11: Saying the World?

Throughout the last two posts I have discussed ideas about particular perspectives of subjectification- the cyclic and simultaneous ways a subject comes into being. Similar ideas about the continual formations that people undergo in becoming subjects are discussed in the book, Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.20). The authors of this book depict the space where subjects emerge between the tensions of submitting to particular discourses and taking up other roles or identities. 

Subjectivity is not essential, not some pre-given substance. It is shaped by social forces and produced in the functioning of major social institutions, including family, (pre)school, and workplace. But we are not just acted upon, not only made; we also continually make ourselves, and in this process of constituting ourselves we are strongly influenced by dominating discourses and practices of power.

This concept of a porous subject disrupts the divisions between the public and the private, the individual and the collective and learning as an act of individuality or community. It presents a fluid image of the conversations, relationships and explorations with people, places and materials that shape who emerges in any interlude in a classroom. Steven Johnson(2010) speaks about these plural origins of ideas as networks that mirror the connections of neurons in  the brain. 

Johnson (2010) recognizes the role of language in generative spaces, as the words we use influence the subjects that can emerge and the possibility for creating spaces where we can think with others. He has helped me to question how we create environments where theories and ideas remain trapped with the individual. How, instead, can we create spaces where thoughts can be  enacted and permitted to reverberate publicly in our classrooms? How can we embody the double-entendre of the French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy(2000, p.4), who says, "we make sense"? In this simple phrase Nancy speaks both- of how being together is meaning- and of how human beings make meaning of the world. Although, for Nancy (p.3), language sets humans apart, he still challenges the divisions of the physical world and the world inaugurated through language: "Language says the world; that is, it loses itself in it and exposes how 'in itself' it is a question of losing oneself in order to be of it, with it, to be its meaning." Like the ways subjects take up and submit to discourses, the speaker gives meaning to the world through language in ways that are influenced by the languagings of the world: What does it mean to think of ideas, words, people and learning existing in networks without origins or linear story-lines?   

Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. 

Johnson, S. (Speaker). (2010). Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from [online video]. New York: Ted Conference LLC. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html

Nancy, J-L. (2000). Being singular plural. (R. D. Richardson & A. E. O'Byrne, Trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1996).