Triple Canopy 16 (July 2012). See →.
Generated by →.
To see a transcript of Corey’s speech, visit →. I have no idea how the talk was received. In fact, there are many such examples of successful discursive hoaxes, in different forms; I return to this below.
On the study of this English, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Among other forms of linguistic improvisation, scat talking and scat singing are ages old. Scat singing was practiced in the modern era in the US by Jelly-Roll Morton and Al Jolson (see Wikipedia) and robustly during the Jazz Age by Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, the fabulous Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, Mel Tormé, Carmen MacRae, Betty Carter, and later by the “vocalese” trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, the Swingle Singers, and hosts of others; the rock ‘n’ roller Dion; and of course Bobby McFerrin, and some hip-hop artists. Between double-talk and scatting is poetry, from Gertrude Stein to the Language (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poets, and Edith Sitwell, Lord Buckley, and Captain Beefheart, but perhaps not including non-bardic monologuists from Jean Shepherd to David Antin to Spaulding Gray or the mellifluous nonsense poets such as Edward Lear or even Lewis Carroll.
And related old-timey television characters such as Ralph Kramden and more so his pal Ed Norton, Fred Flintstone, and the rube puppet Mortimer Snerd; by virtue of “allowing” us to mock them, they become fetishized.
I was in an experimental program at Brooklyn College, modeled on the British system, that incorporated a tutorial approach to higher education.
Clearly, I am ignoring the difference between grammatical and phonetic analyses here.
That is, in contrast to a personalized humanistic reading on the one hand, and to a formalist myopia on the other. A statistical study of Wordsworth’s corpus rather than a single poem might have led to some insights about his work, but I am not persuaded. Sketch Engine, the online tool used by Rule and Levine, which they characterize as a “concordance generator,” claims to work “at the intersection of corpus and computational linguistics”; in the case of IAE, the “corpus” was e-flux’s online press releases. Even back in the 1960s, when I was performing my sophomoric analysis, statistical linguistic analysis was meant not as a literary tool exactly, but as a precursor to computerized machine translation and, like almost all government-funded linguistic research, including that of Noam Chomsky, was aiming for an eventual military/AI application. Since then, a whole universe of linguistic modeling has opened up.
Something like the ads in Whole Foods, a supermarket chain whose very name ripples out from the Whole Earth Catalog of hippie days.
A Gourmet Experience, 1974.
Rule and Levine, joking or not, are hardly sophisticated linguistic commentators. They attack the generative process of nominalization, but contemporary English is rife with strange nominalizations, so much so that the New York Times Sunday Book Review, in a recent article on the process, ridicules, among other coinage, the neologistic fail (for failure) and sequester (for sequestration). (See Henry Hitchings, “Those Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns,” March 30, 2013, and his subsequent “The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns,” April 5, 2013; the Times has addressed this issue repeatedly over recent years, but we should remember that journalism amuses itself by pillorying academe.) Our writers also inexplicably fail to recognize the increasing prominence of the word space in many disciplines, including psychology and its pop versions, since the 1960s. In that vein, one might consider the importance to many contemporary theories of the privileging of space over time (cf. Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others) in contemporary capitalism. Thus we may expect philosophically inflected corpora to have more terms relating to spatiality than to temporality. Rule and Levine also note the prevalence of dependent clauses, particularly as sentence openers, but what academicized writing fails to employ these? Why else is Microsoft Word always beseeching us to abandon their use, along with high-flown padding, which is also attacked by Rule and Levine? Finally, their comments on the word text are close to unintelligible.
The military is well-known for its idiosyncratic language of euphemistic substitutions (“collateral damage, enhanced interrogation, targeted killing”), the most outrageous of which is the renaming of the War Department as the Defense Department; see also Godard’s Alphaville for the poetics of philosophical and emotional impoverishment abetted by selective lexical reduction, which no doubt is derived from the “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and his postwar ur-texts on politics and language.
The slight barbarisms of language are as quoted; the original formatting is worse. See →.
J. Peter Kincaid is one of the authors of the document, written in 1992, from which the Simplified English example was drawn. I believe the Microsoft Word dictionary, in trying to get readers to reword their paragraphs to produce less passive constructions, grades the results using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score.
See the opening epigraph and the closing quotation of the present article.
The US has few art-making programs that offer a doctorate, except in supposedly non-market-oriented fields such as “social practice.” Some are floating the idea that this added credential is necessary to catapult its holders above the MFA crowd when it comes to academic jobs. Caution makes me refrain from adducing examples of self-descriptions by such hyper-educated people that look even worse than the bad examples offered by Rule and Levine.
In my effort to stem email overload, I also routinely request to be removed from gallery and artist announcements. I don’t appreciate bloat. But I digress.
In the mid-1980s, as globalization became a topic, the public television “miniseries” The Story of English developed from a book by the same name written by a former US public television news co-host, the Canadian-born Robert (Robin) Breckenridge Ware McNeil. The message was the richness of the language, whose productivity and immense vocabulary (dually sourced from Norse/Germanic and Greco-Roman roots) is the story behind the story of English dominance. This is little more than the imperialist imaginary at work.
This is not the place to consider the ways in which the terminology, or designation, of English as a second language (ESL) has been sliced and diced, and in some cases replaced by ESOL (English for speakers of other languages), EAL (English as an additional language), ESD (English as a second dialect), EIL (English as an international language), ELF (English as a lingua franca), ESP (English for specific purposes), or even EAP (English for academic purposes). See the Wikipedia entry for English as a second or foreign language, which is chock-full of variants and their acronyms: →.
“Upper class” and “not upper class.”
President Obama, in his speech of April 2, 2013 on the BRAIN initiative, announced an initial expenditure of $100 million for 2014 and a projected total of $3 billion over the decade. (See “Remarks by the President on the BRAIN initiative and American Innovation,” →.) The European Union got there slightly earlier, announcing in January 2013 the Human Brain Project, on which it expects to spend $1 billion over the coming decade. (See John Horgan, “Why You Should Care about Pentagon Funding of Obama’s BRAIN Initiative,” Scientific American Cross-Check blog, May 22, 2013, →, and his earlier posts linked therein.) Some sources suggest that the National Institutes of Health already spends about $5.5 billion yearly on neuroscientific research. (See Jason Koebler, “Obama’s $100 Million BRAIN Initiative Barely Makes a Dent in Neuroresearch Budget,” US News & World Report, April 3, 2013, →.)
See Alyssa Quart’s summary “Adventures in Neurohumanities,” The Nation, May 27, 2013, →; Patricia Cohen, “Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know,” New York Times, Mar. 31, 2010, →; “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities?” by the editors of the New York Times Opinionator blog, Apr. 5, 2010, →; and Tim Adams, “Neuroaesthetics,” published on the blog Blouin Artinfo, April 23, 2009.
Tim Adams, ibid. For a look at a recent neuroaesthetic reading of literature, see Kay Young, Imaging Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), available at →. On this bandwagon one finds Marina Abramović; after people sat staring into her eyes for extended periods, often bursting into tears, during The Artist is Present (2010), her performance at MoMA, Abramović became interested in somehow making visible the brain function involved in “the transfer of energy between performer and public.” Supported by the Mortimer D. Sackler Family Foundation, Abramović worked with US and Russian scientists on “an experimental performance installation” at Moscow’s Garage. The installation was called Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze (2011). See Marina Abramović, “Neuroscience Experiment I: Measuring The Magic of Mutual Gaze,” on the Abramović-Garage website →. She and New York public radio talk-show host Brian Lehrer sat, wired up and gazing across at one another during a radio broadcast; the resulting discussion can be hear at →.
Hats off to Greg Sholette for his reinsertion of the Sputnik effect into art discourse. Much of the funding in linguistics and related fields stemmed from the legislation passed to respond to this Cold War space race.
Christopher Prendergast, “Evolution and Literary History: A Response to Franco Moretti,” New Left Review 34 (July/August 2005); much of Moretti’s work had been also published in the New Left Review. For a later, non-theoretical critique, see Kathryn Schulz, “Distant Reading,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 26, 2011, p. 14; published online as “What is Distant Reading?” June 24, 2011, →. See also Elif Batuman, “Adventures of a Man of Science: Moretti in California,” n+1 issue 3 (Fall 2006) and published online (Apr 23, 2010) at →. Batuman distinguishes formal literary development from Darwinian natural selection, as does Prendergast’s essay, and notes that Moretti does not mind the loss of a “human” element in such studies.
Judith Rodenbeck has directed my attention to the magazine November, parodying October—a target of Rule and Levine—which put out a single issue in 2006. It featured articles by “Lukács G.C. Hechnoh,” “Rosamund Kauffmann,” and “Chip Chapman” (respectively, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, and Hal Foster).
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text (Spring/Summer 1996). Sokal published his self-exposé in Lingua Franca in the May 1996 issue.
The article under discussion here, “International Art English,” gained a second life when the authors were interviewed in the Guardian newspaper.
In case it is not abundantly clear, let me reiterate that the book-end quotations gracing the present essay are, in the first instance, the machinic product of a generative computer program, and in the second, Alan Sokal’s devilish foray into gobbledygook/double-talk. See →.