Doing Words with Things

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.

Today I’ve been looking through the BSL Poetry Anthology website, an ongoing research project at the University of Bristol. You can watch videos of BSL poems and click on links to download translations and linguistic analyses of each one in terms of anthropomorphism, blending, eyegaze, handshape, neologism, symmetry and use of space.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/research/sites/…

My BSL is insufficient to follow the poems in any depth so the translations are a great help, and it’s been interesting to think about how these translations differ from the parallel text translations I’ve worked with in the past, in which both source and target are written.

I’m very aware of how much expression is necessarily lacking in these translations, and how helpful it is to read over the analyses to learn more about what’s actually going on in the performances.

Accessing poetry through markedly separate translations and accompanying structural analyses is a strange and clunky way of trying to second-guess the intended effect of a poem. The analyses are primarily linguistic rather than literary, and so the force of each composition is at best implied in these commentaries by reference to tropes used by the signer. Trying to read a poem in a foreign language you don’t speak is best done by reading as many translations as you can get your hands on, and this process feels a bit like that. Many approaches, none of them quite touching.

There’s a reading night in Bristol later this month and I hope to make it over to see the poetry happening live. No analyses, no translations, and my beginnerish signing won’t let me approach the poems very closely at all. But the liveness will add a new means of approach, even if it means I’m approaching something rather different without the semantics at play. The rustle of language?

I’ve just spent an hour and a half shortening and shortening an email to get it into a 500-character contact form.

It was an introductory email trying to describe this project and ask for advice all at the same time, and to shrink it I had to make all kinds of curious omissions and abbreviations while still keeping it friendly and unbrisk. I hope I didn’t go too far. It may be that I’ve just sent off a very very polite email that fails to say or ask anything at all. We’ll see when (if) I get a reply.

At this stage, the project’s been in my notebook for a good four or five months, and on the books of the Word Festival for at least two, and at last it’s sufficiently settled that I can start approaching collaborators.

Briefly, the performance will involve signing instructions and descriptions for the actions of a co-performer, who will be constructing a small but growing wire sculpture. It’s a small-scale project, with a handful of performers and just a single performance in Spring this year.

Crucial to the success of the work will be finding a collaborator who can share with me their expertise in the structure, detail and poetry of BSL. In my collaboration with Anthony the orchestra conductor of ‘Musica Practica’, having an idea for the work was a start, but it only really came together through careful and excitable discussion and the gradual piecing towards one another of originally disparate practices.

I’ve been informally interested in sign language since my linguistics degree many years ago, and I passed my Level 1 BSL Exam last summer – but Level 1 is a bit like a fairly elementary GCSE. I can ask you all about your pets and your brothers and sisters and what you have in your pencil case, but not very much more. And that’s on a good day. I have been known to forget the sign for hello. (I panic.) I’m still a complete beginner, and am well aware of the glaring gaps in my understanding of the underlying structures of the language.

So over the past few months I’ve been reading some research articles into the linguistic structure of BSL, most recently about deixis, metaphor, gender and sign order. I find these articles very exciting as a means to develop a broader sense of how the language works beyond the particularities of the individual signs and constructions I’ve learned.

I’ve also been finding out more about Deaf culture and how BSL fits in, and thinking about what it means for a hearing artist to devise a work involving BSL. What’s curious from this perspective is that my interest in the language is first of all formal, as is my interest in language as a whole:

BSL is exciting for me because of its physical phonology: where oral/aural languages use sound, sign languages use space. Much of my research involves grappling with the relationship between material and referential properties of language and text: Henri Chopin’s audiopoem Rouge seems to merge acoustic sound and physical form and almost obliterates meaning in the process; my line drawings take graphological marks off the page and make them directly touch, rather than describe, the things they name. Mallarmé, Broodthaers, John Barth, I think even Allan Kaprow deal with these ideas in one way or another. And in BSL the physical phonology of the language relates to the materiality of the world in ways that are quite unique and can’t be found in oral/aural language.

At the moment, then, I’m searching for a BSL user who shares this fascination with the structure of the language, as there’s so much I still don’t know. Known unknowns.