We are attending a parents evening for our daughter (let’s call her Renata) and it is becoming worrying how each successive teacher laments if only our daughter would “Speak up a little more in class. She is a confident girl but very quiet.”

Miffed we walk home querying each other is she really that quiet? Well if she is then who is to blame? Easy, of course it us, her parents.So as parents when she has gone to bed we starts discussing this problem of Renata’s language, or lack of it in class.

This is a child who luckily has no learning or speech difficulties. We try to think back on where we might have gone wrong. “Remember how demanding she used to be for those bedtime stories.” We recalled at about three she was already hungry for the strict rules that these bedtime stories must have a beginning, middle and an end.

What we didn’t know - this would come later when I started some research into language - that there is a growing consensus in Western thought and science that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply if we think in terms of patterns of relationships rather than of reified essences or entities. This pattern dependency seems strictly human for nothing like this obsession with extracting hidden patterns is seen in other animals.

Interestingly this pattern-hunger isn’t limited to speech, people who cannot speak hunt down patterns in sign language. So perhaps we were guilty for inculcating her with this fixation for extracting hidden patterns. Without knowing it we had brought her up as if we were from some strict sect called the Aristoleans for wasn’t he the guru of beginning middle and end. “Me and my friends went ...” “My friends and I...”

Come on, admit it as parents we have all done it. Yes, blinded by doing the best for her, we were supine to the dangers as we took her through the gradual process of language normalisation. Yes, we were bringing her up under the illusion that there was an entity out there, a kind of linguistic communism, and to prepare her for that world we were going to be strict grammarians.

A week has elapsed. “But why hasn’t she the confidence to speak up in class.” Flummoxed, we decide, “Let’s talk to her now.”                                                                                                                              “Oh she will just try to brazen it out.”                                                                                                           “You don’t know what the classroom is like...the people who are chosen to speak when hands go up, and the nonsense they speak. It’s usually television references (we know she has been teased for not having a television) which the teachers can identify with... if ever I speak the other pupils are speaking at the same time, yet the teachers demand absolute silence when they speak, what’s the point? And anyway...”

As our daughter continued to protest her right to remain silent in classroom debates, I thought again of that parent’s evening and of how we, the community, have passed authority to those teachers giving them the right to be bearers of the skeptron. (In Homer, the speaker holds the skeptron, which reminds the audience that they are in the presence of a discourse which merits belief and obedience). “...and some of the teachers they never stop speaking and if they ever do listen it’s the impatient nod of the head, as if they wished you would hurry up and get on with what you have to say so as they could start talking again.

“Condescending ...yeah?”                                                                                                                                  “Oh stop using big words, Dad.”                                                                                                                   So you give her a hug, wish her goodnight and leave it at that, but you go away feeling you must delve into this after all our daughter is in this language arena...maybe with her, it is just a simple matter of confidence. 
Then you do a little research and you find that this ability to speak up is a little more nuanced that the touchy feely concept of confidence. For those who ‘speak up’ must feel they have the authority to do so and those who listen must feel the addresser has the power to make them listen.

It would appear this power and authority is implicit in all linguistic communication. As I dipped my toes further into research on language what was becoming uncomfortably apparent was my own laughably naive take on it. How culpable we had been as we immersed our daughter in language; like other caring parents we thought were inculcating her into the correct linguistic disciplines that would prepare her for life. And how did we tackle this problem?

Well, we brought our objectivity to bear on this very important task, how to use language. We did so as if we were lighthouse keepers splaying our searchlight on what might become turbulent linguistic waters. The main shortcoming of our hubristic objectivism, is that it juts failed to reflect rigorously on its own conditions of possibility. After all the lighthouse is in the sea, we cannot stand on a rock and observe objectively as if we were momentarily on the outside, in the language game we are all on the inside and there is no outside.

You see we thought we could bring our objectivity to language because it had an invariant core.
But the problem with this assumption is that  language does not have an invariant core, its only core, if you can call it that, is difference and difference is not a thing, it is not substantive But no one will tell the powers that be in education that the snag with difference it cannot be reified, it is relational and therefore it does not exist in space or time.

You see the problem was as we instructed Renata more in the rules of language we were unable to grasp the structure we were elucidating. We thought we were just well, you know, preparing her for ‘life’ “After all, if you wish to communicate well then you will have to speak well,” – we didn’t say, “If you acquire the form and formalities of the language field, you will gain a kind of power; a symbolic power." We didn’t do this, simply, because we didn’t know.

Yet, we have always been faintly aware that there was power in language but till the ‘Parents evening’ we were not aware that those who do not partake of this symbolic power contribute in a kind of silent but active complicity to their own subjection, There are sanctions if you speak up too much, and in our daughter’s case, too little. As to language sanctions and censorships in schools.

I thought of my own immigrant status of many years ago and of how I came to judge my Irish accent with such practical severity. I felt I was a deviant because of my accent. For in my day people speaking in dialects were instructed to collaborate in the destruction of their instrument of expression. Having a regional accent meant you did not measure up and were cast out into the limb of regionalism, which teachers and fellow pupils decried.

For those who do not speak properly, are the least favoured to the negative sanctions of the scholastic market. Hence the silence and the hesitation which may overcome working class children like me, in what they deem to be official or formal occasions.I did not want my daughter to grow up with that outsider sense of being alienated.

So I delved deeper and as I did so it was being revealed that language is a process which arises out of an awareness of differences and such differences themselves mainly arise within a larger classificatory context, through unconscious processes pre-formed by linguistic categories, rather than through conscious processes performing rational procedures.

So Renata and her classmate arrive at the awareness of the dissimilarities in language within a circumscribed cognitive domain, most of which has been formed unconsciously. The problem arises when Renata and her classmate, encouraged by the teachers, endeavour to pin down the butterfly of language.

"But let me get this right, when I speak I do so from a cognitive domain which has over aeons of time developed through evolutionary means and by which our world of experience is continuously yet unconsciously constructed, classified, and mapped. By this evolutionary process and through the recursive and circular causalities of language, this process we have has given rise to forms of awareness." Renata didn't say that. But if she had she would have got it about right 

And I didin't say this to her: So when the pupils put up their hands and cry ‘Miss, Miss, Miss, me Miss’ as they do so they have a proliferation of thought. “See Miss, I am speaking up,” However, as long as the thought "I am" persists, so will endless cycles of apperceptions, (past perceptions constituting our present perceptions)) conceptual proliferation and further apperceptions etc. keep spinning. Talk about spinning, where am I? I have arrived at ‘Thoughts without a Thinker.’

Well I am not going to burden Renata with that one, I mean it is bloody destabilising to say the least, even as I think about it I can help but feel a touch of ontological vertigo. Perhaps that is why they don’t teach this sort of stuff on language.However, drawn, detectivist like, I follow the trail. So in this evolutionary process of language the unconscious structuring of experience with its processual and interactive arising of things has taken place and this has imparted the cogency of human experience, with its deep sense of subjective coherence, which is this self, or this symbolic self.

Yet where the self, one is cannot individuate a subject at all. It would appear the metaphysical subject is not an object of experience at all, but a way of indicating the overall structure of experience. It would appear that the evolutionary linguistification of human mental processes has given rise to a symbolic self, which is dependent upon the reflexive possibilities of language rather than reflecting the existence of the substantive.

From this standpoint, cognition, or how we perceive, is thus neither purely subjective nor wholly objective. Like a transaction that takes place between individuals, cognitive awareness occurs at the interface, the concomitance of a sense-organ and its correlative stimulus.

Cognitive awareness does not reflects things, as they are, since what constitutes an ‘object’ is necessarily defined by the capacities of a particular sense organ; say the eye, and it is well to remember that the cognitive capacities of a sense organ are also correlatively defined by the kinds of stimuli that may impinge upon them.

As Capra (1998, 220) points out, "...as it keeps interacting with its environment, a living organism will undergo a sequence of structural changes... an organism's structure at any point in its development is a record of its previous structural changes and...each structural change influences the organism's future behaviour."

Here we arrive at another problem in how we view language - stimuli are always impinging upon the sense organs, say the eye, giving rise to forms of cognitive awareness; and these processes continuously but subtly modulate the structures of these organs, which in turn influences their receptivity to subsequent stimuli. The two notions - that living entails continuous cognition and cognition entails continuous modification of living structures - introduces an important causal reciprocity between the structure of sense organs and the arising of cognitive awareness.

These reciprocal processes take place not only at the micro level of cognition, but also at the macro level of evolution. Both evolutionary biology and the view of dependent arising articulate models of circular causality to describe how things come into being over the long term.

Through this circular, recursive and evolutionary process we arrive at what we feel to be language, but is no more than difference.So when I perceive something, say what I am typing on this screen now, I perceive difference; I look at the empty screen and I have a proliferation of recursive and circular aperceptions. For all receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of difference.

To even speak of perception is to necessarily speak of awareness of differences. Awareness of differences, however, cannot arise outside of a context, since differences occur between phenomena. An absolutely isolated object would be imperceptible, like say ‘real originality’ it is impossible, for how would we know it is was original if we had nothing to compare it to.

Contextual differences however, have no singular location. As Bateson (109) avers: "Difference, being of the nature of relationship, is not located in time or in space." Since awareness of differences arises contextually rather than independently, and is episodic rather than enduring, it has no substantive existence. Not being a substance, it neither comes nor goes anywhere. Differences have neither any actual substance nor any singular location; they are neither a something nor a nothing ontologically speaking.

The differences we perceive or aperceive are to be regarded as the effects of the difference which preceded them." (Bateson, 121) Circular causality, which classroom logic eschews, occurs in the form of recursive feedback processes, wherein the results of previous events serve as the basis for succeeding ones. The language we use refer to patterns of relationships, not properties of substances; to maps not territory; terra incognita not terra firma.

“But language must have come from somewhere, Dad?” I am beginning to talk to Renata about my new take on language. “Well our linguistic capabilities didn’t spring fully formed from the mouth of the Gods.” Our linguistic capabilities are part of the accumulative, constructive and interactive processes of evolution whereby cognitive processes condition living structures, which in turn condition further processes and so on. As symbolic communication dependently arose in early hominid species it became a powerful evolutionary force in its own right, radically and irrevocably changing the structures and processes of the human brain.

This momentous change centred on an increasingly enlarged prefrontal cortex, where such symbolizing processes apparently occur. As language use and this ‘prefrontalisation’ mutually reinforced each other, the symbolic-linguistic mode of cognition that is dependent upon them came to dominate other, originally non-linguistic, processes.

Human cognitive processes, even simple sensory ones, in other words, unavoidably arise in dependence upon our linguistified brain. Language, then, along with the systemic distinctions upon which it depends, is not something added on to human cognitive processes. Systemic symbolic thinking is constitutive of normal human cognitive processes.

We live our lives in this shared virtual world. The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the evolution of language "We cannot help but see the world in symbolic categorical terms," Deacon declares (416), "...dividing it up according to opposed features, and organizing our lives according to themes and narratives."

This linguistification of human cognitive processes thus represents a physiologically enstructured, dominating cognitive strategy characterized by compulsive yet creative recursivity, based upon words that are defined mutually and systemically, not independently or substantively, and whose ultimate meanings are conventional determined. It is late at night, there is a moon out there reflecting its light on the back garden.

A fox barks, I read on... it would seem the most deeply entrenched source of these recursive possibilities, which also doubles back to generate its own linguistically generated recursivity, is no doubt our sense of self as an enduring, experiencing agent. The fox yaps again, this is not the hour to be doubting the self. This sense of self, however, derives its compelling cogency, it’s enduring and endearing allure, from the same social and linguistic matrix other words and symbols do. Like language, this symbolic self is a product of massive interdependency; like other relational phenomenon, it has no substantive existence in time or space.

The idea of self would appear to be the final lignusticirony.
“And if I do ‘speak up’ Dad, I know the teachers will only correct me, because they are kinds of ...instruments?”
“Instrument of what?” “Well....instruments of correction, Have I got the right, Dad?”
"Spot on, Renata," I say gushing with parental pride.
School are not a language area for semantic freewheeling, without referring to anything in particular, they are in arena of formal rigour where linguistic norms are imposed.

Through innumerable acts of correction, the educational system tend to produce the need for its own services as teachers consecrate legitimate language and conserve their monopoly in their labour of correction. As parents we had never given a thought to the fact that the teachers were paid to teach codified language with authority for they were codified by grammarians, and their task is to encourage equivalences in a system of grammatical norms not to teach the evolutionary fact that we are the word made wo/man.

Ends (2750 words)
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