Off the Mark

As I wend my way through ever more readings on integrational linguistics I become even more enamored of this view of language. Vastly more important than the valid reasons for liking it that arise from the excellent philosophical, sociological and historical critiques of Western views of language, and of academic linguistics, in particular, that Roy Harris and others have generated is the fact that it begins to explain my own lived and felt experiences of language use. And that is one powerful reason.

I have just finished the book, Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader (full citation below), with the last section, entitled “Language and Society.”

Ideas from 2 chapters read Tuesday (18 Dec) really resonated with me regarding issues within librarianship and, in particular, professionalism. The first are from Hutton’s chapter, “Law Lessons for Linguists? Accountability and Acts of Professional Classification.”

Hutton writes:

Thus, while academic linguists might consider themselves professionals, and might even be regarded as such by non-academics (for example in marketing surveys, sociological categorizations, etc.), they rarely have the kinds of professional skills that are exercised at the intersection of academia and society. In this sense, they are not professional experts: their professional standards and professional knowledge are largely discipline-internal. Linguistic theories are created, debated, rejected or affirmed primarily by other linguists, and career advancement in linguistics, as in other academic careers, depends on peer review, on what ‘the field’ has to say. This is not necessarily to imply the theoretical beliefs of doctors and lawyers or better grounded in empirical reality than those of linguists; rather that there is no automatic challenge to linguists’ professional language that arises out of their daily professional experience. They do not have to explain themselves, or what they are doing, to others qua specialists (294-295).

In brief, linguists are not accountable or responsible to non-linguists, broadly speaking, for their acts of classification (303).

The discipline of linguistics as a whole can only make a contribution to interpretive issues by accepting, at least in principle, some form of social accountability for its acts of classification. As long as linguists seek to accrue all the trappings of professionalism, such as academic status, prestige, influence on neighbouring disciplines, a masterful and opaque terminology, with none of the costs (the scrutiny of those acts of classification, public debate, criticism, challenges to those ideas from ethical and other standpoints, a critique of opaque terminology), the profession will continue to experience a sense of crisis that threatens the existence of linguistics departments in the United States and worldwide (303).

Any new metalanguage must arise out of a genuine attempt by linguists to understand the beliefs, practice and customs of … in relation to language, … (303-304).

Take that 1st paragraph and substitute librarians and (academic) librarianship and you have a pretty accurate description of librarianship and particularly academic librarianship. Be aware that I am not arguing that this is how it should be; in fact, I am arguing the opposite.

These sentiments, I feel, go a long way to explaining much of the angst and, often, hostility that goes along with many of the changes we face in the practice of librarianship. Long gone is that world where we are free to dictate, with no responsibility for, our practices.

We need a new metalanguage of librarianship. We need a metalanguage which is fully engaged and conversant with “the beliefs, practice and customs of” our patrons; whomever they are. We must strive for “social accountability for [our] acts of classification,” broadly construed.

I do believe that academic librarianship is, perhaps, a bit more accountable than linguistics in that there is some influence on our career advancement that isn’t strictly internal, but it is not much.

Perhaps, as Hutton claims, if librarianship was more engaged with those we serve we would not be facing such an existential crisis as we are currently. We must begin to explain ourselves. And by that I do not mean marketing. If you choose to spin it broadly as marketing fine. But marketing serves a vastly different aim than does explanation. Both are needed, but we must not confuse the goals to be achieved by each means.

Morris on translation: I also take much of what Morris writes about translation as a highly applicable (metaphoric?) description of what we do with our classifications, subject headings, thesauri and other forms of description/subject analysis. Thus, all of his caveats about translation apply to our work as well.

He also had some comments on anthropology as “cultural translation” that I wanted to include but the quotes didn’t work as well. I also see much of what I do as a “cataloger” as anthropological. It is cultural anthropology in many and varied ways, be it description and translation of other “cultures” to description, interpretation and evaluation of assorted material cultures and artifacts. Thus, many issues of concern to anthropology ought to concern us in our libraries and as librarians.

… but the translator is exceptionally well placed to appreciate how many areas of human life are taken in, experienced and expressed in irresolvably distinct ways. The issue is not whether something will be lost, a nuance or a shade of meaning, for these certainly will, but whether something more important, the overall sense of a text, its meaning in its context, will be permanently obscured even by the careful and respectful moving of each linguistic brick (313).

This directly and forcefully applies to the work of assigning subject descriptors and classifications, at least as currently practiced. Our tools and practices constrain us in our ways that we can “translate” what a work is about. Sometimes our tools work well towards this end, but more frequently they fail us and force us to describe something in ways in which the creator and the audience would disagree with our translation. We may only lose some “nuance or a shade of meaning” but we will often obscure meaning by removal of important context.

The essential problem that aspiring innocent translators face is not the oneness of the world, or the sameness of experience that they imagine can be relexified, language by language. It is the differences we experience in contact with another society which happily afford us meaningful surprises. But beginning translators, intent on finding the word or phrase that corresponds to the ’same’ experience in their own language, overlook and miss the significance of what might otherwise surprise them (314).

Ah, yes. Searching LCSH and DDC for that subject heading or classification “that corresponds to the ’same’ experience in [our] own language” can cause us to “miss the significance of what might otherwise surprise [us]” or, even worse, to ignore it.

Here is a kind of limit to the idea that we should trust not the teller but the tale. No tale is told with absolute completeness, the listener must always supply what language points to. The translator-listener must not only supply what the listener in the original language would normally supply from experience of that other society, but also specifically refrain from supplying what would not be supplied. And in a sense, business letters, government documents, personal accounts, words spoken in court, all are tales (315).

Our tools, due primarily to their slowly changing nature, can force us to supply “what would not be supplied” and to leave out “what the listener in the original language would normally supply.”

The specific ways we analyze and teach language, and the tools we use - dictionaries, grammars and so forth - not only illuminate but can interfere with our understanding, impose a kind of pattern that diverts attention as one tries to listen to the language of the text, which is someone else’s language, after all. The continuity of the writer with his world may be lost to the translator in the choppy reduction that the formal study of language implies.

These wonderful tools of analysis, instruction and reference, monuments to the creative richness of a tradition of thought, all essential in translation, may also have the effect of authorizing translators to only think in their terms, and so constitute a limitation on the imagination (315).

DDC, LCC, LCSH all authorize us “to only think in their terms,” even when their terms are clearly wrong. These are fine tools, and they are testaments to “the creative richness of a tradition of thought” but like any tool they have their limitations. Just as any particular hammer or screwdriver is not suited to any and every job that calls for a hammer or screwdriver, respectively, neither is every classification system or subject description language suitable for every job to which they might be applied.

These are somewhat tentative thoughts in that I imagine they could be said better, and that much more could be said. They are not tentative in the sense that they are metaphorical. Please do not fall into the orthodox linguistic view of metaphor as an aberrant kind of meaning. Far more is metaphorical than most can even begin to imagine, much less comprehend. Without metaphor meaning could not even begin to exist in anything close to what we know it as. Even analytic philosophers and logicians with their seriously impoverished views of meaning could not get started as their way of imagining meaning is itself metaphorical.

For my own CAS purposes: These ideas also mesh with Hjørland’s views on domain analysis, subject expertise, epistemological priority, and so on.

Hutton, Christopher. 1998. Law Lessons for Linguists? Accountability and Acts of Professional Classification. In Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First Reader. 1st ed, Kidlington, Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1998.

Morris, Marshall. 1998. What Problems? On Learning to Translate. Also in the above.