Give me crack and anal sex

Take the only tree that's left

and stuff it up the hole

in your culture

Give me back the Berlin wall

give me Stalin and St Paul

I've seen the future, brother:

it is murder.

Kia ora

1. There can be little doubt, as established by bio-linguists (Lenneberg 1967, Chomsky 2004), that all human languages share a common structure, if only based on the common sense observation that natural languages arise from a brain structure that is common to all human beings. Detractors, who claim that linguistic differences are absolute, can be compared to racists who peddle racist discrimination on the basis of absolute racial differences (cf. Reich 1946).

2. Equally there can be little doubt that human cultures also share a common foundation. To claim absolute differences is again akin to racism. Take for example Lévi-Strauss’ groundbreaking work (1962 a, b) to show that so-called primitive cultures have the same underlying structures as so-called highly civilized ones. The modern class system in New Zealand has its antecedents in various caste systems as much as in Maori totems (Schwimmer 1963) - hence the potentially awful realisation that, world-wide, we are not evolving at all but regressing to a state of neo-feudalism (see Leonard Cohen’s predictions above).

3. Less certain seems to be the position on the interdependence or otherwise of language and culture. If we consider the history of both phenomena, we can track the changes and permutations, with the result that language and culture diverge rapidly – at least in the sense that contemporary globalisation runs parallel with a global, popular and hybrid culture that seems more and more independent of language differences. In other words, many different languages are all in the service of one culture. In traditional societies, language and culture were closely connected, if only by default. However, even in traditional societies there has always been the real potential for language to go far beyond the confines of culture. Cultural practices are of course not only dependent on language but also on environmental factors. For example it is widely assumed that various Maya cultures were radically changed due to prolonged droughts. In modern times the loss of many traditional languages due to globalisation – if not linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992) – has not necessarily meant the parallel loss of traditional cultures. In the English language domain there are traditional cultures that are maintained basically via English as a first language and the traditional (indigenous or heritage) language in various degrees as a second language – if at all. Attempts to revitalize indigenous languages as first languages have invariably failed – witness te reo Māori. Nevertheless Maori culture seems to be transmitted reasonably successfully via English as the first language and te reo Māori as a second language to various degrees of competency. Kwachka (1995) reports a similar situation for Eskimo cultures in Alaska.

4. If we then consider Universal Grammar (or more widely the universals of language) and Universal Culture as separate entities, we may well ask what the implications are for TESOL. Even if we acknowledge that these two entities can be closely connected in traditional settings, we still need to ask if ESOL teachers (or language teachers in general) are qualified to teach both, especially when there are strong claims in some quarters that language and culture must be taught together (Kramsch et al. 1996). One of the more bizarre assertions is indeed one by Kramsch (2009), echoing the worn old Sapir-Whorf thesis:

So it’s this irony that we’re moving into an era where more and more people speak English and yet less and less do they understand one another because through English they are thinking, they speak English but they think French, or they speak English and they think Hindi.

The Sapir-Whorf thesis (language influences thought) was famously proven false by the founder of biolinguistics, Eric Lenneberg (ibid).

5. In the first instance Universal Grammar (UG) is still pretty much unknown in TESL despite seminal works like Lydia White’s 2003 Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. This is a scandal of major proportions and can be likened to mathematics teachers being ignorant of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica – which to their credit, few are. I have elaborated elsewhere (Sperlich, 2011) on the pedagogical advantages, if not necessity, of UG in language teaching in general and TESL in particular; it suffices to repeat here that the learning path from L1 to L2 is made possible precisely because of UG. If L2 were an alien beast (as for example claimed by Everett, 2012) we would not be able to understand it, let alone being able to learn it. Teachers of ESOL, like any other subject teachers, are ‘subject’ to the common sense demands, as articulated by many a professional teacher, e.g.

Teachers need a firm grasp

- subject knowledge

- pedagogical knowledge AND

- subject-specific pedagogical knowledge

so as to be flexible in their approaches and to cater for diverse learners and provision (Coben & McCartney, 2012)

6. What about culture? If we accept that language teachers ought to be trained and certified like all other subject teachers, does it follow that ‘culture’ teachers should have the same requirements? There can be little doubt that the study of culture is a well defined academic field, generally within an anthropology department. Indeed there is also a well-established sub-field entitled variously as ‘linguistic anthropology or anthropological linguistics’ (cf. Ottenheimer 2012), hence one would expect that language teachers – if they insist on teaching culture as well – are indeed qualified in linguistic anthropology to do so (for example I claim to be an anthropological linguist, having specialised in Melanesian and Polynesian languages). If it is scandalous to claim that native speakers of English all qualify as English teachers, it is equally so to claim that all members of English culture qualify as ‘English culture teachers’ – or worse, as ‘culture teachers’ generally, having no qualms comparing English with, say, Chinese cultural practices, and advocating the former – while at the same time they have no idea about the Chinese language, and being singularly unable to use comparative syntax (as based on UG) when teaching English to speakers of Chinese.

7. There is also the often exaggerated claim that New Zealand/Aotearoa is some kind of advanced multi-cultural and multi-lingual society, and as such all her citizens – and native ESOL teachers in particular - are well placed to exemplify this state of affairs. With regards to the latter, i.e. ‘multi-lingual’ we do know, however, that New Zealand is still one of the most mono-lingual countries in the world (cf. a recent Listener article entitled Why are we so doggedly monolingual?), and with regards to the ‘multi-cultural’ claims we can assert that Auckland is indeed multi-cultural as nearly half of the population is foreign-born. Unfortunately many of them originate from English-language backgrounds (with European ancestry) who integrate their respective cultures with the conservative (if not right-wing), mainstream New Zealand pakeha one, whilst the other non-English/non-European lot tends to retrench in ethnic ghettos. As such, few mainstream ESOL teachers (you must be a ‘native’ speaker to get a job with us) qualify as experts in multi-culturalism. In fact New Zealand may well follow the dreadful example from Germany where Chancellor Merkel (2012) has declared that "Multikulti in Deutschland ist absolut gescheitert"(trans. multi-culturalism in Germany has absolutely failed).

8. In the abstract I commented on an example from an AKTESOL newsletter (for an in-depth critique of Magee, see APPENDIX) where marriage customs were takes as tokens of ‘cultural diversity’ - with my reading of the sub-text being, that in our glorious Western culture we can chose our partners and even live and have sex with them before marriage whilst the unfortunate ‘others’ have to yield to medieval practices of arranged if not forced marriages. I contend that we have long transcended national and cultural boundaries in the marriage game, whereby the global caste system dictates who can do what and with whom. The issue of whether or not a British pretender to the royal throne can marry a Catholic is the same as to whether or not a Saudi royal can marry a non-Moslem. The issue of same-sex marriage inflames the fundamentalist Christians of the USA as much as the fundamentalist Christians of Uganda. Nowadays there are liberals in all nations and cultures who advocate free marriage – or indeed no marriage at all as it is an outdated custom to keep women in domestic prisons. As such the issue of marriage is not cultural but social, economic and political. There is nothing wrong with discussing such issues in the classroom as long as points of views taken are not type-cast as having roots in cultural practices. Of course one can also argue that language teachers are generally not trained as sociologists, economists and political scientists either, hence they should stick to what they know best, namely ‘language’. Anyone who studies a language in academic depth will of course be drawn to the so-called language arts, traditionally listed as literature, film, history and medieval studies (as for French, German, Sanskrit, etc.) but also to media studies and politics, especially as the latter is invariably rich in the language of propaganda. If as a teacher of ESOL you have done equivalent studies for English then you may be a better teacher for it but at the same time you may be distracted from the main job of practicing ‘applied linguistics’.

9. At any rate, there is an easy way out for language teachers who are unqualified to teach culture, namely don’t do it. There is absolutely no harm in not doing it. In the first instance this would merely confirm that culture and language are quite independent of each other, and in order to learn the former one has to learn nothing about the latter. In fact from a pedagogical point of view this frees up valuable time to learn the language much faster – and fastest if supported by UG. For TESL this is ever more so the case because there is no such thing as English culture anymore, that is directly associated with English language as a lingua franca. Sure, English culture has a very rich history but modern expressions have morphed into the Coca Cola culture (cf. Foster 2008) at worst and into a global, popular and hybrid culture (cf. Burke 2009) at best. With reference to the former consider the awful spectacle of the Eurovision music contest where just about every song from any nationality is sung in English. Or else consider the perfectly valid pessimism – if not artful cynicism - expressed by Leonard Cohen in his lyrics above. With reference to the latter again, consider modern English literature which features fewer and fewer ‘indigenous’ English writers – Indian writers, for example, have in the last decade or so informed the English literature canon to the highest degree. Just think of Arundhati Roy who had never been outside India before her The God of Small Things was published in the UK. Think of Aotearoa where Maori writers have influenced English literature far more than NZ English writers.

10. Of course I wish that all ESOL students were deeply interested in English literature in order to experience and learn from the more exquisite forms of English but the fact is that most ESOL students want to become chefs, IT operators, bankers, tinkers, sailors and candlestick makers for which they require mastery of technical English, quite devoid of any English literary culture. International English as a language of commerce, technology and science is by design devoid of unnecessary use of idioms, metaphors, sayings, proverbs, similes, figures of speech and what have you – not that I would claim that these ‘literary’ devices are totally culture bound either. It is no accident that many immigrant children from non-English backgrounds excel in maths and science at school, precisely because they can quickly master the technical English language skills. Of course there are also a few of those who take on literary English as well and excel in Shakespearian English, not least because it too transcends culture and national boundaries – as all good literature should.

To conclude, and stated in plain English: T(each)ESOL based on UG. Nothing else!

Kia kaha!

References

Burke, P. 2009. Cultural hybridity. Polity.

Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity. Lecture delivered at MTA, Budapest, May 17. http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20040517.htm

Coben D & N McCartney (2012) Quality, Choice and Innovation in Embedding. Numeracy and Literacy. University of Waikato

Everett, D. 2012. Language: the cultural tool. Pantheon.

Foster, R. 2008. Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. Palgrave Macmillan.

Kramsch, C., Cain, A., & Murphy-Lejeune, E. (1996). Why should language teachers teach culture? Language, Culture and Curriculum, 9(1), 99-107.

Kramsch, C. (2009). Interview. http://pterodactilo.com/numero6/?p=541

Kwachka. P. 1995. Language shift and Cultural Loss. Languages of the World 9:19-25.

Lenneberg, Eric. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Lévi-Strauss, C., 1962a. Le Totémisme Aujourd'hui. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

_____________, 1962b. La Pensée Sauvage. Paris, Plon.

Listener, http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/cultural-curmudgeon/why-are-we-so-doggedly-monolingual/

Merkel, http://diepresse.com/home/politik/aussenpolitik/602605/Merkel_Multikulti-in-Deutschland-absolut-gescheitert

Ottenheimer, H. 2012. The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Wadsworth Publishing.

Phillipson, Robert (1992), Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford University Press.

Reich, W. 1946 (first English edition). The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Orgone Institute Press.

Schwimmer, E. 1963. Guardian animals of the Maori. JPS Volume 72, No. 4: 397 – 410.

Sperlich, W. 2011. TESL without cultural baggage. Language, Education & Diversity conference paper, University of Auckland, 22-25 November 2011.

White, L. 2003. Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge University Press.

APPENDIX

The reference to the AKTESOL Newsletter refers in turn to the following note:

At the 10 November session, Jenny Magee of Conversity (www.jennymagee.com, www.conversity.co.nz)
showcased a set of picture cards to prompt conversations about cultural diversity. These generated a lot of interest among the teachers present, and Jenny kindly awarded a set as a prize for the one who came up with the most creative use of the cards.

When looking at the two websites promoted by Jenny Magee, one finds the quixotic logo, saying:

On the outside, we are all different. On the outside, we are all the same.
On the inside we are all different. On the inside, we are all the same.

One cannot go wrong with stating all possibilities but just let’s say that from a biological point of view we are certainly all the same on the ‘inside’ and do not have many differences on the ‘outside’ either (unless one wants to play the skin-colour card).

Magee goes on to claim that

‘Across Cultures’ will spark conversations about the visible (food, language, festivals) as well as the invisible (attitudes, values and beliefs).Some of our ethnic differences are visible - those aspects we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Other sides are hidden, part of the inner rules we learn as we grow.

It seems a bit bizarre that ‘language’ is included in ‘visible’ ethnic differences since it should be clear by now that ‘language’ is NOT necessarily an ethnic attribute. Recent history is littered with ‘ethnic cleansing’ whereby all the people concerned speak the same language but have different religious beliefs – which is the cause of the conflict. Sure many so-called ethnic communities have their own languages – the whole point here is however to establish whether or not language per se has anything to do with ethnicity and culture. My claim is that language has nothing to do with it!

If we take food, dress, festivals and the arts generally, there is no denying that traditions and customs CAN differ according to ethnic and geographic lines but as noted before, in modern societies such differences have become choices for individuals to follow as they wish. The global village devours ethnic trends as fashion-fusion, forever giving rise to new expressions – possibly under the banner of popular culture. Those who hark back to the good old days when race and ethnicity were clearly labelled by the colour of your skin, the food you eat, the way you dress, the religion you believe in - and the language you speak – have long been exposed as bigots and racists, belying the fact that the distinctions never existed in the first place.

It is instructive that Magee includes ‘beliefs’ as ‘invisible’ differences when we know all to well that much of the human conflicts are based on believers wearing their beliefs on their shirtsleeves. Indeed Magee presents a quite bizarre story, presumably to demonstrate her point of view in these matters:

What you are

‘What you are shouts so loudly in my ear that I cannot hear what you say'. Ralph Waldo Emerson was so right.

The man at the café wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Speak English or #*@! off’, left me outraged. Could I hear his point of view? No, I was much too offended by his apparent prejudice to even want to. Far from encouraging me to engage in a conversation, the t-shirt provoked an instant negative reaction. I immediately consigned him to the ‘bigot’ box without even a hello.

So much for tolerance. I’ll never know if he really thinks that way or if he was out to provoke. Nor will we have the opportunity to challenge each others view. For one who teaches about first impressions and the limiting effects of stereotyping it was a salutary reminder that there is always a chance that I might have been wrong about him.

So, when I come across the woman wearing a big cross around her neck, or the Pope in his funny getup, or the Hare Krishna devotees in their orange robes, or the woman in the burka (as most likely to be enforced by a male guardian wearing jeans and t-shirt), or the banker in his Saville Row suit – are they all out to provoke me? Should I talk to them to find out if they really mean it? And what if they do? What if the man at the café really meant ‘Speak English or #*@! off’ and thereby, even according to Magee, is then classed a ‘bigot’?

Ralph Waldo Emerson should have changed his homely to ‘What you are shouts so loudly in my EYES AND EARS that I CANNOT BEAR TO hear what you say'.

Suffice to say that those who wear their religion for all to see, will also define their ‘attitudes’ and ‘values’ under that banner. Nothing ‘invisible’ here!

Those who keep their beliefs, attitudes and values to themselves, in public - and in polite discourse with ESOL teachers - are of course fairly handicapped if called upon to reveal their ethnic peculiarities. To be polite, they will discuss issues of culture and ethnicity but not with reference to themselves lest they are seen to betray the (biased) expectations, like the ethnic Korean having to admit that he/she actually doesn’t like eating kimchi, or the ethnic German refusing to wear Lederhosen and eat Sauerkraut and speak English with a German accent. The latter harks of course back to the above ‘Speak English or #*@! off’ with the further implicit qualification of ‘speak NATIVE English or else …’. ESOL speakers know all to well that they may never acquire a NATIVE accent even though their English may be perfect in every other way. To be asked ‘where do you come from?’ as an unrelated question in a friendly conversation and trying ‘I come from Auckland’ will quickly deteriorate into ‘I mean where did you come from ORIGINALLY?’ and if you are silly enough to try ‘Auckland’ again you will be cut off fairly quickly. Of course NATIVE English speakers delight in various native English accents but for some reason they cannot stomach any FOREIGN accents, for a foreign accent is synonymous with a foreign, non-English ethnicity – if not race – and as such undesirable to the tune of ‘Speak English or #*@! off’.

It is very tiresome to equate ethnicity/culture with group think since we know very well that within a single ethnicity or culture – if there is such a beast at all – there are numerous organisations that enforce group think to the maximum, using mass psychology to good effect (cf. Reich, 1946).

If modern societies have anything positive going then it must be the primacy of the individual, all the ones who have risen above the clamour of the group and their ethnicity, and have become modern citizens of the world. How wrong it then feels when Magee asks again:

Did you know that waiting in line varies between cultures? Should you always tell the truth, or is it more important to save face?

 How often do we trot out the worn adage that Asians put ‘face saving’ over ‘telling the truth’ whilst us still superior Europeans ‘tell the truth’ always, like all good people should? Such discourse is blatant nonsense at its most benign and blatant racism at its worst.

I do not ascribe any bad intentions to Magee at all – what do ascribe to her is the proverb of ‘the path to hell is paved with GOOD intentions’. For good intentions she surely has, as evidenced in the last section of the following paragraph:        

Our human brains are hardwired to notice difference. Sometimes the similarities seem more difficult to find. Getting to understand and appreciate each other is not always simple or easy, yet when we have positive, quality contact with each other, what we have in common stands out and the differences matter less.

What is sad about above statement is that ‘getting to understand and appreciate each other is not always simple or easy’ because ‘our human brains are hardwired to notice difference’. Pseudo-scientific – and indeed totally un-scientific – facts of the matter are always manufactured in such discourses as otherwise there would be absolutely no reason for the value statement in the first place. Who says that ‘our human brains are hardwired to notice difference’? Where is the reference so I can check? What if I counterclaim with ‘our human brains are hardwired to notice similarity’? Neuro-science hasn’t progressed to the point where any such claims are proven in any way.

If Magee would only listen to her own logic when she says that ‘when we have positive, quality contact with each other, what we have in common stands out and the differences matter less’, considering the simple negation for the positive outcome, namely ‘when we have NEGATIVE, ZERO-quality contact with each other, what we have in common stands out LESS and the differences matter MORE’. I am sorry to say that despite Magee’s best intentions, she unwittingly promotes the latter.

We all must try to get away from exploring insignificant differences – including the notion of different languages when we can postulate a common Universal Grammar that underlies all languages and thus makes them more ‘common’ than ‘different’. The same goes for culture, ethnicity and national traits. Let’s get away from this mythical Kiwi culture and its associated patriotism, for as Samuel Johnson – as a true-blue Englishman and linguist - is reported to have recognised a long time ago (1775) that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. We must get away from vast generalisations and false claims, such as Magee’s assertion of ‘New Zealand values, customs, etiquette and communication styles - verbal and non-verbal’. The world is changing, and if it is changing for the better, we may as well take Magee with us by simply appending the word INDIVIDUAL or IDIOSYNCRATIC to her final claims:  

We each have an IDIVIDUAL/IDIOSYNCRATIC cultural lens through which we view the world.

Our INDIVIDUAL/IDIOSYNCRATIC culture affects everything we do - what we say, how we say it and what’s important to us.

We will then soon discover that our individuality is also our common destiny, just as ESOL may turn out to be a useful conduit. As such I may find out that, say, as a German-English speaker I have far more in common with a Chinese-English speaker than with a mono-lingual German, English or Chinese speaker – or any shade of gray in-between.

Modern times: fast forward to the past

Modern politics and economics – being one and the same – are moving rapidly towards neo-feudalism, not as a far-out conspiracy theory but more and more in terms of main-stream commentary. One such example is given in Der Spiegel in an article on Romania’s current problems. A so-called renowned political commentator by the name of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is quoted as saying that in the current crisis Romania’s ‘real’ political structure is exposed, whereby ‘various cliques conduct a life and death battle to conquer the state in order to plunder it. The political parties are like medieval armies whose recruits are not paid, making a living only by conquest and plunder’. This analogy seems to me to apply to the rest of the world as well: be it by all-out war as in Syria or as media manipulation for the so-called hearts and minds of the American electorate. Winners take all and distribute the spoils amongst the faithful. The losers die or else suffer degradation and humiliation. It is becoming increasingly impossible to simply sit on the fence and watch the tragicomedy unfold, for ‘if you are not with us you are against us’.

The French race towards neo-feudalism is of course laced with a heavy dose of deviant sexuality, be it the Strauss-Kahn escapade or now the Dehar scandal. The Guardian tells us the story from the British point of view as a sort of neo-feudal sex romp that could equally apply to Prince Harry: the under-aged Dehar (of Algerian ethnicity) was flown to Munich to have paid sex with a French soccer star (playing for Bayern Munich) by the name of Franck Ribéry who, according to the Guardian is a ‘good dad and an observant convert to Islam’. The case is now before a French court. Dehar is now a celebrity sponsored by the bizarre German fashion icon named Karl Lagerfeld. Not surprisingly she models underwear for his label.  Lagerfeld is quoted as saying that Dehar ‘is so fascinating precisely because she is a reminder of France's 18th-century courtesans, the paid mistresses of the rich and powerful, a purely French tradition that the whole world admired and copied’. Welcome to the past! What is even more amazing is the ease with which we are retreating to the quintessential feudal notion of serfdom. For to make a living as a courtesan – or artisan – you have to abandon any notion of self, i.e. giving yourself – your body and mind – without reservation to your feudal lord and master. The Guardian makes this point very succinctly by reporting that Dehar was asked by a French journalist ‘if she was irritated by always being reduced to sex, to being a sex symbol. Dehar replied: "Me, I don't know what I am, in fact. It's other people who know …"

NEXT NIHILISTIC HOPEFUL BLOG

There is always another one

If the previous one

Was a bit dumb

Of course it’s all different 

If you hit on mine

Super intelligent

Not towing the line

Even though I cannot see the point

For anything much

Mine included

As dumb as the next one

A clicking game played by idiots

Compulsive communicators

Lonesome fornicators

Unpublished poets

Wannabes

Misunderstood scholars

Short of a few dollars

Free to say and post a pic

Insert a vid

Show off your kid

Blow your lid

Pretend

Show your colours

Discuss your disease

Make life unbearable

Frown at the unforgivable

Gawk at the shameless

Pictures of sunsets

Family dogs

Dog families

Daily life live

Private TV

News from the cousins

OR

The gem

Waiting to be found

Like the needle in the haystack

Referred to in the history of the world

As the stone that started

The avalanche

The revolution

The turning point

The development nobody predicted

Or expected

OR

It could have been

If it would have been

But as it wasn’t

The world never changed

The blogs continued

As before

Ad nauseam

OR

The secret weapon

In the Arab spring

The rebel’s social network

Mobbing the Arab dictators

Surplus to requirement by the West

Posting pics of atrocities

Adding vids of gas attacks

Forwarding to journalists

Embedded 

Whose bed-time blogs appear in the 

Guardian

New York Times

Der Spiegel

On-line Human Rights Watch

Transparency International

The Coalition of the Willing

The Social Democrats

The Labour Party 

And the Greens

And all the movers and shakers

The pastry makers

The cooks

In the human zoo

In Beijing

Moscow and Berlin

A merry-go-round

Blog to blog

Ashes to ashes

OR

Innocent, so naïve, so sweet

The cat, the dog and the dancing cockroach

It makes you laugh, LOL, totally

It offers you for sale

Sweet nothings

Red shoes

Blue stockings

Needlecraft

Chocolate plum pudding

Tips for a diet and prolonged fertility

Advice on bicycles and post-marital sex

Blue jeans

Pretty boys

Popular culture and haute couture

Fish and chips

How to paint a realistic picture

Drawing the line in the shifting sand

Exploiting puns and mixed metaphors

A blog for all occasions

For mum and dad

For good Christians and bad Moslems

For the master and the dame

And the boy who lives down the lane

A blog that makes you happy

Like a good shit

Feeling fully evacuated

Ready to eat again

Being human and a humanist

A good neighbour

A middleclass hero

A teacher and a nurse

A family with two kids

Struggling but always smiling

In the pics you post

On your bloody blog

BTW

Don’t worry

I’m much obliged 

You found the time and my blog

And for making it clear

Like Syd

That I am not really here.

Some personal comments on ‘Knots, Language, and Computation: A Bizarre Love Triangle? Replies to Objections’ by Sergio Balari, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Marta Camps, Víctor M. Longa & Guillermo Lorenzo, in Biolinguistics Vol 6, No 1 (2012).

Above article, as a rebuff to ‘All Tied in Knots’ by David J. Lobina (same volume) raises some interesting questions, as the saying goes. Here I am less interested in the crux of the matter, i.e. whether or not knot-theory – excuse the pun – explains anything about language and language evolution. Lobina seems to place the art of tying knots squarely in the domain of cognition, i.e. more or less independent of language, while his detractors elaborate on their original claim that the computational complexity of knot-theory can be incorporated into their Natural Computational System (NCS), if not into FLN:

            Thus, what we have characterized here as a NCS roughly corresponds to

what Hauser et al. (2002) called the Faculty of Language in the narrow sense

(FLN), but our characterization is broader in the sense that we do not conceive of our NCS as either language-specific or human-specific. Indeed, even though we follow Hauser et al.’s (2002) methodological proposal of distinguishing between narrow and broad aspects of some cognitive ability, we deny to their FLN its human and language specificity, whence our terminological switch here to NCS.

While both sets of authors claim to work within the Biolinguistics model (if not MP) – with Balari et al. more so than Lobina, it seems to me that in fact both are departing from Chomsky’s paradigm in a substantial way. Lobina puts it like this:

The position defended in Chomsky (2007a, 2007b), Hinzen (2011), and implicitly in the works I will discuss in the next section, however, seems to depart from the outline I have provided. It seems that these scholars are attempting to somehow modify the Aristotelian dictum that language is sound with meaning into a view of language as a system of meaning (thought) only accidentally connected to sound. A fortiori, then, linguistic “derivations” ought to be viewed, according to these scholars, as a kind of a “language of thought”. I take this is what Chomsky has in mind when he states that language is primarily an “instrument of thought” (2007a, p.17), but there is a certain circularity in the suggestion that language is the vehicle of thought and the overall attempt to explain how linguistic derivations meet the conditions imposed by another system of the mind, the C/I interface. (Note: this quote is from Lobina’s original paper ‘Conceptual Structure and the Emergence of the Language Faculty: Much Ado about Knotting’, as noted in his references)

Chomsky has of course evolved, as many a long-lived scientist does but it is worth to look back at one of his gems when he critiques Popper in Language and Mind (1968):

The assumption that human language evolved from more primitive systems is developed in an interesting way by Karl Popper in his recently published Arthur Compton Lecture, “Clouds and Clocks.” He tries to show how problems of freedom of will and Cartesian dualism can be solved by the analysis of this “evolution.” I am not concerned now with the philosophical conclusions that he draws from this analysis, but with the basic assumption that there is an evolutionary development of language from simpler systems of the sort that one discovers in other organisms. Popper argues that the evolution of language passed through several stages, in particular a “lower stage” in which vocal gestures are used for expression of emotional state, for example, and a “higher stage” in which articulated sound is used for expression of thought – in Popper’s terms, for description and critical argument. His discussion of stages of evolution of language suggests a kind of continuity, but in fact he establishes no relation between the lower and higher stages and does not suggest a mechanism whereby transition can take place from one stage to the next. In short, he gives no argument to show that the stages belong to a single evolutionary process. In fact, it is difficult to see what links these stages at all (except for the metaphorical use of the term “language”). There is no reason to suppose that the “gaps” are bridgeable. There is no more of a basis for assuming an evolutionary development of “higher” from “lower” stages, in this case, than there is for assuming an evolutionary development from breathing to walking; the stages have no significant analogy, it appears, and seem to involve entirely different processes and principles.

Now, would it be too radical to extend Chomsky’s metaphor to ‘breathing = cognition’ and ‘walking = language’, whereby cognition is the catch-all phrase, as in cognitive linguistics, that seems to encompass all sorts of mental facilities and activities – language included. Indeed ‘cognition’ appears to have gathered the same force as ‘behaviourism’ once did, and where language was verbal behaviour. As we all know, we have to thank Chomsky for having us saved from this deviation.

If on the other hand we restrict cognition to mean a ‘natural computational system (NCS)’ in the sense described by Balari et al. (see earlier quote), especially as a descriptive term for the hardware found in brains of all species, then we are back to the body-mind conundrum which has been solved long ago by the common sense assertion that the mind arises from the brain. Indeed this NCS is very much the subject of current research and we learn more by the day about the biological architecture of it. Van Wedeen et al. (2012) report that

The structure of the brain as a product of morphogenesis is difficult to reconcile with the observed complexity of cerebral connectivity. We therefore analyzed relationships of adjacency and crossing between cerebral fiber pathways in four nonhuman primate species and in humans by using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. The cerebral fiber pathways formed a rectilinear three-dimensional grid continuous with the three principal axes of development. Cortico-cortical pathways formed parallel sheets of interwoven paths in the longitudinal and medio-lateral axes, in which major pathways were local condensations. Cross-species homology was strong and showed emergence of complex gyral connectivity by continuous elaboration of this grid structure. This architecture naturally supports functional spatio-temporal coherence, developmental path-finding, and incremental rewiring with correlated adaptation of structure and function in cerebral plasticity and evolution.

Note that ‘cross-species homology was strong’. If we take it as ‘not subject to rational debate’ (a phrase bandied about by Balari et al.) that language is human-species specific – an axiom of the biolinguistic program, I thought – then we are back to the famous question as to how the Language Faculty (FL) arose from this NCS, and how FL has developed features that cannot be explained via the biological features of NCS.

The best we can do, to employ another Chomsky metaphor, is to look like the drunk driver for the key under the lamp post because that’s where the light is. In other words we can investigate FL only via FL, in what I would call the language paradox or the snake devouring itself (or less dramatic, the kitten chasing its own tail). There are however some real insights to be had, much along the Chomskyian paradigm. From this point of view I wish to reclaim the term ‘cognition; in its original Cartesian sense of ‘cogito, ergo sum’. If we take cognition to mean the human-specific ability to think, then my claim is to equate cognition with language per se. Lobina (in above quote) credits Chomsky with asserting that language is primarily an instrument of thought, so I want to take this one step further. As a point of departure consider the problem raised by Lobina (ibid.):

There is an intuitive sense in which thought is possible without language, not least because of the manner in which the latter appears to underdetermine the former. Slips of the tongue, deictic reference and paraphrases are some of the phenomena in which the employed linguistic vehicles are neither rich nor accessible enough to represent the corresponding thoughts.

We can turn the argument that language sometimes ‘underdetermines’ thought on its head: if FL with features of UG gives rise to pre-language-specific thoughts, then it is not surprising that the constraints (fixed parameters) of a natural language may not succeed in expressing the thought we originally had. This is quite a common affliction, and at least from introspection I can say that this happens to me quite often, in that I think that have a brilliant thought but when it appears on paper it isn’t so brilliant anymore. Nevertheless, I think, the vast amount of verbal expression is prefixed with ‘I think that X’, and exactly echoes the Cartesian saying of ‘cogito, ergo sum’. Presumably it is also a skill which one can learn to ever more precisely match the thought with natural language, and precisely because thought equates with language at the level of UG. I would attribute such a skill to great writers and ‘thinkers’ who are able to communicate their thoughts with matching language. Bi-lingual speakers (e.g. my native language is German but I have lived in New Zealand for over 40 years, speaking and writing English) often comment on which language they ‘think’ in (in my case English) thus providing evidence of the close if not absolute link between thought and natural language. Note that the only real evidence we have of thoughts is our ability to verbalise them. As such it is pure speculation that pre-verbal infants and animals alike have thoughts. We have brought up two children and have three grandchildren at present (all three under 3 years old) and we have three cats (and had a few more before) and we all love them dearly but it would stretchy the truth to claim that any of them ever expressed a thought as pre-verbal infants, or in the case of the cats, at any age.

I am not sure how ‘slips of the tongue’ and ‘paraphrases’ can be evidence for thoughts being independent of language but lets look at the so-called problem of ‘deictic reference’. Nobody in their right mind would argue that the audio-visual system, maybe in terms of Balari ‘s NCS, does not strongly interact with cognition-FL-UG-language. Indeed a vast amount of language is dedicated to represent the visual world. Deictic reference is a clever and economical UG device to make use of visual information. We all know the consequences of audio-visual impairment: deictic reference suffers. One can also speculate that the audio-visual memory one develops over time is only accessible when labelled with language tokens. I can only see a tree in my head if and when I think/say ‘tree’ as a label I affixed to the visual representation of a tree or trees. When I immediately identify my wife’s voice on the phone, I presumably do so because I have an audio file in my memory, prominently labelled ‘my dear wife’. Since we have as many as five senses, we have of course a rich inventory of associations we can label and identify. FL-UG registers these experiences and sometimes we are lost for words of our natural language, as we are unable to translate the primordial thought-language data into our everyday language – notwithstanding other constraints such as memory loss, reduced verbal motor skills and psychological-emotional factors like fear, elation and surprise. As such ‘to be lost for words’ is evidence for and not against the equivalence of  thought and language at the level of UG.

Let us briefly return to the vexed question how FL could have arisen from NCS. The evolutionary change from primate to homo sapiens as far as the brain is concerned seems to simply be a process of more of the same. To accommodate the increasing neural mass, curved space reminiscent of Einstein, is made use of  (cf. Van Wedeen et al. (2012). I wonder if this can ever be determined, so in the meantime we can only employ unscientific metaphors, like, somewhat ironically, employed by one of the greatest materialists of our time, Engels (via Hegel), when he concluded that there must have been a ‘leap from quantity to quality’. We could also invoke quantum physics inasmuch sub-atomic particles seem to behave in wondrous ways, as one is unable to pinpoint their location other than to say that there is a statistical probability that they will be there at some point. By analogy the hazy mind with all its fuzzy logic may well be subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, metaphorically speaking at least.

The point I wish to make here is that it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for a natural system to explain itself. Science and mathematics have the luxury to have reduced language to a meta-language for science and mathematics, stripping natural language of all embellishments, setting up theoretical spaces in the heads of scientists, in which they can ‘think’ and even dream to their hearts’ content (Schrödinger is said to have ‘dreamt’ his eponymous formula). We can now explain many natural phenomena, copy them and manipulate them; we can send machines to outer space but can we devise a half-decent economical system on earth? The study of cognition-FL-UG-language has the unique challenge of having no meta-language. Language can only study itself. While we cannot explain ourselves we do have the logical imagination – a subset of thoughts – that if there is a meta-language for language and the human condition in general, it cannot be ours, it must be at a higher level, it must be super-natural. Ipso ergo, we imagine gods and devils who know who we are, hence can influence our destiny. Some are waiting for science to take over this role; probably to no avail, for as Nietzsche famously noted in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, science is only telling stories like everyone else. Chomsky employed a more convincing metaphor (somewhat rephrased by the current author): when the Martians come to visit us they will figure out UG in a flash and speak all natural languages in five minutes. An optimistic reading might be that the earthlings will eventually evolve to the super-intelligent status of a Martian, and then are able to figure out that, for example, the past human propensity for generating false, insane and pathetic thoughts was due to the lack the Common Sense Faculty (CSF) which failed to develop in a large number of humans as a parallel thought-checking procedure. As such human history up this point is littered with humans not only thinking the un-thinkable but also speaking the un-speakable – and worst of all, putting into action un-imaginable atrocities, and often with scientific precision so as to demonstrate the schizophrenic condition they are in.

Strangely enough, as a Martian one also wonders what linguists think when they engage in rhetoric reminiscent of the linguistics wars. In the current exchange played out in Biolinguistics, Lobina critiques arguments put forth by Balari et al. in stinging terms:

I will attempt to show that these studies are predicated on a fanciful characterisation of the Chomsky Hierarchy, a misappropriation of Knot Theory from mathematical topology, and a frankly bizarre view of the mind.

Academics ought to remain calm and collected in the face of such onslaughts and not start a slinging match, upping the ante, as Balari et al. do:

            Nothing in Lobina advances our understanding of the problems that

were at stake here. It is a classic instance of formal bullying, whereby tools that ought to help us gain insight over our subject matter manage to turn into

rhetorical cilices for no discernible purpose other than posturing. It is sad to see how this sort of sophistic logic is often sold as sophisticated reasoning.

There is no doubt in my mind that academia is full of academic bullies who torture their underlings, making them wear cilices, making them rewrite their research articles for the nth time and generally enforcing the corporate model of modern society. Considering that both camps work under the umbrella of biolinguistics, one can only assume that biolinguistics has absolutely nothing to do with it.

As a footnote, let us consider the topic about knots. I am not sure if one can train a monkey to tie a simple knot. If so, then the NCS is sufficient. If not, i.e. it is human-specific skill, then I suspect that language and thought interact with the visual-tactile sensory systems, and thereby, after some practice, allowing us to tie and un-tie the knot.

References

Balari, Sergio, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Marta Camps, Víctor M. Longa & Guillermo Lorenzo. 2012. Knots, Language, and Computation: A Bizarre

Love Triangle? Replies to Objections. Biolinguistics Vol 6, No 1 (2012).

Chomsky, N. 1968. Language and Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Engels, F. 1925. Dialektik der Natur.

Lobina, David J. 2012. Conceptual Structure and the Emergence of the Language Faculty: Much Ado about Knotting.

Lobina, David J. 2012. All tied in Knots. Biolinguistics Vol 6, No 1 (2012).

Nietzsche, F. 1882. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.

Wedeen, van J., Douglas L. Rosene, Ruopeng Wang, Guangping Dai, Farzad Mortazavi, Patric Hagmann, Jon H. Kaas, Wen-Yih I. Tseng. 2012. The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways. Science 30 March 2012: Vol. 335 no. 6076 pp. 1628-1634.