THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVOLUME 14.2 (2004) ISSN 0847-1622http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb

Editorial

Replaying Reuel DenneyBy Randle W. Nelsen

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Editorial: Replaying Reuel Denney 1-3 By Randle W. Nelsen

Telling Stories 3-7By Peter C. van Wyck

Language's Beginnings 7-12By Anne C. Zeller

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THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVolume 14.2 (2004)

Table of Contents

As a poet, man of letters, and socialanalyst, Reuel Denney was engagedin semiotic and cultural studies long

before this became fashionable in NorthAmerica. His readings from the 1950s ofcultural spectacles such as football gamesand common cultural practices such asowning and driving automobiles remainvaluable in illuminating life in the twenty-first century. The following Denneyappetizer is written with the hope that it willhelp create a renewed interest in his workand what can be inspired by it, an interestworthy of his insightful scholarship.

William Walters’ (2003) recent review ofPeter Pericles Trifonas’ essay concerningUmberto Eco’s work on English footballfocused my own long-standing interest inAmerican and Canadian football as culturalpractices. More specifically, and beyond theFriday night hometown Americanaspectacles I participated in as a high schoolplayer, my thoughts turned to the 1950’swritings of the late Reuel Denney (1913-1995). For most academics, if they haveheard of Denney at all, it is usually as thelesser-known collaborator with the lateDavid Riesman and Nathan Glazer in writingthe best-selling sociological classic, TheLonely Crowd (1950). This book’s well-known trio of tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed types serves todescribe and analyse social changeconnecting historical eras and societies aswell as to reflect upon the dominantcharacter or ethos typically produced indifferent societies.

I first met Professor Denney as one of hisgraduate students in two American Studiesseminars he offered at the University of

Hawaii during the 1965-66 academic year.Denney came to Hawaii in 1961, and stayedfor the rest of his career, after spendingfourteen years with the English, Humanities,and Social Sciences staff at the University ofChicago. Riesman had encouraged andsponsored his move there in 1947. Prior tothis, since his graduation from Dartmouth in1932 at the age of nineteen, he had workedon Wall Street, in a Buffalo, New Yorkfactory that manufactured automobile parts,and for five years (1936-1941) as a highschool teacher in Buffalo. Denney becamerather well-known as a poet and essayist, andby the time he received a GuggenheimFellowship in 1941-42, had already publishedhis first book of poems. During the war yearsof the early 1940s he wrote for both Timeand Fortune magazines. He achieved somenotoriety, and came into conflict with hisconservative editors, with his stories on the1944 world financial conference at BrettonWoods and on the California banker A.P.Giannini and his monopolizing Bank ofAmerica.

Denney’s sports participation can betraced to his father’s influence and tutelage,and his interests in the cultural and classaspects of sports were fostered by threegenerations of immigrant movement up theclass ladder. After landing at Ellis IslandDenney’s maternal grandmother, who hadearned her passage as a dairy maid, securedexcellent employment as a parlour maid,while his grandfather complemented hergood fortune by landing well-paid secureemployment with the New York FireDepartment. In brief, Denney’s mother’sparents lived (from Ireland to New York Cityand from the barn to the front parlour) bothethnicity and social class, and they knew and

taught him the problems and potentialsassociated with each.

On the paternal side there was somemoney and success in business enablingDenney and his parents to live in closeproximity to, if outside the officialboundaries of, Buffalo’s wealthiest district.He rubbed shoulders and became friendswith the children of that city’s upper class.

This, combined with summers back amongfriends from the immigrant and first-generation German, Irish, Italian and Jewishfamilies of the Brooklyn neighbourhoodwhere he spent his first eight years, instilledin Denney a life-long interest in studyingand writing on social class differences,sociability and leisure-time activities. Inshort, Denney’s Buffalo high schoolexperiences together with his participationon neighbourhood sandlot football andbaseball teams and his tennis games, alltaught a young Denney that the relationshipbetween the social and the intellectual — akind of sociability, if you like — might beworthy of exploration. They also gave himan abiding interest and a kind of faith insocial democracy that is reflected in hismusings on football and popular culture.

Some of Denney’s writing on football canbe found in his groundbreaking tour ofAmerican popular culture, The AstonishedMuse (1957; 1964; and republished in 1988).He explains the speedy development as wellas the early and quick acceptance byAmericans of their variant of English rugbyas a consequence of the new game’s close fitwith “other aspects of their industrialfolkways.” He analyses and describesfootball as a game becoming increasinglyrationalized at the turn of the nineteenthcentury: “The mid-field dramatization of

line against line, the recurrent starting andstopping of field action around the timedsnapping of a ball, the trend to a formalizeddivision of labour between the backfield andline, above all, perhaps, the increasinglyprecise synchronization of men in motion”(Denney 1964:111). Efficientsynchronization of a formalized labour forcecombined with the introduction of new rulesand manners governing play, helped takelocal proclivities, local colour, and inequitiesout of the game. The result was movementtowards a professionalized standardizationand a business-oriented centralization of thesport. As Denney put it, Knute Rockne wasthe game’s Henry Ford.

In an article written earlier Riesman andDenney (1951) provided a history ofRockne’s game as it developed into anAmerican cultural staple. The authorsoutline how the tenth and eleventh centuryEnglish game became formalized in theUnited States as both entertainment and bigbusiness. They show how “the ambiguities”of the English versions of soccer (the kickinggame) and rugby (the running game) weremelded into Rockne’s version — how Ellis ofRugby’s 1823 faux pas of picking up the balland running with it became a “mistaketurned into innovation” as Americans addedthe forward pass and downs with minimumyardage-gain and offside rules to create amore exciting, quicker-paced game. In brief,football’s United States version revealedmuch about the character of Americanculture — not only the taste for theexcitement of action-driven entertainmentbut also a desire for the no nonsensestandardization and centralization of businessfavoured by their rule-bound, legalisticapproach.

American football’s transformation intobig and profitable entertainment alsorevealed “an element of class identification.”The authors note that early football inBritain was played by an elite or upperstratum before lower strata audiences whowere at least as much interested in carefullyobserving the players to be sure theydemonstrated the “good form” of “gentlemen”as they were in keeping track of the score.The American experience and game wasdifferent; it was played by a collegiate elite,but watched by audiences with someexperience in playing the game. As a result,the latter “were unwilling to subordinatethemselves to a collegiate aristocracy”(Riesman and Denney 1951:318).

American football as a kind ofdemocratization in the world ofentertainment is part of, subsumed by, alarger theme central to Denney’s sociology:The battle of capitalism and its attendant,standardized professionalism as it intersectswith democracy and its emphasis upon a less-regulated, craft-based discipline grounded inamateurism. Denney was especially insightfulon the matter of how differences betweenamateurism and professionalism are related tosocial class. He perceptively analyzed theoften lower-class youth amateurism of hot-rodder culture as threatening to the middle-class professionalism and respectability of theDetroit auto-makers who sought to normalizeand standardize the amateurs. “Not a fewpeople seemed to feel, without quite sayingso, that the duty of young Americans was to

buy cars, not to rebuild them. To rebuild acar, it appeared, was an attack on theAmerican way” (Denney 1964:145). Putanother way and to incorporate a 1990’sadvertising pitch, to mess around or tinkerwith the Chevy in the backyard was to messwith capitalism, “the heartbeat of America.”

Buying and not tinkering with the Detroitmodel pits corporate restraint against thetendency towards individual freedom. Thatdemocracy as freedom for both individualand community might be engendered byupward social mobility (i.e. the purchase of anew, factory-built car) was another concernand a theme familiar in Denney’s writingsand to his students. We soon learned to lookbeyond the automobile or the material gooditself to share his awareness that culturalcapital walked hand-in-hand with monetarycapital and was often the advance guard forcrossing class, gender and ethnic barriers.On the latter point he writes: “For thesecond-generation boy, with his father’smuscles but not his father’s motives, footballsoon became a means to career ascent. Sowas racketeering, but football gaveacceptance too — acceptance into thedemocratic fraternity of the entertainmentworld where performance counts and ethnicorigin is hardly a handicap” (Denney1964:117). As for changing performancestandards and the cultural requirements oftoday’s game, suffice it to say that recruitinga good linguist, once a prized asset when inthe 1890’s arguments with the refereeoccurred as a matter of routine after mostplays (see Riesman and Denney 1951:317), isno longer a top priority of today’s big-timeuniversity programs.

What Denney’s writings on football teachus is to look past the borders and theboundaries of the field of play and the gameto see what lies beyond — to deconstructfootball in order to see something else, to seemore of what C. Wright Mills called “the bigpicture” as it changes. Walters (2003:12) inhis criticism of Trifonas and his treatment ofEco notes that what is absent is “a sense thatfootball is subject to social and culturalchanges. It is not a static system of signs, buthistorically dynamic and changing.” Witnessthe road we, in Canada and the UnitedStates, have travelled from the first gameplayed, Harvard meeting McGill in Rugbyfootball in 1874; to the early Americanizationof the game and the different gamedeveloped in Canada in the late 1800s andearly 1900s; to countless high school andcollege homecoming game spectacles (seeFriedenberg 1963, 1965:158-162 for a classicdescription of one such 1963 event) whichsolidify both individual and communityidentity and status; to the militarized businessorientations of university football programs(see DeLillo 1972; Shaw 1972); to today’shigh-stakes gambling wars where millions liveall weekend (and Monday nights too) in atechnological bubble of flat-screen digitaltelevision pictures reporting the progress ofheavily-armoured and electrified warriorsdoing battle in domed stadiums that put atechnologically-sophisticated end to suchembarrassments as the 1962 Grey Cupknown as “the Fog Bowl” played in the pre-Sky Dome days at Exhibition Stadium (seeGillmor 2003). Denney’s work helps us readfootball as cultural narrative(s) (see Oriard

1993).

As I write we are entering the thirdmonth of the college and professional footballseasons. Saturday’s and Sunday’s “BigGames” across the United States bring thecar and football, gridlock and gridiron,together in the popular cultural practiceknown as “the tailgate party.” Here the carbecomes not only the warm-up for radio andtelevision’s play-by-play coverage but alsokitchen, bar, music centre and so on —literally the centre of the party. In itstransformation it is transformative, anextension of the stadium to the parking lotand in some ways a levelling, a sort ofdemocratic counterpoint, to the differencebetween the box seats on the fifty yard lineand the cheap seats in “the nosebleedsection.”

Denney taught his students to becomeattuned to such transformations, specificallythe historical changes in cultural meaningsattributed to material artifacts. His work isreplete with models to be emulated in thisregard. For example, in sketching the historyof the car as both democratic possibility andmedia extension Denney (1964:142) writes:“sometime between 1920 and 1945, roughly,the auto had passed through a stage of itsexistence symbolized by the comic strip‘Gasoline Alley’. As auto it had lost much ofits old novelty as transportation; in order toretain its glamour it had to become, indifferentiated forms, a kind of daily apparel.”As this beautifully constructed metaphorreminds us, we as a culture have beenchanged by the auto and as changed beingswe do our best to make our ownmodifications, pushing the boundaries of themedium as both message and massage.

Football and the Sunday drive havemerged in stadium parking lots across theUnited States. Canada is not yet known forits tailgate parties but Grey Cup, like SuperBowl, parties and the attendant corporateprofits are plentiful enough. The point isthat Denney’s work recognizes theimportance of football as a window, perhapseven a mirror, of cultural identity. Studyingfootball tells us something about ourCanadian identity and what may remain ofour inferiority problem when we compareourselves and our culture to the Americansand their notions of cultural superiority.Think of the denotative/connotativedifferences between Grey and Super. Footballas it is financed, played (including differencesin rules, size of field and ball, number ofplayers and so on), watched and reportedupon in the CFL vs. the NFL may even offersome insight into value and belief differencesbetween the two countries regardingacceptance of the business-industrial systemas exemplified in Eisenhower’s famouswarning concerning the increasingdomination of the military-industrialcomplex; regarding deference and submissionto legal and governmental authority;regarding the mix of populism and elitism inour increasingly entertainment-orientedsystems of education and our Hollywoodizedpopular cultures.

The popular culture promoted andsustained by Hollywood could serve as a focalpoint for extending Denney’s work on bothfootball and automobiles. Certainly the

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violence and grandiose deeds of football fitwell with the obligatory car chases and fierycar crashes of Hollywood movies. And aswith half-time extravaganzas, whether weread these spectacular crashes as evidence ofthe apocalypse and cultural decay or ofinnocence and cultural renewal, or asevidence of something else, the point is thespectacle, the messages it conveys, the way ittransforms us and we transform it throughour understanding of its meaning. Denney’swritings on football as cultural practice, aswell as his musings on cars, deviance, socialclass and democracy, the connectionsbetween leisure and business, play and work,architecture and the mass media, continue toprovide useful points of reference in ourattempts to understand ourselves and oursurroundings.

Randle Nelsen teaches sociology at LakeheadUniversity. His most recent book is SchoolingAs Entertainment: Corporate Education MeetsPopular Culture (2002). His study of Denney’slife and work, “Remembering Reuel Denney:Sociology as Cultural Studies,” appeared inthe American Sociologist 34/4 (2003).

References

DeLillo, Don (1972) End Zone. NewYork: Houghton Mifflin.

Denney, Reuel (1957, 1964) TheAstonished Muse. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Friedenberg, Edgar Z. (1963, 1965)Coming of Age in America. New York:Random House (Vintage).

Gillmor, Don (2003) “Yard Lines,” TheGlobe and Mail (November 15).

Oriard, Michael (1993) Reading Football.Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress.

Riesman, David, Reuel Denney, NathanGlazer (1950) The Lonely Crowd: A Study ofthe Changing American Character. NewHaven: Yale University Press.

Riesman, David and Reuel Denney(1951) “Football in America: A Study inCulture Diffusion,” American Quarterly 3:309-325.

Shaw, Gary (1972) Meat on the Hoof: TheHidden World of Texas Football. New York: Dell.

Walters, William (2003) “EchoChamber,” The Semiotic Review of Books13.2:11-12.

Telling StoriesIan Angus, (Dis)figurations: Discourse / Critique / Ethics. London: Verso, 2000.Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication: Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements. Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 2000.

By Peter C. van Wyck

Communication loves to tell storiesabout itself. Stories about beginnings,and histories and filiations. And,

according to taste, such stories are aboutpositing, retelling, inventing, contesting,elaborating, deconstructing, systematizing,unmasking, and so on. To be sure, some ofthese stories are more potent than others. Ithink of two recent examples. First, JohnDurham Peters’ book, Speaking into the Air: AHistory of the Idea of Communication. He tellsa primal story of communication. His versionis a wonderfully inventive combinationinvolving, on the one hand, the synopticGospels and the figure of Jesus on thehillside, and on the other, the Eros ofdialogue (and general graphobia) of thePhaedrus. For Peters, these two positions, intheir characteristic modes, exemplify abiding,trans-historical anxieties with respect to themeaning of communication. In the first case,“Socrates’ model of the proper and thepathological forms of communication,” writesPeters, “resounds to this day” (1999: 50).That is, we are “still prone to think of truecommunication as personal, free, live, andinteractive” (Ibid.).

Communication for the Phaedrus,when it goes well, can be the mutualdiscovery of souls; when it turns bad,it can be seduction, pandering, missedconnections, or the invariance ofwriting, ‘signifying the very same thingforever’ (Ibid.).

In other words, here dialogue is good,and dissemination bad. On the other hand,in the Gospels we find a different abidingmodel. Here it is precisely the model ofdissemination that is operative. In the secondcase, the parable of the sower (casting seedsto the side) becomes the hyper-analogy,enacting its meaning in the manner of itsutterance (“it exemplifies the operation of allparables” [1999: 52] — a manner of public

address in which the interpretive problem isshifted squarely onto the audience, thereceiver”). One must cast many seeds to thewind, only some of which will find fertile soil,and some of which will perhaps multiply.“Those who have ears to hear, let themhear” (1999: 51). But the parable is also akind of narrowcasting, for only the fertilesoul of the proper ear could hear it. Theparable, unlike the Socratic dialogue, doesnot contain the instructions for its use orinterpretation. Casting seeds is, after all, anact of faith.

Peters takes these two models and followsthem (or perhaps the better word is leadsthem) through a remarkably idiosyncratichistory, and he makes some discoveries.Ghosts, mostly. Ghosts, that is, in the form ofhauntings in our technologies and our ideasabout them. And, having wandered throughthe Gospels; Augustine and Locke; thetraditions of Scholastic angelology (Aquinas,et al); and Mesmer, the ectoplasmics ofSpiritualism; the strange business of etherand telepathy; Hegel, Marx, andKierkegaard, the deathly ambiguity ofnineteenth century communicationtechnologies; Emerson; Comstock and theDead Letter Office (contra Lacan); Maxwell,James and Cooley, and Turing—Peters leavesus with this parable of epistemologicalhauntings, perched, waiting on the shore.

In an incredible act of ventriloquism, thefinal word is given to the dolphins — forunlike us, “they are naked, and notashamed” (260), he tells us. They live thetopos of a pure oceanic communism, theundersea agora. For the dolphins, there is nodifference in scale between hearing andspeaking. Peters’ work here gives a lament, amelancholy communication, a state ofperpetual disconnect, marked by a longingfor a meaningful proximity together with anacknowledgement of an impossible distance.

Peters has done amazing work toconvoke a back-story to a certain version ofthe contemporary communication studiesscene. But, and at the risk of putting too finea point on this, it is such an incrediblyAmerican piece of work. Even thoughultimately it offers a model in whichmiscommunication, the failure, the gap, theinfinite remoteness of bodies, may indeed bea feature and not a failure, it is still aboutspeech (dolphins notwithstanding). Almostnary a whiff of a sign in sight, nothing post-anything, or really inflected at all but by suchconcerns the new; it just draws a new linethrough a history that unproblematicallypersists behind us. We are left to surmisethat for Peters, contemporary theoreticalpreoccupations are merely swept up in thesame dialogue/dissemination history; thatthey simply narrate an ongoing story withinthe oscillations between speaking andbroadcasting. Powerful metaphor it is, but itstrikes me that the story he invents isultimately unable to address itself to what wemay call the contemporary theoretical scene;that is, the new humanities, the scienceshumaines, the threads upon which linguistics,shall we say, has made its turn(s).

But Peters is certainly not the onlyrecent attempt to clarify this domain, and totell the story of communication differently.Briankle Chang’s book, DeconstructingCommunication (1996) is a very different takeon the whole business. In a way he merely(or boldly, depending on how you look at it)dives headlong into the breach that islamented by Peters. Chang’s strategy is toenact a deconstructive drive-by shooting onthe very idea of communication as anoceanic, transcendent ebb and flow ofovercoming of difference. That is, heproceeds outward from the constitutiveparadox of communication: communicationunderstood as both an enunciation itself, and

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the theory of enunciation. Chang’s openinginsight is that the big problem withcommunication theorists is that they tend toview communicative events as

moments within a teleological process,as foreclosing dialectic, eventuallyleading them to their unquestionedvalorization of identity over difference,of the selfsame over alterity, ofdialogue over polylogue, and mostimportant, of understanding and thedetermination of meaning overmisunderstanding and undecidability(1996: xi).

All of this to say that the “ideology of thecommunicative,” undergirded by the“idealist-transcendental economy,” as he putsit, is to become the object of both a faithful,and transgressive reading of communicativehistory. If Peters gives us a parable ofproximity and it hauntings, Chang offers upcommunication as a radically undecidableproposition; it is simultaneously impossibleand ceaseless, even in its utter negativity.Speech on the one hand, and writing on theother. In a way, the two positions as set outby Peters and Chang are such welcomecontributions to a domain —communication studies, let’s call it —because they come at a time when thisdomain seems to suffer its ownpreoccupations with its constitution, withthe manner of its own constitution. It ismarked, I think, by a certain degree ofanxiety; an anxiety arising from the veryindistinctness of the boundaries of thisdomain, from its troubling generality, andalso perhaps from its points of hybridizationfrom other general domains such as “culturalstudies” (whatever it is that it turns out wemean by that). It is also that we find so littlein terms of theoretically adequate accountsthat would provide a stable, if temporary,clearing.

Deep Innis

Ian Angus, a professor of communicationat Simon Fraser University, has recentlymade an interesting set of interventions toall of this, let us call it, philosophy ofcommunication. Weary (or perhaps justpolitically and ethically mistrustful) ofcertain readings of the discursive turn inphilosophy and the human sciences, Angusreturns to and reinvents — in certainrespects, at least — the material basis ofcommunication media. Accordingly, hereaches for a different metaphor. Not thedisseminative sower of Peters, but rather thatof Harold Innis: “the basic metaphor ofHarold Innis’ communication theory ofsociety is transportation, the traversal ofspace” (Primal Scenes, 3). How it is, in otherwords, that one thing carries over from oneplace or situation to another. This, as Angusnotes, is also the intersection between Innis’communication theory and the rootmetaphor of metaphor itself: carrying-over.It’s a long portage, but it works; he calls itcomparative media theory.

He sets this all out in three sections, thefirst on the materiality of expressive forms,concerning the logic and operations ofcomparative media theory; the secondsection deals with the loss of mediation in

consumer society as the point of origin forcomparative media theory; and theconcluding section is on the possibilities ofsocial movements. Each section of this workis itself an elaboration of the sameconstitutional paradox that occupiedChang’s work.

They [the sections] answer thequestions: What theory? Why thistheory now? And why/how does onebecome aware of this phenomenonnow? (Primal Scenes, 190)

In a stylistically confused opening section(at points oddly pedagogical, in explainingthe meaning of rhetoric, and then laboriouslytheoretical), Angus sets out the field inwhich the discursive turn is to be understoodas both performative (i.e., Austin, Ricoeur,Volosinov), and relational (i.e., Saussure,Levi-Strauss, Wittgenstein). What he istrying to establish is a way to think of “amedium of communication as both thetransmission of a certain content, and moreimportantly, as the primal scene institutingsocial relations” (PS, 4). And theimplications of this are several, as he notes.First, discourse is not to be understood in acorrespondence with a reality or as an indexof truthfulness. Second, the constitution ofsocial institutions through speech acts can beunderstood to produce obligations, or whathe calls “institutional ethics,” a manner ofethics that is immanent in the discursivepractices of an institution. Third, thediscursive turn implies that the social canonly be understood as a function of a field ofdiscourses; there is no coherent meta-narrative to reconcile the cacophony, nor tocreate the appearance of a non-discursivereality to prop things up. And finally, theplurality of discourses is precisely whatconstitutes a world, a form of life, and so on.That is, it’s discourse all the way down (paceThomas King).

With a clearing established in which thenon-discursive no longer looms on theoutside to trouble a theory of discourse,Angus moves into what I feel is the mostinteresting part of this text: his faithfullyunfaithful reading of Innis (a reading frombehind, so to speak, to recall Deleuze). Themain significance of this reading, he says, is“a way of introducing the materiality ofexpression in the discursive formation ofcontemporary philosophy and humanscience” (PS, 20). And this of course requiresa particular reading of Innis. For example, toInnis’ idea of “empire” as a social formationthat has a capacity to balance spatially andtemporally oriented media, Angus resists aKantian structure of real versus phenomenal;this is simply consistent with Angus’ refusalto allow discourse to be set out in oppositionto something on the outside of itself. Instead,he moves Innis into a phenomenological andMarxist framework according to which spaceand time are “constituted through media ofcommunication, and media ofcommunication are formed and developed byhuman praxis” :

Space exists only insofar as it istraversed in some manner, and timeexists only through the means oftransmission between generations.Communication media thusconstitute, through human labour, the

limits of what is experienceable, andthe manner in which it is experienced,in a social formation… In short, mediaof communication institute a socialorder, a regime (PS, 21-22).

A medium, then, is not just about acertain contents, nor about its physicalcharacteristics (e.g., stone or paper, heavy orlight), nor the object conveyed; rather, it isthe manner of carrying. The particular bias ofa medium unfolds in its particularity in partthrough its situatedness in a givenenvironment. And yet, as Angus notes, thespecific conceptual relations between amedium’s characteristics and itsenvironment, were not specificallyelaborated by Innis. This is important,because it is the point at which Angus beginsto make Innis take a different shape.Focusing on Innis’ contradictory use oforality (on the one hand as a balancing,therapeutic, time-biased antidote tocontemporary Western civilization, and onthe other as a fundamental, integrative modethat underlies all media), Angus observes ananimating mechanism in Innis’ work. It isnot only orality that is infected in thismanner; the same contradiction is present inInnis’ conception of space as well (between aquantified space, and a differentiated spaceof traversal). And this contradiction itself issymptomatic of the historical situation hiswork seeks to address. In other words, it isprecisely an artifact of the contemporarysituation of reflexivity — “the difficulty ofassessing the quality of a culture of which weare a part” (Innis, quoted in PS, 26) —variously termed the twilight of humanism,the end of history, and so on. As a result, the“therapeutic intention of communicationtheory”

cannot be properly fulfilled throughthe notion of balance. It is betterserved through the metaphor ofexcavation, of digging down to thefundamental unity, from whichcommunicative capacities have beenabstracted, at the same time a doubtthat this excavation is uncovering afundamental unity — a suspicion thatthis fundamental unity only appears assuch through a historical bias that is inthe process of disappearing… . (PS,34)

One notes here a certain paranoia withinthis operation of disavowal; I know it’s true,but all the same… It is like Foucault’sparanoia — that our very anti-Hegelianism isHegel’s last trick (1972: 235). In otherwords, one must always be suspicious of one’ssituatedness, and the manner in which thiswill necessarily inflect any discourse aboutbalance, and yet one must also, perhapsceaselessly, invent a discourse in which thequestion of balance may be posed.

Now all of this is quite fascinating, atturns a bit confusing, and at times veryinstructive. Angus is a very careful reader ofInnis, and he has a surprising capacity tobrush him against the grain. But it is not untilwe get to the third chapter of this text thatAngus starts to develop what he really meansby his comparative media theory. But hemakes the reader work for it. First we mustcontend with a kind of manifesto ofcommunication studies:

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From the standpoint of therelation between philosophy and thehuman sciences, the constitution ofperceptions, institutions, and thoughtby media of communication is thethesis proper to communication studies(PS, 35).

Indeed. The feared object here is thetyrannical idea of communication thatfollows from the work of Shannon andWeaver. Angus’ project could be described asan endeavour to reformulate acommunication studies that does not fallprey to the conceptual and ideological errorsof the linear “transportation model” (PS, 84,128). In particular, he does not imaginemessages that simply move from mind tomind. Communication under thetransportation model is understood as“simply the transfer of content from onelocation to another” (85). One needn’t betroubled by the status of sources or receivers,as such things simply pre-exist the messageand the transfer. Angus sees in this model —and ones he likens to it: e.g., Lasswell,Jakobson — three assumptions that renderits vision of communication unworkable.

The first assumption has to do with theconceptual status of a channel. In theShannon and Weaver universe content andchannel are completely unrelated. Indeed, asAngus points out, the only possiblecontribution of the channel is noise (and itscontradictory relation to “information” [PS,128]). Secondly, the subjects ofcommunication are not troubled by thecommunicative act; they are simply sites of atransaction in which their status qua subjectspre-exists. And finally, questions with respectto the effect of communication are reducedto the effects of individual messages. In otherwords one cannot speak about a generalsocial effect of communication, nor of asocial effect that may derive from theemphasis of particular media (PS, 85-86).And for Angus, what allows this model itscontinued and pressing theoreticalsignificance is that, under conditions of aclosed “code of monopoly capitalism” (83), itconceals the fact of a precipitous reductionin forms of social mediations (qualitativelyand quantitatively). Hence, on the onehand, Angus’s interest in a theory ofdiscourse that can cope with the so-calledextra-discursive—the exo-semiotic—and onthe other hand, his interest in howcontemporary social movements, byconstituting new mediating institutions (e.g.,“community organizations, civil rightspressure groups, environmental protestorganization, women’s groups”) are agents ofsocial transformation (PS, 86-87). Thisaspect of Angus’ argument might well haveprovided a pathway into the entire project.That is, rather than framing comparativemedia theory in relation to the discursiveturn in philosophy and the social sciences, hemight have flipped things and begun withthe problematics of communication.

The Site

In any case, as one follows Angusthrough the various arcs and pedagogicaldigressions of this work, one may come towonder how it is that, having made the

obligatory post-foundational moves, hemanages to operate with such theoreticalforce. It can seem as though the reflexivity isonly to be discovered, sought-out, excavated,to use his metaphor, but I can see too littleevidence of his suspicion. It is a difficult lineto walk, to be sure, and perhaps it is in partabout a writing as drawn to Husserl as it is toInnis — neither of whom, one mightobserve, are paragons of theoretical clarity.But it perhaps also points to a more profoundsituation for theory. One might say simplythat his writing, his theorizing, is occasionedby the very situation within which it findsitself. Which is to say, that on his account, acomparative theory of media gets exactly thetheory it deserves; a recapitulation of thesame reflexivity paradox that returnsrepeatedly. But this seems an alibi of far toomuch convenience. Elsewhere, he has putthings somewhat more clearly:

Every saying occurs at a site, ahistorical location whose institution asa primal communicative scene sets upsocial relations… everycommunication act is an ‘institution’in a double sense. It is a rhetoricwithin a given communicationmedium through which it is a sayingwithin the cultural complex ofinstitutions that define a world and assuch defines a politics that takes placewithin an already-instituted primalscene. It is also an instating act,whereby a given form of expression isbrought into being and sustained assuch, as a formation of the site. In thissense, it implies a rhetoric of mediaforms in which a historical epochappears with a certain perceptual,social and cognitive emphasis. Everycommunication act occurs within agiven cultural complex, and is thus a‘choice’ to promote a certain view ofexpression… . ((Dis)figurations, 259).

The implications here are theconstitutive elements of his comparativemedia theory. The comparative dimension issimply acknowledgement that one is alwaysand already immersed in and influenced byparticular media of communication —critique must contend with this.“Comparative media theory is concernedwith various dimensions of continuoustranslations in the media environment…”(PS, 38). Thus, universal claims always runaground on the shoals of the particular. Thatwhich is representative and that which isconstitutive exist, at least discursively, in astrange loop that Angus calls a “rhetoric ofoscillation” (PS, 39-42). Adding anotherterm to an already weighty table of values,this rhetoric is less to do with the sense ofone’s yielding to a persuasive content, than itis with “a deeper persuasion, inherent inevery expression, to assent to the form ofawareness that is manifested through thecontent” (D, 41). (Think language game asitself an abstraction of practice.) And it is inthis manner that Innis appears for Angus asa poststructural and, interestingly, apostcolonial hero. The critique of modernityis not just about its abstractions andfractures. It is, for Angus’ Innis, that veryunderstanding of the crisis of contemporarytimes, its relations to space and time,

industrialization and orality, is itself aproduct of the very bias that facilitated andproduced a global in the image of aEurocentric project.

To this initial outline of the reflexivity ofcomparative media theory, Angus just keepson adding things to the pot. At the outset,this means appeal to McLuhan, Husserl, andBateson (PS, 41-51). But particularlyHusserl, or a version of him, with whomAngus clearly has a fondness, despite thefact that Husserl’s thoughts oncommunication must be overlooked (PS, 67-74). Yet for the reader, this reader, things bythis point are becoming difficult. We havebody, discourse, expression, and material,technology and institution. We have thesethings swept up in particular configurationsof media; media that are both expressions ofsuch configurations, but also, in a significantsense, the specificity of the configurationssuch as they are. Again, this is the seat ofthe constitutive paradox, the reflexivity, andso on. And finally, comparative media theorysteps up as theoretical practice to begin toarticulate communication in a mannerappropriate to its situation; that is, as amaterial envelopment that has tended tobehave toward human endeavour as watertoward fish, until, that is, epochal changesare at hand, at which point such otherwiseinvisible arrangements come to bediscernible. This is good. And it’s producedin a compelling fashion. But there is an oddoscillation within the text itself, and in a wayit suffers from waves of its own iterations,each one aimed at a re-diagnosis of the samecrisis.

Social movements, actual socialmovements, about which Primal Scenes issubtitled, are surprisingly scarce in Angus’analysis. Nor is the reader really told whatsuch a thing is. Is it really possible to speakof feminism as a social movement in thesame way that one might speak the peacemovement? Perhaps, but it is only clear whythis might be the case if we understand thatthe reason social movements are of interestto Angus from the outset is that in the veryprocess of voicing a claim, an emergentsocial expression with a locus somewhere inthe social, a new and strategic mediation iscreated. And the mediation is not merely acopy of something that subsisted prior tobeing voiced; the claim that is voiced createswith it new subjects, a new state of affairs.Whereas the tendency has been tounderstand social movements as theexpression of something previouslysuppressed, Angus’s point is that this isprecisely wrong, and furthermore, it obscuresthrough the “the hegemony of liberalindividualist discourse” (PS, 151), the “co-constitutive” process by which a socialmovement calls forth new subjects, and newsubject positions. Angus’ argument in thelast third of Primal Scenes draws out theimplications of this, drawing particularly on areading of Laclau and Mouffe.

The essays grouped together in(Dis)figurations also track through themesexplored in Primal Scenes — the constitutiveparadox, the discursive turn, doubling, theproblems of universality versus particularity,reflexivity, and so on. The essays in(Dis)figurations are in fact a set of curatorial

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documents, or prefigurations, that help thereader to situate some of the turns taken inPrimal Scenes. The title essay in this volumesets out the thematic trajectory that is takenup in Primal Scenes in much the same terms,with the significant exception that it setsthings out in more overtly ethical language,and in doing so issues notice of thecontinued relevance of philosophy to socialcritique; in a way, answering the question asto why the discursive turn is not presented inthe first instance as a communicativeproblem in Primal Scenes. And this I thinkgives us a clue to understanding why Angushas published two texts that are sothematically close. In a way this is not aboutcommunication, nor about bringing materialinto discourse, nor about simplyunderstanding the doublings and reflexivityof modernity. Rather, I think it is really aboutfinding a place for philosophy and finding aphilosophy for (our) place. The materiality ofcommunication, of discourse, is a matter (soto speak) that must in the end be secured,and for Angus, this is accomplished byphilosophy — “that without belief or armor”(PS, 191) as he put it in the very finalgesture of Primal Scenes. Philosophy alone iscapable of engaging the history of expressiveforms, and philosophy alone is capable ofrefiguring (via a reflexive disfiguring) theprimal communicative scene (the saying, thesaid, and the site [D, 23], or the poetic, therhetorical and its representation [D, 258]).Not a philosophy of balance, of course,because, as we’ve seen, he’s already offered afigure of excavation.

So is one to presume that philosophy as adiscourse that “hovers over the human skin,”(D, 191) is really in a supervisory position atthe site of the excavation, at the dig? Yes andNo. Philosophy wants to account fordiscourse at the very historical moment thatit pulls up short and becomes revealed as ametaphor. But in order to do this, we return,oddly, not to the site of the world, or the dig— this would be but the domain of theexample — but rather we return with Angusto the very site of philosophy (his version ofit) to re-experience and (once again, theparadox) re-write the possibilities of its re-constitution. But at the same time Angusmarks philosophy as precisely “not adiscourse, but a distinctive and radical typeof move within discourse” (D, 247). ForAngus it is a matter of understanding how itis that philosophy can persist in the wake ofthe various scenarios and articulations of itsdemise; whether through neglect,proclamation from the “inside,” or from anundecidable position that he calls“simultaneously from inside and outside” (D,215). In the essay “Critique of GeneralRhetoric,” Angus is attempting to figure outhow philosophy can get buried in the firstplace. (And the interesting thing aboutburial — a repetitive figure in these texts,and a necessary back-story to theproblematics of excavation, one might add— is that it really can come to pass indifferent ways.)

Rhetoric, Madness and the Excavation(s)of Philosophy

Anyway. The situation for philosophy,which I contend is really at the core of these

writings, is that it is brought under a kind ofscrutiny by general rhetoric. Angus puts itthis way:

The core of the philosophicaltradition is summed up and given aradical formulation in EdmundHusserl’s discovery of thetranscendental reduction — thesuspension of belief in a worldsubsisting independently of anyone’sperception of it. Such belief is notdenied, but it is simply suspended, inorder that it may be held up forinspection and its pervasive influencedescribed. This is the contemporary,radicalized, form of Greek ‘wonder’that was taken to be the origin ofphilosophy and which motivated theinquiry into truth that came to beconstitutive of the philosophicaltradition. This, the explication anddevelopment of the theory of thetranscendental reduction is a centraltheme for a contemporary defense ofphilosophy (D, 220).

The return of the linguistic turn, then, isthe moment at which a self-consciousnessemerges that language is not in the businessof description, but rather in the event-making of discourse. Rhetoric then stages arather interesting return itself. No longerrestricted to procedures and gestures ofpersuasion, a “general rhetoric,” a rhetoricalcriticism emerges within the very plurality ofpostmodern discourse. The continuoustranslation performed on discourse by thisrhetoric is taken as ongoing testimony of thelack of foundations in the field ofdiscursivity. Whatever coherence isgenerated within and between discursivefields (as meaning, and boundary) is thusconstantly eroded. And here Angus developsan attractive argument about the relationsbetween plurality, rhetoric and madness:

Since translation reducesboundaries, other discourses, and thediscursive field itself, enter everydiscursive formation. Madness, whichis the unfixity of meaning, invadeseach utterance within a discourse fromits outside. General rhetoric is thushaunted by madness. Rhetoricalcriticism re-establishes plurality ofdiscourses and therefore unfixity ofmeaning within discourse. Unfixitypervades the field of discourse andtherefore the practice of rhetoricalcriticism itself (D, 243).

Madness, he tells us “appears as bothproduct and practice of rhetoric” (D, 243). Ifind this a very interesting formulation. Nowone might take issue with such a generalsense of madness as the unfixity of meaning.One might say, for example following Becker(1973: 75-81), that a world of unfixity ofmeaning, like a world of insufficient necessity,is a world understood through the optic ofnot madness per se, but more specificallyparanoia. This is Kierkegaard’s “infinitude’sdespair,” says Becker. And in a way thismakes perfect sense; it takes us right back tothe suspicious hermeneutics of excavationmentioned above; uncovering the disavowal,and the suspicion. It is perhaps against thisthat we might consider the place of theworld configured differently, the world as too

much constraint, a sickness of finitude onemight say; a world, says Becker, of depressivepsychosis. At the risk of pushing themetaphor beyond all usefulness, we might seephilosophy — at least for Angus — asfiguring this way. An oscillation betweenpost-foundational sickness of infinitude, andits twin, the madness of a philosophy thatcan imagine nothing at all, a philosophytrapped under the impossible weight ofnecessity.

But in any case, both philosophy andrhetoric have their tricks for holdingmadness at bay. We are not constantly struckmute by an infinity of possibilities any morethan by an infinity of constraint restrictingany possible move. In each case, we couldsay, after Burke — whose ghost looms largeover Angus’ work here — that it is aboutestablishing a constitution which makes noclaim beyond a set of motives, “a given set ofcustoms and values, from which similarcustoms and values are deduced” (Burke,cited in Charland 2003: 123). But this is notquite how Angus imagines it. Generalrhetoric, he suggests, even in its (although ina way, because of its) capacity to constantlyrecover plurality, cannot help but succumbto its own inability to “monopolize theactivity of translation” (D, 244). That is,“[g]eneral rhetoric engages in the continuoustranslation that defines postmodernity, but,in the same moment, succumbs to thedynamism of postmodernity” (D, 244). Inother words, the madness of general rhetoricis but leakage from the madness that is the“postmodern condition itself” (D, 245). Andyes, philosophy returns for Angus. And it isdirectly in the wake of rhetoric revealing itsultimate inability to know itself (being proneto babbling madness), that philosophy stagesits return. Quips Angus, “Now that we havediscovered the Sophists as ourcontemporaries, may we not discoverSocrates too?”(D, 246). I suppose, but theepicycles are adding up in this unwieldyphilosophical machine that Angus is buildingfor us. Here Platonic philosophy steps in topause, and to stall through its silence — yetonly briefly — the unfixity of meaning,thereby performing meaning. It is not a tool,not a discourse, but a way of life, in which,to return to Primal Scenes, “we do not simplylive within a communicative form, but canengage new projects of instituting” (PS, 190).

And then

Things have become somewhat tangled.Angus is not what one might call ademonstrably clear writer. However, by thisbit of empirical observation I mean noparticular criticism of his work. Clarity hasno necessary place of privilege here. Rather, ifI were to measure the success of this work, itmight be in the manner that he has managedto gain my complicity. And he has. In part.That is, I too worry about such things asphilosophy and its place, and I too thinkabout how the emergent qualities of the neware not merely actualizations of priorpossibilities, but rather creative pieces ofproduction. Theory, the question of theory,the manner of its constitution, its place inthe academy; these I would urge are issues ofpressing concern. Or they ought to be.Indeed the state of theory today, its domain,

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and the manner in which it may function asa mediated mode of social engagement, theseare issues central to the theoreticalendeavour, and, I would add, to thesubstance of our politics and our pedagogy.That said, Angus’ work, particularly PrimalScenes, suffers under the weight of its ownconstitution. It is an elaborate and at timesawkward machine, and although itsarchitecture is made more engaging throughthe essays collected in (Dis)figurations, thereader, this reader found himself wishing tosee more of the machine set in motion.Having told us what it means, we now wantto know what it can do. Yet what he writeshere is more about a kind of theoreticaltriage. An intervention aimed at securing aphenomenological, quasi-Innisianphilosophy, than about understanding thegaps, articulations and pauses of socialmovements, or really for that matter, acomparative media theory.

In the end, what we end up with is toomuch of a cipher. Its rich and often baroquefigurations — that is, his manner of carrying-over — can eclipse the very material worldthat motivates the project from the start.

Peter Van Wyck teaches in the Departmentof Communication Studies at ConcordiaUniversity. He is the author of Signs ofDanger: Trauma, Waste and Nuclear Threat(2004) and Primitives in the Wilderness: DeepEcology and the Missing Human Subject(1997).

References

Becker, Ernest (1973) The Denial ofDeath. New York: Free Press.

Burke, Kenneth (1962) A Grammar ofMotives. Cleveland: Meridian Books

Chang, Briankle (1996) DeconstructingCommunication: Representation, Subject, andEconomies of Exchange. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Charland, Maurice (2003) “TheConstitution of Rhetoric’s Tradition,”Philosophy and Rhetoric 36:2:129.

Foucault, Michel (1972) “The Discourseon Language,” Rupert Swyer trans, in TheArchaeology of Knowledge. New York:Pantheon Books.

Peters, John Durham (1999) Speaking intothe Air: A History of the Idea ofCommunication. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

van Wyck, Peter (2004) Signs of Danger:Trauma, Waste and Nuclear Threat.Minneapolis: University of MinneapolisPress.

Language’s BeginningsBarbara J. King, ed. (1999) The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates Can Tell Us. Santa Fe: SAR Press.

By Anne C. Zeller

Arguments about when, how and whyhuman language originated havebedevilled researchers for over 150

years. The answers will require input from awide variety of disciplines, since aspects ofanatomy, neurology, linguistics, cognitivedevelopment, ontogeny and primatebehaviour must be considered. The questionof language origins deals with both what islanguage, and how we produce it, and looksto evidence from the past and the present,both naturalistic and experimental. B.J.King, the editor of The Origins of Language,decided to assemble such a multidisciplinarygroup through the School of AmericanResearch Advanced Seminar Series toengage in a discussion of this age-old topic.The participants included primatologistsKing, Snowdon and Maestripieri, linguistsBurling and Wilcox, ape language researcherSavage-Rumbaugh, primate neurologistsGibson and Jessee, and child languagespecialists McCune and Davidson. Theybegan by recognizing that there were twomajor theoretical positions concerninglanguage origins. One is the nativistapproach supported by Chomsky’s idea thatthe brain structure of the developing childholds an innate, rule-based system ofgrammar derived from the geneticspecialization of the human brain. Thisapproach “is not concerned with theperceptual or pragmatic aspects of languagecomprehension and use” (Tomasello 1995 inKing 1999: 4). The other position acceptsan evolutionary background for thedevelopment of the anatomy and mentalabilities that language requires, linking themin a feedback loop with the gradual increasein mental abilities which vocal languagesystems allow, such as planning abstractthought and complex deception skills; thekinds of abilities that are subsumed under theidea called “Theory of Mind” (Premack1988).

A number of modifications of these twopositions exist, including, in particular,Pinkerton and Bloom’s idea that the geneticchange that causes language arose throughnatural selection in the hominid lineage as aspecialized biological system only present inmodern humans, thus supporting thediscontinuity position. King and hercolleagues were more interested in askingand answering questions about whatlanguage has in common with thecommunication systems of non-humanprimates, and also with their non-linguisticbehaviour.

Approaching the question this way willalso eventually allow researchers to assesswhat is similar about these systems. Inaddition, this approach provides a focus onthe communication systems of our closestliving relatives and comparative work mayallow us to extrapolate into the past, lookingfor origins of human specializations. King iscritical of those who try to approach thistopic with little understanding of thecharacteristics of primate communication(which were, after all, the basis of how ourearliest ancestors communicated).

In order to address substantial issuesconcerning the similarities and differencesbetween primate communication systemsand human language, the topic must bebroken into a series of sub-questions. Theseinclude such questions as “To what degreedoes primate vocal and gesturalcommunication unfold in a flexible manner,according to experience and interaction,instead of according to prespecified,biologically determined structures andprocesses?”(8) “How do events duringontogeny contribute to the development oflanguage?”(8) and “Are there (or were there)linguistic and/or behavioural precursors tolanguage in non-human primates, includingthe hominids?”(8).

When struggling with the issue ofdefining language, it seems clear that thetheoretical position from which you beginwill define the questions asked. From aninnatist’s perspective, who sees language asan inborn uniquely human trait, questions ofthe presence, origin and function of syntaxas the organizing fundamental of languagewill loom large. From the evolutionaryperspective you might look at language as aset of functional subsystems, such asclassificatory ability, controlled vocalizations,and the ability to build up calls or gestures,from a combination of available elements.The primate precursor systems can then beexamined for evidence of such abilities, or ofeven more complex ones, such as theunderstanding of relationships amongpatterns which can show up in complexsocial interactions where differentialresponses are directed to individuals whohave different types of relationships with thesender.

These kinds of observations on primatesdepend on long-term detailed studies of bothfree ranging and captive groups. Freeranging studies are particularly importantbecause of the complexity of socialorganization in undisturbed groups whichprovides evidence of how animals in themclassify their relationships.

In addition, detailed study of thestructure of face and body gestures, as well asvocal communications, provides evidence forhow these systems operate and whetherthere are indications of a basic underlyingsyntax or at least a level of meta-communication. King, in particular, statesthat she sees language not as a static set offeatures, but as a dynamic interactive systemof production and reception.

King’s first chapter begins with adiscussion of Bickerton’s viewpoint about theimportance of syntax as a defining feature of

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language. Immediately this means that datafrom primates is not a productive place tolook because, according to Bickerton,primates can only communicate aboutemotion, not about specific features of theenvironment. He agrees that other animalscan infer meaning from the first (as in apredator alarm) but argues that there is ahuge difference between that function ofcommunication and an intended meaning towarn others about a dangerous feature. Healso argues that primates do not showvariable responses to particular calls, andthus maintains that there is a separatecognitive base for animal communication.

King argues with this viewpoint becauseshe states that monkeys and apes haverelationships — not just interactions — andthat these relationships involve attending tothe other, such that if a mother calls to aninfant she means that it should come, andwill go and retrieve it if it does not respond.This is particularly evident in captive andenculturated apes interacting with humans,or with other apes, where they visibly waitfor a response after making a communicativegesture. King discusses Wallman’s approachto language origin issues by noting that hisobservations support both the continuity andthe discontinuity theories because hesuggests that differential monkey vocalalarms are “plausible precursors of words”(35) while concluding that primates do notevince language-like principles in theirnatural systems of communication. Hecomes to this conclusion because he doesnot find many language-like features such asduality of patterning and vocal learning inprimate systems. In fact, vocal learning isnow widely accepted for a variety ofprimates, e.g. Snowdon (this volume) andbonobos direct particular gesturalmovements towards infant bonobos, thatdepend both on the context and theresponses of infants, in a clearlycommunicative way. Another good exampleof call modification is the development ofco-calling and counter-calling in gibbons,where mates gradually align their calls toform a unified duet. King argues thatlooking at what primates really do, beforeimposing constraints based on standards ofhuman behaviour, will help us learn a greatdeal more about primate communicationsystems than starting with human standardswhich apes may not match.

The next theorist King discusses isGibson, who as a continuist, looks on brainstructure and communication skills as basicto primates and expanded in humans. Shesees language as essentially an emergentproperty built up out of components, as amosaic of features to allow interaction andsocial information donation, rather thanfocussing on single utterances. Otherfeatures of language, such as voluntarycontrol of utterances, and combining twocalls to make a new meaning, are present inprimates in a rudimentary form according toher. Thus, Gibson argues that humanlanguage is not unique, even though it hasdistinctive features based on the increasedintellectual abilities of humans. The keyclaim in this approach is that smallneurological changes can explain theincremental changes in communicativeabilities in primates such that the differences

between apes and humans should be seen inquantitative rather than qualitative terms.King supports this argument by citing in herown work evidence of referentiality, vocalcontrol, precursors for syntax and processorsfor turn taking. The evidence for precursorsfor syntax is supported by Armstrong, Stokoeand Wilcox (1995), who emphasize thatcontinuity in the gestural-optical channelallow visible gestures to promote anunderstanding of sequential actions. Anexample is a raptor seizing a prey animalbeing modelled by a hand grasping an object;in other words an actor, a target and anaction. Once the sequential organization ofaction is mapped onto meaning, then basicsyntax can be said to occur.

Evidence for these levels of ability aredifficult to discern in wild populations ofprimates, but enculturated apes candemonstrate an understanding of agent-action-object quite clearly. This isparticularly true for language trained apessuch as Kanzi, who can even deal withembedded clauses in a received sentence.Those who argue that apes only live in thepresent may not be interpreting theirexcellent memories for past acquaintances,or ability to move around their ranges toforage optimally, as evidence of anunderstanding of the past. Delayedredirected aggression, in which an animalattacks another who has a close relationshipwith the one who offended it the day before,also shows ability to remember the past andperhaps to plan future retaliation if theoriginal attacker was too powerful to bechallenged. Despite the many argumentsfrom discontinuity theorists thatenculturated apes show little or no use oflanguage since the signing that they do isoften “instrumental” (they are requestingsomething), or in response to being signedto, there are certainly many episodes of ape-initiated comments and rule governedproductions of strings of signs. In her workwith Kanzi, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (1998)has tested his ability to comprehend novelsentences and found that without rewardand on one presentation of each request, hewas able to perform a variety of what musthave seemed like odd behaviours, such as“put the grapes in the swimming pool.” Herinterest in focusing on comprehensionpermits a comparison with human languageand a way to look for the key elements oflanguage. Production withoutcomprehension is not much use as anevolutionary strategy, so it seems likely thatcomprehension of signal forms was a majorunderpinning to the structuring of languageand co-occurred with production.

Since detailed information on primatevocal and gestural systems is still beinggathered, Maestripieri, in the next chapter,investigates how the social environmentinfluences the cognitive abilities andcommunication systems of primates. In thiswork Maestripieri compared Rhesus, Pigtailand Stumptail macaques in terms of theirdominance and kinship organization inrelation to the complexity of their patterns ofaffiliative bonding and development oftemporary alliances. The results of this studysuggested that the less dominance orientedspecies, e.g. the Pigtail and Stumptail, have awider repertoire of non-aggressive gestures

and more sophisticated communicativeinteractions. Rhesus macaques do not usemany affiliative signals and use gesturesmainly to express dominance andsubordinance. In particular, evidence fromStumptail macaques who are less organizedby dominance and the impact of matrilinealkin, suggests that the need to co-operatewith unrelated individuals requires clearsignals of affiliative intent, since the varietyof assertive and submissive gestures indicatesa great potential for within-group conflict inthe species. Therefore, expressions ofreassurance and bonding are needed tomaintain cohesion in their relatively largesocial groups. This is an interestingapproach, especially if the results suggestthat particular types of early hominid socialorganization might have influenced thesophistication of their communicationsystem.

In particular, as Maestripieri notes, it ismuch more probable that pressures forcomplex communication were likely to arisein the context of social behaviour than inthe context of external referents. Thestrategies of intra-group co-operation andcompetition in primate groups are morecomplex than seen among almost all otheranimals and have been suggested as the basisfor increasing development of primatecognitive skills (Whiten and Byrne 1988;Tomasello and Call 1997).

Snowdon’s chapter extends the range ofthis book to a discussion of thecommunicative capabilities of New WorldMonkeys. This is important from thephylogenetic perspective because New Worldforms have been separated genetically fromOld World ones for over thirty million years.Thus, if there is a unified genetic basis tocomplex primate communication skills thismust have developed a very long time ago.On the other hand, if what we see is paralleldevelopment, this suggests that the parallelfeatures of primate social life and functionaladaptations to group living are powerfulforces in the development of complexcommunication skills. Snowdon maintainsstrong empiricist views and promotes thevalue of good empirical data to support histheoretical position. He begins by addressingHockett’s design features of language anddiscusses at what level these features arepresent in primate systems. After runningthrough all the criteria, Snowdon claims thatall of them are present in one primate speciesor another, although he does agree that nonon-human communication systemincorporates them all. He then discusses theuniqueness of human production andperception of sounds as speech, butconcludes that other primates cancategorically perceptualize human speechsounds. This discussion proceeds toevidence that primates have categoricalperceptions of their own vocalizations, suchas occurs in pygmy marmosets whocategorize their trill vocalizations on thebasis of call duration. Evidence for within-category discrimination occurred whenpygmy marmosets would responddifferentially to playbacks of short trills madeby known individuals who usually madeshort trills, versus long trill playbacks of thesame animal, and vice versa.

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Snowdon uses this data to argue thatthere is nothing “special” about speechperception. It uses phylogenetically oldperceptual contrasts, but in certain socialsituations within-group categorization ofsocial factors such as age, sex and individual,impact the meaning of the actual linguisticsignal. He goes on to deal with the conceptof language universals, critical periods, wordorder learning patterns, and individuallearner preferences. By examining languagedevelopment in a variety of cultures, and inthe bilingual learning situation, Snowdonargues that all of these frequently acceptedtruisms about language development do nothold globally.

He then moves to monkey vocaldevelopment. Comparison with isolationreared and deafened song birds suggests thatthe development of vocal production inprimates is quite conservative, since they areless affected by isolation procedures thansong birds (based on Seyfarth and Cheney1997). However, the calls investigated wereusually predator alarm or infant lost calls,which need to be ritualized and rapidlyresponded to for survival reasons.Vocalizations used in social relationships aremuch more plastic and influenced bylearning. He supports this claim with dataon affiliative vocalizations in marmosets andtamarins. Trill vocalizations of pygmymarmosets have traits that allow individualrecognition. In the wild, as animals getfarther away from the group, they alter thestructure of their calls so they can be moreeasily located. The members of the grouptake turns calling and thus all groupmembers know where everyone is. Thedevelopment of captive pygmy marmosetsindicated that the calls developed with age,becoming deeper and longer, as would beexpected from maturational development.However, some were also shorter and higherpitched, so that the changes could not beaccounted for by maturational factors.Social impacts also affected trill structure, asstranger and established animals bothchanged their vocalizations after beingplaced together for some time. Whenanimals were newly paired they also changedtheir trill structure to converge with theirnew mate. This study was compared to theresults of humans joining a new group andchanging their speaking patterns (Giles andSmith 1979). Another parallel with humansthat Snowdon discussed was the presence ofbabbling in infant pygmy marmosets. He iscurrently investigating whether adultsrespond differentially to infant marmosetswhen they are babbling, and if the adult’sreinforcement changes or directs thestructure of the calls. Altogether, Snowdonwas making three points in his chapter. First,he found it difficult to find explicit criteriathat differentiate human language from thevocal communication of other species, exceptfor the use of words and the concomitantneurological complexity and increased socialdependence of humans. Second, the ideassupporting the innateness argument, such asuniversals of development and criticalperiods, may depend more on learningpatterns and motivational processes than ona genetic basis. Third, the data derived frommarmosets and tamarins on social impact,babbling and teaching of food associated calls

provide experimental evidence to support anargument that learning and cognitivevariables are very important aspects ofdeveloping primate communication systems.In particular, language and communicationare socially constructed. Communicationsignals are learned and shaped into adultmodes of production usage andcomprehension.

Savage-Rumbaugh begins her chapter byquestioning whether the accepted scientificmethod of hypothesis and experiment is, infact, the best way to understand what isgoing on in the minds of primates. In orderto prove goal direction, intentionality andconsciousness without being able to talk withan animal, what means can researchers use,since such mental attributes cannot beempirically proved for humans, except byself-report?

Savage-Rumbaugh clearly expresses thedifficulties she has faced in attempting toscientifically prove that the Yerkish-usingchimpanzees, particularly Kanzi, utilizelanguage. Her argument maintains that astudy based on replicable, countable linearevents is not going to provide much of anindication about the mental abilities of apes.Data collection techniques can be structuredto “make minds appear to be like machines.One can count and classify and lump, butone learns little by making a mind appear tofit the current mold of science” (119). Newmethodologies need to be developed andaccepted to study the multiple phenomenathat make up ape behaviour, becauseotherwise the kinds of questions we ask willnot bring us answers relevant tounderstanding what apes are really like.

The chapter continues with a Platonicimaginary dialogue between Savage-Rumbaugh and an invented critic. Theydiscuss many of the questions that arecurrently at issue. Savage-Rumbaugh givesexamples of bonobos referring to past events,such as a fire. After the fire occurred, one ofthe apes led a caregiver out to the location ofthe fire, but arguments were put forward thatsince there are no past tense symbols on aYerkish board, that we do not know if thebonobo just used the word and led thecaregiver there because she wanted to seethe place again, rather than transfer theinformation that a fire had happened. If thiswere the only event of its kind thisreductionist level of explanation might bereasonable, Savage-Rumbaugh argues, butwhen there are hundreds of events over theyears, they cannot all be chance or mindlessoccurrences. The main question that wasrepeatedly asked by the critic was “how canwe ... be sure that what you (Savage-Rumbaugh) see in the apes is really there?”He argues that she cannot be objective aboutthe apes because she participated in raisingthem, and therefore, she will interpret anysituation as if it were evidence ofcomprehension. The problem with hisquestion is that he would probably seesomething different than she because it takesa well-trained and experienced eye toperceive what is happening in apecommunication. In her anecdote aboutgetting her keys back from one bonobo whowouldn’t give them to her by asking Kanzi totell Tamuli to give me my keys (136), she

agreed that the critic probably would nothave asked Kanzi for help, and thus wouldnot have had the opportunity to observe thisthree way interaction. What she is trying tosay, as the Gardners and Fouts have alreadysaid, is, if you don’t think the animals aregoing to understand you, you will probablynot see any evidence that they do. You maysee manifestations but you could always saythey were random or accidental responsesand not true evidence. I have certainly seen,and have video of, apes who clearlyunderstood what they were being asked to doand who were not trained for that particularsituation. The critic in this imaginary debateends by saying that he can’t imagine howprimates can use referential communicationbecause we do not know what is going on intheir heads, and that the ape languageresearchers may be over-interpreting theirresults. The chapter ends with a discussionof the critic’s arguments. In particular, thecritic has suggested that Savage-Rumbaughis not objective and her reply is that allscientists have feelings about their workwhich will affect how they collect, classify,analyse and interpret their findings. To me,an objective researcher is one who is willingto accept whatever results the data show,whether or not the hypothesis is supported.

The other major issue was the differencebetween anecdote and experiment. If someape communications such as greetingroutines are standardized, they are not ofinterest to the linguist because they might berote actions, or repetitive, and therefore donot reflect linguistic competence. On theother hand, a novel or unusual behaviour orincident that displays an intelligent solutionis an anecdote and therefore not acceptableto science. Savage-Rumbaugh calls this adouble standard because unique behavioursfor humans are considered to provideevidence of intelligence, possible problemsolving, and linguistic competence. Firstverbalizations, and even repetitions of“Mama” by infants, are considered evidenceof preliminary linguistic skill.

The chapter ends with a description ofhow Panbanisha (a pregnant female bonobo)responded by pointing at her belly the firsttime she was asked “Where is your baby?”She also touched her stomach when the babymoved and she was watching it on asonogram (which she had never seen before)and she did not normally touch herself whenthe fetus moved. For the observers it seemedclear that she understood the sonogram wasa picture of her hidden baby. When theinfant was born and she was asked “Where isyour baby?” she always pointed to it, not toher stomach or vagina. This was her firstpregnancy, but she had seen her mother, anda number of humans, when they werepregnant, and later with their babies. Theconceptual ability to know that a baby isinside you represents a fairly sophisticatedunderstanding of self and other, since sherecognized the born object as her baby.

Kathleen Gibson and Stephen Jesseeapproach the language origins questions byinvestigating the “brains, anatomy andbehaviour of humans and their closestphylogenetic kin” (194). They examinequantitative differences in the size of thebrain and many of its parts. Their argument

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is that larger brain areas in humans allowincreased mental capacities, differentiation,conceptual schema, and advanced motor andobject manipulation skills. This viewpointsupports the position that quantitativedifferences provide sufficient mentalcapabilities for what seem to be uniquelyhuman traits.

Lieberman had suggested that apes couldnot articulate because their epiglottis waslevel with their uvula, but dissections ofchimpanzees indicate that it usually lies justbelow the uvula. In humans, the epiglottisalso lies below the uvula, but the distancebelow has a range of over 20 mm. Thus,there is a quantitative range between thedistance of the epiglottis below the uvula inapes and human, but overall structure is notnearly as different as Lieberman hadindicated.

These arguments do not mean to suggestthat the differences between apes andhumans are minimal, because they are clearlyquite substantial. Most human brains arethree times the weight of an average apebrain. Since brain and body size are highlycorrelated, the EQ or encephalizationquotient is a common equation used tofactor out effects of body size. High humanEQs correlate with our perception of humansas having the highest brain/body ratio, butEQ levels do not correlate well with mirrorself-recognition and tool use in non-humanprimates. Dunbar suggests that the ratio ofneocortical brain size correlates with the sizeof social groups in his hypothesis, that socialskills are the underlying basis of cognitivecomplexity. However, Gibson and Jessee feelthat large absolute brain size with enlargedcircuits, complex dendritic branching, andmany interacting neural regions, is associatedwith long periods of learning and isimportant in mediating sensory motor andcognitive functions. They go on to suggestthat linguistic skills are not mediated only bya developed Broca’s area alone but by“coordinated changes in the sizes of manystructures and tracts with diverse functions”(20).

Procedural learning is the developmentof habits and skills that become almostautomatic (like riding a bicycle). Parts of thebrain involved in this are larger in moretaxonomically advanced primates. Inhumans, complex dance routines, pianoplaying, speaking and writing clearly reflectprocedural learning, which makes itsdevelopment an important role in learningvocabulary. The foraging lifestyle of primateswould benefit from this type of learning andit has been experimentally demonstrated inmonkeys and apes who have the enlargedhippocampus and frontal and temporal typecircuits on which it depends. This learningis mediated by emotion and thus emotionalcontrol is an important aspect of takingadvantage of this ability. The size of theneocortex relates to the complexity of thefunction of the part controlled rather thanits size. The interconnectedness of motorneurons leads to an exponential growth ofthe number of movements controlled.Therefore, the need to combine andrecombine the movements of lips, tongue,and oral cavity and to fine-tune mouthmovements requires multiple parallel neuraltracts working together. In humans, large

association cortices provide multiplesimultaneous and sequential control overmotor acts as is required for speech orwriting. The level of cross-modal integrationin humans allows smells and sounds to bereconstructed into a larger whole, such as“that’s a predator.”

After discussing the structure of ape andhuman brains and the advantages modernhumans gain from their increased brain size,the authors discuss developmental process inchildren. They suggest that hierarchical andcross-modal connections are the basis ofbeing able to comprehend “object-name”when an object is presented to an infant andthe name is spoken, which are two separateinformation sources which must becombined. The child constructs a concept ofthe word, from seeing the object, acaretaker’s reference to it, and the sound ofits name. Words thus depend on mentalconstructional skills, as do phrases, sentencesand stories. As they become more complex,they convey more information. Humanlanguage has an overall hierarchicalstructure, but it may not require abilitiesunique to humans to make it function.Language trained apes can merge orconstruct concepts by seeing objects andhearing their names even though theirabilities to hierarchically construct multi-word utterances are much poorer thanchildren over age two. It may be that thenumber of parallel circuits they have to keepa variety of concepts in mind simultaneouslyis just not sufficient to create complex verbalstrings.

Early human minds may have started atthe same place, but interactions of humanskills and the development of complexprocedural activities may have interacted toincrease manipulative, social, and eventuallylinguistic complexity. As tool use andmaking emerged and developed, sensorymotor, imitative, and planning skills, whichare essential for making stone tools, wouldhave emerged. Gestures and vocalizationused to process foods, indicate traveldirection or direct a youngster’s attention toa foraging opportunity would have hadserious selective advantages. By the timeHomo erectus with a cranial capacity of 900-1000 cc (halfway between apes and modernhumans) were in existence, they weremaking balanced, symmetrical, bifaciallyflaked stone tools for cutting, butchering,and perhaps throwing.

Modern pre-school children cancommunicate about actions, events andlocations present in the environment, butamplify their descriptions with considerableuse of gesture. Older children (age 7+) cancommunicate comprehensibly about absentobjects, abstract ideas and previous events.By this time, their brains are larger thanthose of most Homo erectus. They developthe use of deictic devices which allows themto discuss distant events more accurately. Ifthey were foragers they could talk aboutdistant resources. The development oflanguage skills seems to track the increase inbrain size very well, and Gibson and Jesseeargue that Lieberman’s ideas about deficientNeanderthal verbal skills are not supportedby this approach. In fact, they replicated thecranial base study on which Lieberman’shypothesis rested, and found that the cranial

base flexure in modern infants was wellwithin the range of variation of verbalchildren. Moreover, the degree of cranialbase flexion in the La Chapelle Neanderthal,which was the original one underlyingLieberman’s ideas, was also within themodern human child range. Gibson andJessee’s conclusion, therefore, maintains thatlanguage evolution is based on thecoordinated evolution of a variety of neuralfunctions arising from the increased size ofthe modern human brain.

Davidson’s chapter on continuity anddiscontinuity in language origins starts fromthe continuity perspective because, heargues, most other research begins from thediscontinuity end. This is because thearbitrary nature of languages, by theirsymbolic nature, encourages this approach.He begins by discussing the concept ofnaming as a discontinuous aspect of anessentially continuous communicative skill.The analogy he uses is the episodic nature ofhistorical events embedded in thecontinuum of history. In looking forlanguage origins he comments that even thisprocess produces discontinuity because wesee an origin as a new and different thingthan previously existed. He does, however,argue that there is a distinct discontinuitybetween non-human primates and modernhumans which means that primate evidenceis not a direct source of information abouthuman behaviour. The big question is “howthese differences emerged” (231). Davidsonlooks to four types of data to answer thisquestion. A frequently used approach is toargue by analogy from non-human primatesto early humans. The author argues thatthis is a very weak source of data. Thesecond approach is a discussion of ecologicalfunctional similarities as a conceptual modelto reinforce the referential models byestablishing a theoretical basis for possiblesimilarities between primates and earlyhominids. This approach is judged to havesome promise, but the environmentalflexibility of humans makes it difficult toclearly delineate evolutionary processes ofchange in early hominids. The nextapproach is an effort to reconstruct the lastprimate/human common ancestor by using acladistic style of assessment. The problem ofconvergence makes it difficult to proceedwith confidence, and the processes by whichthe differences between the lines developedare difficult to identify. However,archaeological material shows us some of theintermediate stages in the development fromcommon ancestor to modern human, andallows us to check our model. In spite of thedifficulties Davidson sees in the first threeapproaches, he does accept that his fourthmethodology might be useful. This involvesusing primate data to set a primate baselinefor human activity. Apes make tools, usecomplex communication, and live incomplex social groups. They eat meat, hunt,and spend a long time raising their young.But this does not tell us how or when earlyhumans refined these abilities. In particular,for language we do not know when or wherehuman capacities advanced beyond apes, butsince production would be useless withoutreception, the two must have developedconcurrently, and thus probably in socialgroups. The ultimate cause of language was

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probably the development of particularsolutions to general primate problems.However, it couldn’t have happened withoutrelaxations of the selection pressures againstlarger brains. Brains are expensive tomaintain and need to be kept at a constanttemperature. As Australopithecinesdeveloped, their tool-making skills may haveprovided more meat and the potential forbrain growth. Another jump in brain sizeoccurred with the development of Homoerectus and increasing tool production skills.Eventually the brain growth pattern ofinfants included a substantial post-birthgrowth phase, which greatly increased thepotential for learning. Noble and Davidson(1996) argued that it was not actually achange in the form of communication whichpushed it into language, but the discovery ofthe symbolic potential of referentialutterances. This allowed a changeover frommemorizing every instance of communicationto developing a hierarchical structure of codeutterances, thus allowing for a reduced“instruction set” for the use of these newlydeveloped symbols.

The discontinuity between our ancestorsand ourselves comes from the fact that allour ancestors are extinct so we can no longersee the developmental continuity thatoccurred; we have no idea how long thestages took or when they were.Archaeological evidence of conservativetool-making strategies and slow populationgrowth suggests that language developmenttook a long time. The appearance of symbolsis recorded in the archaeological record butwe will never know if we have found the firstoccurrence. Davidson’s conclusion is thatwe can argue for continuity or discontinuityfrom the same evidence depending on howwe interpret finds from the past.

Moving from the course of evolution tohuman ontogeny, McCune argues thatattention to language acquisition processes inprimates and humans may help to inform usabout language development at the specieslevel. If autonomic vocalizations occur inresponse to metabolic needs across species,they describe internal states and can promptthe recognition of sound-meaningcorrespondence. Communication requiresboth sender and receiver. If the receiverunderstands the message, Searle (1992)argues that s/he experiences an internal stateof meaning closely related to that of thesender (270). He calls this an Intentional orI-state. These I-states characterize consciousexperiences of the organism paying attentionto its surroundings. It implies a sense of self,a focus, and an affective tone.

Infant humans experience I-states veryearly in life and utilize vocal grunts tocomment on internal and external states.By the age of one month, they first exhibitlinguistic referential ability, by using gruntswhen they notice objects. By nine to sixteenmonths, there are three uses of grunts withthe third being used as accompaniment tocommunicative gestures and looks at themother. This leads to the beginning of vocalinteraction. Since the physiological effort ofgrunting and the visual attention suggest aconsistent I-state, directed to environmentalstimuli, the environmental focus and thegrunt may then be joined in a symbol-

referent relationship. The meaning may varywith the child’s attention focus, but this mayfacilitate learning if it gets differentialresponses.

Parent/infant exchanges develop asparents learn to recognize their infant’ssignals and respond to them as if they hadmeaning, thus giving them meaning. Mutualattunement occurs in mother/infant pairs allthrough the primate order. Mother/infantattachment is developed through interaction,and human children develop language tohelp maintain that attachment (279). A setof interacting conditions is needed toproduce referential language in humans.These include caring adults who will engagein representational play, a communicativefocus, like the grunt, and developingphonetic skill that allows vocal schemes toemerge. Representational play can evolvethrough finger pointing at objects, oftenaccompanied by a visual check on the socialpartner to see if they are attending to thedesignated object. This development of jointattention and object differentiation isevidence of differentiation between self,social partner, and object that is consideredthe basis of reference. This author claimsthat primates use object play and somepointing, but I do not think she gives apesenough credit for object attentioninteraction. At any rate, human childrenrapidly move from babbling to vocalizationsorganized by motor schemes that becomemore patterned and rhythmic. The authorthen deals with the question of whether achild’s first words are already referential andstates that situationally limited words (e.g.,particular events and objects) may developfirst. These include social words such as“bye bye” and game markers like “peek-a-boo”. This is a practised, memorized use ofwords rather than the use of a word as asymbol, which characterizes referentiallanguage. The development of speechrequires an interlocking set of species-typicalexperiences in a culturally maintainedlinguistic system. The child develops aconcept of self in relation to others and theexternal world. The communication gruntmentioned above may be the child’s initialpersonal symbol. Making similar noisesallows matching of the I-state, so vervetmonkeys making a “grunt to a dominant” areanswered by the same sound, although itcan’t be true in both cases. Seyfarth andCheney (1986), who studied vervet grunts,feel that the reply may indicate “messagereceived” rather than the initial meaning.Since young monkeys must learn the correctcontexts for effective use of vocalizations,they must be learning about sound-meaningcorrespondence.

Since there are eight types of grunts inthe vervet repertoire, plus many othersounds, a considerable level of learning isinvolved. The same is true of chimpanzeevocalizations, some of which have individualaspects. They are used in a wide variety ofsituations. Gestures frequently accompanythem, often with overlapping meaning.These gesture/vocalization packages may bedeveloped into a ritual with considerablesocial relevance (such as greeting rituals).Chimpanzee food grunts usually combinepresence and activity. Thus, when trying toteach language trained chimpanzees a label

for a food item, researchers detach theconcept of eating from the item’s label. Thisis necessary so as to persuade animals to labelitems that are not present or not available tobe eaten. Eventually, the experimentalchimpanzees learned to distinguish thereferential nature of the symbol from theexpectation of eating it. Labelling absenttools and people revealed the same issue,with a sudden resolution and a jump to100% correct answers after a few days oftraining. This learning experience may beone major underlying factor why captivechimps seem much more capable of problemsolving than wild animals.

Burling is a linguist who utilizes Peirce’sthree way division of signs among icons,indices and symbols. The indices and iconsare not symbols, but tied to their referent ina non-arbitrary way. An index is associatedwith a reference, like a paw print with a cator smoke with fire, that is, by its causality.Icons are subdivided into three aspects:images, metaphors, and diagrams. Imageshave a physical resemblance to theirreferents such as the ASL signs for cat ortree. Metaphors are more abstract, but theyrelate to the idea in a physical way, such asholding up hands, palms inward, to indicatethe size of a fish. Human languages arebased on arbitrary word-object associationsbut also contain much iconicity andindexicality.

Burling claims that the distinctivelyhuman aspects of communication arelanguage itself and what he refers to as“gesture calls.” These include face and bodygestures and the non-verbal sounds we maketo indicate emotion. These gesture callsform an analogue system with continuousgraded levels of expression. Some gesturesare actually learned, such as the “V” forvictory and these form a subset of whatKendon has called quotable gestures (1992).These edge out of the analogue category intothe more digital arrangements of spokenlanguage with its discrete phonemes andmorphemes. Gesticulation and intonationare aspects of analogue language butcomplement the digital vocal production.Since Burling includes both of these in theanalogue category, I’ve excluded them from anarrow definition of language components.All of these indices, icons, and formsmentioned, are types of motivated signs inPeirce’s organization deployed by Burling.Motivated signs were of much greaterimportance in early language than in modernforms. Actions became conventionalized andeventually developed into arbitrary symbols.If conventionalization goes far enough,motivation can be undermined and signs canbecome contrastive, and therefore digital.Sign language has a more iconic base thanspoken language, but is still complex andarbitrary enough to require learning ratherthan being iconically obvious. As youngprimates/humans develop, they can turn veryeasily instrumental gestures intoconventionalized gestures. Even babyorangutans raised with people hold theirarms up to ask to be picked up.Conventionalization speeds upcommunication and makes the job of theproducer easier. Apes in the wild use somemotivated signs, and these can becomeconventionalized between parents and

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offspring. They are not universal in aspecies, but have to be learned by eachinteracting dyad.

At this point in the chapter Burlingmoves from discussing data to speculatingabout how this patterning of indices, icons,and gesticulations could have transformedinto language through the process ofconventionalization. The capacity todevelop, remember, store and retrieve suchcommunicative elements would have beenenormously advantageous to thoseanimals/early hominids successfully usingthem. Infants could learn these patternsfrom their mothers and increasingarbitrariness would have helped to keep theelements distinct. Burling comments thatalthough innovated signs were probably animportant underpinning for language, theywere not, by themselves, sufficient to causelanguage. Brain development, increasedcognitive mapping, and social bonding are allprobable components of the developingsystem of human language.

Wilcox, in the final chapter of the book,proposes that language developed out ofcognitive abilities, social processes and visiblegestures present in primate ancestors. Thekey elements of language must have beenpresent in early hominid abilities andbehaviours. These abilities underlay novelinventive discoveries that increased linguisticability in a fashion parallel to the punctuatedequilibrium model of evolution. He arguesthat even distant primate ancestors possessedcognitive abilities sufficient to formstructured conceptualizations, and to classifyexperiences based on similar features.

The essence of Wilcox’s argument is thatcognitive abilities, ritualization and visiblegesture acted in concert to mediate theemergence of language. Languagedevelopment rests on two aspects of visiblegestures: the expressive bodily action and thecoordinative structuring which takes a seriesof non-symbolic movements and arrangestheir production, resulting in a movementwith meaning (like a “thumbs up”). ForWilcox, the raw material of visual gesturesacted upon ritualization and cognitiveabilities. Visible gestures mediate betweenindividual and social arenas, as well asbetween action and perception. Originally,these actions may have had instrumentalfunctions, as well as serving communicativepurposes. In order for the refinement ofvisual gesture to linguistic attribute, thegesture must be refined to a single salientunmistakable movement or expression. Thissingle feature is then interpreted as acommunication cue and the other features ofthe gesture are disregarded. During thisprocess, in many cases, ritualized gestures areemancipated from their original functions.As this occurs, the acts become free to takeon alternative meanings and can be modifiedto become signals with the connotation ofthe original act being transformed to adenotative meaning. This, it is argued, is theinitial stage of language because the actionlooks back to the gesture it was and themeaning it developed, and forward to theworld of grammar. One might ask how wemoved from visible to audible gesturesystems, but Wilcox argues that the visiblegestures often had auditory components, and

during the course of initialization, auditoryaspects could become the salient features.

He bolsters the argument by saying thatincreased vocal signalling may have becomemore useful if hands were busy using toolsand performing a variety of tasks. Otherselective factors could have contributed aswell, such as the need for hunting signals, orcommunicating in the dark. The differencesbetween the digital language system and themore continuous gestural one could havearisen as emergent properties arising fromthe process of ritualization. In animals,ritualized activities occur at “typicalintensities,” because clarity of form is vital.Thus, no matter the level of stimulus, thedisplay movement is invariable. Thisexplains how previously continuous gesturescould become digital.

The process could also underlie thedevelopment of arbitrariness. The ritualizedresponse carries little information about thesender’s actual emotional state. Over timethese gestures can become stylized to thepoint that their origin is hardly discernible.As stylization proceeds, a signal that matchesthe community standards will be perceivedmuch more rapidly than one that does not.Standardization of signals thus developswhich could serve as the foundation forgrammar. The symbols would be most usefulif they were discrete and contrastive, inaddition to being combinable in productiveways. The long string of modifications thatled to this stage each arose from the previousabilities that the animals/hominids possessed,emerging through the process of ritualization.Wilcox feels that this argument movesbeyond Burling’s approach because itsuggests a mechanism through whichgestures could be converted to discretedigital expressions. The key elements werein place before the development of languagebegan and a series of developments, none ofthem uniquely human, allowed linguisticcommunication to develop.

This book provides ten schemata fromthe continuity perspective about howlanguage could have developed. The newdata bout primate vocal learning,referentiality, and the impact of socialrelations on communicative complexity, areall important contributions. Those whodiscussed the ontogeny of human languagetook the argument to very early levels ofdevelopment, showing how simple vocalindicators, such as grunts, can be shaped intolanguage. These authors also related thesimilarities of vocal indicators to thesituation in monkeys. Savage-Rumbaughreinforced our awareness that theoreticalpositions constrain the types of questions weask, and how this caninfluence our perceptionsof what language is.Comparative data on brainsize and its impact onfunction helped to clarifyone approach concerningthe necessary underlyingfoundations for speech.

The lack of aconcluding chaptersynthesizing thesepositions is something of aloss, but altogether this

book stimulates many ideas from oneapproach to language origins. It is wellwritten, thoroughly referenced, and makes asubstantial contribution to the ongoingdiscussion of this issue.

Anne Zeller has been studying macaquessince 1973 and is Chair of the AnthropologyDepartment at the University of Waterloo,where she has taught for the last twenty-twoyears. Her research covers a wide range ofprimate behaviour, includingcommunication, infant socialization,handicapped primates and object use amongmonkeys. She is currently working on aproject on ape painting.

References

Armstrong, D.F., Stokoe, W.C. andWilcox, S.E. (1995) Gesture and the Nature ofLanguage, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.

Giles, H. and Smith, P. (1979)“Accommodation theory: optimal levels ofconvergence.” In Language and SocialPsychology, ed. H. Giles and R. St. Clair,Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 45-65.

Kendon, A. (1992) “Some recent workfrom Italy on Quotable gestures(emblems),”J. Ling. Anthropol., 2:92-108.

Noble, W. and Davidson, I. (1996)Human Evolution, Language, and Mind: APsychological and Archeological Inquiry,Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.

Premack, D. (1988) “Does a chimpanzeehave a theory of mind?” Behav. Brain Sci.,4:515-26.

Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S. (1986) ApeLanguage: From Conditioned Response toSymbol, New York: Columbia U. Press.

Savage-Rumbaugh, S., Shanker, S.G., andTaylor, T.J. (1998) Apes, Language, and theHuman Mind, New York: Oxford U. Press.

Searle, J. (1992) The Rediscovery of theMind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Seyfarth, R. and Cheney, D. (1986)“Vocal development in vervet monkeys,”Anim. Behav., 34:1640-58.

Seyfarth, R.L. and Cheney, D.L. (1997)“Some general features of vocal developmentin nonhuman primates,” in Social Influenceson Vocal Development, ed. C.T. Snowdon andM. Hausberger, Cambridge: Cambridge U.Press, pp. 249-73.

Tomasello, M. and Call, J. (1997) PrimateCognition. New York: Oxford U. Press.

Whiten, A. and Byrne, R.W. (1988)“Tactical deception in primates,” Behav.Brain Sci., 11:233-74.