words that nourish

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