Beyond signification: A posthumanist ontology for language in teaching and learning in early childhood education
Keywords:
Deleuze, languageAbstract
Posthumanism positions language as immanent in and entangled with its context, refusing to give priority to the discursive, or indeed the human, within its ontology. Instead language has a materiality and an agency that emerges in its interrelations with the world. The use of written language to record early childhood events in teaching and learning gives language a materiality that provokes further entanglements in the production of an electronic file, a monologue read aloud, printed on paper, scribbled on, serving as a point of discussion between parents and teachers and child... Language is not a symbolic plane, existing above and beyond or outside of matter and the reality we experience. It is not a representative realm that sits alongside the real without affect upon it. Language is imbricated in the real and affective within it. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) conceptualisation of language as order-words, language is seen to be made up of words that impose particular productions of the world congruent with their presuppositions and assumptions. Language becomes a force for stratifying and imposing order on the world. This paper goes on to explore another potentiality of language hinted at by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), which is a more empowering conceptualisation of language. This is the potentiality within language that moves language beyond order-word. This paper considers ways in which teachers might employ this potential of language in their everyday teaching contexts, and allow language a productive and generative role in teaching and learning in early childhood education.
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