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Semiotic Review Semiotic Review 9: Images - article published November 2020 https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/63 Spectral Signage: A Discussion with Steven Feld Steven Feld [email protected] Meghanne Barker [email protected] Constantine V. Nakassis [email protected] Figure 0. Costas Nakassis (CN; top-left), Meghanne Barker (MB; top-right), and Steven Feld (SF; bottom); 4 May 2020, online in Chicago, Illinois, London, England, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Preface. This discussion with Steven Feld occurred online on May 4, 2020 for around two-and-a-half hours. It covers a wide range of topics: Feld’s training and background; the relations of linguistic anthropology, semiotics, linguistics, film studies, visual anthropology, musicology, and acoustemology; linguistic poetics, iconic power, and visual form; spectralism and the trace; relationality and interspeciality; the Anthropocene, the atomic bomb, and COVID-19; among other topics. This conversation builds upon Feld’s keynote lecture, “Spectral Signage” for the workshop Sense and Semiosis: Bridging Conversations between Linguistic and Visual Anthropology (September 26–28, 2019, at the University of Chicago, organized by Constantine V. Nakassis and Meghanne Barker, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation), as well as the discussion that followed. A recording of the online conversation was transcribed by Emily Kuret and Constantine V. Nakassis, and edited by Meghanne Barker, Constantine V. Nakassis, and Steven Feld for readability, completeness, and context. References were later added as endnotes, and visual images and sound recordings discussed during the conversation were intercalated into the final text. – Meghanne Barker and Constantine V. Nakassis MB: Steve, it was wonderful to have you join us in September for the Sense and Semiosis workshop and great to have you joining us for this special issue on images. For both of these forums, Costas (Nakassis) and I wanted to bring together linguistic and visual anthropology into a closer dialogue but didn’t want it to be limited only to the visual. Your work on what you’ve called acoustemology is so great in pushing us beyond that. So, to start us off, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about acoustemology as a general approach. SF: Okay, well, I’ll broach that question first from the linguistic side. One of the things that I remember really clearly when I was a graduate student in the early ’70s in linguistics and anthropology was that Indiana University was a very extraordinary place, because Tom Sebeok was there, and there was a world of talking and thinking about the semiotics surrounding Tom. At the same time, Tom had, to put it mildly, difficult relations with folks in anthropology and linguistics. Anthropology at Indiana had “anthropological linguistics.” That was Carl Voegelin’s world, and it was largely Sapirean and it largely related to Native American languages in the Southwest. It was also steeped in the legacy of alums like Dell Hymes, Oswald Werner, and Ken Hale and early streams of linguistic activism about native knowledge. And the linguistics department had the classic divide between the people of, say, the Fred Householder generation, who were really deeply engaged with the legacies of Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield, and then people who had been in the first wave of scholars trained at MIT and UCLA, who were proselytizers for transformational grammar and the study of syntax; and the only language they worked on was English. There were some exceptions to that, like Charles Bird, who was multilingual and who worked with musicians and orators in Mali, in addition to studying Bambara syntax, and who was really deeply engaged with poetics. So, what happened to me was that I had a kind of classic reaction to linguistic anthropology and linguistics and semiotics all at that time, which was all around the question, What about the sound? I mean, think about the early ’70s, how little work there was on prosody. There was work certainly on intonation, like Dwight Bolinger and people like that.1 But it was a world in which the actual sounds of language, and the huge relationship between the spectrum of language sounds and other kinds of sounds in the world—the idea that, you know, language involved listening—this was not really what people were talking about. This was pre-everyone-getting-stoked-up-on-Bakhtin. And, you know, semiotics offered a real area of hope. I mean, here is Tom Sebeok editing books not only on language, not only on cross-species relations and zoosemiotics, but on drum surrogates and speech surrogates in language and all of these language–music relationships.2 And so, I felt a kind of opening from linguistics, and particularly from semiotics, toward the idea that language could be much more about sound, and this was in real distinction to what was a growing kind of consensus there to study syntax. And there was barely any talk about semantics. It was like, you could kind of get a little bit of that for dessert if you did your syntax homework very well. Then Bonnie Kendall, also a Voegelin student, came on to replace him, and brought semantics and the study of homophony and polysemy into the foreground. And that contributed greatly to my thinking about sound as a way of knowing. Ethnomusicology at Indiana was presented through Alan Merriam’s idea of the anthropology of music, and that was really something that came out of functionalist and ’50s, sometimes quite behaviorist, ideas that music starts with something called “conceptualization,” then moves into something called “behavior,” and then it has these things called “contexts” and “functions.” And that was Merriam’s versioning of his mentor, Herskovits’s program for expressive culture. I remember that Merriam had us write a paper in response to the Anthropology of Music, his 1964 book that was a sort of theoretical manifesto that we were all supposed to master. It was in the same semester that I was taking a course with Carl Voegelin on Introduction to Anthropological Linguistics. And the first sentence of my paper responding to Merriam was, “What about an anthropology of sound? What about an anthropology of voice?” That was in 1971. And I think probably that was what got me going with acoustemology and thinking across language and music, poetics and voice, and not wanting to be specific to any one of them. It was what got me particularly interested in all of those forms between speech and song, and all of those ways that the study of music, musical sound, and the study of linguistic sound and sense really could be approached together, approached acoustically, with a focus on the relationship between the materiality of sound and its sociality. And that’s really kind of the birth of acoustemology. It took me twenty years before I used that word. I mean, in the ’70s and ’80s I referred to my work as anthropology of sound or anthropology of voice. It wasn’t until the early ’90s that I introduced the word acoustemology and really tried to focus on ways that we could think through relations between language and music,3 rather than just sort of taking theories from generative grammar and seeing if they could be applied to musical structures, or taking ideas from studies of the formal structure of music and looking at how they were language-like or not language-like.4 It seemed to me that the dominant syntax-driven approach to language and music was totally wrong-headed; that the thing to be looking at was sound. It was Carl Voegelin who realized that I was interested in this, and he turned me on to reading Sapir and made me write an extensive essay on Sapir’s work on sound patterns and symbolism.5 And he turned me on to Roman Jakobson and got me thinking about Jakobson’s work about the grammar of poetry and the poetry of grammar.6 And that’s what got me into iconicity. As soon as I sort of caught on about iconicity with Jakobson, then the acoustemology thing really made sense, because the semiotic plane was a powerful way to create much more of a conversation between linguistic and musical anthropology. The visual part of that also came through Jakobson. But that was a little later. But anyway, that’s a little intellectual genealogy ((laughing)), or a personal genealogy of how those ideas emerged for me. CN: I was going to say, one of the great moments in that Sapir essay, “Sound Patterns in Language,” is where he’s talking about form-feeling, about how we get a feeling, an affective feeling of phonemes based on the phonology of the language. (SF: Yeah.) In the lecture, you showed this slide about sound symbolism and Bosavi phonology to explain the impromptu composition of a song by Ulahi, a Bosavi poet, prompted by the cicadas in the rainforest, who had come alive with the rising temperature (Figure 1). That just each vowel in Bosavi has a sound symbolism and is a resource for composing an impromptu song—I mean, that just blew me away. Figure 1. Ulahi’s song and the Kaluli vowel space SF: Well, I remember as a first-year graduate student being so blown away by Sapir’s experiment in sound symbolism, just saying over and over again in my mouth “[li] [lo] [lɔ]” and just all of a sudden thinking what an amazing idea that was! And then to read in Jakobson, who in this kind of quirky, fabulous way, where he describes putting on the blackboard the words “big, bigger, biggest” and ((laughing)) talking about the reaction of people seeing the words enlarge right in front of their eyes with the number of strokes to make those words; and what happens when you repeat them.
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