Twit twit twit

In Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit identifies the animal cry as the limit point beyond speech:

The animal cry signals the moment of contact between those two ontic worlds: the cry is, as Derrida explains, a signal burdened with the antidiscursive force of animality and madness. Burke's 1757 reflection on the sublime includes a section on "The Cries of Animals." For Burke, the experience of the sublime aroused by the animal's cry imposes a moment wholly outside time—an extemporaneous moment—in which the dynamics of reason are temporarily halted. (43)

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

Yet a long philosophical tradition (including Kant) also locates in the animal cry the source of human speech, insofar as speech is imagined as originating in the mimicry of animal sounds (Lippit 41).

So there is something coy about the way that Twitter names itself after animal sounds,
as if to suggest that there is something fundamentally antilinguistic about social media text. "Don't mind us," it seems to say; "we're just twittering, like animals. No language to see here."

I think that in some cases this makes people feel as though they have to live up to a kind of antilinguistic standard on Twitter, to introduce noise gratuitously as if in homage to the medium—as if to make it really tweeting. That's the only explanation I can think of for tweets like this one from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa; @ChuckGrassley), whom I imagine writes like this only on Twitter:



In contrast with common abbreviations and slang, which are underwritten by identifiable (if diverse) logics, here the abbreviations and nonstandardisms seem random, even perverse. For example, "evr." does not save any characters; a period would seem better spent at the end of the first, unstopped sentence. As for the wasted space before the question mark or the capitalized "Learn"—what can these be but antilinguistic performances? (I was interested to learn, incidentally, that Sen. Grassley shares my hatred of the "History" Channel.)

T. S. Eliot, from The Waste Land, 1922

The fact that the animal in question with Twitter is the bird adds another dimension to consider. Bird-talk is gendered feminine, from the speechless Philomel ("twit twit twit"—she is turned into a bird to enforce her speechlessness, when cutting out her tongue is not enough) to the cheeping and twittering of the town women in The Music Man:



It's no wonder Twitter is seen as a site of gossip and rumor, intellectual triviality and linguistic disaster. It intentionally casts itself as mere animal noises, or, what evidently amounts to the same thing, female speech. And as I've suggested elsewhere, the radical multiplicity of voices on Twitter likewise suggests a flock indiscriminately cheeping.

This is undoubtedly the source of the fears that are occasionally raised that social media are making us lose our grip on language, as if that were a thing that could be so easily lost. (Try writing like Gertrude Stein. It's not easy.) To lose language might just be to lose our humanity, and then where would we be?

Well, the posthuman turn is so five years ago that it's difficult to get exercised about such a question. The interesting implications do not lie in fears of loss, for we are all already cyborgs or animals.

But good old Twitter—it makes us both at once.

--



Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.

When the birds attack Bodega Bay in Hitchcock's film (1963), a terrified mother lashes out at the film's avatar of liberated (and threateningly undomesticated) femininity, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren): "I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil!" One reading of The Birds would take the birds as a furious feminine multiplicity, attacking domesticity and the family as if in revenge.

Paul Hiebert at The Awl:

The post-World War II "neat" may have been an ignorant oversimplification of the world and its inherent messiness, but the post-9/11 random is an exaggeration of this messiness and an unwillingness to find resolve or connection. There is something unthinking and uncurious and unfeeling in its use.

Risk society, statistical panic, flows?

It seems to me that the popular mistrust of critics, especially when they write using specialized language, is structurally similar to popular mistrust of difficult writers like Gertrude Stein. Like that of Stein, the critic's status as a worker is always in question, and the critic's claim to cultural legitimacy is therefore always threatened.

We need to revisit the structures of feeling around work.

Español

He decidido que hay que escribir en español de vez en cuando. Ya sé que no lo hablo bien. Pero quería debilitar la noción que inglés sea el idioma "normal" aquí.

What is plagiarism?

Oh, please; don’t start this good vs. evil shit. This isn’t Star Wars. People on all ends of the spectrum fuck up.
     --Sylvia/M

The UC Berkeley Campus Code of Student Conduct defines plagiarism as

the use of intellectual material produced by another person without acknowledging its source.

It includes:

1. Copying from the writings or works of others into one's academic assignment without attribution, or submitting such work as if it were one's own;
2. Using the views, opinions,or insights of another without acknowledgement; or
3. Paraphrasing the characteristic or original phraseology, metaphor, or other literary device of another without proper attribution

The English Department adds:

Unacknowledged use of the words or ideas of others from any medium (print, digital, or otherwise) is plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the appropriation of another's words or ideas without acknowledgement.

The recent controversy over white feminists appropriating the work of feminists of color reminds me of a student I once had who very blatantly plagiarized a good two thirds of a paper.

When I discussed it with em, e claimed that e thoroughly understood the definition of plagiarism outlined above, and that e had also read and agreed with the section on plagiarism that I'd assigned from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers. I put a few questions to the student about it, and e seemed to understand what, in theory, constituted plagiarism.

But when I brought up eir own practices, I met with something mindboggling. E freely and cheerfully explained how e had read the Cliffs Notes on the text in question, taken notes on it, including exact phrasing, and plunked things from the aforementioned notes directly into eir paper. These acts were unambiguously plagiarism, even if the words and ideas did take a brief detour through the student's notebook. But the student adamantly denied that e had committed plagiarism.

Finally, after much painful discussion, I realized that it was the word plagiarism that the student could not accept. This student simply felt that plagiarism was something that Evil People did, and that as long as one was not Lord Voldemort, whatever one was doing could not be plagiarism.

A similar thing happens all the time with racism: people who have had the life-long privilege to rarely or never be subjected to ethnic or racial oppression believe that racism is a thing that Evil People engage in, so that joke they told or that comment they made simply couldn't be racist, and dang, lighten up, get a sense of humor! Then we hear that our culture is oppressive to white people because they live in mortal fear of being labeled a racist. Such reasoning presupposes that it is worse to be called a racist than to be called by a racist slur. Because, you know, white people get lynched for being suspected of racism. Really!

My friends, let us call a spade a spade. Plagiarism is plagiarism. Racism is racism. Even if you left your swirly black cloak at home.

I'd like to learn woman-French, please.

The Guardian has published some excerpts from linguist Deborah Cameron's new book The Myth of Mars and Venus.

The idea that men and women "speak different languages" has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith. Our faith in it is misplaced.

Cameron cites Mark Liberman's heroic denunciation of the false claims made in Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain. (You can hear Charlotte Perkins Gilman snorting in the background. "The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.")

Liberman closes the loop by posting on the Guardian's coverage of Cameron's work.

One of the most interesting things that Cameron mentions is that she's noticed a trend in contemporary analysis: all social and political problems are attributed to problems in communication, as if, if we could just talk, everything would be solved. I'm not sure what to make of this yet, but it's an observation that strikes me as plausible. A quality of the information age, I suppose.