Language beyond meaning

This chapter introduces theory and scholarship that helps us to think about language as more than merely the exchange of information or meaning. As well as representing things (e.g., a dog, a tree) and conveying stable meanings, language includes bodily and non-representative elements. In this sense, it might be more productive to pay attention not so much to what children’s language is or what it means, but to what it does. We introduce and explore the concepts of expression, improvisation, and worlding in order to ask: what does language open up, close down, put into motion? We then turn our attention to the question of power and in particular the tendency of formal education settings to require certain kinds of language from children, the kinds of language that do foreground meaning and representation. We pose a question first asked by Viruru: what is lost when language is gained? This is an unsettling question in our current educational context, where gaining language is usually assumed to be a beneficial process with no drawbacks. We draw on Glissant’s theory of opacity (as Viruru does) to ask what happens when particular kinds of language are imposed too quickly on young children – what these might do to children’s sense of identity and potential for creative bodily experimentation.