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Words that Nourish
Alison Phipps, University of Glasgow
Managing Languages
• Total Management systems.
• Safe biscuits • Standard biscuits• Successful biscuits (The
market decides)• Alienated biscuits (we sell
our labour)
Anthony Gormley
Language Policy
•Submit words to narrow quality control.•Standardise their size and shape.•Make them profitable.•Re-package them.•Demonstrate their efficiency.•Calculate their cost.•Words (in people) become commodities to be bought and sold.•They cease to nourish.
Recipes for Questioning Quality
• What is a successful biscuit?
• What skills are needed to make successful biscuits?
• And what are the learning outcomes for the biscuits?
• Who decides?• How good are they at
deciding?
Safe Biscuits
• Benchmarks• Kitemarks• Qualifications
Frameworks• Standards• Professionalize• Quality industry
Standard Biscuits (the inspectors decide)
• Inspectorate• Methods• Materials• Numbers and grades• Levels and language
ladders
Rich Biscuits (the market decides)
• Berlitz• Rosetta Stone• Brands• League tables• Rankings
Mark Mumford
The Results• Standard.• Efficient.• Unexciting.• Lacking in surprises.• Risk-Free.• Myths: Language
quality can be manufactured like biscuits
Fegerfeuer in Ingolstadt
Brecht & Das Kulinarische• Culinary theatre wears
down the capacity for action in its audience.
• Nothing to chew on.• Takes human being for
granted.• Believes in linear
development.• Has its eyes on the finish.
Auntie Beth’s Biscuits• Messy process.• Requires a feel for the
dough.• Create stories and life.• The broken misshapes
are often highly prized, as they come out of the oven.
• They change over time.• They are social events –
relational even.• They are good.
Words
Un-nourishing Philosophies• Modernist bureaucractic
rationalism seeks control and occupation.
• It celebrates linear progress.
• It banishes lines of relation (Auntie Beth’s Biscuits)
Empty
Quality is an empty word filled with discourses which reflect competing and incompatible ideologies of quality.
(Barnett 1992)
Crude Language“To reduce human action to
a constellation of terms such as ‘performance’, ‘competence’, ‘doing’ and ‘skill’ is not just to resort to a hopelessly crude language with which to describe serious human endeavours.”
(Barnett 1994) (178)
Simone Weil: words of the Middle Range.
“But when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing.(Weil, 2005: 241)
Poetry of Life
Goldsworthy: Elm Tomb
Our Loss• Life• Liveliness• Political engagement• Embodiment• Stories• Surprises• Peculiarity• We are are exiled from
our everyday nourishment.
Goldsworthy: Enclosure
Language Lines• Lines of occupation;
cartography, planning, retreat, surveying, viewing across the surface of the world. Dot to Dot. Lines died for by millions.
• Lines of inhabitation; wayfaring, story-telling, moving along through the world.
Tim Ingold
Other ways of nourishing life with words
‘Caring for words in a Culture of Lies’
“To maintain usable and reliable language – to be good stewards of words – we have to do these 3 things: 1) to deepen and sharpen our reading skills 2) to cultivate habits of speaking and listening that foster precision and clarity, and 3) to practice poesis – to be makers and doers of the word.” (Marilyn Chandler Mcentyre 2009)
“I do not know how you live your life, what you
assume, what practices you have learned and evolved, but I assume that you have ‘named
your world’.”
‘pronounced’
(Freire)
A Vibrant Linguistic Era• We are on the move – dwelling-in-travel• We are surrounded by people living in and
through other languages• To learn other languages, to become fluent …is
a slow, messy process• It requires people who know how to work with
strange, new, different words• It requires, ethically, that modern languages be
taught, critically, as an intellectual and intercultural endeavour. And relationally.
Qualities are learned through languages
• Humility• Perseverance• Patience• Listening• Risk• Mischief• Symbolic
sensuousness
The Social Bond
MeetingGreetingEating
denderedzwa
At Table
Conversation grows in gardens, fields.
Conversation is nourished at table, sharing food.
Mealtimes interrupt.
Poesis: makers & doers of words
The speech of genuine thinking is by nature poetic. The voice of thought must be poetic, because poetry is the saying of truth, the saying of the unconcealedness of being.
(Heidegger)
truthfully
The world begins at the Kitchen Table