Episode 47: The grammatical face of the other

Structured Visions

We go back to middle school this week, looking once more at the This American Life episode dedicated to the subject, and taking up once again Levinas’s notions of alterity and face. Here’s what I said last week about middle school:

Middle school is a social body that has a face. … I want us to be able to look at the face of that social body and see it as something completely other.

I also said this:

If I can interact with middle school face-to-face, then I have the possibility for opening into a world that I don’t know about yet.

But how do you look at the face of the social body? How do you find its eyes, ears, nose and mouth? I propose in this episode that grammatical analysis gives us access to the otherness of the social body. In other words, grammatical structure is the face of the social body.

For an example, consider what Ira Glass says in one segment of the middle school episode of This American Life. He’s talking about a seventh-grader’s experiences in the classroom. I’ve divided his comments into tone units, and underlined the noun phrases that serve as Themes (in some cases) and Subjects of clauses (in others):

a big problem for him

one reason that he was ostracized

he didn’t wash

kids would whisper about it

and when he would get mad

and then arguments would escalate

that is where it would go.

‘You’re dirty.’

‘You smell.’

The kids would say it right to his face.

Where are the grammatical selves in this text? Note that there are two selves here: the unique, individualised, embodied, singular ‘he’ and the collective, plural, non-embodied ‘kids’. ‘He’ is the one with the ‘big problem’ – and what is his ‘big problem’? His body. It’s dirty, it smells, he doesn’t wash it. If this non-individualised collective, the ‘kids’, is the social body here, the social body is doing something we see it do often: it’s bullying the individual human body.

What’s the possibility for transformation here? Well, seeing the social body configured in this way – that is, divided into the individual embodied self and the collective group self – opens the way for us to imagine a different configuration. What about one in which the collective were instead comprised of multiple unique, individual, embodied selves? And what if these human bodies were not seen as ‘problems’, but instead as singular, unique sites of new possibilities?

Download Episode 47: The grammatical face of the other.