How being lost for words can be a good thing. A thought-in-progress.
When we talk about knowing we commonly have in mind the kind of knowledge that is produced and held in our awareness by means of language. One example of this is the linguistically-based thought we use for internal dialogue (with ourselves, or our imagined interlocutors). This has been called “thinking for speaking” (Slibor, 2003, in Nūnez, Sweetzer, 2006) but I prefer the term linguistic-thinking because this kind of thinking is not just geared towards external speech, but is practiced internally–acting as filter or rehearsal for more considered thought; as well as sometimes by-passing speech altogether by way of the written word. Linguistic thinking can also happen directly through the process of writing: I am performing linguistic thinking right now as I work out my ideas on the blog ‘page’. The important thing to note about linguistic thinking is that it follows its own (linguistic) logic and results in a particular, language-based kind of knowledge, as I will describe.
Linguistic thinking, of course, is not the only party in town. As a contrast, artistic-research often utilises embodied thinking, following a sensory, perceptual and experiential logic that offers an alternative to that of verbal language. This embodied thinking in turn allows a different kind of knowledge to emerge, one that we might call embodied knowledge. (Moore, 2017) What is important about embodied knowledge is that it includes elements that cannot be fully expressed through words.
But what is the point of knowledge that can’t be put into words? And why bother making a distinction between linguistic knowledge and embodied knowledge at all? The distinction is an important one though, if you value diversity of thought, partly because of a phenomenon that was identified in the field of linguistics more than half a century ago known as Whorfian linguistic relativity. Benjamin Lee Whorf, writing in 1956, held that there is a co-constitutive connection between thought, knowledge and language. He puts it like this:
“Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars.” (Whorf 1956: 214, in Scholtz et al., 2021)
In other words, language influences thought, and different languages can have different influences on our thinking. The implication is that language is not just a neutral tool you use to express some kind of free-wheeling idealised thought process, but to some extent at the very least, the thought itself is shaped, structured and limited by, the grammar of the language you share within your socio-cultural grouping. (Scholtz et al, 2021). What this means then, is that when we use linguistic thought, or ‘think for speaking’ we are utilising a particular linguistic grammar. And by doing so, we are influenced by certain socially and culturally pre-prescribed boundaries to thought, inscribed into the structure of the specific language we are using. Put simply, how we are able to speak about something, affects how we are able to think about it.
The weakness or strength of language’s influence on thought outlined in linguistic relativity has been debated hotly since the 1950s and the theory has a complex relationship with both structuralist and post structuralist thought.(1) It’s a huge subject, and inguistic relativity is only one way to express this close relationship between language and thought, but nevertheless Whorf’s legacy persists, and recent studies have shown “strong evidence” of linguistic relativity in action. (Nūnez, Sweetzer, 2006).
Embodied knowledge has its own intertwined relationship with conceptualisation and culture too, of course. Marion Iris Young’s feminist essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ (Young, 1980, 2005) gives a powerful account of how gender is inscribed onto the physical comportment of bodies, for example(2). Another intriguing example is that of the Aymara-speaking culture in the Northern Andean region of South America, whose spatial-gestural schema for time is in opposition to that which is common in Anglophone culture. Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s famous doom-laden reading of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (where the Angel of History is being hurtled backwards through time, a powerless witness to the violence and destruction that is piling up before her) the Aymara conceptualise their everyday experience of time as having the past laid out in front of them, and the future, invisible, behind their backs (Nūnez, Sweetzer, 2006). These are just two examples of how gestural grammar is also involved with the shaping our conceptual worlds and our bodily comportment. For the purposes of contrasting linguistic thinking with embodied thinking though, I take a Whorfian position and suggest that language can operate as a kind of double-bind to thought, to the extent that it offers structural contradiction or reinforcement to feelings and conceptual frameworks that exist alongside the language in question.
Embodied thinking (as I’ve acknowledged) may come with its own constraints but the important point is that these are differently inflected constraints to those emerging from language. If the boundaries of thought available through embodied thinking may not be wider in themselves, at least their borders will delineate different spaces to those of language, and, therefore the employment of embodied thinking alongside linguistic thinking may offer a wider terrain overall in which to explore and question culturally constructed norms; and produce a different kind of embodied knowledge as a consequence.
It may be helpful at this point to put aside the words thinking and thought for a moment, since they have such a strong association with linguistic and teleological logic, and instead use the broader philosophical term cognition. In the field of philosophy of mind, cognition is the umbrella term for what we might commonly call thinking but, importantly, also includes “mind, thought, reasoning, perception, imagination, intelligence, emotion and experience” (Anderson, Cairns et. al, 2019).
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In logic, if a thought can be expressed as a clear proposition, it can then be assessed against existing knowledge and judged to be either true or false. But how does this work when the cognitive processes you are engaged in and the knowledge you are involved in producing are non-propositional, as can be the case with artistic research? What measures can be agreed upon to assess the ‘validity’ of non-propositional knowledge? We may need to re-conceptualise the research question itself. Could the research question be conceived of as a tool to stimulating thought, rather than something designed to find answers? If this were the case, the measure of the success or failure of such a question, would perhaps not lie in the force of its argument, but in the intensity and number of the questions it generates.(3)
A powerful example of a film concerned with non-propositional knowledge is the feature length documentary produced through the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Leviathan ((Castaing-Taylor, Paravel. 2012). Leviathan is ostensibly a film about fishing in the North Atlantic. A documentary in the loosest sense of the word, it is filmed aboard (and often overboard) a working fishing trawler, but it eschews the explanatory or story-telling techniques usually associated with this type of filmmaking such as conventional narrative structure, voice over, talking-heads or diegetic dialogue. Instead it assaults the senses through novel camera POVs, visceral use of haptic images, and an almost overwhelmingly immersive soundtrack. It is a film that demands to be experienced rather than understood. The film does not necessarily ‘say something’ or seek to present a singular, linguistically digestible conclusion on its subject matter. Instead it compels, surprises, delights and disturbs through the senses, sharing experience on a physical, embodied level. Experiencing Leviathan as a viewer/listener is to share in “an adventure in perception” (Brakhage, 1963).
Andrew Moore, a film scholar who wrote his PhD thesis on Leviathan, categorises the film as “sensory” or “non-propositional” filmmaking, and the knowledge it conveys as embodied knowledge. (Moore, 2017) Non-propositional is a useful term for describing the type of cognition that cannot be expressed in straightforward linguistic terms. As mentioned above, a proposition is a concept that can be assessed in terms of truth or falsehood. One of the strengths of non-propositional artistic research then, may be its ability to grapple with the kind of concepts and experiences that do not convert easily into propositions, especially those that are non-linguistic (in the sense of not conforming to an existing set of coded signs - verbal or pictorial - with clearly understood meanings).
“…film can not only engage the viewer cognitively, using sounds and images to generate meanings and suggest interpretative possibilities through verbal and non-verbal means… [but can convey] …. forms of knowledge that are experiential, embodied and fundamentally non-cognitive and non-verbal” (Moore, 2017)
Moore singles out another filmmaker in his thesis, Stan Brakhage, whom he suggests is an an earlier proponent of the same kind of non-propositional filmmaking he identifies with Leviathan. He quotes Brakhage’s own assertion that he is pursuing the kind of knowledge that is “foreign to language” (Brakhage, 1963). The notion of knowledge or experience that can be ‘foreign to language’ resonates strongly with the subject of my short film Cosmic Domestic (5). The absence of dialogue was important to the intensity of sensory perception involved in the kind of intimate engagement with the world I wanted to explore.
Rather than being concerned with binary notions of truth and falsehood, artistic research often deals in overlaps, nuance, grey areas, resonances harmonics, and unresolved tensions. This state of non-resolution and (sometimes conflicting) tensions can, I would argue, produce knowledge without producing conclusions. Artistic research can deal with nuance and complexity, and does not necessarily need to conform to ideas of linear progress in order to be meaningful. Non-resolution, or in the process of artistic research is, in some senses, its raison d’être and end point too. This non-resolution is described by artistic research scholar Henk Borgdorff. as “unfinished thinking”. He says:
… artistic research seeks not so much to make explicit the knowledge that art is said to produce, but rather to provide a specific articulation of the pre-reflective, non- conceptual content of art. it thereby invites ‘unfinished thinking’. hence, it is not formal knowledge that is the subject matter of artistic research, but thinking in, through and with art. (Borgdorff, 2019) p44
Non-linguistic thinking and sensory experimentation through filmmaking can be thought of as akin to Borgdorff’s “thinking in, through and with”. It is, I would suggest, a kind of non-verbal speculating-in-the-world (6). The knowledge which is contained in artworks is a non-propositional knowledge which is semantically very open, but also particular, in that it pertains to a “specific articulation” of reality created by that speculation alone. It does not require translation but must be shared through experience. However, the specific articulation that Bergdorff mentions is, in the vast majority of practice-based doctoral theses, achieved in part by an accompanying written text. Choosing a mode of verbal articulation for an artwork that is non-conceptual, non-propositional or deliberately ‘foreign to language’ therefore presents something of a conundrum for the practice-based PhD researcher.
Perhaps one way of writing about embodied knowledge, is to explicitly embrace the ‘unfinished’, by utilising forms of language that can themselves embody a kind of unfinished thought., such as writing a research question whose answer is another question, perhaps. Or cultivating what Salomé Voegelin calls a sonic sensibility in one’s writing (Voegelin,2014). In the end, the point is to enable artistic research to be shared, and contribute to a wider discourse. To generate, as anthropologist Anna Grimshaw puts it, “ways of knowing that resist translation but exist in productive tension with other knowledge forms” (Grimshaw, 2011 in Moore, 2017). The challenge of resisting translation, and instead finding verbal equivalents capable of articulating a non-propositional research practice, is ongoing.
So to return to my initial subtitle by way of a summary, how is it that being lost for words can be a good thing? In the context of artistic research, experimenting, through embodied thinking (and the embodied knowledge that it can produce), allows questions about the world to be explored outside of the specific logical and conceptual restraints of verbal language. In this way, artistic experimentation may be able to subtly disorient our habitual positions, chip away gradually at blind spots in our culturally produced conceptual schema and provoke new questions about the received thought that shapes our world. Non-propositional or sensory filmmaking, as arguably more wholly concerned with non-linguistic knowledge than some other types of filmmaking, I would suggest, offers a particularly apt medium for performing these experiments.
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The history of this complex relationship is helpfully outlined by Ranjit Chatterjee in his article ‘Reading Whorf Through Wittgenstein’ through references to Saussure, Chomsky, Derrida and others, demonstrating some close similarities between Whorfian and Wittgensteinian ideas. (CHATTERJEE, R. 1985). [See also Nietzschean perspectivism and Foucault’s ideas on discourse and epistème].
See also NOLAND, C. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Particularly for her elaboration of anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ ideas about infant’s culturally produced muscular-skeletal development but also how bodies can resist cultural inscription (especially gender based inscription) through attention to bodily discomfort.
Brakhage’s film Text of Light (1974) (introduced to me by Benjamin Cook, Director of LUX) became a reference for my short film Cosmic Domestic.
Writer/academic Nicholas Royle posited something akin to this idea at an online discussion with writer/academic Maria Fusco at a SGSAH online discussion event I attended. He read a text he had written which consisted entirely of questions (Royle, N, 2021)
Cosmic Domestic, is a short experimental film with no dialogue about finding the infinite in the everyday, filmed between May and July 2020, under UK Covid-19 social restrictions.
I use speculating-in-the-world as a playful adaptation of the phrase from Heideggerian phenomenology “being-in-the-world”, a term he coined to suggest that our existence is inseparable from our relationship with our environment. (WHEELER, M. 2018.)
ANDERSON, M., CAIRNS, D. L. & SPREVAK, M. 2019. Distributed cognition in classical antiquity, Edinburgh, University Press.
BORGDORFF, H. 2019. The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research. In: BIGGS, M. & KARLSON, H. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. Routledge.(p44)
BRAKHAGE, S. 2014. From Metaphors on Vision. In: MACKENZIE, S. (ed.) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures : A Critical Anthology. Berkeley, UNITED STATES: University of California Press. pp105-116 (First published 1963, in Film Culture 30 pp25-34)
CASTAING-TAYLOR, L, PARAVEL, V., 2012. Leviathan. The Cinema Guild.
CHATTERJEE, R. 1985. Reading Whorf through Wittgenstein: A solution to the linguistic relativity problem. Lingua, 67, 37-63.
EVANS, V. 2020. Cosmic Domestic. UK: LUX Scotalnd and BBC Arts.
GRIMSHAW, A. 2011. THE BELLWETHER EWE: Recent Developments in Ethnographic Filmmaking and the Aesthetics of Anthropological Inquiry. Cultural anthropology, 26, 247-262.
MOORE, A. B. 2017. A documentary like no other?: harvard's sensory ethnography lab, embodied knowledge & the art of non-fiction film. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
NOLAND, C. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, Cambridge, UNITED STATES, Harvard University Press.
NÚÑEZ, R. E. & SWEETSER, E. 2006. With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time. Cognitive science, 30, 401-450. (see p402 for Slobin, on “thinking for speaking”)
SCHOLZ, B. C., PELLETIER, F. J., and PULLUM, G.K, "Philosophy of Linguistics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/linguistics/>.
VOEGELIN, S. 2014. Sonic possible worlds hearing the continuum of sound, New York, NY, USA, New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic.
WHEELER, M. 2018. Martin Heidegger. In: ZALTA, E. N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Fall 2020 Edition) ed.: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
YOUNG, I. M. 2005. On female body experience : "Throwing like a girl" and other essays, Oxford University Press. (Chapter Two, pp27-45, 1980)