[This was first written on 17 September 2011]
Perception (contd)
When this idea first came to me, it felt revelatory. In a sense, none of us is using methodology that emphasises broad coverage, validity-through-volume, systematicity. (I hope no one feels insulted by that remark – I certainly do not mean it critically. My point is just that a lot of the work is located in the insights produced in attentive interaction with others.) The notion that our walks were a perceptual experiment made sense of them for me in a very exciting way. Walking and taking photos is not a particularly systematic way to gather ‘data’, but it is a very powerful means of watching one’s own perceptions change, and – crucially – to watch those of others in interaction with you.
To articulate this in terms of figure and ground has worked well for me. It provides a way to gather the other ideas presented in this writing into a practical account of what happens when one explores everyday writing in the urban setting. Why do some texts emerge as figures? It may be because they seem charged with a particular political energy, with the pathos of memory, with an uncompromising insistence on identity, with an aesthetic power realised in the materiality of the text or in its nature as discourse. But others may not respond to the writing in the same way. The political charge may not touch them at all. They may not be in interested in the history that is memorialised here. So reading urban writing with another person and noticing what emerges as figure and what recedes into ground is to learn something about the way one understands the politics, history, aesthetics of the landscape oneself, how one’s companion understands them, and how both can be changed through the act of companionable walking.
I would like to build this idea up a little and I believe that there might be useful material in the literature on phenomenology – Merleau-Ponty is a name that has been mentioned in this context.
Appropriation
The last term I want to write about is APPROPRIATION and I feel that it should really have come earlier in the sequence. It does not belong here at the end and PERCEPTION would have been a better place to stop and bring things together. So, with that proviso, let us think about how everyday writing engages in acts of appropriation.
As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, speakers do not invent languages for themselves – we have to use the language we are presented with as a result of where we grow up and live. It is a simple point, but, if we invented our own language, its communicative usefulness would be nil. The result is that every word we say has been uttered before countless times by countless other people in countless contexts.
And it is not only the words themselves. In the section on GENRE, I emphasised that language users do not ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time they speak or write. There is a multiplicity of genres that provide models for language use on a wide range of topics and in a wide range of situations. The same is true of MEMES. Well, no – memes are slightly different. It is difficult to see how one could communicate at all without any reference to the everyday genres of speech and writing. But many of the phenomena described as memes can safely be left alone. No one is obliged to draw Chad on a wall or post another lolcats image online. These memes are more a resource than a necessity, perhaps.
In fact, we also view existing discourse as resource in other ways. It is customary to include a quotation in the inscription on a tomb stone – from poetry or from a religious text. The point made through the quotation varies. Sometimes it expresses a fairly orthodox religious viewpoint – the ‘hope of resurrection’ in Christian cemeteries, for example. But sometimes texts are chosen to convey something about the IDENTITY of the person buried here. Readers can infer something about the deceased through the specific choice of text. Quotations appear in graffiti too and slogans borrowed from elsewhere. (Steve and I were surprised to see ‘black power’ written on a fence post in a playground in East Herringthorpe.) And quotations are a fairly popular choice for tattoos. Leafing through a tattoo magazine in connection another project, I found some very striking ones: ‘no true friends in modern life’, for example. This is from a song by Morrissey called ‘Something is Squeezing my Skull’.
Bakhtin provides useful ways of thinking about these phenomena. A fundamental idea is that, when someone appropriates – or just uses – speech from somewhere else, at least two ‘voices’ are audible in the ‘utterance’. A part of what the utterance means derives from its earlier uses. Although I can ‘understand’ the phrase ‘no true friends in modern life’ to the extent that I am a speaker of English and understand those six words and the syntactic principles that hold them together, I do not really understand its use here unless I know that it comes from a song by Morrissey. (In a way, this has the result of sorting informed readers from uninformed readers. I had to look this quotation up – if I had met the bearer of the tattoo in everyday life, I would not have been among the cognoscenti.) But, if I am an informed reader, I will read the tattoo and hear the original voice speaking in it. At the same time, I will also hear the voice of the person who had this phrase tattooed on his body. (It’s clear from the picture in the magazine that the bearer is male.) That person is uttering the words again – fusing his voice with that of the original writer.
Bakhtin talks about this in terms of DIALOGISM or DOUBLE-VOICING – the idea that many voices can resonate in a particular utterance and that the meaning of the utterance actually lies in the interaction of these voices. I see this time and again in the everyday writing we have looked at in the project and so some consideration of APPROPRIATION and hence DIALOGISM seems essential to me in exploring the way in which that writing works.
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