Doing Words with Things

I’ve been reading The Linguistics of British Sign Language.*

It turns out BSL makes frequent use of proforms: elements that refer to terms previously defined in a given discourse context. Pronouns, which refer specifically to previously defined nouns, are a category of proform common in English. Pronouns make up a proportion of the proforms found in BSL, but BSL makes greater use of a range of proforms because of is spatially and temporally marked grammatical constructions.

Much grammatical information in BSL is indicated in the use of space and movement, and as many full signs are anchored to certain locations on the body or use both hands at once, they cannot not freely accommodate the kinds of movement necessary for grammatical inflection. Temporarily transferring significance onto a simpler and more versatile handshape makes this inflection possible.

The full sign for “car”, for instance, is two-handed and is positioned symmetrically in front of the chest, like holding a steering wheel. But indicating a car’s location, movement, relation to other objects etc. means moving the sign in space and time and in relation to other signs that might be going on simultaneously. The BSL proform for a car, a flat handshape with the palm facing down, is a form sufficiently versatile to carry these grammatical inflections.

The sculpture to be constructed during the Doing Words with Things performance will incorporate several components, each of which will need to be manipulated by the sculptor whose movements will in turn be instructed/described by the signer. As many of the components will be fragments rather than distinct and identifiable objects in their own right, it might be that the inevitable proforms will be defined in the first place with ad hoc signs created one by one for each scrap of material: “the-bit-with-the-curled-up-end”, “the-red-one”, “that-one-over-at-the-edge”, and so on.

I want to develop the sculptural fragments and the overall sculpture itself with a similar degree of abstraction as the language consequently needed to describe it. Inevitably, they’ll be causing one another (MATTER again…). The language and the sculpture need to be planned in parallel.

* Rachel Sutton-Spence and Bencie Woll, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

I’m trying to find out what the formal difference is between the imperative and indicative moods in BSL, so I know whether instructing will look different from describing. In English you can’t quite conflate the two moods into a single ambiguous form: phrases like ‘you, fold this!’ are distinct from phrases like ‘you’re folding this’. I’m hoping BSL might afford some context-bound ambiguity here, but if the two moods are quite distinct we’ll have to select one or the other.

The ambiguity between instruction and description were crucial to the conductor’s movements in Musica Practica, and I’d like to pursue this here if it proves possible.

Last weekend I went to the Drill Hall in London for a matinee performance of four plays written and performed in BSL by Deafinitely Theatre. Particularly engaging for me was the continuous bilingualism that went on throughout.

The plays all incorporated surtitles projected above the stage, but the written English was used in a number of ways over the course of the evening. The words served not just to translate BSL into English but to describe music and sound effects, to show the content of a document being read silently on stage, and even to indicate private thoughts that remained unsigned. In all of these cases certain ideas and components of the productions existed for the entire audience only in English.

There was abundant bilingualism among the characters too: certain characters signed and spoke in turn, many did not use English at all, some used only English and needed other characters as interpreters, one character could not sign but didn’t speak either, communicating instead in non-BSL gestures. There’s a great amount of play you can do when you anticipate a bilingual audience, and when a shared language is such an important part of community identity.

During the interval I found myself sitting with some other BSL learners who were training for the Level 1 exam I passed a couple of years ago, and I was startled by how comprehensively I’ve forgotten what I’d learned. Bad. I felt like a complete beginner again. Since then I’ve been practising with RNID resources online and in print in advance of the BSL poetry reading in Bristol next weekend. Though I don’t expect to understand a great deal of what’s being signed, at least I’ll be able to say hello without panic.

http://www.drillhall.co.uk/

http://www.deafinitelytheatre.co.uk/

http://www.rnid.org.uk/

I’ve just adjusted the title of this blog having confirmed the name of the piece as “Doing Words with Things”. It’s a play on J.L. Austin’s lectures on speech acts and pragmatics in the 1950’s which was entitled “How to Do Things with Words”. His lectures discussed the pragmatic interlocking of language and world, and though some of his conclusions don’t convince me he lays out a useful set of nodes to navigate. The phrase “Doing Words with Things” reflects titles of other related pieces of mine: “What To Do” (2010), “What The Matter Is” (2009), “Do Something” (2009), “Writing Art and Life” (2010-11). I like words that are short and plain.

The piece is gradually taking shape: it will have a clear start and end rather than being a durational performance, and I’m working more on ideas for the sculpture that will result. To sustain something like a narrative before a seated audience, I want to make the sculpture vary its appearance over time while keeping it continually abstract. The important thing is that it mirror the gestures of BSL that instruct its construction. I’ve found a couple of images that suggest the kind of thing I have in mind – here’s one I love (scanned from a clothes catalogue) but mine will need more structural variety and a greater range of materials.

I’ve been hanging around on this website a lot lately, trying to relearn my elementary BSL in front of a mirror:

http://www.bslhomework.org.uk/index.php

Two years of Mandarin Chinese lessons in my teens have left me with about four words of the language and a leftover affection for the difficulty of getting tones right. I did a degree in Italian and I was fluentish for a while; it’s subsiding. French is drifting too. My grasp of German is very slight: I can talk with excessive emphasis, helpless grammar and wildly invented vocabulary and I love it like this. My partner is half German and I anticipate eventually learning the language to a good degree of fluency, and I regret that this loose use of the language will have to go.

It strikes me that the languages I’ve taught myself and picked up in various incompetent and ad hoc ways are the ones I most enjoy speaking, even if I do it pretty badly.

I suppose this is evidence of my analytical rather than social interest in language, because being delighted by the badness of a badly learned language doesn’t do much good when I’m trying to get something said. I was at a wedding in Germany a few weeks ago and felt helplessly grateful to a kind woman who patiently let me try and say interesting things to her about the history of choreography. I dread to think what it actually sounded like. She may have been nodding and smiling with complete bemusement.

This delight in half-learned languages has informed my artwork for many years, and I’ve often worked with translation and multilingualism specifically because of what is to be found in the gap between separate languages – when you step outside of one and don’t manage to step all the way into another.

But although I’m bringing to this project the excitement of my unfamiliarity with BSL, in this case my main concern isn’t my own relationship with the language but rather the particularities of BSL itself. It isn’t so much the potential of the gaps in between individual languages that interests me here as the singular gap in between Language and World.