Last week, I wrote about “Once In A Lifetime” and cited a psychoanalytic reading of Remain In Light (pdf). I never mentioned the best part of that paper, which I’ve excerpted below. Emphasis mine.
Producer Brian Eno was highly influential in the achievement of this effect through the implementation of his personalized production style (Gans, 1985). His process was intended to promote the expression of instinct and spontaneity in the songwriting and disregarded preconceived notions of final product. Gans instructed the band that “the things one doesn’t intend are the seeds for a more interesting future” (p. 66) and so encouraged the musicians to come to the studio without anything prepared, to experiment and improvise with their instruments, and to capture and utilize “mistakes” (p. 77) in their songwriting as modalities for getting them to open up. He encouraged singer David Byrne to be freer with the album’s lyrics, helping him to embrace the idea that “rational thinking has its limits” (Emerson, 1985). Eno, in a sense, can be said to have functioned as psychoanalyst for the group, encouraging them to follow the fundamental rule for their songwriting and providing shape and coherence to their primary process material. Like an analyst, Eno would prove to be highly influential to the band and for a time appeared to become an object of identification for David Byrne, who was observed to be dressing like Eno for a time (Gans, 1985, p. 87).
As part of my project of condensing and archiving my phonology notes into one super awesome moleskine, I reviewed the arguments for the dual-level hypothesis in Kenstowicz 1994, and I found a token mention of the disutility of extreme behaviorist empiricism in phonology. YES! I exclaimed. Most of generative linguistics’ anti-behaviorist (hence psychologically meaningful) arguments come from syntax, as though the field is the discipline’s golden child. Which is a shame because the study of sound systems is the only part of linguistics that deals with real things located in reality! Words and sentences are abstract bundles of—wait for it—acoustic sound (or sign) made by the gestures of the human vocal tract (or hands)!
The argument is as follows: Strict behaviorism posits that there is no such thing as mental states and that the only thing we can know or discuss is overt human behavior. So a behaviorist theory of speech sounds can only refer to observable phonetic detail. For the untrained speaker, observably distinct sounds may all be perceived as being the same sound. /t/ has seven distinct realizations in American English: s[t]em, [tʰ]in, a[ɾ]om, in[ɾⁿ]ernet (bad IPA, I know), ro[ʔ]en, ten[]s (tents). We perceive sounds that are not actually present or at all similar. Moreover, /t/ is not the only sound with a null allophone—e.g. ten[]s (tends)—so there is no unique intersecting acoustic characterization of the /t/ category because (1) it overlaps with other categories and (2) has a null realization (the category intersects the empty set!). These facts cannot be adequately explained by strict behaviorism; instead we need to talk about /t/ not as a mere set of sounds but also as a mental construct that behaves accordingly to rules and information in the speaker’s mind. Our instincts allow us to recover neutralized distinctions (/t/ and /d/ can be [ɾ] or []) with categorical certainty, and the strongest theory of phonology requires abstract mental states and objects in addition to observable phonetic detail. Another nail in the coffin!
