Sphota
I really love this concept and made a theatre work around this idea.
Seemingly naturally, I called it Sphota despite the fact that, giving it a name at all, mitigated against the desire to celebrate randomness ~ but, conversely, this decisive act debilitated the idea that anything in the universe is random anyway and, as the actors often pointed out, the name had nothing to do with the outcome as the outcome was never predetermined. I might as well, one actress said, have called it Mike because deciding to do it at all caused the experience to be, to some extent anyway, prescribed and the outcome immediately pre-determined.
We had a nominal script made up of a wide range of written, sung, chanted, mimed and improvised pieces, some purpose written, some from other works, some by myself, some from other sources and the actors chose ~ in situ ~ what would be performed and what came next. The only constants were the opening and the closing which worked like bookends to whatever happened in between. It was my attempt to create something as close to being randomly made as I could come up with short of simple improvisation. Actors could choose whether or not to take part and no roles were fixed.
Sound was organically created as required from what the troupe carried with them and lighting was improvised by the actors from a range of sources ~ torches, hand-held lamps, candles etc ~ and the whole thing was ‘filmed’ by actors not required in the chosen scenes, again with a number of hand-held cameras ~ and projected onto large screens and edited by a technician as the show progressed. Anything could be shown ~ audience, actors, set, backstage ~ and no record of this was kept because to do so was at odds with the random nature of the experience.
The opening involved dressing the actors from a couple of trunks randomly filled with costumes and the detritus of dressing. The end involved a procession of running to a patterned shape during which the actors would, one item at a time, shed their clothing and replace it with another item until all were dressed completely in white.
This represented ‘the end’.
The piece could, and was, performed wherever we felt like it or wherever someone asked us to perform it.
As an organic and exciting theatre piece it was extraordinary, particularly when the actors chose to do a piece called My Mind Is Mated with the following script:
One: two: why,
Hell is murky!
Yet who would have thought that
man to have had so much blood in him?
What, will these hands ne’er be clean?
No more of that, my lord, no more o’ that:
you mar all with this …
Here’s the smell of the blood still.
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this
little hand.
Wash your hands, put on your nightgown;
look not so pale
To bed, to bed!
There’s knocking at the gate:
Come, come, come, come, give me your hand.
What’s done cannot be undone.
This is an edited version of Act 5: Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth and, in this case, I had 13 Lady Macbeths, all in white, chant the lines with repetitions and choreographed gesture while standing on ritually laid out white sheets and being smeared all over with ood (artificial of course). It was incredibly chilling and posed a technical question for the aqctors (how do we clean up in seconds) and for the actresses (do we clean up or do we play the rest of our characters covered in blood)?
Audiences generally loved it and only actors who were limited by the need for form had any difficulties with it.
Dykiegirl
Friday, 18 June 2010
Sphoṭa (literally bursting, opening) is an important concept in Indian grammatical tradition, relating to the problem of speech production, how the mind orders linguistic units into coherent discourse and meaning.
The theory of sphoṭa is associated with Bhartṛhari (c. 5th century), an early figure in Indic linguistic theory, mentioned in the 670s by Chinese traveller Yi-Jing.
Bhartṛhari is the author of the Vākyapadīya ([treatise] on words and sentences).
The work is divided into three books, the Brahma-kāṇḍa, (or Āgama-samuccaya “aggregation of traditions”), the Vākya-kāṇḍa, and the Pada-kāṇḍa (or Prakīrṇaka “miscellaneous”).
He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages:
1. Conceptualization by the speaker (Paśyantī “idea”)
2. Performance of speaking (Madhyamā “medium)
3. Comprehension by the interpreter (Vaikharī “complete utterance”).
Bhartṛhari is of the śabda-advaita “speech monistic” school which identifies language and cognition.
According to George Cardona, “Vākyapadīya is considered to be the major Indian work of its time on grammar, semantics and philosophy.”
Origin of the term
While the sphoṭa theory proper (sphoṭavāda) originates with Bhartṛhari, the term has a longer history of use in the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit grammarians, and Bhartṛhari may have been building on the ideas of his predecessors, whose works are partly lost.
Sanskrit sphoṭa is etymologically derived from the root sphuṭ ‘to burst’. It is used in its technical linguistic sense by Patañjali (2nd c. BCE), in reference to the “bursting forth” of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. Patañjali’s sphoṭa is the invariant quality of speech.
The acoustic element (dhvani, audible part) can be long or short, loud or soft, but the sphoṭa remains unaffected by individual speaker differences. Thus, a single letter or sound (‘varṇa’) such as /k/, /p/ or /a/ is an abstraction, distinct from variants produced in actual enunciation[1].
Eternal qualities in language are already postulated by Yāska, in his Nirukta (1.1), where reference is made to another ancient grammarian, Audumbarāyaṇa, about whose work nothing is known, but who has been suggested as the original source of the concept.[2]
The grammarian Vyāḍi, author of the lost text Saṃgraha, may have developed some ideas in sphoṭa theory; in particular, he made some distinctions relevant to dhvani are referred to by Bhartṛhari.[3]
There is no use of sphoṭa as a technical term prior to Patañjali, but Pāṇini (6.1.123) refers to a grammarian named Sphoṭāyana as one of his predecessors. This has induced Pāṇini’s medieval commentators (such as Haradatta) to ascribe the the first development of the sphoṭavāda to Sphoṭāyana.
Bhartṛhari
The account of the Chinese traveller Yi-Jing places a firm terminus ante quem of AD 670 on Bhartrhari. Scholarly opinion had formerly tended to place him in the 6th or 7th century; current consensus places him in the 5th century. By some traditional accounts, he is the same as the poet Bhartṛhari who wrote the Śatakatraya.
Vākyapadīya
In the Vākyapadīya, the term sphoṭa takes on a finer nuance, but there is some dissension among scholars as to what Bhartṛhari intended to say. Sphoṭa retains its invariant attribute, but now its indivisibility is emphasized and it now operates at several levels.
Bhartṛhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, where he views sphoṭa as the language capability of man, revealing his consciousness[4].
Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, the śabda-brahman, or the Eternal Verbum. Early indologists such as A. B. Keith felt that Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa was a mystical notion, owing to the metaphysical underpinning of Bhartṛhari’s text, Vākyapādiya where it is discussed, but it appears to be more of a psychological notion. Also, the notion of “flash or insight” or “revelation” central to the concept also lent itself to this viewpoint. However, the modern view is that it is perhaps a more psychological distinction.
Bhartṛhari expands on the notion of sphoṭa in Patañjali, and discusses three levels:
1. varṇa-sphoṭa, at the syllable level. George Cardona feels that this remains an abstraction of sound, a further refinement on Patañjali for the concept of phoneme- now it stands for units of sound.
2. pada-sphoṭa, at the word level, and
3. vakya-sphoṭa, at the sentence level.
In verse I.93, Bhartṛhari states that the ‘sphota’ is the universal or linguistic type – sentence-type or word-type, as opposed to their tokens (sounds)[1].
He makes a distinction between sphoṭa, which is whole and indivisible, and ‘nāda’, the sound, which is sequenced and therefore divisible. The sphoṭa is the causal root, the intention, behind an utterance, in which sense is similar to the notion of lemma in most psycholinguistic theories of speech production. However, sphoṭa arises also in the listener, which is different from the lemma position.
Uttering the ‘nāda’ induces the same mental state or sphoṭa in the listener – it comes as a whole, in a flash of recognition or intuition (pratibhā, ‘shining forth’). This is particularly true for vakya-sphoṭa or sentence-vibration, where the entire sentence is thought of (by the speaker), and grasped (by the listener) as a whole.
On the other hand, the modern sanskritist S.D. Joshi feels that Bhartṛhari may not have been talking about meanings at all, but a class of sounds.
Bimal K. Matilal has tried to unify these views – he feels that for Bhartṛhari the very process of thinking involves vibrations, so that thought has some sound-like properties. Thought operates by śabdanaor ‘speaking’, – so that the mechanisms of thought are the same as that of language. Indeed, Bhartṛhari seems to be saying that thought is not possible without language. This leads to a somewhat whorfian position on the relationship between language and thought. The sphoṭa then is the carrier of this thought, as a primordial vibration.
Sometimes the nāda-sphoṭa distinction is posited in terms of the signifier-signified mapping, but this is a misconception. In traditional Sanskrit linguistic discourse (e.g. in Katyāyana), vācaka refers to the signifier, and ‘vācya’ the signified. The ‘vācaka-vācya’ relation is eternal for Katyāyana and the Mīmāṃsakas, but is conventional among the Nyāya. However, in Bhartṛhari, this duality is given up in favour of a more holistic view – for him, there is no independent meaning or signified; the meaning is inherent in the word or the sphoṭa itself.
Beyond Bhartrihari
Sphoṭa theory remained widely influential in Indian philosophy of language and was the focus of much debate over several centuries. It was adopted by most scholars of Vyākaraṇa (grammar), but both the Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya schools rejected it, primarily on the grounds of compositionality.
Adherents of the ‘sphota’ doctrine were holistic or non-compositional (a-khanḍa-pakṣa), suggesting that many larger units of language are understood as a whole, whereas the Mīmāṃsakas in particular proposed compositionality (khanḍa-pakṣa).
According to the former, word meanings, if any, are arrived at after analyzing the sentences in which they occur. Interestingly, this debate had many of the features animating present day debates in language over semantic holism, for example.
The Mīmāṃsakas felt that the sound-units or the letters alone make up the word. The sound-units are uttered in sequence, but each leaves behind an impression, and the meaning is grasped only when the last unit is uttered. The position was most ably stated by Kumarila Bhatta (7th c.) who argued that the ‘sphoṭas’ at the word and sentence level are after all composed of the smaller units, and cannot be different from their combination[5].
However, in the end it is cognized as a whole, and this leads to the misperception of the sphoṭa as a single indivisible unit. Each sound unit in the utterance is an eternal, and the actual sounds differ owing to differences in manifestation.
The Nyāya view is enunciated among others by Jayanta (9th c.), who argues against the Mīmāṃsā position by saying that the sound units as uttered are different; e.g. for the sound [g], we infer its ‘g-hood’ based on its similarity to other such sounds, and not because of any underlying eternal. Also, the vācaka-vācya linkage is viewed as arbitrary and conventional, and not eternal. However, he agrees with Kumarila in terms of the compositionality of an utterance.
Throughout the second millennium, a number of treatises discussed the sphoṭa doctrine. Particularly notable is Nageśabhaṭṭa’s Sphotavāda (18th c.). Nageśa clearly defines sphoṭa as a carrier of meaning, and identifies eight levels, some of which are divisible.
In modern times, scholars of Bhartṛhari have included Ferdinand de Saussure, who did his doctoral work on the genitive in Sanskrit, and lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the Paris and at the University of Geneva for nearly three decades.
It is thought that he might have been influenced by some ideas of Bhartṛhari, particularly the sphoṭa debate. In particular, his description of the sign, as composed of the signifier and the signified, where these entities are not separable – the whole mapping from sound to denotation constitutes the sign, seems to have some colourings of sphoṭa in it. Many other prominent European scholars around 1900, including linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield and Roman Jakobson may have been influenced by Bhartṛhari[6].
Editions of the Vākyapadīya
Wilhelm Rau, Bhartṛharis Vākyapadīya / die mūlakārikās nach den Handschriften hrsg. und mit einem pāda-Index versehen, Wiesbaden : Steiner, 1977, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 42,4
Wilhelm Rau, Bhartṛharis Vākyapadīya II : Text der Palmblatt-Handschrift Trivandrum S.N. 532 (= A), Stuttgart : Steiner, 1991, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Nr. 7, ISBN 3-515-06001-4
Saroja Bhate, Word index to the Vākyapadīya of Bhartr̥hari, together with the complete text of the Vākyapadīya (Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers, 1992.) ISBN 10: 8185133549 Open Library
References
1.^ a b The word and the world: India’s contribution to the study of language (1990). Bimal Krishna Matilal. Oxford.
2.^ Brough, J., (1952,). “Audumbarayana’s Theory of Language,”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 14, (1,): pp. 73–77,.
3.^ Dominik Wujastyk, (1993,). Metarules of Pāṇinian Grammar, the Vyāḍīyaparibhāṣā,. Forsten. Wujastyk notes, however, that there is no early evidence linking someone called Vyāḍi with a text called Saṃgraha that is said to be about language philosophy, and that the connection between the two has grown up through early misreadings of the Mahābhāṣya. Furthermore, the Saṃgraha is mainly referred to for having an opinion about the connection between a word and its meaning (śabdārthasaṃbandha).
4.^ The Sphota Theory of Language: A Philosophical Analysis (1997,). Coward, Harold G.,. Motilal Banarsidass,. ISBN 8120801814,. The first part of this text is a good review of the metaphysical underpinnings in Bhartṛhari.
5.^ Gaurinath Sastri A Study in the Dialectics of Sphota, Motilal Banarsidass (1981).
6.^ Frits Staal The science of language, Chapter 16, in Gavin D. Flood, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 599 pages ISBN 0631215352, 9780631215356. p. 357-358
Alessandro Graheli, Teoria dello Sphoṭa nel sesto Ahnikā della Nyāyamañjarī di Jayantabhaṭṭa (2003), University “La Sapienza” thesis, Rome (2003).
Clear, E. H., ‘Hindu philosophy’, in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge (1998) [1]
Saroja Bhate, Johannes Bronkhorst (eds.), Bhartṛhari – philosopher and grammarian : proceedings of the First International Conference on Bhartṛhari, University of Poona, January 6-8, 1992, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1997, ISBN 81-208-1198-4
K. Raghavan Pillai (trans.), Bhartrihari. The Vâkyapadîya, Critical texts of Cantos I and II with English Translation Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971.
Coward, Harold G., The Sphota Theory of Language: A Philosophical Analysis, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980.
Herzberger, Radhika, Bhartrihari and the Buddhists, Dordrecht: D. Reidel/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1986.
Houben, Jan E.M., The Sambanda Samuddesha and Bhartrihari’s Philosophy of Language, Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1995.
Iyer, Subramania, K.A., Bhartrihari. A Study of Vâkyapadîya in the Light of Ancient Commentaries, Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute, 1969, reprint 1997.
Shah, K.J., “Bhartrihari and Wittgenstein” in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Meaning (Vol. I, No. 1. New Delhi.)1/1 (1990): 80-95.
Saroja Bhate, Johannes Bronkhorst (eds.), Bhartṛhari – philosopher and grammarian : proceedings of the First International Conference on Bhartṛhari, University of Poona, January 6-8, 1992, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1997, ISBN 81-208-1198-4
Patnaik, Tandra, Śabda : a study of Bhartrhari’s philosophy of language, New Delhi : DK Printworld, 1994, ISBN 81-246-0028-7.
Maria Piera Candotti, Interprétations du discours métalinguistique : la fortune du sūtra A 1 1 68 chez Patañjali et Bhartṛhari, Kykéion studi e testi. 1, Scienze delle religioni, Firenze University Press, 2006, Diss. Univ. Lausanne, 2004, ISBN 978-88-8453-452-1
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