Hi Xiaoqin and participants at her just concluded seminar!
My apologies for dropping out mid-question: my WIFI has the habit of doing
that at the most inconvenient moments.
To sum up my question: if the symphony orchestra is often invoked as a
paradigmatic example of "capitalist rhythm", like any metaphor, it can be
interpreted a number of ways. Although normally the emphasis is on the
conductor as a stern director coordinating individual movement, the
presence of a conductor could also be seen as enabling more complex
synchronization than would be possible if everyone was timing off their own
rhythm or that of the people around them. Again, although it can be
interpreted as individual movement being constrained by a dictatorial
force, the use of a conductor itcould also be seen as enabling far more
different kinds of participation to occur, with different elements having
their own moments of prominence, than would be possible otherwise.
Likewise, I think we should be asking what do the synchronised rhythms of
the classroom Xiaoqin was describing afford the participants, particularly
the students? Even though the motivation on the part of the University
administration for putting such classrooms in place may well be to cram
more students into a class group and perhaps cut down on the need for
teacher presence, it is highly unlikely that the administration would have
much if any idea of what actually goes on in those classrooms, which may be
enabling student agency in positive ways. Generally speaking, I would be
sceptical that there *is* such a thing as "capitalism rhythm": even from
its own viewpoint, capitalism is far too complex a beast to be
characterisable by such a relatively simply dimension; and from the
viewpoint of its "slaves", the imposition of a pattern always allows - nay
enables - the subversion of that pattern. Metaphors are slippery things,
and they are no substitute for a careful identification of fractal patterns
at numbers of levels, from that of embodied movement right up to that of
semioticised ideologies.
best to all
Ed
On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 11:58 AM Yaegan Doran <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hi all,
Just a reminder about this arvo’s Friday seminar. 😊
Yaegan
*From: *Yaegan Doran <yaegan.doran@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Date: *Monday, 11 October 2021 at 2:20 pm
*To: *"asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <asflanet@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "
sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Subject: *Friday Seminar
Hello all!
This week’s Sydney Friday seminar is from Xiaoqin Wu, *4pm Sydney time
Friday 15th October.*
Although lockdown has just wrapped up for most of Sydney, it hasn’t yet
for the universities, so we’ll still be online, but hopefully we will be
able to come together face to face again in not too long.
The link is: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84093744071
All welcome. Below is the abstract and the schedule for the semester.
Yaegan
*Modeling rhythm as a multifaceted construct: A social semiotic
understanding of rhythm in space *
Xiaoqin Wu, UNSW, Sydney
Rhythm has been assigned a great significance both in everyday life and in
academic research, especially in studies of temporal structures and
processes. It has been claimed as a basic mode of being (You 1994), and
people even go as far as to say, “I rhythmize, therefore I am” (Jousse
1974: 175). However, in the current modelings of rhythm, there is an
over-emphasis of the temporal and an under-emphasis of the spatial in
rhythm analysis. In light of this, the presentation provides a multifaceted
theorization of rhythm that synthesizes two complementary accounts (e.g.
Lefebvre 1996, 2004; Van Leeuwen 1985, 1992, 2005). This model presents
the ways rhythm functions to make semiotic meaning that symbolically
articulates social meaning (Hasan 1989), which accounts for the body on the
near side and power on the far side. Under this theorization, space and
time are considered together in the exploration of rhythm configured as
*spatial-temporal* experiences.
By contextualizing space and time to the design and the use of a
so-called ‘Active Learning Classroom’ in film lessons in the tertiary
settings, this presentation conducts a nuanced multimodal rhythm analysis
of co-instantiated speech (Halliday 1970; Martin & Rose 2007) and
movement (Han 2022; He 2020; McMurtrie 2016; Ngo, Hood et al 2021) patterns
in teacher-student embodied interactions. Through the analysis, this
presentation exposes how the institutional hegemonic class attempts to
reinforce its power and control via inscribing regular rhythms in the
designed space, thus appropriating the space and disciplining the body to
perform confirmatively, and how teachers and students adapt or even
resist this appropriation and regularization via imprinting their own
beats in the performed space. In doing so, this presentation develops
systemic ways of analyzing, describing and interpreting the multifaceted
nature of rhythm by attending to its material, semiotic and social sides.
By coupling space and time, this presentation also contributes to a
temporal understanding of space and a spatial understanding of time, which
is particularly useful in investigating the patterns of multiscalar
temporality. In doing so, it ultimately contributes to an understanding
of the ways space participates in the production and reproduction of social
relations (Ravelli & McMurtrie 2016).
*References *
Halliday, M.A.K. (1970). *A course in spoken English: Intonation*.
London: Oxford University Press.
Han, J. (2022). A social semiotic framework for music-dance
correspondence. PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Hasan, R. (1985/1989). Linguistics, language and verbal Art. New York:
Oxford University Press.
He, Y. F. (2020). Animation as a semiotic mode: Construing knowledge in
science animated videos. PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
Jousse, M. (1974). *L'anthropologie du geste*. Paris: Gallimard.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). *Writings on Cities *(ed. by E. Koffman & E. Lebas).
Oxford: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. (2004). *Rhythm analysis: space, time and everyday life*.
London: Continuum.
Martin, J. R. & Rose, D. (2007). *Working with discourse: Meaning beyond
the clause*. London: Continuum.
McMurtrie, R. (2016). *The semiotics of movement in space*. London & New
York: Routledge.
Ngo, T., Hood, S., Martin J.R., Painter, C. Smith, B. & M. Zappavigna.
(2021).* Modeling paralanguage from the perspective of Systemic
Functional Semiotics: Theory and Application.* London: Bloomsbury.
Ravelli, L., & McMurtrie, R. (2016). *Multimodality in the built
environment: Spatial discourse analysis*. New York: Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, T. (1985). Rhythmic structure of the film text. In T.A. van
Dijk (ed). *Discourse and communication – New approaches to the analysis
of mass media discourse and communication*. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Van Leeuwen, T. (1992). Rhythm and social context. In P. Tench (ed). *Studies
in systemic phonology*. London: Frances Pinter.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). *Introducing social semiotics: An introductory
textbook*. London: Routledge.
You, H. L. (1994). Defining rhythm: Aspects of an anthropology of rhythm.
*Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry*,18, 361-384.
*Date*
*Presenter*
*Topic*
13th August
Jim Martin
Construing entities: types of structure
20th August
Ed McDonald
Back to the future: Descriptive adequacy in Halliday’s The Language of the
Chinese "Secret History of the Mongols"
27th August
Dragana Stosic
An axial perspective on Serbian nominal groups
3rd September
Yaegan Doran
Factoring out structure: Nuclearity, linearity and iteration
10th September
Geoff Williams
Semantic variation theory as appliable linguistics: Exploring contexts for
melanoma treatment.
17th September
Helen Caple & Ping Tian
Analysing the representation of diversity in early childhood picture
books: Challenges for multimodal discourse analysis
24th September
Mary Macken-Horarik
Building a knowledge structure in school English: Troubles and (potential)
triumphs
Mid-semester break
(ASFLA)
8th October
Sally Humphrey & Dragana Stosic
Towards a social semiotic perspective on Health Literacy
15th October
Xiaoqin Wu
Articulating social discourse and enacting spatial pedagogy: A
multifaceted understanding of rhythm and space
22nd October
Anna Crane
Interpersonal meaning in Gija: contributing understandings to
revitalisation programs
29th October
Bev Derewianka
Recontextualising a pedagogical grammar from theory to classroom practice
5th November
Alison Moore
#Recover South Coast: social media in bushfire recovery
12th November
Thu Ngo
Functions of film sounds from the systemic functional semiotics perspective
*Y. J. DORAN*
*THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY*
