Musicalization of Language as a mode of social memory construction and as a strategy of...

102

The Musicalization of Language as a Mode of Social Memory Construction and as a Strategy of Self-Preservation of the

Oppressed: as Exemplified by the Language and Music of theAlevi

Abdurrahman Gülbeyaz

Osaka University

1. IntroductionMy paper intends to be a succinct discourse upon the nature and function of the

transformation of language into music in the context of, and in connection with, memory and memory related phenomena. Since this appears to me to always be the case with human speech, no matter what the actual subject is, this monologue will also, at least implicitly, be entirely concerned with the differential features of sublunary humanoids.

That is why I thought it would not be out of place to prepare the grounds for my arguments and assumptions relating to the points specified in the title by touching on that same old elemental terrain of human existence, which I am going to do in the first stage of my presentation. Based upon, and parallel to, the assumptions made in the course of this initial move I ’m going give a rough sketch of human modes of communication, drawing attention to those aspects which I hold to be the most constitutive and differentiating.

In the second stage I am going to talk about memory, trying to delineate what memory in relation to language is, and what it is not. The contemplation in this connection will inevitably, but for the most part tacitly, have recourse to the ongoing philosophical debate on linguistic and non-linguistic communication, to the theories of oral tradition, to psychoanalysis, to the theory of formulaic speech, to memetics, etc.

In the final stage, I am going to introduce the transformation of linguistic utterance into a musical one, as a mode of detention, recall and transfer of mental entities in human society, and will eventually try to elucidate and exemplify the social functions of this process which, against the background of the thematic settings here and today, appear to me to be the most focal ones.

2. All human communication is nothing other than remote communicationIf I - for the sake of intelligibility and at the risk of contortion of what 1

understand by the specific mode of human existence - allow myself to exceptionally use the concept of ‘human individual’l}, I would like to begin my reasoning by an allusion to a truism in connection with the so-called human individual. Namely, that the human individual, as a social sentient being, is and has always been - in every single stage and state of its emergence and evolvement - existentially dependent upon some sort of remote communication system. Whereby, I have to forewarn you that I will - somewhat unorthodoxly, no doubt - regard any communication system whose functionality is contingent on some kind of vehicle and some form of processing procedure as remote communication.

In more straightforward terms, I am drawing on a qualitatively remodelled definition of ‘remote’ as ‘relocated’, ‘transferred’, entirely ignoring the accidental aspect of quantification of the distance. I am of the opinion that this move is sufficiently legitimized and sanctioned by the basic semantic configuration of the underlying etymon. Irrespective of how antagonistic the prevalent communication theories are to each other, they all - wilfully or not - corroborate this train of thought with their irreducible core configuration, which, more often than not, demonstrate a tripartite structure consisting of a communicator or sender or encoder etc., on one side; and a hearer or receiver or decoder, etc. on the other side, and some substance between these two poles through which signals or messages - or whatever it is called by the respective theory - are conveyed.

Mental experiments would definitely succeed in invoking various qualitatively different modes and models of communication. This is indeed, I have to add, already the case. Science-fiction literature, cinema and television have already offered a number of impressive communication models as possible modes of conveyance or conducting of information, embedded either in a future stage of human society, or in societies of extra-terrestrial civilisations2*. But, for the time being, and with respect to the known history of human societies, we have to face the fact that all human communication is nothing other than remote communication.

Abdurrahman Gülbeyaz: The Musicalization of Language as a Mode 103

1) What makes the use o f this well liked and highly marketable abstraction problematically inelegant is the plain fact that the very notion ‘human’ and the ‘individual’ arc irreconcilable with each other, they are indeed mutually exclusive. Still, due to the ineluctable corporality o f human existence, human individuals obviously feel to be obliged to organize their linguistic activity on and in accordance with the premise that human society is the arithmetical product o f human units.

2) A witty and excellent example in this respect would definitely be the “Great Link” o f the Founders in the science fiction television-scries Deep Space Nine (cf. S. D. Perry et al. 2007)..

104 Toward Hetero-Symbiosis and Tolerance

3. Plato’s cave: An early analogy to the semiosphere in which the human beings lie in chains

I think it would not be inappropriate to attribute this - for some tender ears definitely sadly sounding - state of affairs to the specifics of the way the human being is. It is causally linked to the corporeality of the existential mode of the human species, that is to say, to the nature of the hyletic texture of the human entity. Dissimilar to materials such as a perfect fluid or an ideal solution, the substance of which the human body is made of, does not constitute a formless and homogeneous continuum. The circumstance that the very mode of the physical existence of the human individual consists in a rupture of living biomass into form-dependent, and apparently self-acting chunks ' }, is both the source, and the explanation, of the spatial and temporal gap which gives birth to remoteness. On account of this primordial gap4), from the very intimate individual inner world, to the factually accessible and theoretically inferable extraterrestrial phenomena, the entire universe is, as it is perceived or thought up by human individuals, nothing but an endless and thus amorphous space of signs.

I would, with reference to this assessment, venture to argue that the entire intellectual history of human agents could, with a bit of imagination, be reread as an ongoing coherent documentation of this primordial gap as the fountainhead of this remoteness, and hence the inescapable dependency* of human communication on an intermediate agency of some sort. It is, for instance, not an easy task to decide what to do with the entire cosmology of Plato with its forms, the matter, the demiurge, and with all those lower deities etc. However, what is indisputably clear

3) As is generally known, there is in the history o f thought a gamut o f established philosophical and theological positions the mild tones o f which dispute this assumption while the harsh ones dismiss it adamantly. The outstanding representatives o f the latter arc the Ash'aritc school o f the early Islamic Philosophy and the Cartesian school o f 17 century European Philosophy. “Al-Ash'arl denied that things could be caused by anything other than God. There is no causal cfficacy among God’s creation: a ball on a playing field appears to be moved by a player, but in fact it is moved by God. There is only one single causc for all events in the universe, which is God.” (Griffel, Frank. 2009: 126-127). “There is no relation o f causality between a body and a mind. What am I saying ? That there is no relation between a mind and a body. I am saying more. There is no real relation between one body and another, between one mind and another. In a word, no created thing can act upon another by an activity which is its own.” (Malebranche, Nicolas. 1923: 180).

4) By the way, it is o f interest in this conncction to call to mind that this gap has been accounted for- dircctly or implicitly - in almost all classical models o f philosophy and religion. The everlasting quest for a primary matter is in a sense nothing more than the substantiation o f both the pcrccption o f this gap and the ineluctable urge to fill it with something. The perennial track o f four or so elements that comes down from the time immemorial, the fifth clement, the allegedly aristotelcan aether, o f which the spherical shells o f aristotelcan cosmos are made, the mır (j>*) or diya ' (*^—* )̂ in the philosophical teachings o f Al-Farabi and Avicenna - the latter o f whom “in his psychological writings regards the light as a link o f the soul and body” (Bosworth, C.E. ct al. 1995: 123) - or the God in Al-Ghazali’s thinking arc but a few examples o f this circumstance. The range o f examples could easily be extended to the modern pursuance o f antimatter resp. anti-particles in CERN.


is that the way Plato relates the world, the universe and the phenomena therein is an expression of the fundamental mediateness of external reality. I would, in this respect, like to refer you to his cave allegory3 from the seventh book of “the state” .vhich pictorially illustrates the basic aspects of his ontology. Although Plato lets Socrates say that he uses this figure of speech in order to demonstrate the degree of advancement of human nature, I tend to see in it an accomplished simile for the complex network of interconnected and multilayered signs: the semiosphere.

Elsewhere I stated that “all science - if not indeed all specifically human doing - :s nothing but linguistic performance”6*. This statement could - on the basis of the line of thought so far - be reworded and posited in a broader compass here as e.g.: All intellectual activity of human agents is nothing but semiotic activity.’ We, the

prisoners of the platonic cave, are therefore condemned to semiosis.

4. Thinking, speaking, writing and memoryBoth the linguistic performance and the semiotic activity of human agents

require, and presuppose, a faculty by which things are remembered, that is some kind of apparatus which fulfils the task of selectively and systematically retaining, perpetuating or - if need be - reviving the signs to which the sensory organs are exposed. This faculty will, in accordance with the prevailing conventions, be referred to as ‘memory’. Though it might admittedly be very practical, I will refrain from the endeavour to depict in outlines the current theories and research achievements concerning the structure and operating principles of human memory. For an easily accessible introduction to the neurological basics of memory Learning and Memory: The Brain in Action (Sprenger, Marilee. 1999) might be consulted. A relatively new and highly controversial theory concerning the transgenerational transmission of the so called “cultural” phenomena which - insofar as it, drawing upon the Darwinist evolutionism and replacing the “gene” '.herein with “meme”, tries to account for the modes of operation of social memory - could be of some interest for the points at issue here7).

5 1 Human beings living in an underground cave with their legs and necks chained so that they can see nothing but shadows which a fire throws from outside the cavc through the cntrancc on the opposite wall o f the cavc. Also the voiccs o f the passers-by behind the low wall in front o f the opening o f the den are attributed to the shadows, (cf. Platon, 1940: 248)

6) Gülbeyaz, A. 2009. Cult o f “Khizir” o f Asia Minor and “Ak Burkhan” o f Altai: A Comparative Semiotic Enquiry. In Myth and Mystery in the Altaic World - Proceedings - Permanent International Altaistic Confcrcncc. Inner Mongolia University, The Altaic Socicty. p 49.

7) “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea o f a unit o f cultural transmission, or a unit o f imitation. 'Mimeme1 comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to memc* If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought o f as being related to 'memory', or to the Frcnch word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.


Yet, assuming that every individual has a raw intuitive experience-based knowledge of the processes and phenomena which are apt to be subsumed under the concept of memory, I will put this path of discussion aside and try henceforth to shed light on what memory is, and what it is not, by contrasting written language with spoken language, that is, by juxtaposing the written conveyance and the oral conveyance, and thus demarcating the distinguishing features relevant to the question raised here.

For the sake of economy, I would like to begin this leg of my discourse with an abrupt point of departure, by inverting the course of reasoning, and so pronounce the conclusion at the outset: Writing is not memory. Due to the stem reductionism that makes up its very nature and its core functional principle, writing cannot offer the capacity of rendering or representing the conditions and experiences of sentient earthlings - not even approximately. As a one-dimensionally and unidirectionally processing sign system8\ organized in accordance with a principle of extreme economy, writing is structurally bound to squeeze its target, its reference datum, into a text-thing. Because this forceful refashioning, that is, deformation, is not only inevitable, but also simply the very program which rules and supervises its modus operandi, an act of writing has no control over the mode of its processing procedure and the outcome thereof. That is, it cannot forestall the deformation. All it can do is to decide what, in a given configuration of a given socio-historical space-time, is to be deformed.

Hence, it is, for example, out of the question to reconstruct, on the basis of a piece of writing, that is, by virtue of reading, the original reference whose representation or rendition the text intends, or pretends, to be. There are, as a matter of fact, phenomena such as mathematical relations or geometrical forms and objects, whose inherent qualities show an affinity for modes of one-dimensional and unidirectional notation. Owing to this affinity, writing can process such

Examples o f memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways o f making pots or o f building archcs. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so mcmes propagate themselves in the mcmc pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lccturcs. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft o f this chaptcr:'... mcmes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.* When you plant a fertile mcmc in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the memc's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism o f a host cell.” (Dawkins, Richard. 2006: 192)

8) For the sake o f safety I will confine m yself within the framework o f this paper to conventional writing. I believe I have reason enough to desist from going into the question as to whether the post- typographic hypertext o f modern digital society ends the linearity o f the text, thus closing the age of literate civilisations and written history in its classical sense, and calling for a radical reconsideration and reassessment o f the entire complcx o f writing-related phenomena.


rhenomena with significantly less distortion and corrosion. But the structure of the mind and memory in human individuals is a qualitatively different one. Its constitutive characteristics and parameters are quite the reverse of those of writing. The causally interconnected and inextricably intertwined processes of thinking, remembering and speaking9* are nonlinear, multidirectional and multidimensional.

The actual modi operandi of the thinking / speaking / remembering-apparatus of sentient beings - which, in the case of humanoids, would be the brain - are in fact incompatible with the existence-mode of the social individual in the first place10*. They appear to be simply unsympathetic to the determining conditions of the one and only dominant mode of social organisation that human civilisation was able to accomplish. I tend to refer to this paramount mode of social organisation as a death-driven phallocracy,’ with death being its covert motive force, its supporting

plinth, its tacit legitimation, and the strongest card up its sleeve, ready for foolproof, gratifying use, whenever a social negotiation threatens to get out of control. This phallic power is fed by death, whereby death, in this respect, is far more the murderability of the human mammal than its mortality.

If I try to construct a quick comparison, writing would appear to me to be an edifice for storing particular artifacts of social activity of human agents in a given socio-historical space-time - not unlike a granary. Consequently, it has a socio- historically determined / dictated shape, size and partitioning, and a definite manner of operation. As such, it is entirely regulated by code and sanction. That is, what, when, and in what amount, crosses its threshold; what, when, and how much of it, is communally available; who is given the rights of access and use etc.; who rules over the allotment and withdrawal of these rights etc. is stringently dictated and administered by the respective power bloc of the respective phallocracy, under the approval and blessing of the dominant Weltanschauung of its members.

Therefore, it is not surprising that written records, or, more generally, records carved on some sort of data carrier other than the human brain, first emerged in a period of social history in which, triggered apparently by the development of the division of labour, the first surplus production, and in connection with it, tools and technologies for conserving and storing came into being. Private property, and with it - and for the purpose of its appropriation and defence - mechanisms, institutions and processes of systematic social oppression followed. The first known writing systems, that is, the Mesopotamian clay tokens, and the ensuing cuneiform notation

9) the sequencing is unmotivated10) That human agents outwardly seem to be able to employ their memory, for the most part,

meaningfully and beneficially, is becausc o f the social restraints forcefully imposed on the multiplex o f thinking/speaking/rcmembcring. The members o f human socicty arc bound to put a bridle on their memory to keep its activity within socially sanctioned boundaries.

lOK Toward Hetero-Symbiosis and Tolerance

on clay tablets, were used to represent either detailed lists of commodities and the names of their owners, or the quantities of performed labour in time units11’. In other words, writing was originally contrived and employed in order to make the community forget the social character of production, that is, that wealth was, has always been, and still is, a product of collective communal activity. Hence: Writing was not created to preserve, promote and facilitate remembering, but simply to perpetuate oblivion12’

The written is not memory, it is, as is stated, oblivion, it is non-memory. For memory has to be alive, in order for that which is in it to be, and to remain, alive. The spoken (the oral) is endowed with this quality. Even more, the oral tradition consists simply in life. It both materializes and functions as life. It is never stable, it never takes on final form; on the contrary it remains unstable and changeable. This mutability and inconstancy function as a safeguard against excessive abuse and excessive distortion of what the case was, and therewith, what it respectively should be. The text, in its most innocent mode of operation, is basically a contingent incarceration of what the case is, or was in a fixed, terminal posture. The text1 is not alive. It is at least not alive in the same ways that spoken language is.

The text freezes as soon as it is accomplished, and in doing so, it freezes with it the one pose, the one facet of what, under a particular set and configuration of conditions, appears to be the case. This makes plain that the text cannot be memory, but is simply the negation, the abolishment of it. The act of writing is a highly invasive act. It is itself exceedingly context sensitive, so that it is governed by a number of factors which, on their part, are absolutely irrelevant to that which is supposed to be put in writing. These factors which distort what is being put in

11) Also cf. “The growth o f civilization required yet another advance in technology. The complex society o f a city-state requires administration, and administration requires record keeping. Early attempts to meet this need included the working out o f a numerical tally system and perhaps the use o f tokens, which stood for farm animals, quantities o f grain, trade goods, or other objccts that needed to be recorded. But these advances were not enough to meet the culture’s growing bureaucratic needs. The technology that emerged to meet those needs - writing - filled a prosaic but essential purpose: accounting. The impetus behind its invention was not a desire to faithfully record language, but to record trade transactions, crop yields, and taxes - to record and preserve information, not language.” (Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. 2009: 13-14 )

12) Now, it is no doubt another good moment to call Plato to mind again. Although, from an entirely different point o f view, and motivated by solicitudc for utterly different things than is the case here, Plato rcachcs in this rcspcct, the same conclusion in Phacdrus. Seeing Tcuth’s newly invented letters- o f which he is sure that they would make Egyptians wiser and elevate the efficicncy o f their memories - Thamus pronounces: “ ...this discovery o f yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, becausc they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written charactcrs and not remember o f themselves.” (cf. Platon, 1940: 474)

13) Here it is more to the point to understand under “the text” the concrete individual text. I consider the totality o f all texts o f human history something qualitatively different from the historical individual pieccs o f writing.


anting extend from the - in itself, already exceptionally complex - psychosocial Hid mental layout of the concrete writer, through the pure coincidence which rirticipates in the game in various ways and modalities, as far as the tool with * hich the act o f writing is executed.

In the modern times of the internet era - in which the text seems to be going mrough a metamorphosis - the cataclysmic power of written language appears to recome more perceptible than in any other period of the history of sentient humanoids. To be a little more specific, the “copy and paste” technique that has meanwhile become the most vital action of the intellectual routine of the social everyday of the contemporary community, is increasingly unifying and in fo rm ing14} the universe of human individuals, and by doing so, flattening, regimenting, homogenizing and demolishing their memories.

The memory works as an amorphous, incorporeal mode of life. It is impalpable. Its contents are not translatable into any one of the known semiotic systems without critical loss or dissipation. Accordingly, we cannot capture and depict it by means of the linear and unidirectional operation of writing. Also, iconic semiosis, :o give another example, is equally inappropriate, although it appears not only to have the quality of surmounting the strict one-dimensionality and linearity of the written sentence, but also to slacken in a certain way the chains of the omnipotence of mediateness. The main problem with iconic semiosis is nothing less than what makes it up, its very nature: its iconicity. Apart from the fact that the responsiveness to iconicity is nothing but an accidental feature of human existence, :he icon is, to a great extent, immutable; it cuts, redistributes, reframes and eventually freezes the human experience - or whatever the respective reference is - in its own style and manner.

5. Spoken language, sung languageBut spoken language perspicuously contrasts in this connection with other major

modes of semiosis. The researchers of oral tradition have, from the middle of the 19th century on, recurrently and convincingly demonstrated that the facts of the matter, whose origination, storage, and transmission had been promoted exclusively by means of spoken language, did not suffer significant systematic changes. “The transmission of oral traditions is remarkable to the modern, literate observer. Songs, stories, and poems are kept in stable form in memory for centuries without the use of writing, whereas the literate observer has trouble remembering what happened yesterday without notes.” (Rubin, 1995:3).

14) The necessary modes o f operation o f the act o f ‘uniforming’ arc eradication, obliteration.simplification and the like.


The reason why the exclusive use of the oral / aural processes generate veridical renditions, representations, models, or maps of what is linguistically processed, disseminated, stored, transmitted, and recalled is, in the first instance, the changeability and malleability of the spoken. That is, it is thanks to their changeability that oral traditions remain, in the main, stable and unchanged. Even one and the same social individual would recount one and the same experience within even the shortest period differently each time. Each time, however, it would be the same old story.

Research has shown that, with regard to their mechanical manner of operation, oral traditions as a physical process rely on a multilayered structure of a series of constraints on the semantic and prosodic levels. Including, among others, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, stress, intonation etc. Here, I am firstly inclined to identify an incident of resemiosis. And, secondly, I see therein the explanation of the fact that oral traditions tend to make extensive use of musical forms as the vehicle of detention and transmittal. The quantity of such constraints1̂ required for the musicalization of linguistic material is namely the highest. The process of musicalization of spoken language incorporates the techniques, means, and forms of poeticizing and comparable processes in spoken prose.

At this point I must alert you to the fact that, whenever I am forced to use the term ‘music’ for lack of a better concept, I will, as a rule, be referring to either pre- capitalistic or extra-capitalistic16’ music. That is, music which is not produced as a commodity of the modem market economy. The so called “European classical music”, that is, the music of both the declining rulers of late feudal society, and the ascending ones of the modem capitalistic society in transitioning Europe, is definitely something other than the so-called “folk music” of the unprivileged masses. I tend to think that it is sufficiently plain that a serenata by Mozart which was ordered and paid for by the imperial family in Vienna, or the archbishop of Salzburg, is something fundamentally different than a song sung at a funeral service in some Anatolian village, or the otherworldly sounding tunes of throat singers during the move to the wintering grounds on the steps of South Siberia, or a work song sung collectively in the course of rice planting in the paddy-fields of south-east Asia. The difference between European classical music and its numerous

15) These constraints lead to stability without fixing the text; they limit the choices o f what can be sung in a given context, and they cue memory (Rubin, 1995:10).

16) While I am employing - if not even unintentionally coining - this term, I begin to be tormented by the question as to whether the implication issuing from this construction could really be reasonably legitimated. That is, if the current configuration o f the globe with its digitalised power structure still permits such vacua to come into being, or if the idea o f an elusion is actually nothing but illusion.


offspring - such as pop, rock, techno, heavy metal etc. - and the pre- or extra- capitalistic music is of a constitutive nature, that is, strictly speaking, if the one is supposed to be ‘music’ then the other is definitely something else.

The orally transmitted extra-burghal music is anonymous, alive and thus mutable. It has no connection to modem society and its market economy. It is not money- bound. Consequently, oral tradition is immune against power structures of society and related corruptions. It does not associate itself with the institutes, devices and practices of social control and dominance. It neither participates nor legitimates the sovereign. The market driven music of highly industrialized phallocracies seems to me to have a significant affinity to writing, whereas the pre- or extra-capitalistic music could be compared with oral language.

The scholars of the theories of oral tradition have already made clear that singing has always been one of the most effective modes of storing and remembering information. I want to add to this that the musicalization of language does much more than that. It is the most effective way of constructing social memory and, with that, the only mode of social-identity-construction which offers an approvable basis for making the notion of social-identity presentable. I think it is, for example, safe to assert that the oral tradition, and particularly the sung oral tradition, has always played a much greater role in the construction of social identity in Japan than Kojiki, Man'yöshü or any other text.

In order to be able to come to an end soon, I will try to briefly outline the implications of the above discussion for the relation of music and spoken language. Firstly, both spoken language and music are sign systems. That is, they are subspaces of the semiosphere. Secondly, there seems to be a certain hierarchy between the subspaces of the semiosphere. Thirdly, the natural language of humans in its oral implementation17) seems - by a certain criterion from whose discussion I want here to desist from - to be vested with the highest rank in this hierarchy. Fourthly, the varyingly configured, different semiotic subsets are principally convertible into each other. Fifthly, depending on the respective subsets and directions of conversion, there is at the end of the process always a significant change in the degree of accessibility / decipherability of the resulting semiosis.

6. Speaking in tunes and tonguesIn the case of a transformation of the linguistic sign into a musical one, a

significant tapering occurs with respect to accessibility/decipherability. That is, the perimeter of the social subspace within which the resulting network of signs

17) which could be referred to as ‘extra-scriptural language’ with all its implications and associations


remain meaningful and penetrable, is markedly downsized. That is why it is not surprising that the socially deprived, and persecuted groups, have always manifested the tendency to desist from public speaking and to sing instead, i.e. to musicalize social or communal meaningUS). This has always been, and still is, the case with the Alevi community, a heterodoxy with a sizeable amount of adherents, the bulk of which is presently situated in Turkey. Due to their basal non-accordance with the established doctrines and practices of orthodox Islam, the Alevi community has always been the target of unceasing reprisals and aggressions of the establishment19’. As a survival strategy they appear to have - at some stage in the course of their history - given up employing the language for community-related concerns and activities, and have re-encoded them instead into music. The musicalized word has gradually become the great link for the Alevi.

That ritual music functions as the ‘great link’ is not an exceptional story, it is, on the contrary, rather a general phenomenon. During the ‘cem’ [pronounced like the English word “gem”], the principle collective corporate worship service of Alevi, the community enters a state of mind wherein communication - if I may use the term “communication” for lack of a more appropriate word201 - is a non-semiotic, non-linguistic one. That is, it is not mediated, but direct and intuitive; and due to this very nature of unmediatedness and directness, this collective experience is unrelatable, that is, linguistically unprocessable.

A much more popular example of this social behaviour is the socio-musical

18) A discussion on the - more often than not fatal - delicacy o f language usage is to be found in my Transformational Processes in Language and Music Behaviour (In connection with pow er and biopolitical modes o f operation) from which I would like to quote a lengthy passage in order to emphasize the verity and necessity o f this behaviour: “Although language, as has been implied throughout my argumentation, had always been a domain upon which the rulers, be they o f worldly or o f sacred provenance, had to rely in order to keep their sheep firmly in hand, and in which almost always the last and all-deciding battle in every power struggle was to be fought, the inception o f the ‘language ban’ as a powerful means o f subjugation has to be sought in modern society. Precisely, in the invention o f the concepts and institutions o f ‘nation’, ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ plus all the conceivablc combinatorial possibilities o f the three. The contrivance o f these “big three” in the wake o f the rise o f capitalistic modes o f production in Western European societies took placc in causal connection with, and as an answer to, the systcmic demands o f the modem relations o f social production. And, what is o f foremost interest here is that all three concepts arc structurally based on language. Language is - i f not the only one - the most important and absolutely necessary constituent o f these constructs; they practically consist in language. For this simple reason such modern processes as “nation-building”, “identity construction”, “national defence”, “national heritage”, “national values”, etc. have to avail themselves o f language as the field o f operations which, on their part, consist basically o f two opposite sets o f overt and covert strategics: cxtolment I o f the one “nation-building” language and denouncement o f the others.” (see Komatsu, Hisao ct al. 2011: pp 259-269)

19) For a concise first-hand account o f the major massacres o f Alevis in the last 50 years in Turkey sec Yakın Tarihimizde Alevi Kıyımları (Göçmen, Ali 2010: pp 5-103).

20) Although the etymon “communicate” with its central semcm “share” is probably one o f the best possibilities, if not simply the best choice, since, ctymologically seen, it doesn’t contain some sort o f “sending across”, or a “transport” as one o f its principal semems.

history of the Afro- American community. The slaves on the plantations were forced to employ a survival strategy which was basically identical with that o f the Alevis and similar social groups. I think that the following passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God tells enough to give an accurate impression of what I mean:

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song. (Hurston, Zora Neale. 2004: 44)

As a closing remark, I would like to rearticulate, and underline, the one point which has already been implicitly indicated; that is to say, this state performs another, and probably a more crucial, function as well, it re-encodes the inner configuration of the community, and thus protects it from a hostile outside and ensures its survival.

References

Bosworth, C.E. et al (Eds.). 1995. The Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition.Volume VIII Ned - Sam. E.J. Brill, Leiden.

Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The Selfish Gene. 30th Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press Inc., New York.

Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. 2009. The writing revolution : cuneiform to the internet.Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex.

Göçmen, Ali. 2010. Olaylar Tanıklıklar: Aleviler. Vesta, Istanbul.Griffel, Frank. 2009. Al-Ghazali’s philosophical theology. Oxford University Press,

Inc. New York.Gülbeyaz, A. 2009. Cult of “Khizir” of Asia Minor and “Ak Burkhan” of Altai: A



Comparative Semiotic Enquiry. In Myth and Mystery in the Altaic World - Proceedings - Permanent International Altaistic Conference. Inner Mongolia University, The Altaic Society.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 2004. Their Eyes Were Watching God. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., Toronto / Auckland / London / New York.

Komatsu, Hisao & Karasar, Şahin & Dadabaev, Timur & Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun, Güljanat (Eds.). 2011. Central Eurasian Studies: Past, Present and Future. Maltepe Üniversitesi Yayınları, Istanbul.

Malebranche, Nicolas. 1923. Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion. Translated by Morris Ginsberg with a Preface by G. Dawes Hicks. Georg Allen & Unwin Ltd., London.

Platon. 1940. Sämtliche Werke. Berlin: Lambert SchneiderRubin, David C. 1995. Memory in oral traditions: the cognitive psychology of epic,

ballads, and counting-out rhymes. Oxford University Press: New York.S. D. Perry & Weddle David & Jeffery Lang & Keith R. A. Decandido. 2007.

Twist of Faith. Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.

Sprenger, Marilee. 1999. Learning and Memory: The Brain in Action. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria.

Musicalization of Language as a mode of social memory construction and as a strategy of...

Documents

Transcript of Musicalization of Language as a mode of social memory construction and as a strategy of...