Différance

All of these phenomena suggest that we require a way of working able to capture, or at least to obliquely denote or enact, the observed hybridity and heterogeneity. Language is a multiplicity and, if we want to think language from language, as I cite Martin Heidegger to have said in the preceding chapter, then we need to build a theory that begins rather than ends in multiplicity. Where does this multiplicity come from? Many language philosophers agree that it comes from language itself, which, precisely because it is different from itself continually tropicalizes and metaphorizes itself in use (writing), a process Derrida (1972) obliquely refers to as différance. But différance is not a concept: it is, where Derrida emphasizes that the “is” itself needs to be crossed out, a movement of play that produces difference. We therefore require ways of thinking that are able to handle the difference produced by différance positively: difference in itself rather than difference derived from, and therefore less than, sameness. Over the years, my thinking with respect to the nature of language has evolved from taking it as a transparent means into the mind of students (during my dissertation) to a tool for producing and reproducing reality (e.g., in discursive psychology) and to an integral part of the fabric of life composed of linguistic, pre-, and non-linguistic moments. I arrived at my “movement” in and through the play consisting of (a) a close, slow listening to and reading of recorded audiotapes and videotape transcripts, and (b) a close, slow reading of continental philosophy and its close attention not only to the agential aspects of language-in-use (which is the route Anglo-Saxon scholars have gone) but also its passive moments (see Chapters 4 and 9). In fact, much of the literature in which my work is grounded is the result of bringing together phenomenological concerns with those of dialectical and dialogical thinking, such as it has been developed in the lineage from G.W.F. Hegel and K. Marx. This lineage of thinking has led to the emergence, on the one hand, of the Russian social psychology that Lev Vygotsky and his students founded and the group around Mikhail Bakhtin, and on the other hand, to the emergence of the philosophy of difference that Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger announced and that mainly French philosophers subsequently developed. In much of the mainstream, the dominant and dominating views of language and scientific literacy are based on an epistemology that begins the presupposition of the identity of a thing with itself:

VOICE-OVER: Because the thinking of metaphysics remains involved in the difference which as such is unthought, metaphysics is both ontology and theology in a unified way …

(Heidegger 1957: 139, emphasis added)

Both the phenomenon of representation (inscription) and the figure of the scientist as rational thinker and actor are premised on this identity. Yet no text can be thought in and of itself. Any text always already is read in the context of a world of texts that it itself contributes to producing, that the text, in fact, presupposes for the possibility of being read in an understanding way. The voice-over in this paragraph makes this relationship between text and context salient and a topic

of the paragraph. Thus, the referent of any text is “no longer the Umwelt of the ostensive references of dialogue, but the Welt projected by the nonostensive references of every text that we have read, understood, and loved” (Ricœur 1986: 211). This inherent feature of all written texts is articulated in and by the use of voice over or parallel texts, texts within texts, that mutually refract each other-as exemplified in a number of texts that Jacques Derrida produced including Glas (Derrida 1974) and “Tympan” (in Derrida 1972) and which I, together with a number of colleagues (e.g., Roth and McRobbie 1999), have used in a variety of scholarly articles on knowing and learning in science classrooms. Recent philosophical scholarship generally, and the French philosophers of difference and dialectics particularly-among them Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Didier Franck, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paul Ricœur-take a very different perspective on the question of language. This perspective emphasizes that the opposite, the non-self-identity of a thing or person with it or him/herself is more compatible with our experiential reality-as articulated throughout this book in the empirical analyses. In this, these philosophers articulate an approach already chosen earlier by Mikhail Bakhtin, who recognized that unless language changed at the instant someone produced an utterance, we would not be able to understand the internal dynamics that make language a living, cultural-historical phenomenon. A language is dead, unchangingly frozen in a permanent state, precisely when it is no longer spoken (as is the case for classical Latin). For Bakhtin (1984b) as for Nietzsche (1954b), language is something living. Spoken language, therefore, inherently and unavoidably changes-in particular the spoken language of the people rather than the written works of the middle and upper classes-and for Derrida (e.g., 1981), it is the concatenation of writing, “that movement which situates every signified as a differential trace,” that produces continual change in language and thought. Yet change is precisely the least theorized linguistic phenomenon in the literature on learning-yet it is this that we are confronted with on a daily basis. But if continual change is the case, if living language changes at the very instant that someone realizes it, then language cannot be self-identical. Such a perspective is not wishywashy hand waving and fuzzy talk with the label “postmodern.” It is a serious position that better theorizes the learning of language in the indeterminate manner in which they concretely (observably) realize themselves, whether the observational sites are school science classrooms, community controversies over environmental resources, or the workplaces of scientists and technicians. In the present chapter, I further develop an approach to language and literacy articulated in my recent writing, adding to the sets of concepts (a) bricolage, métissage, and hybridization, (b) diaspora, (c) heterogeneity and hybridity, and (d) mêlée (Roth 2008a, 2009b). The theory built from this set of concepts is suitable for providing explanatory descriptions of learning as instances where students come face to face with a foreign and strange idiom that has facts, theories, and concepts as its topics and resources. But because the radically foreign always lies inexorably and unreachably beyond our horizons, the relatively strange is appropriated only when the relatively familiar already contains an element of the relatively strange, that is, the

individual not yet capable of speaking a specific idiom already has the possibility to speak this foreign idiom. Language, therefore, is a mêlée of the simultaneously familiar and strange, it is a continuous process (rather than a thing) non-identical with itself: it is a river. This river continually changes, each time someone speaks, with each word; and it is only because language changes with each utterance that it is undergoing historical change, from the inside so to speak. Change is built into language and does not require great poets and writers. The perspective I develop in this chapter has another advantage that other theories currently do not have, but which a forward looking, change-oriented theory of language and literacy requires for understanding the constant and increasingly exponentially changes these undergo: an internal dynamic. The perspective that I outline has serious consequences for the way in which we think about learning and assessment of knowledge and literacy.