Working Papers in

Translanguaging and Translation

Paper 37

Transmitting and translating cultures in the domestic landscape: minds, bodies, and worlds.

John Callaghan

AHRC Translating Cultures Large Grant: ‘Translation and Translanguaging: Investigating Linguistic and Cultural Transformations in Superdiverse Wards in Four UK Cities’. (AH/L007096/1)

Please reference as: Callaghan, J. (2018). Polymedia and convergence: a study of social action and individual choice from the law phase of the TLANG project (WP36).

Transmitting and translating cultures in the domestic landscape: minds, bodies, and worlds.

Abstract

This paper provides an account of a linguistic landscape study (LLS) carried out as part of the AHRC Translation and Translanguaging Project (TLang), which investigated linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse wards in four UK cities (London, Cardiff, Birmingham, and Leeds) between 2014 and 2018. This LLS was one of a number carried out by the Leeds TLang team to pursue those TLang aims felt to be amenable to LLS approaches. These aims were: to understand histories of communicative practices in superdiverse inner-city wards; to understand translanguaging as communication in public and private settings; and to develop interdisciplinary approaches. We had the further aim of studying the role of translation, understood broadly as the transmission, interpretation, transformation and sharing of languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives. Our strategy involved establishing a connection between social space and social interaction—that is between mental, embodied and environmental phenomena—a relationship seldom adequately theorised or empirically explored in LLS or multilingualism studies more generally (Aronin & O Laoire, 2012). To this end we drew on ecological theories of mind from a range of disciplines together with a theory of ‘material engagement’ (Malafouris, 2013). In combination these perspectives offered a comprehensive and unified view of social life, unrestricted by traditional boundaries between minds, bodies, and worlds. In particular, they highlighted the foundational role in mental and therefore social life of space and the material objects which fill it (previously seen as ‘context’ or ‘environment’), suggesting ways in which the material and cognitive are mutually constitutive, and thus supporting the continuing development of the linguistic landscape project. Our strategy is illustrated by a LL case study carried out in a domestic setting, where we find unparalleled opportunities to explore the topographies of our participant’s intimate being (Bachelard, 1958), with findings that throw important light on her interactions in the ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1992) of both public and private space and on the cultural transformations which do or do not take place there.

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1 Introduction 1.1 Linguistic Landscape Studies and TLang

Over the past twenty years, against a backdrop of intensifying globalisation, urbanisation, and population diversification, some sociolinguists have shown increasing interest in the urban public landscape and its potential for bringing to light social processes—initially linguistic processes in bilingual or multilingual settings—which might otherwise remain hidden. Since Spolsky and Cooper’s (1991) study of the languages of Jerusalem, and under the gravitational pull of the label ‘linguistic landscape’ (LL) introduced into English by Landry and Bourhis’ (1997), what was a largely disconnected body of work has coalesced into a distinct sub-field of sociolinguistics, with annual international workshops and conferences, over 600 articles in a wide range of publications, and a dedicated journal, Linguistic Landscape: an International Journal.

Like most fields of enquiry, however, linguistic landscape studies (LLS) are characterised by both agreement and difference, with fundamental terms and ideas—not least ‘linguistic’ and ‘landscape’—taking on an ever wider range of interpretations. At the same time accelerating development and expansion are opening up the field, often to what some feared would be ‘a hardly definable variety of other arenas of language use’ (Backhaus, 2006: 10), and even into arenas beyond the linguistic.

Our work falls into this last category, and here, by way of illustration, I report on a LL study carried out as part of the AHRC Translation and Translanguaging Project (TLang), which investigated linguistic and cultural transformations in superdiverse wards in four UK cities (London, Cardiff, Birmingham, and Leeds) between 2014 and 2018. The LL study reported on in this paper was one of a number carried out by the Leeds TLang team, using and extending linguistic landscape studies (LLS) approaches to pursue TLang’s overarching aims, or at least those aims we felt amenable to such approaches. These aims were:

1. to understand histories of communicative practices in superdiverse inner-city wards2. to understand translanguaging as communication in public and private settings3. to develop interdisciplinary approaches

In addressing the first aim (to understand histories of communicative practices) we knew we would be able to draw on established LL methods and our earlier longitudinal LL study of the superdiverse Leeds ward of Gipton & Harehills (Baynham, et al., 2013; Callaghan, 2011, 2015), and to extend this through the TLang project (Callaghan, n.d.). In availing ourselves of the historical perspective afforded by this longitudinal LL approach we would also be supporting the project’s commitment to avoiding presentism. Addressing the second aim, however, presented quite a different challenge since TLang’s focal interest (fine-grained technologies of social interaction, rather than evidence of social processes in written or multimodal material signage) was, at the time, outside the scope of LLS. It is true that our most fundamental conviction in bringing a LLS strategy to TLang—that there is a direct

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and vital connection between social space and social interaction—can be seen to underlie the earliest LLS. This relationship, however, is seldom adequately theorised or empirically explored in LLS, or indeed in multilingualism studies more generally (Aronin & O Laoire, 2012).

Our task then was to devise a LL strategy which was, on the one hand, capable of exploring this relationship, and, on the other, could complement TLang’s linguistic ethnographic approach (Baynham et al., 2015; Rampton et al., 2004) and enhance its ability to throw light on the kinds of social interaction the project was committed to studying—those involving translanguaging as communication and the translation of cultures. Moreover, this strategy would—again, in keeping with TLang’s aims (Aim 2 above)—need to enable the investigation of not only public but private and, in particular, domestic settings. These kinds of settings, as it happened, we already had some experience of studying, and as a result had become convinced that, generally speaking, domestic settings have greater potential to reveal what Bachelard (1958) called the topography of individuals’ intimate being than other kinds of social space. So studying the semiotic and material landscapes of TLang’s research participants’ homes, we felt, would greatly enhance our ability to see the world through their eyes, as well as helping us understand their actions in other, more public domains of their lives. It would at the same time expand the scope of LLS, taking them over the threshold of the public domain into the private and domestic. In order to maximise the benefits of this move, however, we knew we would need an approach broad enough to encompass the full range of phenomena we were likely to encounter in domestic settings—material and symbolic, mental, embodied, and spatial. We also knew that, whether used in public or private domains, our strategy would need to be underpinned by sound theoretical justification for the kinds of links we hoped to make between these different kinds of phenomena. Consequently, whilst we have drawn on the LLS literature, we have also found it necessary to expand the boundaries of our theoretical influence—and, as it turned out, of our analytical focus. The result is that we have ceased to think about research participants as individuals within settings (subject/context, figure/ground), but about ecological systems in which mental, embodied, and environmental phenomena are interdependent and mutually constitutive. In assembling this strategy from a range of sources in order to achieve the necessary descriptive, analytical, and theoretical power to pursue TLang’s particular interactional aims we have contributed to a third project aim, that of developing interdisciplinary approaches.

Finally, beyond the above-mentioned aims, we found we also wanted to respond to a need identified by the AHRC Translating Cultures Theme (under which the TLang project is subsumed). The need is, ‘in a world seen to be increasingly characterized by transnational and globalized connections ... for understanding and communication within, between and across diverse cultures’. This need can be addressed, it is suggested, ‘by studying the role of translation, understood in its broadest sense, in the transmission, interpretation, transformation and sharing of languages, values, beliefs, histories and narratives.’1 So, by studying specific instances of intercultural interaction in ‘contact zones’ (Pratt,

1 .http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/research/fundedthemesandprogrammes/themes/translatingcultures/

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1992) in both public and private space we hoped to throw more light on the ways in which cultures are translated—or fail to be translated—in multilingual settings, how understanding in intercultural interaction may or may not be achieved, and indeed how agents and their worlds, viewed in terms of mental, embodied, and environmental phenomena, can adapt/be adapted to one another and thereby constitute one another in the context of migration and settlement.

In this paper I present an account of a LLS carried out in a domestic setting, the purpose of which was to help address TLang project aims (outlined above) and, in particular, to enhance our understanding of heritage in the context of migration and settlement. Before introducing the case study I provide an outline of the ideas which oriented it. I situate this within the context of LLS.

2 LLS: the current landscape

Throughout its brief history the theories and methods of LLS have, inevitably, been shaped by its goals, which at the outset were the assessment of ‘linguistic vitality’ and the social status of ethnolinguistic groups, often in officially bilingual cities such as Montreal and Jerusalem (Spolsky & Cooper, 1991; Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Gorter, 2006). At this point, ‘language on signs in public space’ was taken to be a reliable indicator of linguistic vitality, ethnolinguistic status, and the impact of English as an international language, and thus became ‘the study object of linguistic landscape research’ (Backhaus, 2007: 9). ‘Language’ meant ‘language in its written form’ (Gorter, 2006: 2), ‘public space’ was defined as ‘outside or inside a public institution or a private business’ (Ben-Rafael et al 2006: 14), and ‘signs’ were limited to those in situ, i.e. ‘located in the appropriate topographical context’ (Joseph et al. cited in Backhaus, 2007: 6). Over time, however, confidence waned in this ‘narrowly language-focused’, often ‘heavily quantitative’ approach (Huebner, 2016: 2) and in the trustworthiness of the connections it assumed between written signs and social life. At the same time, attention turned to other issues—public space, political and social conflict, language policy, identity (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009), and theories, methods, and focal objects changed to address these new goals. Key here has been a broadening of focus, which now takes in not only signs but also ‘the role of people in the linguistic landscape, and their awareness of being part of it, as authors and actors’ (Barni & Bagna, 2015: 7)—and indeed, more recently, as researchers (Szabo & Troyer, 2017). Along with this shift has come a willingness to adopt ideas from other fields, including semiotics, sociology, geography, and politics (e.g. Boudon, 2003; Bourdieu, 1977; Goffman, 1959; Lefebvre, 1991; Peirce, 1986), and thus to develop interdisciplinary approaches. Meanwhile, there has been a broader interpretation of ‘language’, in which interest is no longer confined to the written or even verbal but involves ‘the way written discourse interacts with other discursive modalities: visual images, non-verbal communication, architecture and the built environment’ ( Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010; Aronin & O Laoire, 2012). This growing interest in social space and its contents has been mirrored by the introduction of a historical dimension to LLS as researchers begin recording changes in the

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environment in longitudinal studies (e.g. Blommaert, 2013). In response to these developments there has been a general shift from quantitative to qualitative methods, with increased emphasis on interviewing and in some cases ethnography (Blommaert, 2013; Blommaert & Maly, 2014; Szabo & Troyer, 2017). In conclusion, it may be said that while LLS more than ever means different things to different practitioners the general trend has been towards more highly developed theoretical frameworks and more varied and powerful research methods offering deeper insights into a wider range of social issues (Barni and Bagna, 2015).

Among the developments in LLS has been a growing interest in the relationship between the LL—or social space more generally conceived—and social interaction. Touchstone et al (2017), for example, show how ‘servicescapes’ in retail banks influence interaction by setting up expectations for what happens in service encounters. Other studies have focused on the ‘corporeal landscape’ in, for example, the mobility and materiality of spatialized semiotics and performativity of the human body, as individuals author their being in the world (Peck & Stroud, 2015) and take political action (Kitis & Milani, 2015). Still others draw on increasingly sophisticated theories of space and action, such as nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), or the Lefebvreian trilectics of space (Lefebvre, 1991). Such theoretic frameworks have been used to explore, for example, the complexity of relations between groups caught in intractable conflict (Trumper-Hect, 2010) or the links between environments and learning (Malinowski, 2015; see also Cenoz & Gorter, 2008; Harris, 2016; Laihonen & Szabo, 2017 for other approaches to this subject). Other broader theories have been drawn on: scalar analysis informed by complexity theory (Soler-Carbonell, 2016), action theory (Pappenhagen, Scarvaglieri, & Redder, 2016), and language ecology (Hult, 2009). What we don’t yet find in LLS, however, are theoretical frameworks which enable the linguistic landscape, whether narrowly or broadly conceived, to be set within comprehensive, unified perspectives which encompass all aspects of social life—mental, embodied, and environmental—and provide ways of clarifying the relations between these aspects.

Such a project was proposed a century ago by the Freudian-inspired Surrealists, who sought ‘to decode inner space and illuminate the nature of the transition from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to social life’ (Lefebvre, 1991[1974]: 18). This unfinished programme was taken up by Lefebvre himself in his thinking on social space (1991[1974]), and in our work we have drawn on Lefebvre’s ideas as they are now being interpreted and clarified by ‘a third generation’ of scholars (Schmid, 2008). But there is in addition a growing number of new and insightful approaches to the study of cognition which take a holistic view of human action. These can be found in disciplines ranging from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, to linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and archaeology (see Heylighen et al, 2004; Hutchins, 2010; Malafouris, 2013). What these approaches have in common is a strong commitment to thinking relationally (Bourdieu, 1992), which expresses itself primarily in a rejection of the idea that mental, embodied, and environmental phenomena can be considered

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separate. Since most of these theorists take a cognitive perspective they start, like the Surrealists, from ‘inner space’. LLS, in contrast, start from the world and its semiotic and material culture. However, because in this new theoretical landscape the science of mind and the science of space and material culture are seen as two sides of the same coin, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ come to have great significance for one another. Consequently, theories of cognition have considerable relevance to social science generally and to LLS and ethnography in particular.

In the following section I provide an outline of the ecological theories which have influenced our research strategy. These are distributed cognition, embodied cognition, and extended cognition, frameworks which have much in common as well as important differences. I also provide an account of the ideas of the cognitive archaeologist, Lambros Malafouris (2013), who, with equal interest in cognition and material culture, draws on these same bodies of work to construct a theory of material engagement (MET), arguing that while humans make objects, those objects in turn make humans what and who they are. Because of its intense focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between people and material objects, artefacts, and culture, MET has unique relevance for LLS at this point in its evolution.

3 Mind, body, and world: removing the boundaries3.1 Current orthodoxies and new perspectives in understanding cognition

Cartesian dualism is the idea that the world divides into two different kinds of substances or entities: mental substances and physical substances. For Descartes, the essence of the mental (or ‘mind’) is consciousness or ‘thinking’. The essence of the physical (or ‘matter’) is ‘extension’ in three dimensions in physical space (Searle, 2004: 9). The terms mental and physical, therefore, name mutually exclusive ontological categories: what is mental cannot be physical and what is physical cannot be mental (p.9). This dualism creates significant problems for us, not least, the mind-body problem: how can we account for the fact that mind causes events in body and vice versa when mind and body are ontologically different entities, incapable of interacting? From the mind-body problem, a second issue arises, also with a direct bearing on our area of interest. This is the problem of representationalism. If mind and matter are unable to interact then we can know the world only indirectly through abstract representations. Even today, representationalism dominates thinking in the social and natural sciences and can be seen clearly in the internalist, computational thinking that holds sway in cognitive science. This is ‘cognitivism’, the hypothesis that ‘the central functions of the mind—of thinking—can be accounted for in terms of the manipulation of symbols according to explicit rules’ (Anderson, 2003: 93). According to cognitivism, the role of symbols is to represent specific features or specific states of affairs in the environment. However, ‘it is the form of the symbol (or the proposition of which the symbol is a part) and not it’s meaning that is the basis of its rule-based transformation’ (p.93). Consequently, the relation between ‘sign’ and ‘signifier’ is necessarily

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arbitrary. This creates a gap between the inner arena of symbol processing and the external world of meaning and action (pp.93-94).

The outcome of cognitivism’s information-processing approach—which takes the digital computer as its model for thinking—is a ‘brainbound’ mind (Clark, 2011), conscious of the material world only by means of abstract representations. However, thanks to advances in technology leading to better understanding of the workings of the brain, along with compelling evidence of the importance of the body and the environment in cognition, cognitive science is returning to its original holistic tendencies and an ecological view of mind (Hutchins, 2010).

Such a view was proposed in the 1950s by cyberneticists like Gregory Bateson, who in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000[1972]) identified the theoretical issue at the heart of the enquiry.

Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behaviour, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round. (Bateson, 2000 [1972]: 465)

Bateson’s point is that, far from being ‘brainbound’, cognition is immanent: that is, not in some part of the ‘system’ but in the system as a whole. Trajectories of mental activity loop out through the body into the world and back. Consequently, injudicious boundary placement, at best, makes some things—perhaps crucial things—difficult to see, and, at worst, creates problems without solutions (Bateson, 2000[1972]; see also Merleau-Ponty, 2002[1945]; Polanyi, 1958). It’s for this reason that the philosopher John Searle urges those considering the mind-body problem to reject the traditional terminology and the assumptions that go with it, since expressions like ‘mind’ and ‘body’, ‘mental’ and ‘material’ force us back into the dualism of those mutually exclusive ontological categories which ‘are the source of our difficulties and not tools for its resolution’ (Searle, 2004: 75-76). One theoretical framework which has most wholeheartedly embraced an ‘immanent’ or holistic perspective is distributed cognition.

3.2 Distributed cognition

Distributed cognition is not a form or even a theory of cognition, ‘it is a perspective on all cognition’ (Hutchins, 2010:36).

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Distributed cognition begins with the assumption that all instances of cognition can be seen as emerging from distributed processes. For any process there is always a way to see it as distributed. In practice this implies that wherever we find cognition, it will be possible to investigate how a process we call cognitive emerges from the interactions among elements in some system (Hutchins, 2010: 36).

To take the distributed perspective, therefore, ‘is not to make any claims about the nature of the world’ (p.36), rather, it is to take a particular research stance, looking at the world in a particular way, selecting ‘scales of investigation such that wholes are seen as emergent from interactions among their parts’ (p.36). Research questions concern the elements of the cognitive system, their relations, and how cognitive processes arise from their interaction. The boundaries of the unit of analysis are not set in advance and may, in fact, be found to shift during the course of the activity of the phenomenon under investigation (p.6). Cognitive phenomena may emerge from distributed systems at many scales of space [and time]: distributed across neurons in the brain, across the brain and other organs, and across brains, bodies, and material and social environments (Hutchins, 1995a).

[D]istributed cognition does not assume a center for any cognitive system. Nor does it grant a priori importance to the boundaries of skin or skull. For distributed cognition, the existence of boundaries and centers are empirical questions. Centers and boundaries are features that are determined by the relative density of information flow across a system. Some systems have a clear center while other systems have multiple centers or no center at all (p.7)

Distributed cognition springs from Edwin Hutchins’ pioneering ethnographic work on the piloting of naval vessels and aircraft (Hutchins, 1995b, 1995a) in which he found it productive to view cognitive activity as distributed across systems comprising neuronal, extra-cranial bodily, material, spatial, and cultural phenomena. His work is of special interest to LLS, not only because it allows us to take a broad view of the disparate kinds of phenomena which make up social life, but also because it suggests ways of bridging the representationalist gap between the conceptual and the material, a gap which constrains enquiry into interaction between cognition and material culture. Before discussing Hutchins’ work further, however, I will give a brief account of ‘embodied cognition’, since Hutchins builds on elements of this framework in his own thinking.

3.3 Embodied cognition

It is the gap between mind, body, and world which the theory of embodied cognition (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Rowlands, 1999; Anderson, 2003; Shapiro, 2011) seeks to eliminate. Its basic assumption is that ‘the presence of human-like brains depends quite directly on the possession of a

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human-like body’(Clark, 2011: 200)2. In other words, conceptual systems are created, brought forth, understood and sustained, through very specific cognitive mechanisms ultimately grounded in bodily experience (Núñez, 1999: 41), through the body and the ways in which the body moves through and interacts with the world (p.19). According to embodied cognition, conceptual systems do not have a transcendental abstract logic independent of species-specific sensorimotor capacities (p.41).

Since sensorimotor capacities are embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), an embodied cognition perspective necessarily entails a situated or embedded cognition perspective (Clancey, 1997): ‘there is a level at which the division between embodied and situated cognition no longer makes much sense’ (2003: 109). The focus of embodied cognition, then, is not just on the relationship between mind and body but on the mutually constitutive relationship between minds, bodies, and worlds—or, to dispense with the traditional terminology, between agents (brain and extra-cranial body) and the environments they inhabit. In embodied cognition this relationship is seen as a cyclical process in which the world prompts agents’ actions, those actions change the world, and those changes in turn influence agents’ future actions (recall Bateson’s blind man and his stick). This process is referred to as feedback, a term taken from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Feedback loops which circulate through the body are structured by the precise nature of the body—its perceptual, locomotive, and interactive apparatus (eyes, legs, hands), but also shape, size, colour, sex, etc. This is because ‘an agent’s body places constraints on how the world is experienced (Umwelt) as well as on how the world is acted upon (affordance)’ (Dawson, 2014: 62).

According to embodied cognition, the structuring of feedback takes place at two levels: first at the level of pre-conceptual, direct bodily experiences of the world; then, at the higher level of abstract conceptualisation. Pre-conceptual structures, as the term suggests, exist prior to and independently of abstract concepts and generally involve universal schemata—either basic-level structures (involving gestalt perception, mental imagery, or motor movement) or image-schema structures (based on common patterns of sensorimotor and perceptual experience, such as figure/ground, centre/periphery, container/contained, pathways, gravity, balance, force, and so on). It is these pre-conceptual bodily experiences which (predominantly) structure abstract conceptualisation (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, 2003[1980]). So heat and cold, for example, provide direct real-world experience which precedes and provides the basis for conceptualisation of temperature and its quantification.

But what happens when relevant pre-conceptual structures are unavailable for higher-level abstract conceptualisation? In these cases agents access other bodily-based structures by means of conceptual mappings. The most significant kinds of mappings for our purposes are conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, 2003[1980]) and conceptual blends (Fauconnier, 1997; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). Conceptual metaphors are cognitive mechanisms which allow us to make ‘precise inferences in

2 The same relationship exists between animal, and indeed artificial, brains and bodies.10

one domain of experience (target domain) based on the inferences that hold in another domain (source domain). Through this mechanism, the target domain is understood, often unconsciously, in terms of the inferential structures that hold in the source domain’ (Núñez, 1999: 45). As work in the emerging field of cognitive linguistics suggests, many of the most basic categories humans employ in conceptualising the world are underpinned by an extensive system of metaphorical mappings (p.44-45).

[E]ven our deepest and most abiding concepts—time, events, causation, morality, and mind itself—are understood and reasoned about via multiple metaphors. In each case, one conceptual domain (say, time) is reasoned about, as well as talked about, in terms of the conceptual structure of another domain (say, space) (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003:245).

These mappings are not arbitrary but, as noted, are motivated in general by bodily grounded experience. And when combined in appropriate and complex ways (integrated or blended), mappings may sustain the most sophisticated abstract forms of thinking, as in the conceptual underpinnings of mathematics (Lakoff and Núñez, 1997; 2000; Núñez and Lakoff, 1998; see Núñez, 1999:45).

Metaphor, then, is central to cognition. Humans conceptualise metaphorically, and they do this effortlessly and unconsciously. So far, hundreds of metaphors have been studied. Examples listed by Lakoff and Johnson (2003) include:

– the ‘more is up’ metaphor: increase in height equates to increase in quantity, as in a glass filling with water

– ‘knowing as seeing’: I see now; that’s clear– ‘time as money’: spend, cost, save, budget, run out, worth my time, invest, use profitably, etc.– ‘change as motion’: things have gone downhill, moving on– ‘argument as war’: strategy, indefensible, attack, position, weak/strong, win/lose, shoot down– ‘affection as warmth’: warm/ ice cold (person)

It’s not difficult to hypothesise why two domains might become connected in metaphor. Visible in the ‘affection as warmth’ metaphor, for example, are the origins of metaphorical connection in the common experience of being affectionately held, where neuronal activation occurs simultaneously in different parts of the brain: neurons firing together and wiring together (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003).

Perhaps the most pervasive metaphor and the one which best underlines the importance of embodied experience in abstract conceptualisation is the ‘time as space’ metaphor. ‘In all the languages studied so far—oral and written—time events are in one way or another conceived in terms of things (entities or locations) in space’ (Núñez, 1999: 52): ‘the day after’, ‘what lies ahead’, ‘all behind us now’, ‘back in time’, ‘distant future’, ‘remote past’, and so on. The fact that ‘we don’t observe the conceptual structure of time flow based on human domains such as tastes, flavours, or colours’

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suggests these mappings are not based on convention but are ‘shaped by non-arbitrary species-specific peculiarities of brains and bodies’ (p.52). Spherical beings perceiving equally in all directions, with no concept of front and back, would have a very different understanding of time from the one that predominates in a wide range of human cultures—namely, the future ahead of us, the past behind (Núñez, 199: 53).

Metaphor, it is claimed, far from being merely a literary trope, is a fundamental cognitive phenomenon. It helps us structure, understand, perform, and talk about things. Metaphor exists in language because it exists in thought first. We talk about things in a certain way (considering time in terms of space, for example, argument as war) because we conceive of them that way, albeit unconsciously; and we act according to the way we conceive of things (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003[1980]).

Studies of metaphorical mapping reveal the link between higher-level conceptualisation and direct bodily experience of the world. As a result, they provide some of the most compelling evidence for the claim that all cognition is rooted in embodiment.

3.4 Distributed cognition (continued)

3.4.1 Alternatives to representationalism

I suggested in Section 3.2 that distributed cognition is of special interest to LLS because it allows researchers to take a comprehensive and unified view of the disparate kinds of phenomena which make up social life, as well as addressing the problem of represenatationalism. Representationalism, to recap, is the proposition that thinking is, in general, a symbol manipulation process. It is a thesis which creates an ontological gap between mind on one the hand and body and world on the other, and therefore makes it difficult to account for the impact of the material (bodily actions, objects, natural and built environments) on the mental (thoughts, beliefs, feelings, values) and vice versa. Distributed cognition addresses the representationalism problem by hypothesising an important role for the material in higher-level abstract conceptualisation, one which does not involve the representation function (Hutchins, 2005). In this section I give an account of Hutchins conjectures about this role. I then go on to discuss other aspects of distributed thinking which are of relevance to LLS: the constitutive role of space in cognition and the distributed nature of language.

3.4.2 Conceptual stability via cultural models

Hutchins’ exploration of the role of the material in cognition starts from the issue of conceptual stability. Reasoning processes require stable representations (Hutchins, 2005). Since these processes sometimes involve complex manipulations of conceptual structure, ‘structure must be represented in a

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way that allows some parts to be manipulated, while other parts remain stable’ (Hutchins, 2005: 1557). This will be illustrated shortly with ‘concrete’ examples. For the time being it is important to know that the more stable the representations, the greater the potential for manipulation. Stability is key.

There are two principal ways in which conceptual models achieve stability. The first is via a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes (Vygotsky,1978; Lave, 1988; Wertsch, 1991, 1998). This combination is found in what anthropologists call cultural models. Cultural models provide stable scaffolding for conceptual models in a number of ways.

Because they are shared, cultural models tend to be supported and reinforced by the behavior and thinking of others. Cultural models are also systematic in the sense that they exist in a complex nexus of models that mutually constrain one another. Most cultural models are closely related to many other models. This inter-linking contributes to the conservatism of cultural beliefs over time and to the stability of cultural models as resources for individual and group reasoning processes (Hutchins, 2005: 1558).

The need for representational stability is more clearly seen when stability is absent (Hutchins, 2005). Stability is often absent when cultural models are absent, as has been demonstrated experimentally. In one study for example D’Andrade (1989) showed that university students struggled to assess the validity of culturally incoherent arguments (e.g. ‘If x then y; not x then not y’) but not when these same arguments were culturally coherent (‘If this is a garnet then it is a semi-precious stone; it is not a garnet therefore it is not a semi-precious stone’). Since formally the two problems are the same, any formal reasoning system able to solve one problem should be able to solve the other. The reason subjects struggle with culturally incoherent arguments, it appears, is because elements of the structure cannot be held stably in memory during processing. Conversely, problems expressed in terms of familiar cultural models enhance stability of representation, retention in memory, and processing (Hutchins, 2005: 1558).

3.4.3 Conceptual stability via material artefacts

Besides culturally-based reasoning, however, there are other ways to increase the stability of conceptual representations. One involves linking conceptual structure with material structure (p.1555). This can take place in many different ways. One of the most common is representation.

In a fundamental sense all our interactions with the world rely on representation. Our brains have no direct access to the world outside, which, consisting exclusively of energy and matter, is actually colourless, odourless, tasteless, and silent. Our information sources (photons, air compression waves, molecular concentrations, pressure, texture, temperature) which are detected by our sensory organs,

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must be translated into the common currency of the brain—electrochemical signals. Experience of the world, therefore, ‘is an electrochemical rendition’ (Eagleman, 2015: 36-39). In Peircean terms, the resulting meaning making involves the indexical mode, whereby the representation (‘representamen’) is not arbitrary but directly connected, physically or causally, to its object (the ‘referent’) (Peirce, 1932). This fundamental type of representation takes place in the brain at the cellular level, is hard-wired, does not involve higher cognitive functions, and on the evidence so far is consistent across cultures (Zeki, 2009). Such basic, inherited processes, however, are the building blocks for higher cognitive structures, culturally differentiated patterns involving yet further layers of representation, not only indexical but iconic and symbolic (Peirce, 1932) and thus further removed from material reality. In this discussion when speaking of representational and non-representational processes I am referring to higher-level cognitive functioning, to culturally transmitted and modifiable conceptualisations, not to those fundamental processes which, inherited and hard-wired, are always representational.

But why is this important? It’s important because non-representational structures appear to be implicated in forms of cognitive relations which throw light on role of the material in cognition and in social life. It is precisely these kinds of conceptual-material relations that Hutchins is interested in—relations which are ‘more basic’ than representation (p.1556). In pursuing this interest Hutchins turns from the kinds of cultural models which reside ‘inside minds’ to those which are also embodied in material artefacts, and he finds examples in thinking strategies which involve interaction between mental structure and material structure. As we have seen, researchers working in the embodied cognition paradigm have explored cognitive processes involving the combination of different structures, which they have theorised as various forms of mapping: principally, conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending. Hutchins draws on the conceptual blending framework (Fauconnier, 1997; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) as a means of understanding his examples of mental-material interaction as members of a larger class of cognitive phenomena (Hutchins, 2005: 1559).

According to Fauconnier, a conceptual blend occurs when two input mental spaces (concepts, perceptions) combine to yield a third space, the blended concept. Some, not all, of the structure from the input spaces is projected into the blended space, which now has an emergent structure of its own (Fauconnier, 1997: 150). As a result, new inferences are possible in the blended space. Indeed, some new inferences become automatic (Hutchins, 2005: 1559). Earlier studies of blending had focused on examples of conceptual integration in which input spaces were generally mental constructs. Hutchins, however, chooses to explore ‘the possibilities that arise when some or all of the structure contributed by one or more of the input spaces has physical form’ (p.1559). He calls this association material anchoring, and takes the cultural practice of queueing as a paradigm.

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3.4.4 Material anchors for conceptual blends

Queueing ‘creates a spatial memory for the order of arrival of clients’ (Hutchins, 2005: 1559).

The participants use their own bodies and the locations of their bodies in space to encode order relations. The gestalt principle of linearity makes the line configuration perceptually salient. Our perceptual systems have a natural bias to find line-like structure (p.1559).

In embodied cognition, as we saw, such a ‘natural bias’ would be understood as a universal schema based on ‘pre-conceptual’, direct bodily experience of the world. However, this line-like structure is not in itself sufficient to make a queue.

Not all lines are queues. Soldiers standing at attention in formation form a line, but not a queue. In order to see a line as a queue, one must project conceptual structure onto the line. The conceptual structure is the notion of sequential order (p.1559).

Hutchins represents this directional ordering as a ‘trajector’, observing that it is the conceptual blending of the physical structure of the line with an imagined directional trajector that turns the line into a queue (p.1559). Moreover, other elements in the environment are ‘recruited’ so that ‘seeing the queue ‘makes sense’ in the cultural context of people seeking a service and the (far from universal) cultural principle of ‘first-come, first-served’’ (P.1559).

Once the emergent structure of the queue is developed, other reasoning operations become possible. For example, the questions: Who is first in line? Who is last? How many people are in front of me? can be answered when the line is experienced as a queue, but not when it is simply a line (P.1559).

Some writers have argued that both inputs to the blend are mental representations—one a mental representation of whatever conceptual elements are present and the other a mental representation of the material structure (Liddel, 2003; Taub, 2001). Hutchins responds by observing that ‘there is no need for a person to conceptually represent the details of the composition of the line, because the line is present’ p.1561). He cites Brook’s assertion that in constructing mobile robots ‘[i]t turns out to be better to use the world as its own model’ (1991: 140). And he adds, ‘Not only is there no need to posit a separate mental representation of the material structure as an input space, [but] doing so obscures some important phenomena’ (Hutchins, 2005:1560). For these reasons Hutchins concludes that ‘the physical objects themselves are input to the conceptual blending process’ (p.1560). Moreover, he suggests that conceptual blending involving material anchors may enable more complex reasoning processes than would be possible otherwise. In fact, in some cases, ‘the conceptual structures to be represented and manipulated are so complex that they cannot possibly be given stable representation using mental resources alone’ (P.1562). In Hutchins’ view, then, conceptual blending includes perceptual processes. In other words, it includes bodily interaction with the physical world (p.1560).

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3.4.5 Distributed cognition and space

Growing numbers of researchers in AI take a similar, ‘interactionist’ view of cognition, maintaining that ‘to understand human behavior, and to design robots that scale up to complex dynamic environments, we must explore the interaction between agent and environment’ (Kirsh, 1995: 35). What the explorations of these researchers show is that many kinds of conceptual processes rely on bodily interaction with the physical world, and that how we manage the space around us has become ‘an integral part of the way we think, plan and behave, a central element in the very way we shape the world that constrains and guides our behaviour’ (Kirsh, 1995: 31-32).

Human agents make use of resources in the local environment to help them draw conclusions and solve problems rather than using abstract, symbolic computation (p.34). Under normal circumstances, most adults are expert in performing routine actions in familiar environments; and most expert behaviour of this kind is locally driven and non-deliberate (Kirsh, 1995). It arises in response to relevant environmental circumstances (p.37) and is often automatic, unreflective, and relatively effortless (p.36). It is therefore of low cost to the organism, which is why it has been favoured by evolution. In complying automatically with the constraints of the environment (using doorways to enter and leave rooms, roads for driving, pavements for walking, etc) actions are intentional but not the product of deliberation (p.36). Most environments are prepared or restructured for particular forms of behaviour or tasks. The more completely they are prepared or restructured, the easier the task. Environments can be restructured informationally or physically; often they are both (pp.37-38). Informational restructuring reduces the perceived degree of freedom; physical restructuring reduces the physical degree (p.38). This is the difference between cues and constraints (38). Cuing is the principal method for informationally structuring the environment and works by directing attention (keys placed besides the door as an aide mémoire, chocolates by the supermarket checkout, signage for special offers, etc.) Physical structuring, on the other hand, constrains as well as providing affordances for action (a partition wall, a locked door).

Like interaction orders, genres, registers, and styles, spatial structuring facilitates action by reducing complexity. This is illustrated by the work of David Kirsh (1995), who in empirical research in the workplace finds three classes of spatial arrangements through which we cognitively exploit space in everyday activity. These are: (i) arrangements which simplify choice, (ii) arrangements which simplify perception, and (iii) arrangements which simplify ‘internal computation’ (p.35). Sometimes spatial arrangements achieve two or all three of these effects simultaneously.

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Space can be structured to simplify choice by providing/not providing affordances or by highlighting /concealing them: a kitchen with a work surface set out with implements for chopping, shelves for storage, a sink for washing, etc; a bedroom for sleeping not cooking. The visible, tangible, audible, etc. affordances of space simplify choice and cue particular kinds of activity. Space can also be used to encode the temporal order of actions. Ingredients for a meal, machine parts to be (re)assembled, objects for circuit training in a gym, can be laid out in the order in which they will be used. By using linear orders, compact groups, or other designs that make sense relative to the activity, memory is offloaded onto space (p.51) and spatial and procedural relations are linked.

Structuring can also simplify perception (p.56). Objects can be arranged to form equivalence classes, or so that the associations between them (similarities, differences) are made clear (see Figure 1). Colour can be used as a memory aid and as a cue, as in highlighted text. Objects can be ordered alphabetically, or by symbols and numbers as in playing cards.

A third way an embodied agent can exploit the environment is by using the material and spatial properties of the world to simplify computation (p. 60), e.g. putting objects together to fast sort for length, volume, shape (see Figure 1), or weight rather than measuring them—in other words, using analogue not symbolic computation (as in queueing).

Figure 1. A Harehills locksmith demonstrates intelligent use of space in storing and accessing keys.

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All these methods of structuring the environment to simplify choice, perception, and computation reflect our ‘tight coupling to the world’ (p.65).

3.5 Distributed language

As we have seen, the ecological theories of mind outlined so far, though lacking consensus on the exact relation between mind, body and world in cognition, share a number of robust postulates which encourage the view that cognition is embodied (and not merely procedural) and metabolic before symbolic, embedded (and not merely representational), enacted (and neither subjective or objective), situated, distributed, and possibly extended (Steffensen, 2011: 187). These fundamental tenets have radical implications for linguists, and call for new understandings of the dynamics of linguistic cognition since, surprisingly, ecological theorists’ conception of language remains conservative and representational. In critiquing and differentiating the views of these theorists Steffensen makes five claims about distributed language.

1. Language cannot be explained with reference to a ‘language system’, i.e. ‘a semiotic system for communication’ because language has no stable materiality: ‘the main modalities of language—speaking and writing—share no single (abstract) materiality’ and the materialities language does have are highly variable (p.190)

2. Language is irreducibly bound up with real-time metabolic activity (e.g. voice dynamics, gaze and task oriented modes of action). Here Steffensen follows Volosinov, who in turn recapitulates von Humboldt’s view, that language is ‘activity, an unceasing process of creation (enrgeia) realized in individual speech acts’ (Volosinov 1973: 48, cited in Steffensen, 2011: 193).

Language as a ready-made product (ergon), as a stable system (lexicon, grammar, phonetics), is, so to speak, the inert crust, the hardened lava of language creativity, of which linguistics makes an abstract construct in the interests of the practical teaching of language as a ready-made instrument (p.193)

Unlike von Humboldt, however, Steffensen takes a meshwork rather than linear view of the relation between enrgeia and the ‘individual’ speech act (see points 3-5), and a sociocultural rather than individual psychological view of language creativity (Steffensen 2011: 193).

3. Language gains its cognitive power, not from how individual cognizers handle it, but from how they adapt to socially moulded ecological niches. Linguistic phenomena ‘shape, and are shaped by, a much larger community of individuals moulded in and by human sociality’ (p.194). ‘[W]e become biological individuals who act and think while drawing on a plenitude of other persons’ voices, values, and verdicts in (polyphonic) reasoning [...] moulded by the norms and values of social reality’ (p.195).

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4. Language functions, metaphorically, as airborne synapses in distributed cognitive systems. The social and phenomenal aspects of language give us ‘an ecology in which we become parts of each other’s environment and, thus, each other’s extended brain-body-world systems’ (p.198). Human agency is thus 'partly collective’. ‘We draw on shared resources (e.g. numbers and verbal patterns) that lie ‘outside’ an individual’s borders’ (p.198)

5. Language provides an extended ecology within which human cognizers engage in languaging. Many human processes and activities ‘depend on group level and society-level regulations which depend on processes of self-organization that extend beyond the individual [...] such polyhuman aggregates take place on multiple timescales, both within the individual and distributed across the total system, and language stabilizes the social co-ordination on which such life forms depend’ (p.202).

Together, these claims, says Steffensen, challenge current views of human interaction and call for ‘a deeper view of the real-time bodily activities in and between human beings’ (p.205). Moreover, ‘In order to fully grasp the complexities of human interaction and cognition, the entire extended ecology will have to become our unit of analysis’ (p.205). As I have suggested, distributed cognition is a research approach which offers such a prospect. But there is another theoretical framework that, building on distributed, embodied, and situated cognition, provides conceptual tools to explore the relationships between the elements in extended ecologies, in particular those between the mental and the material. This is material engagement theory (Malafouris, 2013), and since MET also relies crucially on the idea of extended cognition, a brief account of this theory will be helpful.

3.6 Extended Cognition

Distributed cognition, which arises from cognitive anthropology, and extended cognition (Clark, 2011; Clark & Chalmers, 1998), which emerges from the philosophy of mind and draws heavily on experimental cognitive science, imply related, different, but in some ways complementary perspectives on cognition (Hutchins, 2014). As we have seen, distributed cognition is not a form or theory of cognition but a way of looking at cognition. Extended mind theory, in contrast, refers to a particular kind of cognition, one which extends beyond brain and involves the interaction of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ resources. The crux of the theory is found in the ‘parity principle’.

If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process. (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 8)

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So, for example, if one person uses notes in a book to help them navigate a route, while another uses biological memory, the first person is involved in extended cognition while the second is not. In this view—which not universally accepted—the notebook is not a meditational means but an integral part of cognition: that is, an integral part of mind.

3.7 Material engagement theory (MET)

3.7.1 Addressing the epistemic neglect of the object

Material engagement theory (Malafouris, 2013) rests solidly on the ecological theories of mind discussed above whilst advancing the extended/distributed project by addressing the ‘epistemic neglect of the object’ it finds there—that is, the reluctance of ecological theorists to take material culture seriously. Though they recognise the intrinsic relationship between brain/body and environment, according to MET, ecological theorists remain ‘oblivious to the phenomenal properties of the material medium that envelopes and shapes our lives’. The material therefore remains external and epiphenomenal to cognitive structure. It may be attributed a causal influence in cognition but rarely a constitutive role’ (p.10). MET’s aim then is to provide a new account of the making of the human mind by investigating ‘the changing nature, and the different aspects, of the relationship between persons and things ... how they respond to and participate in each other’s coming into being’ (p.8). Investigating ‘how human thought is built into and executed through things’ (p.9), MET asks ‘why we humans, more than any other species, make things, and how these things, in return, make us who or what we are’(p.8). The theory of material engagement rests on three main working hypotheses: extended mind, the enactive sign, and material agency.

3.7.2 Extended mind

MET proposes an strong version of extended mind theory (Clark, 2011; Clark & Chalmers, 1998), conceiving of human cognition as ‘a hyloneotic field (from the Greek hyle for matter and nous for mind) — a mindscape quite literally extending into the extra-organismic environment and material culture’ (p.227). Going far beyond the Vygotskian notion of mediation in human thinking, MET radically asserts that ‘human cognitive and emotional states or processes literally comprise elements in the surrounding material environment’, and conversely, that ‘our ways of thinking are not merely causally dependent upon but constituted by extracranial bodily processes and material artifacts’ (p.227).

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3.7.3 The enactive sign

The theory of the enactive sign provides MET with its semiotic basis, the key issue here being not what a material sign means but how it means (p.18). In exposing what he calls ‘the fallacy of the linguistic sign’, Malafouris distinguishes between the linguistic sign and the material sign.

From a semiotic perspective, language and material culture differ substantially in the cognitive mechanisms that support their semiotic functions. More specifically, my suggestion is that the material sign does not primarily embody a communicative or representational logic but an enactive one. For material semiosis meaning is not a product of representation; it is a product of a process of conceptual integration between material and conceptual domains (p.18)

Readers will recognise the references to conceptual blending and material anchoring theory here (see Section 3.4.3) as Malafouris argues that the appearance of material culture in the cognitive system obviates the need for mental (symbolic) representation. Material things are best presented as/by themselves (Brooks 1991; see also Hutchins on queueing). Thus, ‘the brain need not waste its time producing internal replications of what is directly available in the world’ (Malafouris 2013: 237).

MET also draws on conceptual metaphor theory (see Section 3.3) to insist on a distinction between linguistic metaphor and metaphor arising from other forms of human action. Failure to acknowledge this difference means we fail to acknowledge ‘the active role of material mediation in the enaction of metaphoric projection’ (Malafouris, 2013: 65).

[M]aterially enacted metaphors, unlike their linguistic expressions, present no text-like propositionality. They do not simply communicate meaning; rather they communicate activey doing something. More specifically, material metaphors objectify sets of ontological correspondences, making possible the construction of powerful associative links among material things, bodies, and brains (p.65).

Conflating linguistic and other forms of metaphor we homogenise ‘meditational means (language, artefact, gesture, ritual, etc) that in reality present quite different properties and possibilities for metaphoric mapping’ (p.65), that is, for cognition. Conversely, acknowledging the substantive participation of the material medium (its capacity for communication by actively doing something) allows us to address the question of how human cognition is enabled to produce particular kinds of metaphorical mappings (conceptions, thoughts) in given historical environments—within particular socially, culturally, and environmentally conditioned and conditioning circumstances (p.65).

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3.7.4 Material agency

In the theory of material agency Malafouris rethinks the dualism of ‘agents and things’ and challenges the ‘deeply entrenched anthropocentric understanding of this notion as an attribute of the human individual’ (p.18). In its place he proposes a symmetric conceptualisation.

[I]n the human engagement with the material world there are no fixed attributes of agent entities and patient entities and no clean ontological separations between them; rather, there is a constitutive intertwining between intentionality and affordance. Agency and intentionality may not be properties of things; they may not be properties of humans either; they are the properties of material engagement (p.18)

Malafouris illustrates the relationship between agency, intentionality, and affordance in the case of Stone Age knapping (striking flakes off a core), where knapping is seen as an act of thought, ‘a cognitive process that criss-crosses the boundaries of skin and skull’ and extends beyond the purely ‘mental’ or neural (p.19). The suggestion is that ‘the stone held in the knapper’s hand did much more than simply and passively offer the necessary ‘conditions of satisfaction’ to the knapper’s intention’. Rather ‘the flaking intention is constituted, at least partially, by the stone and the marks left on its surface’ (p.19). How the stone responds to one mark determines where and how the knapper will make the next. Malafouris sees this process as an act of collaboration between human and material agency (p.236). He goes on to suggest that at different times, in different cultural settings, these marks ‘would become memory, symbol, number, and literacy—they would become us’ (p.19). In studying mark making, then, the interesting question for us is not what kind of minds are needed to make particular marks, but what kinds of minds are constructed by making and perceiving them (p.239).

3.7.5 Metaplasticity

Along with the theories of extended mind, the enactive sign, and material agency MET incorporates the notion of metaplasticity, a term used broadly to characterise ‘the emergent properties of the enactive constitutive intertwining between brain and culture’ (p.46). Synaptic plasticity provides the substrate for experience-dependent brain development, learning, and memory. Metaplasticity is a higher form of synaptic plasticity, ‘the plasticity of synaptic plasticity’. It describes the ways in which synaptic plasticity is affected by earlier and later activity (p.46-47). This is exemplified, for example, in the important functional, structural, and anatomical changes found in the brains of musicians and taxi drivers linked to intense sensorimotor experience over time (e.g. Ragert et al, 2004; Maguire et al, 2000; see Malfouris, 2013:47). MET draws on the notion of metaplasticity to argue that minds and things may be seen as continuous.

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3.7.6 MET’s central thesis

MET’s central thesis is summed up thus: ‘the relationship between mind and material culture is not one of abstract representation, or some other form of action at a distance, but one of ontological inseparability’ (pp.18-19). This means that the functional anatomy of the human mind—including the brain, central nervous system, and body—is a dynamic bio-cultural construct subject to continuous transformation by behaviourally important and socially embedded experiences. ‘These experiences are mediated and sometimes constituted by the use of material objects and artifacts (e.g., the blind man’s stick) which for that reason should be seen as continuous, integral, and active parts of the human cognitive architecture’ (p.244). Seen in the context of metaplasticity, ‘when mediated action takes place and where neural and cultural plasticity meet and exchange properties’, the main transformative effects of things in human cognitive life and evolution can be put in three categories: mediation, temporal, and plastic (p.245)

Mediational effects. Interactions between things and humans change and reconfigure the relationship between humans and between humans and their environments. They reconfigure cognitive ecologies. ‘The presence of things means humans no longer react or passively adapt to their environment; instead they actively engage and interact with it’, while things ‘impose their own dynamics, consciousness, and temporality on our bio-cultural continuum’ (p.245-246).

Temporal effects. Things play an important part in integrating and co-ordinating processes which operate on radically different timescales (e.g., neural, bodily, cultural, and evolutionary). They effect temporal anchoring and binding, and through their physical persistence they help us construct histories and biographies, and link things ‘across the scales of time’ (p.246- 247; see also Lemke, 2000).

Plastic effects. Things change the brain. ‘They effect extensive structural rewiring by fine tuning existing brain pathways, by generating new connections within brain regions, or by transforming what was a useful brain function in one context into another function that is more useful in another context’ (p.247). More importantly, ‘they are capable of transforming and rearranging the structure of the cognitive task, either by reordering the steps of a task or by delegating part of the cognitive process to another agent (human or artefact)’(p.247)

MET, suggests Malafouris, ‘opens the way to discovering the cognitive life of things’ (p.248). The challenge now ‘lies in figuring out how plastic brains can be understood within the wider networks of non-biological scaffolds and enculturated social practices that delineate the spatial and temporal boundaries of the human cognitive system as a cultural artefact (p.249). This, of course, is our aim in LLS.

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3.7.7 Summary

In Section 2 I suggested LLS are in need of theoretical frameworks which enable the linguistic landscape to be set within perspectives on social life which encompass all its aspects—mental, bodily, and environmental—as well as providing ways of clarifying the relations between these aspects. In Section 3 I have provided an account of several ecological theories of mind which I believe, taken together, are capable of addressing this need.

First, I showed how distributed cognition answers Bateson’s call for a holistic or immanent perspective on mind, viewing all instances of cognition as emerging from distributed processes in which boundaries and centres are not assumed but produced through empirical investigation.

I then outlined the theory of embodied cognition. Central here was the argument that bodies are always situated, and that situated bodies are essential to cognition. This is because mental processes are dependent on feedback loops circulating between brains, bodies (with their species-specific sensorimotor capacities), and environments. Abstract thought relies on pre-conceptual bodily experiences of the world. When directly relevant pre-conceptual structures are not available for conceptualisation other bodily-based structures are employed by means of conceptual mappings. Mapping processes include conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending. Metaphor must therefore be seen as central to cognition, not merely a linguistic phenomenon.

Returning to distributed cognition, I gave an account of Hutchins’ discussion of queueing and his claim that conceptual blending often involves input from bodily experience of material objects—that is, it involves material anchors. In such cases the world acts as its own best model. Abstract representation becomes redundant and more complex reasoning processes are possible.

From distributed cognition I turned to Kirsh’s empirical findings on the intelligent use of space. These findings reveal space as an integral part of the way humans think, plan, and behave, (re)structuring environments informationally and/or physically to cue and constrain action by simplifying choice, perception, and computation.

Following this I outlined a theory of distributed language, in which language is seen, not as a stable ready-made product, but as real-time metabolic activity taking place within individuals and across groups. This metabolic activity creates socially moulded ecological niches which individuals adapt and adapt to. Niches are seen as extended ecologies which both support and stabilise social action.

In preparation for a discussion of material engagement theory, I made brief reference to the theory of extended mind and its central premise: when a part of the world functions as a process which, if it were to take place in the brain would be seen as cognition, then that process is, for that time, part of the cognitive process, part of the extended mind.

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Finally, I came to the theory of material engagement (MET), a ‘conceptual apparatus’ designed to addresses the epistemic neglect of material objects, artefacts, and culture which MET finds in the ecological systems which inspired it. Here I summarised MET’s foundational hypotheses—a strong version of extended mind, the enactive (in distinction to linguistic) sign, and material agency. I discussed the key construct of metaplasticity, and I presented MET’s central thesis: material objects and artefacts play a vital constitutive role in cognition, with meditational, temporal, and plastic effects—reconfiguring ecologies, linking things across the scales of time, and restructuring brains.

Whether or not one accepts the idea of an extended mind, it seems clear that, taken together, these theoretical perspectives and empirical research findings offer wider access to the landscape of social life than has previously been possible, access unrestricted by the traditional boundaries of mind, body, and world. In doing this they highlight the foundational role of material objects, artefacts, and culture—that is, of what has previously been referred to as ‘context’ or ‘environment’—in mental and therefore social life, and they elevate these things to parity with the other kinds of phenomena with which sociolinguists are used to engaging. In particular, they offer promising perspectives and robust arguments to support the linguistic landscape project as the field continues to evolve, not least by suggesting ways in which the material and cognitive are mutually constitutive. In the following section I illustrate some of the ways in which these theories and research findings may be used to enhance ethnographically-informed linguistic landscape enquiry in a domestic setting.

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4 The case study4.1 Background

Research on the TLang project (2014-2018) took place in four six-month phases, focusing in turn on communication in the contexts of business, heritage, sport, and law. The case study presented here took place during the heritage phase. Our key participant was Monika, a young Slovak Roma woman living and working in inner-city Leeds.

During the research period Monika and her brother Ivan were working to set up cultural spaces for the Roma people in their area. At that time there were none in Leeds. The activities they hoped to initiate in these spaces would, they believed, help people adapt to and prosper in their new and challenging environment. We followed Monika as she attempted to bring her ideas into being. Central to this process was the writing of a business plan to acquire funding to set up a social enterprise. This project brought her into contact with a range of individuals and groups—charities, NGOs, and statutory bodies. We observed and recorded the interaction in many of these ‘contact’ zones.

Towards the end of our time with Monika, when we had come to know her quite well, I arranged to carry out the ‘linguistic landscape’ study of her home. The study was oriented by the literature reviewed in Section 3, as well as by more traditional LLS strategies, principally the ethnographic approach proposed by Blommaert (2013). Other strategies which influenced the study were linguistic ethnography (Rampton et al., 2004), mediated discourse analysis, nexus analysis, and geosemiotics (Scollon, 2001; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, 2004), multimodal interactional analysis(Norris, 2004), and Chalfen’s paradigm for the visual social sciences (Chalfen, 2011). The idea to take LLS across the threshold into the domestic domain came from a longstanding belief in the importance of the home in understanding individuals’ social and mental life. This was undoubtedly inspired by literary works—primarily the novel—but reinforced by authors such as Pink (2007), Bachelard (1958), and Lefebvre (1991).

Data collection at Monika’s house took around two hours. Monika wore a digital recorder. We began outside, talking about and photographing the house, gardens, and access areas. Inside, Monika led the ‘tour’, deciding the order in which the various spaces were to be viewed and picking out the things she wanted to talk about. I asked questions and took photographs of the spaces and their contents. Monika chose to position herself in many of the photographs, something I hadn’t anticipated. Later, she and I had opportunities to discuss this visual ethnographic conversation. Monika was given digital copies of the images (148 photos), a transcript of the audio recording (8,600 words), and of an earlier conversation (4,491 words) and read and commented on the analysis before it was incorporated into our TLang Heritage Report (Baynham et al., 2016). For reasons of confidentiality she requested that certain things be deleted from the analysis. These were deleted. Monika was happy for the photographs of her home to be used in academic presentations, but not for the ones featuring her to be published online.

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4.2 The landscape of the home

Monika’s house has two external doors leading to and from quite different kinds of space. The front door gives onto an area of open-access, litter-free, council-owned lawns, then pavement and a road leading up towards Harehills, a superdiverse inner-city area where Monika shops, works, and conducts her social life. The back door leads to and from the private space of the garden, which is fenced and, as a range of objects testify, very much the children’s space. The scrubby lawn is pockmarked with holes (Monika’s two boys, stripped to the waist this summer’s day, have been digging for worms) and there’s a litter of toys: a yellow racing car (missing a wheel), an action man (also stripped to the waist), two rubbery dinosaurs, a toy dumbbell, a football, and a plastic cat’s bowl (for the four new kittens). The garden is also a temporary holding area for objects signifying homebuilding and on their way elsewhere: an empty five-litre paint tub, a mouldy mattress half covered with a blue tarpaulin, an old formica-surfaced breakfast table with tubular steel legs.

Inside each of these doors, front and back, there is an inscription. Inside the back door, on the nearest available space, transferred onto the recently-emulsioned anaglypta, is this text: Figure 2

Inside the front door, also on the nearest available space, is another.

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Figure 3

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These texts, it seems, are not placed accidentally. Rather their positioning is linked to the kinds of space the doors lead to and from—to public and private spaces, to the public and private spheres of Monika’s life, and to the life projects associated with these spheres. Moreover, the signs are not just linked to these spheres, they actively (re)structure them. They do this, I suggest, by reducing the perceived degree of freedom in the spaces they relate to. That is, they simplify choice, cue, and in fact help constitute bodily, cognitive, volitional, and affective action in the domestic spaces and the public spaces beyond. Being composed of linguistic (written) and other visual modes (font size/style, colour, image) the texts do this informationally rather than physically, directing attention and offloading memory (Kirsh, 1995). They function both as reminders and reinforcers of mental-embodied processes, stances in relation to the world. Linguistically, as life-orienting and life-affirming maxims, they are worldbound visually through their material forms, ornate ‘freehand’ scripts, bubbles, butterflies, flowers, petals, and leaves, connoting and gesturally enacting lightness, delicacy, organic growth, unrestricted movement, the solace of the natural. Since the texts are industrially produced transfers purchased on Ebay they also index an agency which is in part collective and draws on shared resources lying outside Monika’s individual ‘borders’, an extended ecology that supports and stabilises her action (Steffensen, 2011). Furthermore, as I hope to show, these texts have a range of real-world effects: (i) meditational effects, allowing Monika to reconfigure her cognitive ecology, and actively engage and interact with her environment rather than passively adapting to it; (ii) temporal effects, linking actions from personal and group histories to the present and future; and, arguably, (iii) plastic effects, in that repeated actions may lead to learning and the neural and structural changes in the brain which accompany them (Malafouris, 2013), and thus to reinforcement of or changes in behaviour.

4.2.1 The back door: ‘Our Family is Forever’

When I asked Monika why she had chosen to put ‘family’ just here, inside the back door, she said:

M: The sign? It’s because everybody have to respect my kids and me if they come to my house so– (.)

J: So when you say ‘family’ you mean?M: Me and my kids. Because in this house, just really, it’s like my mother’s house.

She have to say her rules, yeah? So this is for me [...] Childhood is important for kids [...] That’s why I put that sign in front of everybody—that my kids is important. It’s forever.

Social space is always somebody’s space, and, supported by ethnographic methods, studying the linguistic landscape can help identify ‘ownership’ of space, revealing how space controls and is controlled by people by means of the codes, expectations, norms and traditions which prevail there

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(Blommaert, 2013: 3). In this house it is Monika who makes the rules, and at their heart is the exempt-from-doubt conviction that children are important, that ‘childhood is important’.

At this point I notice that Monika has the names of her children tattooed on the insides of her wrists, a symbolic (linguistic) but also embodied enactive gesture-made-permanent, committing her to this foundational article of faith: ‘Our Family is Forever’. As Peck and Stroud (2015) have argued in their work on ‘skinscapes’, tattoos not only create ‘bodies that matter in time and place’ but sculpt ‘future selves and imagined spaces’ (p.133). In this sense Monika’s tattoos may be seen as a corporeal nailing of colours to the mast: ‘Because that is most important thing what you have in this life. Nothing else. It’s just family.’

But why this overarching emphasis on childhood and family? During our conversation two possible reasons emerge: one cultural, the other more personal. First, according to Monika, it is ‘because we gypsy for us is most important – family. Siblings, mother, father, family.’ However, Monika also reveals that at the age of 4 she was taken from her parents and placed in what she calls a care house or care home, though in fact the institution sounds more like a girls’ boarding school than an English care home. The removal of Roma children from their parents, Monika says, was not uncommon in Slovakia at that time. But, inevitably, the experience was profoundly traumatic and inspired in her a passionate commitment to the idea of family.

Despite the terrible trauma, however, with the perspective of time, Monika feels especially privileged to have had the opportunities which life at the care home opened up to her, opportunities normally unavailable to Roma children.

That was beautiful childhood […] in care house I am glad because I had education, I had friends, I had trips, go out, Italy, Croatia, I don’t know, Czech, anywhere else [… ] I was four years old, I was already Italia, you know? We learn to ski. We learn sports. We learned lots of things.

And above all there was the absence of stigma.

Yeah, they don’t care you are gypsy or you are white. They take us together in care home, you know? That was most important for me […] There they was look at us same. We are children, yeah? And they try grow us same way, you know?

However, at the age of 18, with virtually no experience of life outside the care home, Monika was given a sum of money and released into the world. This next period of her life was extremely difficult, and eventually, after many ups and downs, she chose to come to Leeds to live with her biological mother. Later she found her own place, and it was here that she gave birth to her two sons. Then, after another period of upheaval, she decided it was time to give her children some of the stability she herself had enjoyed in the care home. It was time to create a family home

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The philosopher Henri Lefebvre was the first writer to argue convincingly that space is socially constructed.

The social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself. Failing this, these relations would remain in the realm of ‘pure’ abstraction—that is to say in the realm of verbalism, verbiage and empty words (Lefebvre, 1991[1974]: 129)

In her own projects, private and, as we shall see, public, Monika evidences an instinctive understanding that if her aspirations are to be realised they must become spatialized—that is, take a particular form in a particular a space—or they will remain forever verbiage and empty words. In finding a space in which to bring up her children Monika had to work hard, not least to demonstrate her suitability to the Council Housing Department.

I wanted a stable home and get council house. So I have to prove I can stay six months [without incident] in social home. So I did it and now I’m here.

Home, more than any other place, is a ‘centre of meaning’(Cresswell, 2015), a ‘field of care’ (Tuan, 1974). It is, as Bachelard (1958) observes, a uniquely privileged kind of place, a first universe that influences the way we go on to think about all the other spaces in our lives. The place which frames Monika’s understanding of social space in general and home in particular is, it seems, the care home. And so when it came time for her to create a stable home for her children in Leeds it was the care home—with its commitment to ‘growing’ children, its valuing of order, stability, richness of experience, and its teachers—which provided the template.

There is no like this book tell me ‘you have to live this way’. I don’t believe that [… ] That’s why I’m saying is not important how you write it down. It’s important how you tell it and show it and how you guide.

Education is enactive.

However, beyond the care home Monika had learned the educational importance of first-hand experience, that in the absence of trustworthy teachers trial-and-error was an invaluable guide. The stable home template, therefore, would be interpreted and adapted in the light of experiences prior and subsequent to life in the care home.

Nobody didn’t explain it when I was pregnant what I waiting for, or what gonna bring it to me […] I never knew nothing […] Then I had to start to cook. I had to start clean. I have to understand what I have to do with my kids […] I know so

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many times I do mistakes. Everybody do mistake. But I learned from them [...] What I never had, I want to give them […] I don’t want this knowledge I will get [have got] now just lose.

So when Monika projects her ideational home into space, she also projects a social ‘regime’, a hierarchical ordering of meanings which invokes matters of ownership and control and allows and enables judgements, inclusion and exclusion, positive and negative sanctioning, and so forth (Blommaert, 2005: 74). It is a regime which foregrounds education, the transmission of ways of doing things, heritage.

Because in this house, just really, it’s like my mother’s house. She have to say her rules, yeah? So this is for me. So if my kids running round, it’s not nice. But tell them calm. No shout. Or if they have toys here, you have to understand, its kids, you know? [...] Childhood is important for kids. If they do mess, if they clean, if they do naughty, if they fix it, they learn now. So when they grow up, they no going to do same mistake. But if I don’t let them now, and they grow up, they’re going to do what I didn’t let them. So that’s why I put that sign in front of everybody—that my kids is important. It’s forever.

Whilst every social space is a space for authoring, not everyone gets to take part, freedom to author space being a key aspect of power. So walking round the house with Monika it’s interesting to see how central to the regime is the space afforded the children to author and construct their own domestic landscape. As if to highlight this Monika explains but does not apologise for the mess of

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toys in the garden and around the house, the crayoned numbers on the cupboard door (Figure 4), and the paintings and scribblings on the uncarpeted floor boards of the boys’ bedroom. All these things

Figure 4

evidence the transmission of a particular culture (particular ways of seeing, valuing, and acting) over the scales of time and space—from Slovakia to Leeds, from care home teachers to Monika, from Monika to her children. Moreover, as practices involving bodies, material objects, and space, they actively constitute this life. Seen in this way the numbers on the cupboard door are not merely numeric signs (though a form of homework they may be) but enactments of particular selves, home, and world. They are also indexes to quite vast spatially and temporally distributed polyhuman systems, cognitive and behavioural (one need think only of the numeric and arithmetic systems).

Before leaving the ‘Our Family is Forever’ text, we should note that it addresses an English speaking readership not a Slovak one. In doing so it plays a part in the constitution of a regime which privileges the children rather than the other, Slovak speaking, users of the home (Monika herself, her brother, sisters, and friends) and signifies an attempt on Monika’s part to adapt the domestic environment to the public environment of the children’s lives (‘They future is here’). However, though Monika’s project to ‘grow’ her children draws selectively on the past whilst adapting to present realities, it is not without difficulties.

I try with my language but I see that they don’t understand my language. Then I have to struggle in English. So yeah, it’s not going to be easy to grow them up this way. But I’m trying.

4.2.2 The front door

Before we enter the front door, Monika wants to show me the contents of the outhouse, which lies just to its left. Inside she points out a miniature table-football, a toy pool table, a Christmas tree, a set of bongos, an electric keyboard, a child’s scooter.

Here is some things what I use for my charity. So example, people donate me clothes, I hide inside [the outhouse] or something, and then when I have my stall then I take it and … selling or for kids or I don’t know.

The project is still at the planning stage.

Monika opens the front door. This is the entrance from public life—from shopping, school, social events, work. Work means volunteering for a Harehills charity as a bilingual advocate. It has also, for

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the past two years, meant the unrelenting slog to set up a social enterprise to support the Roma and other Eastern European people of Leeds. Here too Monika’s aim is to draw on her experiences of the past to make a better present and future, not just for her children but for others too.

M: You know, my kids can pick up from me, and they can give to their kids, and their kids, you know? [...] What I never had, I want to give them [...] I don’t want this knowledge I will get now just lose.

J: You think it’s important for them [the children]? To pass it on? M: Yeah, for everybody. It don’t even have to be important for my kids. They help

[It can help them.] Be important from someone else.

So far, however, there is little sign of success: ‘Two years and I –. There seems to do nothing.’

Leaving the outhouse, Monika opens the front door into a bright hallway: coats on hooks, shoes stored in a bookcase under the stairs, a pair of children’s scooters leaning against the wall. These objects—along with door, walls, light switches etc.—are placed to cue and constrain action. Cueing and constraining action reduces complexity, simplifies choice, and provides affordances for sanctioned actions (Kirsh, 1995). In Monika’s hall sanctioned actions include, among other things, entering and leaving the house, removing and replacing shoes and coats, taking up and parking scooters. The objects involved in the (re)structuring of the space have a physical function (Kirsh, 1995). They do not (unlike texts) embody a communicative or representational logic; they embody an enactive logic, a material semiosis which is not a product of representation but of a process of conceptual integration between material and conceptual domains (Malafouris, 2013:18). These objects are engaged in cognition as material entities not as conceptual entities, as objects not as signs for objects (i.e. not as signs for themselves). It is true that objects can and do act as signs for things, things other than themselves, including other objects (as in the case of a wedding ring, a cross, a crown, a finger post, etc.) But objects cannot be signs for themselves because signs do not have visible objects. The object of a sign is something beyond the sign, to which the sign refers (the ‘referent’) (Peirce, 1932: 228). In a sign the object is always hidden, or there would be no need for the sign (Munday, see Chandler, 2007: 31). Conversely, as Brooks (1991) and Hutchins (2005) have argued, when objects are present to perception it would be superfluous—and at times inefficient—for them to be represented as signs in cognitive operations since the material world is its own best model. The objects in Monika’s hall do, of course, prompt and take part in meaning making, but they do so materially and perceptibly, by being and doing, via material engagement3. As we have seen, one of the ways they take part in meaning making is as material anchors for conceptual blends. Recall Hutchins’ example: a line-like structure of people (material anchor), an imagined directional trajectory (movement from back to front), and a cultural principle (first come, first served) combine to produce the blended concept of the

3 The epistemic neglect of the object Malafouris (2013) finds in ecological theories of mind is perhaps also a concern for semiotics.

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queue (see Section 3.4.4). In Monika’s hall, in the cultural context of the home and my entering it now for the first time, the book case/shoe rack and the shoes which partially fill it provide a material structure (anchor) which combines with mental structures—the imagined process of removing shoes (a cultural model based on perceptual experience and found in memory) and the cultural principle of keeping the home clean—to produce a blended concept: here, in this location, shoes must be removed and placed in the shoe rack before proceeding further into the home. Outside and inside are socially produced as different kinds of space; and this part of the hall, this liminal, outside/inside space is structured precisely to maintain this difference. And this difference is maintained not only through physical (re)structuring but through informational (symbolic) (re)structuring, as I see from the text strategically placed on the panelling under the staircase, which unavoidably confronts us as we step through the door (figure 5.)

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Figure 5

I ask Monika to tell me about this text. Instead she reads it aloud, then adds:

It’s for me that when I’m upset that I read it and I start smile. And butterflies. I love butterflies. And flowers. So, for my heart, you know? I see this signing and straightaway comes to my heart.

And I imagine Monika, returning home from Harehills on a winter’s night at the end of another fruitless and frustrating day in search of funding for her project, opening the door onto the brightness of her hallway and seeing this text. Sententious, mass-produced (‘I order through eBay’), and—some might feel—banal, the verse nevertheless captures perfectly the tone of Monika’s life at this moment:

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rueful, resigned, childhood ‘innocence’ lost to a quiet (though apparently not always so quiet) pessimism born of the ups and downs of an embattled existence, with its hard lessons of separation and loss, failed projects, the inconstancy of people, the changes wrought by time. Above all, time. How past relates to present, and how this relationship must be cognitively and affectively managed: forgive but don’t forget, learn but don’t regret. As for the future, there is no promise here of a world where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, no ‘Our Family is Forever’: only a featureless continuance—‘life goes on’.

But in fact Monika does have a clear vision of her future, a ‘dream’, as she explained during one of our earlier conversations.

J: So can you describe how you see your life in the next ten, twenty years as your kids grow up?

M: Yeah. After I gonna dream about this every day (laughs). My biggest dream to have something like castle, where I can have children who abandoned, and I can give them life, grow them like care home. Second part of my life is still support other people like I do now, and have some animals and–. I don’t know (laughs). I’m too complicated. I just wanna have kind of school or house for people.

As we have seen, Lefebvre suggested that social life moves ‘towards an open future while continually reinvoking an established past’, progressing ‘both as a project and as the consequence of past efforts, even forgotten efforts’ (Shields, 1999: 126). The contents of projects (artefacts, activities, meanings) are distributed across the scales of space and time (the timescales of a wink, a word, a conversation, a relationship, a lifetime, a community, a people) (Lemke, 2000). Because projects carry within them the same backward and forward movement of temporality that Lefebvre ascribes to objective, social phenomena he proposes a ‘projective-retrojective’ method of socio-historical analysis (Shields, 1999: 126). I suggest that such a method combined with a distributed cognition perspective together with epistemic attention to objects and the meditational, temporal, and plastic effects of humans’ engagement with them, may support this endeavour—to ‘illuminate the nature of the transition from ... subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to social life’ (Lefebvre, 1991[1974]: 18). In exploring the other spaces of Monika’s home I hope to show how thoughts, feelings, and aspirations constitute and are constituted by their material contents and structure.

4.2.3 The other spaces of the home

Bachelard (1958) observed that home is not a homogeneous place but rather a series of places each with its own character, memories, and dreams. In Monika’s home we see this clearly: place as an assemblage whose uniqueness—within its socially produced typicality—depends not on the

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individual parts but on the particular configuration and interaction of these parts. The texts we have just been considering, for example, though mass-produced, function in unique ways within the ecology of the home, and may be seen as centres or nodes in a distributed system which extends spatially and temporally far beyond the walls of the building.

Living room.

Monika’s living room is modern, light, and airy: white walls, a three-piece suite, a coffee table of chrome and glass, and a large flat-screen TV, which right now is tuned to a shopping channel showing an elegant woman in a black bathing costume standing by a swimming pool against a backdrop of palm trees. On the wall behind the TV is a set of four reproduction paintings of trees, tall, slender, shafts of sunlight penetrating the green air. ‘I have support worker and I think she knew my character. That’s why she give me these pictures.’ Before coming into the house Monika had pointed out the old horse chestnut standing on the council lawn between the house and the road. ‘I love this tree ... just way how it standing.’ She loves its unique personality: ‘No grow like another tree ... It’s just short and have his body and hands ... broke ... and children try to climb it.’ For Monika ‘trees is life.’ ‘Where I grow up we have lots of trees. And [now] even if work, I choose table next to window that I can watch outside.’ Trees connect and clarify Monika’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioural worlds. Alive, shaped by history, their materiality resonates with her embodied sense of self, and provides ways of conceiving and expressing it. In Slovakia a counsellor asked Monika to draw her a tree.

If you go counselling, doctor, counsellor, if you have some issues, yeah, depressions or something, she is first thing that she tell you: ‘Draw me tree.’ Why? Because from that tree it tell you lots of things.

Monika’s tree was ‘very complicated’.

There was like fruit and there was flower, and there was everything, lots of hands, lots of leaves ... she said I have good future but I have to focus ... and my personality is very complicated.

This connection between the materiality of trees and the human historical body (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) appears to be a cultural model (‘tree it tell you lots of things’). As we saw in Section 3, cultural models provide stable scaffolding for conceptual models both interpersonally and intrapersonally. They are distributed across time and space beyond the bounds of the individual brain and exist in a complex nexus of models that mutually constrain one another. They thus enhance and reinforce individual and group memory, thinking, and behaviour. In cognition they stabilise some parts of the conceptual structure while allowing complex manipulation of others (Hutchins, 2005: 1557-1558). We see this in Monika’s drawing of the tree, an example of plastic brain engaging with wider

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networks of non-biological scaffolds (pencil and paper) and enculturated social practices: another example of material engagement. Shifting the centring of knowledge from discourse to the body, Lefebvre sees a similarly mutually constitutive relationship between space/object and ego, as Shields explains:

At the most personal, we think of ourselves in spatialised terms, imagining ourselves as an ego contained within an objectified body. People extend themselves—mentally and physically—out into space much as a spider extends its limbs in the form of a web. We become as much a part of these extensions as they are of us. Arrangements of objects, work teams, landscapes and architecture are the concrete instances of this spatialisation. (Shields, 1999:146-147)

Looking round the living room, I ask Monika how she feels when she comes into this space with its trees and flowers, candles and butterflies.

This is my room. Relax. I can smoke here. I don’t smoke kitchen or upstairs. I smoke just here or garden. So this is just for me. So if I shout out I smoke, the kids have to go out.

Later, in the kitchen bin, lying beside a discarded lottery ticket (another mundane disappointment), I see an empty cigarette packet, labelled ‘USA Blend’. Monika thinks they're Polish, though the health warning, ‘Курение убивает’ (SMOKING KILLS), suggests Russian.

It’s cheaper than English. I wish I can give up. Not working. One day. Maybe if I have less stress.

Stress reduction, according to Monika, is the primary function of the living room. The scented candles ‘calm me down’ and the dozen or more ceramic, glass, and wrought iron butterflies are distributed around the room because butterflies ‘are free’ and unfettered by everyday responsibilities or considerations of consequence.

They don’t care about anybody else. Lots of colour. Always happy. They don’t think what’s going to happen if I go there, you know? They just go in, and they deal with consequences after.

But social space is constructed by social action, by what it’s used for and what takes place there (Lefebvre, 1991[1974]).

These ‘spatialisations’ are not just physical arrangements of things but also spatial patterns of social action and routine as well as historical conceptions of space and the world … They add up to an eco-spatial imaginary and outlook, which manifests itself in our every intuition (Shields, 1999: 146)

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Viewed in these terms, and in terms of the objects that cue and facilitate action, the living room, it turns out, is not at all an impenetrable sanctuary. In the corner is a workstation, a desk with a telephone, letter rack, reading lamp, and computer: a place for project planning and bid writing—though the lamp’s shade is decorated with images of soccer balls and, in this windowless corner, a green vase holds flowering shoots clipped from a tree. All the elements of Monika’s life, it seems, converge on this desktop, in this room: past, present, and future; inner and outer; public and private. With its objects, images, technologies, and texts the room is at the centre of a dense meshwork of processes distributed far beyond the boundaries of it walls. On the floor next to the TV is a ceramic ornament, a life-size violin and music scroll: ‘My grandfather used to play and when I saw this in shop I had to get it ... I never had chance to hear it properly.’ And on the wall behind the desk are two pictures of horses, paintings by numbers, the handiwork of Monika’s children. (‘I love when they practice it. It’s good for future.’) And the horses:

So used to gypsy have that, yeah. And, I don’t know. Maybe from culture. I don’t know. But I love horse. When I was little I ride and then, that was brilliant. Just freedom ... Horse and dog is most just the animals or, how to say, creature in [xxxx]. How much you hurt them they still love you.

Sitting on the sofa now, Monika glances from time to time at the TV screen. ‘This is Charmed,’ she says. It’s her favourite viewing. Charmed is a series in which three good witches use their supernatural abilities to protect the innocent. Monika watched it first in the care home, and views it again now with subtitles, to learn English. ‘And I can pick up everything in my job from them ... I learn how to deal with law, how to deal with people.’

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On the wall behind Monika’s head as she sits on the sofa are spirals of mirrored glass (Figure 7). I look at them. She follows my gaze.

Figure 7

M: And those is mirror. Is your reflection, yeah? Mirror is your reflection.J: Yeah.M: And you see, is how I feel all my life [in all parts of my life at the moment].J: How do you feel?M: Just don’t know how to get out [Monika describes a spiral motion with her

finger].J: A circle, going round and round? Do you feel trapped?M: Yes. I feel like prisoner.J: How long have you felt like that?

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M: Since I’m here.J: In England? And the plans you’re making for your business, is that not a way

out?M: I don’t know. Maybe I just hide in there.

Here, in Monika’s material engagement with these mirrors, we touch on the three-way tension between her powerful impulse to ‘grow’ her children and support fellow migrants, the bureaucratic demands which this incurs, and her feelings of entrapment by these commitments and her longing to be ‘free’. We see also that Monika conceptualises this conflict metaphorically in spatial and embodied terms—her current life a prison, her business plan a bolt hole (within this prison).

The dynamic which underlies Monika’s current predicament is illuminated by Lefebvre’s (1991) theory of social space, whose fundamental figure, the triadic dialectic, can be understood as ‘the contradiction between social thought and social action, supplemented by a third factor of the creative, poetic act’—not the creative act of highbrow art but of ‘everyday art, the poetry of daily life, the art of life’ (Schmid, 2008: 32-33). Each of these processes in the production of social space is seen by Lefebvre to have a semiotic aspect, which he designates perceived, conceived, and lived. Perceived space is commonsensical space: particular locations with spatial characteristics and practices which provide continuity and cohesion, and require levels of competence and performance. The key elements in Monika’s perceived space are the family home and, her ‘biggest idea’, ‘a community centre for Czechoslovakian people’. And while she feels she lacks the kinds of competence required for such a space (‘I cannot say I’m good enough in way how I am in my job’), nevertheless, her employers ‘trust me and they use me’. She is therefore encouraged to persevere with her project, the business plan. Conceived space is discoursal space: discursive regimes of analysis produced, for example, by expert knowledge, the spatial professions. At the time of our study ‘expert’ conceptions of social space—the conceptions of government, policy makers, Council, funders—were in conflict with Monika’s perceptions. Monika feels ‘people struggle because of no have place. There is services who can help you, but there is [they are of a] different culture,’ and therefore lack understanding. And this is important, in the early stages of settlement at least. Experts, on the other hand, are sceptical of the value of single minority group centres, believing they undermine social cohesion. The third spatial process, lived space, is space creatively lived, which includes the clandestine or underground side of social life. This is ‘space as it might be, fully lived space (l’espace veçu) which bursts forth as ... ‘moments’ of presence.’ ‘It is derived from both historical sediments within the everyday environment and from utopian elements that shock one into a new conception of the spatialisation of social life’ (Shields, 1999: 160-161). It is the space that is directly lived through images and symbols, which ‘often structure problem definitions and thus influence the sort of solutions that are thought of as being possible and achievable” (p.166). Lived space is an ‘essential terrain of struggle on the way to realising ourselves as ‘total persons’ (p.164). This Nietzschean ideal of the total or whole person is

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the goal of the life project, which emerges from lived space and ‘troubles the settled compromise of everyday life’ (p.125-6).

Returning to the spiral mirrors in Monika’s living room with Lefebvre’s triadic dialectic of space in mind we see that what Monika is able to finely conceive and express in the process of cognitive and affective engagement with these objects is that some of the instinctive impulses of her ‘total person’ are in profound conflict with her life project—the family project and the business project which is an extension of it, including problem definitions and perceived solutions (lack of expertise/undertaking training, the need for community space/the search for funding/funders’ reluctance to entertain ideas of a Roma or even Czechoslovakian Centre, etc). On the one hand there is ‘this passion to help people’, and on the other, the understanding that ‘because of this I cannot like be live’—a tension between the utopian social impulses of family, goodness, and altruism and the powerful individuating and individualising draw of ‘nature’, freedom, the unsanctioned. The triadic tension in Monika’s spatial world—between perceived, conceived, and lived space—leads to feelings of being ‘stuck there’: ‘It’s like I always want to run away from here, but something still hold me.’

For Lefebvre, such real-world contradictions can only be understood through dialectical thinking, whereby the contradictions are seen to be sublated, transformed, brought to a higher level, though still containing the germ of a new contradiction. Sublation denotes creative activity, an act, a ‘realisation’. And this possibility of realisation through action (the project) exists in the indefinite, in the space between contradictions, where there is always risk, the prospect of failure, and at the same time a possibility—a promise (Schmid, 2008: 31). Monika’s project, of which the writing of the business plan is a central part, holds such promise and risk. One way or another it will transform the current contradiction, raising it to a higher level, while also and inevitably introducing the germ of a new contradiction. There, according to the dialectic, is no stasis in life.

Bachelard believed that ‘[a] project is short-term oneirism, and while it gives free play to the mind, the soul does not find in it its vital expression’ (1958: 81). It remains to be seen whether this understanding of the relationship between expert opinion, life project, and the ‘poetic’ impulses of ‘fully lived space’ turns out to be apt in Monika’s case, or whether the life project leads to satisfactory sublation of the current contradictions.

Before leaving the issue of the mirrors, given the aims of this paper, it is worthwhile investigating more closely the process of Monika’s ‘material engagement’ with the objects and the role they play in shaping her perception, understanding, feelings about, and communication of her uncomfortable position vis a vis her life project.

Reasoning processes, as we saw in Section 3.4.2, require stable representations, and since these processes sometimes involve complex manipulations of conceptual structure, the structure must be represented in a way that allows some parts to be manipulated, while other parts remain stable

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(Hutchins, 2005: 1557). One way to achieve conceptual stability is by means of cultural models, and in the earlier examples of trees and butterflies this function was clearly present (though there are other processes, including metaphorical processes, at work there). A second way to increase stability is by linking conceptual structure with material structure to produce a third kind of structure, a conceptual blend. Again, as we saw in Section 3.4.4 and in this section, blending can be achieved by representing material entities through spoken or written structures—as in the texts inside the front and back doors of Monika’s house. But stability can also be achieved through a more fundamental form of conceptual blending in which conceptual structures residing ‘inside minds’ are linked with cultural models embodied in material objects in the environment, i.e. ‘material anchors’ (Hutchins, 2005), since material anchors stabilise thinking so that manipulation of other cognitive elements can take place.

In Monika’s spiral mirrors we have an interesting example of material anchoring and of the role played by objects in constituting ‘an important form of thinking’ (Malafouris, 2013:105). We can hypothesise the process. First, Monika sees her body reflected in the spiral mirrors. Her body, ‘caught’ in the mirrors, is at once fragmented by them and transformed into their helical shape. This static shape is then given energy and direction by means of ‘fictive motion’ (Fauconnier, 1997; Langacker, 1987; Talmy, 1995). As in the sentence, ‘The road runs down to the sea’, a configuration of correspondences between the features of a static scene (a pre-conceptual image-schema structure) and the shape of a particular form of motion (a moving trajector) lead to a blending of material and conceptual structures which creates a third, blended structure—a road which runs, a mirror which is a vortex (Hutchins, 2005: 1563). As Fauconnier observes of fictive motion, ‘This is a remarkable mode of expression: It conveys motion and immobility at the same time. Objective immobility is expressed along with perceptual or conceptual motion’ (1997: 177). In Monika’s case, the spiral shape of the mirror visually imprisons her, ‘capturing’ her fragmented image within its spatial bounds, a face seen through bars. This provides cognition with its stabilising material structure. Then, perhaps simultaneously, the spiral assumes the fictive motion of a vortex. Here, the centrifugal force of the vortex, unlike the spiral, is not a material structure currently available in the environment but a conceptual structure found in memory, a cultural model based on perceptual experience—the vortex is something Monika will see every time she pours liquid down the kitchen sink or empties the bath. It is important to note here that in this process the object (the mirror) is constituted as a meaningful entity, not for what it represents but for what it does and what brings forth (cf. Malafouris, 2013: 104). Like the clothes hooks and shoe rack in Monika’s hall, the mirror is an enactive not a representational sign. And what it brings forth in the new space of the blended concept is the possibility—or automaticity (Hutchins, 2005: 1559)—of a new inference. In this case, Monika’s inference is that being caught in the vortex of the mirror is affectively identical (‘how I feel’) to being caught in the vortex of her life project (‘Just don’t know how to get out’, ‘I feel like a prisoner’, ‘something still hold me’).

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In this issue of the mirrors we can see clearly how embodied and spatial relations (perceptual and sensorimotor experience of shape, force, and containment) have become not ‘surrogates’(c.f. Clark, 2010) but prototypical models for conceptual relations, ‘enhancing and tightening conceptual blends in a memorable and durable manner’ (Malafouris, 2013: 104) and promoting inferences which help crystallize understanding and emotion. We can also see why some authors feel justified in arguing for extended cognition, since the mirrors here might be seen to be a part of the world which ‘functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process’ (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 8). The same can be said of the texts, objects, and spatial (re)structuring of the domestic environment discussed earlier, which through Monika’s material engagement are both the products of physical, cognitive, and affective action and the catalysts and shapers of those forms of action. That is, the objects and spaces are ‘made’ by Monika and at the same time contribute to making Monika what and who she is.

As for Monika hiding in her business plans, in the endeavour to acquire funding (‘Maybe I just hide in there’), this appears to be a different type of conceptual mapping: a conceptual metaphor based on common patterns of perceptual experience (container/contained, visibility/ invisibility, freedom/ constraint). It is however thematically linked to Monika’s perceived space (entrapment within the vortex of the life project) and the impulses of her fully lived space (space as it might be, bursting free in moments of presence). Many of the other objects and spatial structurings in Monika’s home are also linked to this theme, including the pale green image barely discernible on the wall above her bed (Figure 8). ‘It’s fairy, and she blow dandelion.’ And the seeds fly off from her open hand, and float away in the air, free. ‘She’s magical creature in a good way. And if she bless–. You know, nature.’

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Figure 8

And then there are the many colourful butterflies on Monika’s bathroom walls (Figure 9). ‘So I think maybe that’s why I have so many tree and butterflies. To be free at least.’

Figure 9

Home is not a homogeneous place but rather a series of places each with its own character, memories, and dreams. As the assemblage theory of space ( Hartshorne, 1939; DeLanda, 2006) suggests, no part is necessary or preordained, everything is contingent, and uniqueness depends not on the individual parts but on the particular configuration and interaction of these parts. In Monika’s home we have seen place as an assemblage, whose parts (children’s spaces, Monika’s spaces, shared spaces, spaces with flexible and overlapping uses, spaces for work, play, rest, relaxation, cooking, eating, etc.) are physically and informationally structured by objects, including texts. These objects cue and constrain/enable bodily, cognitive, affective, and volitional action as a result of a process of material engagement between spaces, objects, and humans. The process involves, among other things, metaphorical mapping and conceptual blending by means of which cognition is anchored and stabilised in the material, and new inferences are thus made possible. MET suggests ways in which objects, spaces, and people (brains and extra-cranial bodies) may be seen to be linked to the world in

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action as simultaneously they are enmeshed in systems distributed across the scales of space and time. Viewed in this way the (re)structuring and assemblage of Monika’s domestic spaces evidences historical and imagined trajectories which provide patterns, if not inevitabilities, to the kinds of things brought together to constitute the family home and the people who inhabit it, making them what and who they are. One might call the transformations which take place in the course of this process—which at a higher scale level is the process of migration and settlement—spatial translations, as humans engage with material objects (as representational and enactive signs, things which do things) to (re)create social space in new and challenging environments. In addition, one may see material engagement—as evidenced in the case of the mirrors, for example—as yet another form of intersemiotic and intermodal translanguaging.

What this case study shows, I believe, is that ethnographic LLS informed by ecological theories of cognition allows us to trace the links between social space and the objects which fill it and social action, bodily, cognitive, affective, and volitional. It also shows that research in domestic spaces, perhaps more than in any other kind of social space, has the power to enhance ethnography by taking us nearer to the ideal of seeing the world through our participants’ eyes. In the following section I show how this LLS, carried out in a domestic setting, and the ecological theories employed in that study, threw additional light on research in other domains of the participant’s life and on the ways in which she communicates or fails to communicate across languages and cultures.

5 Translanguaging and Cultural Transformation in a Business Plan

So I find myself here as a kind of counsellor. Like, I support them through my talking.

5.1 Introduction

In Section 5 of our report on the Heritage Phase of the TLang project (Baynham et al., 2016) we focused on the development and writing of Monika’s business plan. We did this for a number of reasons, each of which was significantly informed by the LLS outlined in the last section. First and foremost, as I have already indicated, a central concern for Monika was to transform her aspirations into reality: that is, to translate them from the realm of verbalism, verbiage and empty words, into social space, to spatialise them. Her aspirations were for the development of a Roma space, a project we saw as linked to Monika’s personal history and cultural heritage. After finding her benefits withdrawn and herself designated ‘self-employed’, turning her ideas into a money-making business became a greater imperative for Monika and the main focus of her activity during and beyond the

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research period. Second, taking a ‘distributed’ perspective, we very soon realised that the business plan lay at the heart of a web of people, places, objects, texts, and discourses which at the time constituted the fabric of Monika’s everyday life. Third, we also discovered that the process of developing the business plan involved a particular dynamic, one which seemed of great relevance to our enquiry, involving as it did a collision of cultures which were not only different but in some ways perhaps untranslatable, and therefore irreconcilable. Here again the deeper understanding of Monika’s lifeworld, mental and material, gained through the domestic LLS oriented and enhanced our enquiry.

As for the business plan itself, inspired by Lefebvre, we found it useful here to take a spatial perspective, viewing the actual digital form Monika was required to complete in order to gain funding for her social enterprise project (see Appendix 1) as a ‘contact zone’, a social space where ‘disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 1992: 4). At stake in this encounter were not only material outcomes but the status of the inherited backgrounds against which the individuals and groups involved made sense of the world and distinguished between true and false, those exempt-from-doubt beliefs which form the basis for action and thought which Wittgenstein referred to as the ‘foundation walls … carried by the whole house’(Wittgenstein, 1969: 94). This seemed an apt and aptly spatial metaphor through which to approach our overall topic: migration, translanguaging, and the transformation of cultures. Migration is, after all, an issue of space —losing and regaining—and always it raises the question Wittgenstein asked of himself: ‘What if you had to change your opinion on even these most fundamental things?’(p.512). In following the development of the business plan we were keen to discover if Monika was ever in a position to respond with the philosopher: ‘You don’t have to change. That is just what their being “fundamental” is’ (p.512). And if so, what was the cost? A full account of this study is can be found in Baynham et al, 2016. Here I provide a brief summary with the aim of showing how analysis was informed and enriched by the LLS carried out in Monika’s home and by the ecological theories which oriented it.

It is worth mentioning that along with our overarching aim of gaining a better understanding of translanguaging and cultural transformation in public and private settings, we were in this phase of the project specifically concerned with the question of heritage. We wanted to know what sorts of things emerging in our data would make us want to call them ‘heritage’, whether these things problematized our current understanding of the concept, how they pushed us redefine it, and how this redefined heritage fared in the interactions we were witnessing: whether it was resource or impediment to action; abandoned, retained, or adapted, disappearing in some contexts, reappearing in others. And finally, we wanted to know the role and fate of this redefined heritage in the process of migration, settlement, and integration.

In what follows I focus on four interactions. The first two involve agents of organisations supporting Monika in developing her business plan: Parmi of Bright Ideas Fund (Leeds City Council) and Sharon

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of Integrity Endeavour. The third and fourth interactions involve Jolana, the multilingual researcher on the Leeds TLang team. Analysis of these interactions reveals how, in supporting Monika, Parmi, Sharon, and Jolana, and the extended ecologies they inhabit, as well as the entrepreneurial ecology of business plan itself (represented here as digital object), all play a part in shaping the proposal. It is an object lesson in the meeting of different cultures, of the imperative to adapt to ecological niches (linguistic, cognitive, cultural, etc.) and of the collective agency of distributed systems.

5.2 Coming up with ‘the big idea’

Parmi is a Commissioning Officer working on a Council funded project. She is currently helping Monika develop ideas for a business plan so that she can apply for Council funding. Her main purpose in this meeting is to get Monika to narrow things down to ‘one single idea’. Monika is unable to do this. Her ‘biggest idea’ for self-employment, she says, is a ‘dance school’; but during the course of this long discussion she moves on from the dance school to:

Some office where I can support clients with my advocacy... Do some parties... People will come to me and I can help them call job seekers... I will do like drop-ins... My job’s gonna be get them some ESOL classes... Zumba classes... Carnival... Advising them... Take them somewhere... Support them to go to GP... To be their hand.

Finally, Monika introduces the issue of a dedicated space, the sine qua non of her project.

My little office like this something [i.e. like the one they are in now.] Little computer, one phone. You know whaddi mean?

Parmi once again encourages Monika to ‘start with one small idea.’

Look at one thing at a time... You're not getting paid... You need the money... You can't start your own business unless you've got some money and are gonna make some profit or you’re gonna put it back into the [business]... Monitoring. Looking at how many people you’re visiting... Gathering that evidence and being able to say that actually we've saved this organisation this much money because otherwise interpreting would have cost this much.’

Monika expresses frustration with these requirements, which prevent her from addressing what she sees as the real, immediate, and diverse needs of her clients.

Two years and I–. There seems to do nothing [nothing has been achieved]. Because they sometimes need the person [like me] and I always tell them, “This is not my

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job. I cannot go with you.” And then they feel like abandoned.

Monika’s desire is to provide holistic support for her clients, unrestricted by bureaucratic or financial considerations and her inability to just get on and do this frustrates her. (In passing we may note that in the light of the ethnographic data the word abandoned may have a particular resonance for Monika, one presumably not felt equally by Parmi).

Parmi, for her part, appreciates and believes she understands Monika’s commitment to ‘her community’, and yet she is frustrated by her ‘inability to focus’ on ‘one single idea’ and to take a systematic approach to realising it. At root this is an encounter between conflicting and mutually incomprehensible cultures, the human and the commercial-bureaucratic. Parmi, here, is a representative of the latter, whatever her private concerns. Monika, in contrast is a member of a minority group which is suspicious of and as far as possible lives outside bureaucratic reach. Moreover, her understanding of the human is grounded in family relations: ‘Because we gypsy for us is most important... most important thing what you have in this life. Nothing else. It’s just family.’ So throughout the interaction, the demands of the human and the commercial-bureaucratic persist, along with their antithetical tendencies – to relate on the basis of affect and to treat as whole and immediately present, or to conceptualise, atomise, commodify, schedule, and defer. However sensitively it is mediated by Parmi the commercial-bureaucratic fails to embrace or comprehend the lived experience and underlying assumptions of the ‘other’ due to its insistence on the narrow circumscriptions of aims, financial accountability, and profitability.

In this interaction we see what happens when conflicting worldviews collide in the contact zone of the business plan and the social spaces (places, people, objects, discourses, etc.) connected with it. Throughout the conversation individuals anticipate one another’s interactional responses, and in some cases complete them, without ever achieving what Husserl called intersubjectivity, being in the place where the Other is (Duranti, 2009). Communicating across cultures, very little of the other’s world gets translated.

5.3 Designing a package

The next interaction took place a month after the meeting with Parmi. It involved Sharon, Monika’s designated contact at Integrity Endeavour, a local agency which provides help and advice to people seeking employment or launching a business. Sharon, like Parmi, is at pains to help Monika adapt to the ecological niche of the business plan and her first job is to make Monika see the fundamental importance of money.

The question is who’s gonna pay for it... this is the point I’ve made. When that money is finished, where is the next batch of money gonna come from? You see

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what I mean?

Sharon’s second aim to is to teach Monika how to package her services in order to acquire this all important money.

You’ll need to find the wages. So the point I’m gonna make to you is–. I hear exactly what you’re saying but what I’m gonna... what I’m I’m gonna help you to do is package it in such a way that, for example, you’re gonna tie it into the benefits benefits agencies. You’re gonna say to them, ‘I’ve got a package here.’ ‘Cause they’re struggling and they want to get people off benefits and you’re gonna say to them, ‘Look at this amazing package I’ve got here. If you refer people to me I can get people off benefits by doing a, b, c, d, e.’ You see what I mean? Or you package or have a package here because the GPs are struggling because people from our communities and your communities, they keep on going for antidepressants. They can’t sleep. They this and that. So the GPs are spending a lot of money on GP visits. If you go to the GP and say with the package you’ve got here you can cut down the amount of people going to them. ‘If you refer people to me.’ That’s what I’m gonna help you to think about… that’s what I’m gonna help you see

Monika’s response to this, ‘My big idea was like if I could be a real advocate,’ stands in stark contrast to Sharon’s packaging discourse, with its emphasis on presentation. Elsewhere Monika’s responses seem equally tangential – though in fact they are restatements of her fundamental impulses. And the conversation proceeds in the same manner without any real sign of convergence in understanding, in spite of Sharon’s claim ‘I hear exactly what you're saying.’ When Sharon, in her role as modifier of perceptions, says to Monika, her sister, and her sister’s partner, ‘The three of you need to think as business people,’ she, like Parmi before her, is articulating the underlying assumptions of the third sector discourse in an era of neo-liberalism: services have to be packaged and sold, and nothing can happen without money.

5.4 Jolana and the business plan

Finally we come to the writing of the business plan. This was undertaken in several stages. In two early attempts Monika was supported by Jolana.

5.4.1 Earlier draft

When Jolana arrived at Monika’s home, Monika showed her an A4 pad with her handwritten notes for her business plan. These include a rough design for a building with space downstairs for an office and space upstairs for activities. Space is thus is an integral part of Monika’s conceptualisation of her

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project, even in its earliest stages. As for the conditions under which this early draft was produced, Jolana wrote in her fieldnotes: ‘The conversation was often going off-topic (talking about children, partners, Migration Counsel) and I felt I should give it more structure, so I took a pen and M’s notepad and started writing down the frame of their business.’ At this stage there had been no discussion in the TLang team of viewing the business plan as a contact zone—that is, as a social space. It is interesting then that from the outset Jolana writes of ‘structuring’ and ‘frame’. She too, apparently, is seeking to spatialise Monika’s ‘pure abstraction’, her (so far) empty words. And this structuring takes place both conceptually and on paper: the pen, the paper, the bodies that see, speak write, and interact with other bodies, and the concepts produced mutually constitute one another in a process of material engagement which lies at the centre of vastly distributed systems.

5.4.2 Later draft

During a later visit by Jolana to Monika’s house the pair once again get to grips with the business plan. Monika has been sent a nine-page Word template, which Jolana opens up on her laptop. The document, titled ‘My Business Plan’, contains 12 headings with frames to hold applicants’ responses, and accompanying notes to guide them through the process (see Appendix 1). The text is clearly designed to be simple, jargon-free, and user-friendly, but responses must fit the business plan’s frames, both spatial and cognitive. Monika still has trouble adapting her words and ideas to these frames. So Jolana and she combine resources to jointly construct responses.

In the transcript turns are numbered, and where interlingual translanguaging is evident, the turn is reproduced in italics below, with the translated text in bold. Brief pauses are marked with (.). Commentary appears in double brackets.

Transcription conventions

(.) short pause↑ rising intonation(laughs) laughter, etc. (( )) editorial comments<italics bold> translated text in <angle brackets, italics bold for Cz/Sl>

1. J Ok erm my personal aims and objectives erm (.) jo tak tady v těch2. v tom vysvětlení pod tim like to prove your capabilities provide security3. for your family or something you have wanted to do for a long time but

just4. not had the chance so it’s like what you want to get out of it5. <Ok erm my personal aims and objectives erm yea so here in this

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6. explanation underneath like to prove your capabilities provide security for7. your family or something you have wanted to do for a long time but just not had8. the chance so it’s like what you want to get out of it>

9. M tak erm hm how to say it hm I want to people stand s-10. be same as me change their future11. <well erm hm how to say it hm I want to people stand s-

12. be same as me change their future>13. J I want14. M I don’t know how to say it15. ((Monika’s partner laughs))16. M no I mean like my job gonna be change them (.) like they in that I was17. in that position where they are now yea ↑18. J yea19. M and I wanna show them they can change (.) they can be same like me

working20. look after family and be strong (.) I mean this way I don’t mean like me21. I’m not good role model (.) some ways (sighs)22. J ((typing, muttering)) community and23. M you know what I mean24. J ((typing)) manage to find my way to employment ((reading out what

she’s25. just written)) I have been in in a similar situation like many people26. in the community and I managed to find my way to employment27. M and look after (.) look after your kids28. J and29. M stable family or how to say30. J and stable family life31. M yea without chaos32. J without any (.) erm (.) jo dobře (.) a co z toho chceš pro sebe tady třeba

jako erm33. <without any (.) erm (.) yea (.) all right (.) and what do you want

34. for yourself out of it here for example like erm>35. M pro sebe↑36. <for myself>

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37. J pro sebe co tim chceš dokázat sama sama jakoby víšco38. <for yourself what you want to get yourself yourself like you

know what>39. M že môžem pomáhať ľudom alebo já nevim že môžem zmenit životy ludiom40. <that I can help people or I don’t know I can change people’s lives>41. J ((JH composes and types an answer to this question))

42. ((reading)) I like I like helping people people to make their lives better43. better and I also like this what they say here er something or something44. you have wanted to do for a long time but just not had the chance I think45. that applies to you as well no↑ (.) so I c- I would put something like

(typing)46. I have worked with the community for a long time as a volunteer47. and also on paid position and now and through through funding (.)

funding (.)48. funding hmmm (.) through funding jo počkej (.) že si s nima pracovala dlouhou dobu49. <I have worked with the community for a long time as a volunteer

50. and also on paid position and now and through through funding (.) funding (.)51. funding hmmm (.) through funding yea wait (.) that you have worked52. with them for a long time>

53. M ale němohla som im provide every any kind of service what they looking for54. <but I could not provide every any kind of service what they looking for>55. J jo to je přesně vono

56. <yea that’s exactly it>57. M because of lack of money or how to say

This extract, relating to the applicant’s ‘personal aims and objectives’, contains one of the clearest and most comprehensive statements of Monika’s life project in our data set. Jolana’s explains: ‘So it’s like what you want to get out of it’ (4). Monika struggles at first to put this into words (9-14). She speaks of her ambition to show people that they can change, be like her, find work, take care of their family, be strong (16-19), though she acknowledges she’s not an ideal role model (20, 23). Jolana (24-26) translates Monika’s musings into the language of the business plan: ‘similar situation’, ‘many people in the community’, ‘managed to find my way to employment’. This is a type of translanguaging which Baynham has referred to elsewhere (Baynham et al 2015) as interdiscursive translanguaging. Just as interlingual translanguaging involves moving between one language and another, so

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interdiscursive translanguaging can be understood as mediating or interpreting a discourse to someone who is outside it, as Jolana does for Monika here.

Viewed in the context of the LLS two recurrent themes from Monika’s world view come to light here. The first is altruism—as opposed to free-market entrepreneurism. Monika touched on this in the LLS: ‘My passion is help. I cannot say I do not care about money. I care about money. But I don’t care that much about money, you know? Mostly for me is–. For me it’s easier for me to help. I don’t know. I always say this: maybe God gave me this passion to help people.’ The second theme is that of stable family life, something she wants to create in her own home and pass on to others as a repertoire of practice: ‘look after your kids’, ‘stable family’, ‘without chaos’ (27, 29, 31).

Then, we come to the heart of the matter. Jolana, apparently feeling that Monika has not answered the original question on ‘aims’, repeats it in Czech (to ensure comprehension?): ‘And what do you want for yourself out of it here for example.’ Monika still seems bewildered (35): For myself? Jolana can put it no more simply (37-38): ‘for yourself what you want to get yourself yourself like you know what.’ Monika’s reprise of her earlier response (‘that I can help people or I don’t know I can change people’s lives’) suggests a breakdown in understanding. The distance between the requirement of the business plan and Monika’s own subject position is at this point unbridgeable. Translanguaging, even supported by interdiscursive translanguaging with an expert mediator, is not always successful. Here there appear to be differing conceptions of ‘self’ at play: self as individuated and independent (the ‘self’ of the business plan) and Monika’s social self, interdependent with and sustained by interaction with others. As other writers have suggested, without clear ideas of self—one’s own and others’—social action, indeed meaning making, become difficult and sometimes impossible.

[A]ny social encounter … has as its logical first and interactionally ongoing highest priority to position the participants in the social encounter in relation to each other’ (Scollon, 1998: 33)

[I]n order to make sense of the signs in a text the reader is obliged to adopt “a subject position” in relation to it ’(Chandler, 2007: 187).

However powerful a statement of Monika’s life project this is, it is not yet a business plan. It begins to become one when Jolana, drawing on the template guidelines which she had earlier read out (3-4) (‘something you have wanted to do for a long time but just not had a chance’) in order to shape her own text (46) (‘I have worked with the community for a long time as a volunteer’) introduces the notion of funding: ‘and now and through through funding (.) funding (.) funding hmmm (.) through funding’, as if aware of the importance of this point and not wanting to forget it. Jolana continues until (53-54) Monika comes in with the missing piece: ‘ale němohla som im (but I could not)’ then moves into the form-filling frame, and correspondingly to third-sector-speak-English: ‘provide every, any kind of service what they looking for.’ Jolana, realizing how well this aligns with the guidelines

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(44) (‘but just not had a chance’), acknowledges the fact (55-56): ‘Yea that’s exactly it.’ And Monika finally comes on message (57) with ‘because of lack of money’. Here, finally, we hear the voices of Sharon and the others who have supported Monika, as well as the authors of the form, the policy-makers, and the larger discourses ranged behind them. Monika is finally thinking—or at least speaking—like a business person, recognising at last that her ‘dream’ must be presented to funders in terms which they can understand. Altruism must be monetized, and a lifeworld based on the ideal of the family must open itself up to commercial transactionalism.

5.5 Business Plan: Conclusions

Carrying out the LLS in Monika’s home gave us forms and levels of insight which, I believe, would have been hard to gain in other settings, certainly, hard to gain so quickly. In particular, it gave us a broad perspective on, to use Bachelard’s terms, the ‘topography’ of Monika’s ‘intimate being’, and an understanding of the key features of that topography: family, the values of the care home, learning from experience, personal freedom. It also gave us a clearer understanding of heritage in the process of migration and settlement—the passing on of things of value, mental and material, learned through experience, to children and others. Our understanding of how this topography related to systems involving people, places, objects, texts, discourses, ideologies, and so on, distributed over a much vaster topographies of time and space was stimulated and enriched by the ecological theories of cognition and space we employed in the LLS. These same theories helped us hypothesise ways in which mental and material worlds interact and constitute one another. In this section I have tried to show how these theories and understandings can support enquiry into other, more public domains of social life by focusing on the writing of the business plan and by doing so to illustrate how LLS can help pursue TLang’s aims by enhancing analysis of the fine-grain technologies of social interaction, rather than merely evidencing social processes in written or multimodal signage.

So what did the LLS, along with its theoretical underpinnings, bring to the analysis of the production of the business plan? First it helped highlight the business plan as a focal centre within a distributed system, and it led to the framing of the process of production of the business plan and the physical (digital) form itself as spatial phenomena: specifically, as contact zones in which different cultures grapple with one another in highly asymmetrical power relations. Then, it allowed us to say some quite precise things about one of those cultures (Monika’s) and, by contrast, the other (the neo-liberal commercial bureaucratic). For example, the kind of social space Monika aspires to produce in her life project (via the business plan), is, I would argue, one dominated by the dimension of lived experience (lived space), the experience of the ‘whole person’, whose impulse is to burst through the normative orders of the business plan (‘It’s so silly’) and to relate directly to the whole and irreducible ‘other’. The world of the business plan, in contrast, is dominated by the dimension of conceived space: fragmenting (‘one thing at a time’), homogenising (‘integrating’), commodifying, transactionalising.

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The ecological perspective carried over from the LLS then prompted us to see the process of production of the business plan—the grappling of contrasting cultures—as an issue of adaptation to ecological (cultural) niches, voluntary or enforced, and that adaptation was in fact transformation involving learning (another term for cognitive adaptation) and the translation of meaning. In studying the production of the business plan we had the opportunity to scrutinise the kinds of changes (superficial or profound) that take place in an individual’s portable culture as it comes into contact with – and comes under pressure to adapt to – the new cultural niche. One thing which became clear: the meanings associated with the spaces of the business plan had been constructed by those with power (Cresswell, 2015; Harvey, 1996), while Monika, hoping to receive funding, was poorly positioned to resist the business plan’s inflexible norms. The business plan thus became ‘a tool in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of relations of domination’ (Cresswell, 2015: 46) with Monika defined by its spatiality (competent or incompetent) and trapped within its grid (cf. Soja 1996: 110).

Finally, what we learned from the LLS helped frame our assessment of the outcomes of the production of the business plan, placing at the heart of our enquiry the question: How far can a culture (an established way of doing things distinctive of a particular group or individual) and the perhaps unformulated and exempted-from-doubt assumptions upon which this culture rests be translated and/or transformed into another culture which rests on quite a different set of propositions? And what is the cost of this process? We have noted the distributed system which enmeshes the business plan, promoting, financing, subsidizing and regulating activity such as entrepreneurship through cultural tools and institutional agents through which the state works to reproduce state-like thinking, acting, perceiving and feeling in everyday life (cf. Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Following Monika through this process we identified some shifts in her alignment to the business plan. Whether these represent superficial strategic compliance or fundamental transformation only time will tell.

Nevertheless, fundamental transformation was a clear goal, which is why funding applicants are encouraged to sit on panels to assess one another’s proposals: to help them see the world through the funder’s eyes. There is little evidence, however, that funders carry out corresponding exercises to help themselves gain insight into their client’s foundational assumptions. Until things change the environment will be what it is, and those wishing to survive and prosper in it must adapt. ‘Start small and do one thing at a time’ may sound like good advice. It does not, however, correspond to the lived experience of, for example, parents, who must address children’s’ needs holistically (not food or clothing, health or education). Nor is the assertion that nothing can happen without money beyond challenge. As anthropologist David Graeber (2011) has shown, money (and debt, which appears on the scene at the same time) have subtly but fundamentally changed the basis of human relations by placing them on an economic (precisely measurable, arithmetic, transactional) rather than a moral footing. The development of Monika’s business plan provides a striking example of this dialectic. It is

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a case study richly informed by the LLS and the wide range of interdisciplinary methods and theories which underpinned it.

6 Conclusions

The LLS carried out as part of the TLang project aspired to go beyond merely accounting for the superdiverse settings in which the face-to-face and digitally mediated interactions of our key participants took place. They aspired to make a worthwhile contribution to the linguistic ethnographic analysis of those interactions by showing how social action and social space, including the objects which fill it, are in fact mutually constitutive. By drawing on ecological theories of mind and the theory of material engagement our studies deconstructed the boundaries between minds, bodies, and worlds (better thought of as brains, extra-cranial bodies, and environments), and showed how language and thought are grounded in bodily experience of the material world, how space and material objects play a central role in cognition (and volition and affect), and how the things we make, use, and live among make us who and what we are. In doing this we proposed a comprehensive, unified theory of social life, taking into account the three dimensions—cognitive, embodied, and spatial-material—as well as their mutually constitutive relations, and thus responded to Steffensen’s assertion that ‘the entire extended ecology will have to become our unit of analysis’(2011: 205).

In this paper I tried to illustrate these things by means of a case study. The study focused on a domestic setting (new ground for LLS) and demonstrated the value of exploring such settings, not only for their extraordinary capacity to throw light on the private world of the individual but on other, more public domains of their lives too. The case study also showed that projects combining investigations of spaces socially produced as public and private can provide a broader, richer field of enquiry for tracing and understanding the processes involved in translanguaging, translation, and cultural transformation—explaining why these things sometimes take place, and why sometimes they don’t.

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8 Appendix: The Business Plan

My Business Plan

My Business Idea.

Before starting any business it’s important to have a clear understanding of what exactly your business will do. Many people have an idea for a new product or service but when it comes down to it, it just isn’t viable. You must differentiate your idea from all the others out there. Will it fill a genuine gap in the market, building on its Unique Selling Point (USP)? This is where you let people know just what your business activities will be. Don’t be too restrictive in your idea.

My Business Aims & Objectives.

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Name.

Business Name.

Private

Address.

Postcode.

Tel. No.

Mobile.

E-mail.

Most people, when asked why they go into business, will reply, “To make money of course.” But you must have some other Aims & Objectives. “To take control of my life,” or, “to achieve something I have always wanted”.

My Personal Aims & Objectives.

You should give a little background on you and what you wish to achieve by starting your own business, i.e. to prove your capabilities, provide security for your family, or something you have wanted to do for a long time but just not had a chance. People like to see that you have enthusiasm and commitment.

Key Personnel.

Who will be involved with the business and why, what will be their roles? It is a good idea to look to the future also if you are considering employing anyone. Don’t forget to include these in your Cash Flow Projection.

My Personal/Business Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats

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Don’t confuse this with your Personal Aims & Objectives. This section covers just what it says on the tin. So just focus on your own S. W. O. Ts that you will bring to your business or what you may need help with to make your business successful. It might help if you invite someone to help you with this, someone who will be honest with you.

The Businesses Products & Services.

This should be clear and concise. Are you providing a service or buying and selling products?

Price lists, Menus, Brochures will be a great help to people you are looking for help from.

My Pricing Structure.

This is a tough one. You must consider your pricing carefully if you want to get into the market. You will need to know your costs before you can arrive at the correct sales price. Your prices need to be keen but don’t fall into the trap of being too cheap. Do your homework and borrow a few prices from the competition and adjust to give you the edge. This will show whether or not you can deliver at a price that is suitable for all concerned. (DON’T SELL FOR MEDALS)

My Market Research. 67

No-one should consider starting a business unless they have done their Market Research relating to their product or service.

This should cover: the market size, the competition, the area you will cover, the customers you will be dealing with and how you will deal with them.

Remember Richard Branson did not invent Airlines, he just made them better. Don’t forget there are lots of people out there offering the same as you, so how will yours will be better?

My Marketing.

How will you get your business known? I.e. Mail Shots, Internet, Posters, Yellow Pages even just word of mouth. Is the market place ready for your product or service? It’s no good thinking about this after you have started. By that time it’s too late. A good business will have an action plan based over several months rather than a scatter gun approach.

Your Competitors Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths Weaknesses

If you have done your market research correctly you will know this and will have decided how to deal with it. Don’t look upon the competition as enemies, you

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may have to use or work with them one day.

The Business Premises.

Decide where you are going to work from. If it’s the back bedroom remember your heating and lighting bills will increase. You can run a business from home but you need permission to do so. Commercial premises can be expensive and involve other costs such as rates and services charges so check and remember to put this in your cash flow projections.

Funding Required For

List all the equipment you need to start with and any that you will need as the business expands over say 12 months with realistic costs and don’t forget VAT, where applicable. All estimates should be included.

(See Excel workbook to aid with the below, using the tabs along the bottom)

Personal Expenditure

Very few businesses make much money in the first year. Use the attached form to work out how much you and your family need to survive over the first twelve months.

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These are the funds you need to keep you and your family going whilst your business gets off the ground or worse still if it stalls. So be practical. You will still need to keep a roof over your head, i.e. holidays, birthdays, the odd drink. You will be surprised when you add them all up.

Sales Forecast

On the back of the market research you have undertaken you should now be in a position to estimate your level of sales and hence the amount of income you will generate. The attached table will help you think about the number of units you think you will sell on a monthly basis across your product range at your chosen price.

Cash Flow Forecast (2 years)

Understanding how cash will move in your business is very important. Using your Sales Forecast for the income side you now need to estimate the costs that you will incur on a monthly basis when running the business. If you have costs which are directly related to each sale (e.g. purchase of stock) these should have been included within the Sales Forecast and you should bring the figure forward from there.

Personal Profile

Please take the time to tell us about yourself and what makes you tick and how this will benefit your business. This will help us in our assessment of your Business Plan. Remember the more information you can give the better for us all. If you need help just ask.

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