Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

McKinlay, Pam

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 1:body

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 7:play

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 13:unseen

Labuschagne, Willem

Heidema, Johannes

English

Leibniz to Lakoff: Language as instrument for Peace

Schmidt, Leoni

7Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 6, June 006
LEONI SCHMIDT
Editorial: Language Matters
When David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language was first published in 1987 
it was reviewed by Walter Nash in the London Review of Books, where he wrote that it is “…a 
celebration of language in all its oddity, beauty, fun, astonishing complexity and limitless 
variety.”1  Consulting the book for the purpose of writing this editorial for an issue of Junctures 
devoted to “language”, it still provides an entry point for a focus on the various registers in 
which contributions to the issue engage with language matters. Crystal suggests that language 
provides a fascinating object of study as it expresses a multiplicity of world views and ways 
of life. “We look back at the thoughts of our predecessors, and find we can see only as far as 
language lets us see. We look forward in time and find we can plan only through language.” 
Crystal continues by saying that the importance we attach to language is due to the fact 
that it is a means of understanding ourselves and our society; and of resolving some of the 
problems and tensions that arise from human interaction.3 
One could add here that language does not only speak of tensions arising from human 
interaction, but is itself the locus of such tension and this is clear – for example – when 
we consider contrasting approaches to language within the intellectual systems of the last 
century. Comparative philology looked for the similarities between languages; formalist 
linguistics focused on a microanalysis of the elements of a text; structuralism embraced the 
concept of difference and made it the key to unlocking the functions of elements within a 
language construct, while positioning language as the very matrix of all systems (including 
the unconscious4). generative linguistics concentrated on the process through which 
language is created within a structural system. Poststructuralism argued for context and 
historical locatedness: “…language is seen not as a static structure, existing regardless of 
social, historical, or personal considerations, but as a system whose values shift in response 
to these factors, and whose meaning is too complex to be demonstrable by structuralist 
techniques.”5 
Crystal requires his readers to consider not only the approaches to language within such 
intellectual systems, but also to think about registers of engagement with language across 
such systems. If and how language can construct identity or subjectivity is a question with 
8 Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 6, June 006
radically different answers within each of the systems mentioned above. The relative positions 
of speaking, listening, writing and reading language are differently configured within such 
systems; as is the acquisition of language; the relationships between spoken and written 
language and other “languages of communication”; as well as the political barriers or 
opportunities posed by language. 
In this issue of Junctures, contributors engage with systems and registers of language in a 
variety of ways which agree with or question one another. The reader is invited to read across 
the contributions in order to find both the points of connection and of contention. Without 
necessarily overtly aligning themselves with particular intellectual systems, the contributions 
signal different allegiances and a multiplicity of engagements and positions concerning 
language as an embodiment or a locus of tension. This editorial provides a small map of 
trajectories – with reference to Crystal’s larger map – with which readers could negotiate 
the terrain covered in the journal. 
***
Norman Denzin contributes a co-performance text, a play which enacts a critical cultural politics 
concerning Native American women and their presence in popular journals and a novel seminal 
to a Montana myth of origin. In his prologue Denzin points out how the persona of Sacagawea 
has been embedded in popular culture as a pan-American legend. He writes: “I understand 
that the presence of the Native American woman in the collective white imagination is almost 
entirely a matter of racist myth and Euro-American patriarchal stereotype…” The play then 
sets out to unravel this stereotype and to render it open to questioning. But, he arrives at a 
two-fold problem: “[Sacagawea] can only be recognized from within the white male mythology 
and its signifying apparatuses [by which she is named and stripped of her subjectvity and 
sadly] there are few, if any Native American signifiers which would allow her to be recognized 
differently.” Denzin’s play critiques the structuralist move towards homogenisation through 
constructing an origin and an essence (often denying the outsider position and the particularity 
of “exotic” cultures in relation to dominant signifying apparatuses). 
Sacagawea’s first problem has a counterpart in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the figure of Hinemoa, a 
Máori maiden, as constructed by artists such as Nicholas Chevalier in the nineteenth century.6 Her 
second problem is being addressed through revisionist research from within Máori scholarship. 
An example is Arapera Royal Tangaere’s 2001 keynote address in which she firmly places the 
figure of Hinemoa as a particular tupuna (a Máori ancestor): “I listened to stories told [by my 
grandparents] about our land, our waters, and our tupuna such as Hinemoa…”7 Alongside this 
statement, she insists that: “Máori research is based on a Máori knowledge base, values and 
concepts. It employs Máori styles of methodology with the Máori language being the key to this 
knowledge [and] research on Máori has the responsibility to redress the images and the ideology 
it has perpetrated.”8 It is such a redressing of the complicity of language in the construction of 
images and ideology in which Denzin participates with his play, albeit in another – particular 
– contact zone shared by Western culture and Indigeneity. 
***
9Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 6, June 006
The relationship between language and the world is also central to the alternatives posed 
by Jaakko Hintikka as analysed by Johannes Heidema and Willem Labuschagne. The two 
authors work together in exploring with Hintikka the field of formal logic and philosophy and, 
more specifically, the alternatives he contrasted as “lingua universalis” versus “calculus 
ratiocinator.” With Ludwig Wittgenstein, some philosophers agree that “language [is] a 
universal medium…a prison from which no escape is possible, because language and 
thought coincide.” With Charles Sanders Peirce, some philosophers agree – in contrast – that 
“language is about stuff outside language, stuff in the world…language is a tool, to be used 
for codifying information about the world.” The authors explore the implications of these two 
alternatives, while resolutely dismissing a Derridean alternative as an exaggerated variant 
of Wittgenstein’s position. 
Connections between language and the world often entail the research of the human brain 
as an intermediary locus of language. Crystal states in his encyclopedia that the mapping of 
brain activity relevant to language production forms a major part of current neurolinguistic 
research and related fields.9 With a background in mathematics and physics and from a 
computer science perspective, Hayden Walles looks at the sensorimotor system of the 
brain that controls perception and action at a concrete level and brings this into the study 
of language. To do so, he refers to cross-linguistic studies and argues that “language can be 
influenced by our physiology.” More specifically, Walles is “looking for a causal link between an 
aspect of sensorimotor processing and a corresponding aspect of the structure of language.” 
More specifically, he discusses “a psychological model of the way that groups of objects 
are classified in the visual system” while exploring the syntax of noun phrases relating to 
number in language. Thus Walles’ model investigates the psychology of visual attention and 
classification as related to linguistic structure. 
***
from her perspective as an art historian, Estelle Alma Maré explores the question of whether 
we can “read” a work of visual art “like language texts, composed of an underlying linguistic 
structure.” She explores ways in which images were used for visual communication with the 
illiterate in medieval times; and the role of supplementary material, context and codification. 
Moving to the contemporary era, the author finds a designation of works of visual art as “texts” 
highly problematic. Her problem with this designation revolves partly around the power invested 
in the art historian and critic as decoder of the message encoded by the artist. “Since the 
‘mutuality between pictures and language’ is at present so deeply entrenched, it raises many 
questions” and after listing some of these, the author agrees with visual culture theorist and 
historian Barbara Stafford that “‘we need to disestablish the view of cognition as dominantly 
and aggressively linguistic. It is a narcissistic tribal compulsion to overemphasize the agency 
of logos and annihilate rival imaginaries’.” Maré concludes her contribution by reminding us 
of the ambiguity of using the term “reading” in relation to visual works of art where she quotes 
Wittgenstein: “‘everything is what it is and not another thing’” and Aristotle’s definition of 
metaphor as consisting of “‘giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’.”
10
Artist’s pages by Clive Humphreys involve visual motifs clearly recognisable as sourced from 
the language of Disneyland. The writing alongside the images also includes words belonging to 
discussions on language: grammar, vocabulary, read. But, the writing clearly does not explain 
the images as utterances adhering to a linguistic system. The writing rather offers a contextual 
field of ideas or clues by means of which the reader may or may not approach the project. On 
looking at the images and on reading the writing, we learn that the integrity of space has been 
contradicted; but only on reading the writing do we learn that the artist likens this manoeuvre 
to the conflict between form and content in political systems, as discussed by John Ralston 
Saul. Because the artist-author refrains from an over-determination of signification, the reader 
is left to her own devices of interpretation within the field suggested by the pages. 
Michele Beevors has also sourced motifs from the language of Disneyland for her large 
sculptures to be found in real space. It could be argued that their scale, materiality and 
physicality in that space in conjunction with a viewer’s body create an open space for 
interpretation. Within Beevors’ artist’s pages included in this issue of Junctures, they are, 
however, positioned on the same pages or “surfaces” as a response to Jean Baudrillard’s 
explanation of our relationship with different types of commodified objects in an era of 
late capitalism. Again, the writing does not explain the images, but rather creates a field of 
signification with them. 
It is important to note here that the format of “artists’ pages” allows for the performance of 
meaning between images or between image and writing, rather than for the simple explication 
of the “meaning” of visual images. various approaches to this format have been and will 
in future be included in Junctures. No doubt, the extraordinarily persistent argument as to 
whether the visual arts function within the parameters of language (read: cultural systems or 
codes) or whether they can aspire to an origin and essence outside of language will continue 
to impact on this format. As Hal foster wrote in 1985 with respect to expressionism: “[its] 
contradictions…are those of a language that would be immediate, a cultural form that would 
be natural. Perhaps in the end, the denial of its historical and rhetorical nature is simply the 
repressed recognition of how thoroughly language invades the natural, mediates the real, 
decenters the self.” 10
***
Crystal discusses the porous boundaries between “literary and non-literary” uses of language 
and refers to Czechoslovakian and Russian formalism. In 1933, Roman Jakobson delivered 
a lecture called “What is Poetry” (in its English translation) in which he said that: “Poeticity 
is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being 
named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their 
external and inner form, acquire a weight and a value of their own…”11  The two poems included 
in this issue both – in different ways – work with the feel and weight of words to suggest 
rather than name. The refusal to name and thus the acceptance of a certain “unknowability” 
seems to indicate the main thrust of Judith Barrington’s poem called “In Praise of Not Knowing 
the Names of Birds”; while Patricia Brody’s “We Were Dead” uses words such as “tree”, 
and “dotter” in ways which poignantly struggle in vain to recoup them from conversations 
unrepeatable in the face of death.
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 6, June 006
11
***
The weight of words where they do name, and represent through this naming in a gendered 
register, can be felt in Suzanne ferriss’ and Mallory young’s article entitled “Chicks, girls and 
Choice: Redefining Feminism.” Discussing different waves of feminism, the authors point 
out, for example, how, in the 1970s, “the word chick was considered an insult, a demeaning 
diminutive, casting independent young women as delicate, fluffy creatures…[and how a] 
generation later…chick has been revived, wielded knowingly by women themselves to convey 
solidarity and [to] signal empowerment.” The article traces the trajectories of related words 
– girl to grrl, bitch, biddy – through a focus on particular popular novels and films, and the 
reader is made aware of the historical contingency of language. 
The liberating and enabling function of language as narrative is discussed by Jim Denison 
and John Winslade in “Understanding Problematic Sporting Stories: Narrative Therapy and 
Applied Sport Psychology.” The authors write that “narrative therapists attend very closely to 
the way people speak about themselves and thus produce themselves…the way we speak 
about ourselves constitutes a constructed identity…this is not to say that the material world 
does not exist…[but that] new ways of speaking have the power to create new lives.” Denison 
and Winslade write about the contrast between a medicalised approach to sporting behaviours 
and a more personal narrative alternative in which the sportsperson is empowered rather 
than objectified through an extraneous language of control.
John C Moorfield writes from the position of a Pakeha (i.e., a New Zealander of European descent) 
on teaching and learning an indigenous language. He focuses on the Te Whanake collection as 
a resource for teaching Máori as a second language to adults and particularly on “the narratives 
by well-known repositories of Máori knowledge across Aotearoa/New Zealand who saw the 
importance of the written word as a tool to aid in the survival of the Máori language, history 
and culture.” Moorfield is careful to acknowledge his own position as a Pakeha and to explain 
that his access to indigenous language and knowledge had been gained through the proper 
processes and protocols, thereby suggesting an understanding of Sacagawea’s first problem: 
representation of the world through language wielded by an agent acting as mediator, although, 
in this instance, there does now – some two decades after the compilation of Te Whanake – exist 
indigenous mechanisms through which narratives can be told in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
***
Two book reviews conclude this issue. Craig McNab reviews The Photobook: A History 
volume 1 (by Martin Parr and garry Badger).  This review discusses, amongst other matters, 
the semiotics of the photograph and the issues relevant to this field of research as addressed 
in the book under review. McNab writes: “… the artists involved in the construction of [the] 
photobooks are typically looking to create a new discursive language to explicate the slippage 
within the medium of photography and the real.”
Bridie Lonie reviews French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie 
intellectuelle aux Etats-Unis (by françois Cusset) which discusses the response in the English-
speaking world to french theory largely ignored in its own country. In this process Cusset 
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 6, June 006
1
contrasts two philosophical (and, of course, socio-political) positions: a “reagonothatcherite” 
individualist as against a “foucauldeleuzian” collective, and negotiates the linguistic structures 
through which these alternative positions construct and communicate themselves.
***
David Crystal quotes Paul van Buren where he writes about “walking language’s borders, 
or being at the very edge of language”; while Bertoldt Brecht has warned us to be aware 
of the myth of the “transparency of language” as its very structure holds meanings often 
disguised by the words uttered.1 The contributions to this issue tells of many matters related 
to “language.” The careful reader will no doubt also find meanings working at the edge of 
language that are no less present than the overt arguments presented between the pages 
of this issue of Junctures. 
Leoni Schmidt
(Editor)
 1 See the London Review of Books, 7 January 1988, pp. -3.
  David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge, New york, Melbourne: Cambridge 
University Press, 1987 and republished in 1997), 1. 
 3 Ibid. 
 4 See Joseph Childers and gary Hentzi, eds, The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural 
Criticism (New york: Columbia University Press), 73 & 87.
 5 See Crystal, p. 79. 
 6 See Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori 1840-1914 (Auckland: Auckland 
University Press, 199), illustration 86 on p. 141.
 7 Arapera Royal Tangaere, “Kaupapa Máori Research: What is an Early Childhood Perspective?”, 
Keynote Address at the International Research Conference on Early Childhood Education, July 001 
in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, published at www.kohanga.ac.nz/docs as last visited on 
15 April 006, p. 18.
 8 Ibid., pp. 1 and 5.
 9 See Crystal, pp. 58-63. 
 10 Hal foster, “The Expressive fallacy”, in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Washington: Bay 
Press, 1985), 64.
 11 See Jakobson quoted in Hal foster, Rosalind Krauss, yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 
1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 004), 35.
 1 See Crystal, p. 7.
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 6, June 006


Language Matters

Mare, Estelle Alma

Can One “Read” a Work of Visual Art?

Humphreys, Clive

76 Humphreys – Democracy – Mickey – Junctures, 6, June 006
77
ARTIST’S PAGES CLIVE HuMPHREYS
DEMOCRACY – MICKEY TAKES AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
“The U.N. won’t participate in Mickey Mouse elections.” (Carina Perelli, Director of the United 
Nations Electoral Assistance Division, quoted in The Washington Post, 18 June 004.)
Facing page:  Clive Humphreys, 004-05, Democracy – Mickey Takes an In-depth Look, acrylic on canvas 
 15 x 13cm (detail, courtesy of the artist).
DEMOCRACY – MICKEY TAKES AN IN-DEPTH  LOOK
Demos – the people    Kratos – authority/rule
This is a painting based upon two bubble bath containers that have sat on the end of my 
bath for the last twenty-five years.  They are amongst those items that did not get thrown out 
with all the other packaging.   It is difficult to say why these objects have suddenly become 
noticed objects as opposed to all but discarded objects. These plastic figures do remind me 
of the very first paintings that I owned, given to me by my Godfather and painted by him during 
a stint in prison. Those same portraits of goofy and Mickey hung proudly on my bedroom 
wall, testament to the one thing that almost anybody can draw given just a little practice and 
patience (he did have time on his hands). 
The language of painting and the language of politics have many equivalences.  Most political 
systems consist of left and right orbiting a much valued centre.  Political parties strive to 
occupy the centre ground or risk obscurity on the periphery (this is also the fundamental 
grammar of pictorial composition). 
viewers of paintings read, on the most basic physical level, the expenditure of the painter’s 
energy (labour) and, in the surface of the paint, a very particular expenditure of resources 
(capital). 
Humphreys – Democracy – Mickey – Junctures, 6, June 006
78
Democracy -- Mickey Takes an In-depth Look is, essentially, a Medieval space, common 
in Byzantine painting; a pre-Renaissance space where depth is suggested mainly by the 
overlapping and size variation of each figure.  Spatial depth is also suggested by degrees of 
colour saturation.  Mickey, who is imitating the viewer (taking the Mickey?), clearly occupies 
the foreground, as he is the only figure painted in full colour saturation.  Other figures 
apparently advance or recede according to their degree of saturation.  But all the rules 
(laws) of spatial depth (implied perspective, colour saturation and scale) have been utilised 
with total inconsistency so that, on closer examination, the whole disposition of the picture 
plane is contradictory.  Just as the painting uses the grammar of colour to contradict its own 
spatial integrity, so democracy has tended to undermine its own principles with contradictory 
mechanisms in what could be described as a conflict between form and content (bureaucracy 
and morality).  As John Ralston Saul suggests about many modern democracies: “The moral 
sense of the eighteenth century has not only been turned upside down, this has been done 
with its own vocabulary.”¹
Clive Humphreys, 004-05, Democracy – Mickey Takes an In-depth Look, acrylic on canvas 
15 x 13cm (courtesy of the artist).
Humphreys – Democracy – Mickey – Junctures, 6, June 006
79
Significant in the recent history of Western European painting has been the democratisation 
of the painted image.  This democratisation tends to embrace the ordinary and commonly 
recognisable moments of popular culture and to step away from the heroic, didactic themes 
of Christian morality and tragedy. It also implies a shift in the relationship between the viewer 
and the maker/author (and thus in the “politics” of viewing).  This shift is characterised 
by a change in the manner of looking, from the fixed and directed penetrations of formal 
perspective, (here we are drawn to the omnipresence of the creator who radiates in deep 
pictorial space from infinity) to something less obligatory.  This other mode of viewing is more 
akin to scanning.  The eye moves laterally across a shallower space, as if reading (or speed 
reading) text.  By projection, the viewer is freer to move through, into and across the objects 
and spaces within the painting with a greater illusion of choice.
Democracy is also very dependent upon visibility (the viewer and the viewed).  This visibility 
is often termed transparency (it is important for the law to be seen to operate and for an 
unregulated press to act as an independent watchdog).  Democracies should be deeply 
involved with public self examination.  In the painting above, negotiating a kind of milky 
transparency, the qualities of visibility and self examination are both random and coy.
I doubt if any of this occurred to my godfather as he whiled away his prison sentence with his 
cheap paint set.  I imagine him sitting in his cell like a caged (framed?) mouse in a research 
laboratory.  Perhaps all political systems are founded on prisons; they are frequently amongst 
the first institutions to be built by any form of government. And my Godfather was not only 
serving his sentence. Consciously or not, he was also becoming a painter, an occupation that, 
along with political expediency, often justifies its outcomes in retrospect.  
 1 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Englewood Cliffs: 
Penguin, 199), 38.
Clive Humphreys is a painter who has exhibited widely; a principal lecturer in Textiles; 
and currently the Programme Coordinator for the Master of fine Arts Programme at 
Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Humphreys – Democracy – Mickey – Junctures, 6, June 006


"Democracy– Mickey Takes An In-depth Look"

Lonie, Bridie

Review: Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), "Thinking Space: Critical Geographies" (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

Halstead, Di

Review: "Shifting Nature", photographs by Wayne Barrar with an essay by Geoff Park (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001)

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 1:language

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