Language as Material
“Any material will do for art; it has only to be given form for there to be a work of art.”
-Kurt Schwitters. (1922), PPPPPP
Humans use language as the material and the tool with which we communicate; we use it to reach beyond ourselves, to relate to one and other and to enhance our own sense of agency in the world. The combined perspectives of artists, historians and philosophers who have rooted their work with language in terrain that metaphorically and directly connects it to our physical experiences, provide useful artifacts and methodology for teachers working with early learners. As a teacher I work as bricoleur surveying and assembling diverse artistic and educational perspectives in a “combinatorial” (Levi Straus in, Wiseman, 2007) attempt to look at and grasp the notion of linguistic materialism. This work represents efforts to bring my longstanding interest in the “substance of the signs” (Senitt, 2005) into an exploration of new materialism delineated by the context of Kindergarten. Particular attention is given here to the language work of German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who provides examples of early twentieth century de/materialist treatments of language. Conceptualizing language as material is a difficult, hall-of-mirrors sort of problem...though the metaphors we reach toward for clarity are rooted in our bodily experiences and our sense of the physical world, language eludes us all the same as we attempt to “put a finger on it”. Attending to the materialism of language presents a fastidiously pointed connundrum, bound with uncertainty by the “mobius strip” (Deleuze in MacLure, 2004, p. 23) that runs between language and the world.
The alphabet is throughout the classroom and children are learning to identify the symbols as meaningful. They are “perceiving” written language. Two Kindergarteners interact with each other, naming the alphabet as they follow the other’s finger, reaching to touch the space where language sits between them. They speak, observe gestures, trace symbols and perhaps, hear one another’s muffled voices. The sheet of plexiglass with hand drawn letters becomes Deleuze’s ‘metaphysical surface’ (2004, p. 278), a demonstrative space upon which language becomes ‘thing’.
We extend ourselves through language while others reach for us. Language is formed in the space between us and can be seen in material terms. The formal characteristics of this active space are as varied as the players who create it, but an appreciation can be found in the Japanese Zen aesthetic concept of Ma which describes an interval in space and time (Ferguson, Kuby. 2015. Pilgrim, 1986). Within our context, Ma space is Language, for it is the space of interaction and positioning. Ma is also our orientation relative to others; a favourite vocabulary building children’s book (Berenstain, 1968) brings this to life narrating what it is to be inside, outside or upside down. Through examples drawn from my classroom, I demonstrate possibilities for the creation and study of language with kindergarten children, helping them to apprehend language as they see and feel it, as object (as well as subject). I argue for an approach to teaching and learning alphabetic language in a manner that recognizes the crucial value of play, particularly the German notion of ‘bauspiel’, or “building play”. Particular attention is given to the playful alphabetic arrangements of one exceptional kindergarten student named Gary (name changed). By conceptualizing language in material terms, teachers of young children can strengthen engagement and reveal potential wellsprings of meaning.
“Language is like red paint. It’s totally dependent upon how it’s used, where it’s used”
-Lawrence Weiner. (1998),
While we metaphorically consider language as a material with which to build, paint and sculpt meaning, describing language in convincing and approachable terms can be difficult. Language looks and feels like the world it describes, in all of its complexity and contradictions. We pursue something that is at once both formed and formless, body and mind, inside and outside, subject and object, like light both particle and wave. The role of metaphor as a viable bridge between any of these points will be addressed later, but first I want to draw attention to the physical side of language, the aspects that we are able to handle literally (letter-really). Morphology is the general study of forms, structures and shapes and linguistics is the morphological study of language. While linguistics is a scientific study of language and can be approached from a predominantly biological or social perspective, artists and writers extend our understanding of the characteristics of language through modes of explanation that are unique to their respective fields.
Some artists show us the characteristics and structures of language, which are normally hidden from our awareness. They allow us to see language using their own morphology and see the characteristics of alphabetic and oral language as art form. Consider, for instance, conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner’s 2004 installation at the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis of laser cut aluminum typographic text that essentially describes the composition of any number of linguistic components (the alphabet, a word, sentence, paragraph or extended text):
BITS & PIECES
PUT TOGETHER
TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE
OF A WHOLE
This text could also be seen as a reference to the brick wall upon which it is installed, or perhaps the entirety of the collection of art that comprises the gallery itself. And then, we are ourselves among the “bits and pieces” that assemble this open-ended statement. As reader/viewer we form a whole.
Language Play, Building Play
Notions of play are varied and have changed over time (Frost, 2010) and as a subject of study play is broadly defined. Peter Gray (2008) sees play as intrinsically motivated and describes the following characteristics: play is an activity that is self directed, it is process oriented and defined by rules generated by the person or people playing. Play is meaningfully imaginative, and our ability to play depends upon our mental well-being. Within the context of elementary school, it is useful to recall a current curriculum position that “Play and academic work are not distinct categories for young children, and learning and doing are inextricably linked for them” (Ontario, 2010-11, p.13). From a developmental point of view children play toward adulthood; Mudede (Arcade, 2013) points out that “...playing makes evolutionary sense for a child because it’s a great way to learn to do things as an adult”. Ideally, children’s work should be playful. Conversely, that play aids their developmental growth. Recognizing that “art is ‘play with serious problems’” (Reichardt, 2010, p.5), the adult artist Kurt Schwitters played back toward childhood, as his method of assembling found materials most closely resembled children’s building-play, or ”bauspiele” (Mindrup, 2008, p. 45). Schwitters worked fluidly across the disciplines of sculpture, design, painting, collage, poetry, prose and performance, summarizing his activities as “Merz”. This invented term functioned as a personal Ma space, a flexible, phonemic signifier for his entire artistic practice. He enacted the same fundamentally playful approach toward collecting and configuring bits of found material for collage as he did while composing sound poetry from letters, syllables, word fragments and nonsense mouth sounds (Gooding, 2013, p.30).
Schwitters demonstrated that as an artist he occupied an important space between letter and listener, stating that “one can perform the alphabet ...in such a way that the result is a work of art” (Rothenberg; Joris. 2002). Schwitters’ play/work with language was highly inspired and purposefully structured. His Ursonate, a masterpiece of non-sensical sound poetry that he began working on in 1922, was carefully rendered textually as a four part sonata. Schwitters took letters and phonemes, the constituent parts of his ur-language, as subject for the Ursonate. He showed linguistic form to be malleable on the page and physical in performance. Concurrent with his composition of the Ursonate, Schwitters attempted to develop the typography to represent a phonetic alphabet that would function in print as a universally consistent language. This was an alphabet in which the segments composing each letter were based upon the position of the mouth, tongue and vocal chords for each sound. Schwitters showed with these projects that language is far from immaterial, and that the constituents of linguistic form are inextricable from the bodies that produce it.
The founder of Kindergarten, Friedrich Fröbel explains in his Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, (1895) that the assembly, dis-assembly, and then reassembly of a whole into its various parts, is a key component of children’s learning. Froebel’s philosophy of parts and the whole was postulated as a natural extension of his early work studying crystalline growth and he used it as an analogy to describe the development of children, people and entire societies. The notion of parts relating to a whole was at the core of his approach to hands-on learning that used manipulable materials, most notably blocks. While there are some direct and literal (letter-all) applications for language instruction using blocks, (such as counting out each letter or syllable in a word using blocks), bauspiele is used in this context as metaphor. Bauspiele in this respect is simultaneous language construction and experimentation, a bridge over the conceptual space between things and representative words. In kindergarten, as children and write, they bring together parts (letters and phonemes) to form a meaningful whole. Or inversely, they look carefully at whole words to discern individual parts. The notion of build-play with language is a metaphor to keep in mind as we assist children’s playful examination of the sounds, structures and interrelationships between the “parts and the whole” of letters and phonemes, and words, sentences and paragraphs.
Language enables us to communicate and store information for future reference. It gives us “symbols and the procedures for using them to construct meaning” (Carey, 2011, p. 113). Language can be described as a capacity that is uniquely human, genetically fixed and universal across our species...something that is born within us. At the same time though, as linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (as cited in Coulmas, 2006) defined it, we also see language as a “social fact”, a shifting ability that varies among cultures and groups, changing over history and governed by conventions. Reconciling these seemingly contra perspectives involves accepting that “...language has both a physical side [brain] and a mental side [mind], and these are not always easily kept apart.” (Coulmas, 2006, p. 9).
The recursive complexity of defining language (through language itself) is perhaps best encapsulated in Carey’s statement that “...in essence, language provides [both] the content and the structure of thinking”. It is both inborn and socially constructed. In his philosophy of language Deleuze offers an element of relief from the compulsion to delineate the physical and mental sides of language. When faced with the the intractable duality of embodied and immaterial language, Deleuze’s notion of something “wild” in language (MacLure 2013) seems acceptable.
There is a spectrum of notions regarding language and we are perhaps best able to sense materiality at points where distinctions on that spectrum dissolve. The group of experimental writers and mathematicians identifying themselves as Oulipo root their literary activities in a deep preoccupation with constraints that various structures of language present. They produce many works revealing the outer limits of creation possible within those very constraints. For example, in Christian Bök’s poetry book, Eunoia (2001), each chapter is confined to the use of only one vowel. This passage from the first chapter adheres to its own rule while describing the severity of this self-imposed challenge: “A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark” (Bök, 2001). While the results of studied and methodical work of Oulipo writers provide fascinating artefacts, even more important is the substantive way these writers focus on relationships between linguistic form and meaning. Bénabou ( in Motte, 1986) explains “One must first admit that language may be treated as an object in itself, considered in its materiality, and thus freed from its subservience to its significatory obligation” (p.40). Schwitters’ use of language within his poetry and collage work is described by Megan Luke (2014) who echoes the idea that “All words, all things, bear a material excess that cannot be exhausted by semantic convention or functionality...” (p.22). In other words, linguistic signs have an inherent substance, both within and without their intended meanings.
Our understanding of the alphabet in kindergarten is constrained by its essential characteristics: we are limited to 26 characters representing sounds in specific or combined ways. We learn that the various letters of the alphabet are each configured with sticks and arcs, and collated in a specific order from A to Z. We identify letters in context as we find them within books, signs, charts and labels. We identify and articulate words, and we bring attention to sounds, connecting that awareness to the representative letters ( Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010, p. 72) But in Kindergarten we also play, physically, with letters before we fully realize what they mean. We pick them up and we play with them using the various elements that compose each letter to create our own pictures. We sense meaning in these assembled lines before fully learning the visual conventions that we agree upon in calling them letters.
Something to Explain Something
“Surprise and pleasure are derived from the structure and inventive combination of the
parts” -Kurt Schwitters. (in Webster, 1997, p163)
Echoing the early ideas of Greek atomistic materialists, Christian Bök (2010) explains that language is composed of “ bits that somehow cooperate to produce the complexity we see around us”, with letters being the smallest units. Kindergarteners invent themselves through their acquisition of (or at times through their resistance towards) literacy. The children come into being through the letters, which are, as Plato asserts, ‘the primeval elements out of which you and I and all things are compounded here.’ (Drucker, 1995, p. 62). From the moment our student Gary begins as a precocious Junior Kindergartener, he makes it clear that the alphabet is a tool for encoding his understanding of the world around him as he asks persistently, “How do you spell that? How do you spell...?”. Wherever Gary sees letters and words in the room he is drawn to them. Walking through the room he leaves trails of writing behind him on bits of paper, with letter tiles, on the chalkboard. He is in what Johanna Drucker calls “the alphabetic labyrinth”.
Gary rapidly learns the alphabet and shows us that it functions as a “symbolic matrix”, (Drucker). He arranges the alphabet blocks on the playground pavement, in a grid, leaving a void where he stands, close to the beginning and the end. In our classroom we document children's learning for consideration then further documentation, as in a hall of mirrors. An image of Gary’s alphabet is circulated for other children to respond to; following the path of letters now with finger or marker rather than feet. One child presents two iterations of the alphabet on the same page, once with a line wandering through the maze, and again indexing the number of letters and aligning them more conventionally as A to Z.
Our words on the page have not always been aligned according to conventions we agree upon today. The ancient Greek term boustropheden, (wikipedia, 2016) which translates as “turning in the manner of the ox”, connects writing directly to a preliterate understanding of embodied space and reveals an intimate connection between lived experience and language. Boustrophedon refers to bidirectional writing that runs as a field might be plowed from one end of the page then turning to return in the opposite direction, back and forth, back and forth.
We no longer structure our text in this manner, we read left to right, then...make a saccadic jump (Dictionary.com, 2016) with our eyes back to the left and repeat. Let us consider in closing, this “jump”, and contrast the amusing thought of jumping with an ox from one end of the field back to the other, with the actual perceptual shift we make from one end of a line of text to the beginning of the next while reading. What kind of energy must we exert in order to complete that “jump” with our eyes and mind? How do we hold attention in that instant when we are “in the jump”? Clearly our brains need to be fit enough to do so... but the word saccade has another historical meaning, which is to “pull in the reins of the horse”. While this may serve as a curious metaphor, it is one perhaps to be suggested to children learning to calm themselves while learning to read and sequentially scan text.
As language is an emergent feature of the mind, we strive to understand how it is used to organize our experiences. But in that effort to comprehend language as a “thing” apart from ourselves we see only the probability that there is a contininually “central unknowableness to existence” (Cudworth, Hobden. 2015). If our “reach” for definitions of language then, will always exceed our “grasp”, perhaps the tool of metaphor might serve us best. To know the world through metaphor is an experience of understanding one kind of thing in terms of another. Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (2003) is a definitive analysis of the core role that metaphor plays in our ability to conceptualize reality. The scope of their study reaches far, far beyond this exploration, but one key axiom, that ”we spatialize linguistic form” helps to explain how the ‘terrain’ in which we create and find language is the same in which we exist. Thus metaphors to describe language, such as a matrix or a labyrinth, become inherently self-reflexive as we lay out our thoughts on the page, get lost in language, and continually return to the point at which we began. These terms describe structures that we can see and walk through, structures that organize and meaningfully situate thought. And these terms illustrate that “...our bodily experiences motivate conceptualization.” (Borkent, 2010). Our attempts to describe language are unavoidably and handily encircled through metaphor, anchored always in some manner with our corporeal experience in space. It has been suggested in fact that the actions of our hands and our corresponding tools have directly influenced the evolution of language over time. A hand holds an object, while a noun contains a thing within its name. The movements of our hands are like verbs, and just as a tool for the hand is used upon material, adverbs and adjectives modify movements and objects, (Armstrong, Stokoe, Wilcox. in Pallasmaa, 2009. p14.). In a way then, language can be said to materialize at our very fingertips. The words we choose stem from our experiences in space, spurring the growth of the language we create and use.
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