The ghost of Integrationism at #BAAL2022

A ghost is haunting linguistics (at BAAL2022) - the ghost of integrationism (apologies to Marx).

I was struck by this thought watching a plenary at the British Association of Applied Linguistics conference 2022. Dr Khawla Badwan describes a project looking at children and the environment. In one particular activity children using play dough were asked to design a piece of land including bridges, rivers and trees. She comments:

"And of course as you are busy making things there were very few words and the applied linguistic in me stood there puzzled. Where are the words that I need for the recording? The children were busy". (20:00 - 20:13).

She continues:

"The troubled applied linguist in me was very frustrated because I needed words, I needed words to represent and describe the world. But there weren't many words. Rather there was fascination with everything else away from words" (24:06 - 24:27 ).

Badwan goes on to report some of the things the children were doing such as making daisy chains, interest in a laser gun measuring device, worms.

She concludes this part by saying:

"The planting event went really well with very few words cause children were very busy. Most of the words were spoken by adults[...]But everything else was sensed and felt, observed, internalised, pretty much silently. And the troubled linguist in me is trying truly to be present, thinking where is my data you know what do I take from all of this" (21:11 - 22:00).

This trouble with seeing language as words was given the name of the fallacy of verbalism by Roy Harris i.e. "the tacit but widespread assumption that signs in all forms of communication must somehow operate like words" as quoted by Jones (2018: 119).

More generally what Badwan is referring to when saying "What is missed if we only see research participants as 'talking heads'" (30:52 - 30:57) or "What if meaning is not always clear, coherent or categorisable" (31:08 - 31:17) is the segregational linguistics of say the Saussurean tradition ('talking heads' from Saussure's speech circuit model of communication).

The segregation refers to the segregation between linguistic and non-linguistic domains of inquiry. This ignores the fact, as Badwan demonstrates when reporting on her project with the children, that linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge are integrated into daily communication.

There are 3 specific segregational assumptions:

(1) Languages as systems; (2) Communication as a consequence of the use of language; (3)Languages as user-independent systems.

and the integrational counter-propositions include:

(1) Language is not a knowing in advance system; (2) Language is the product of communication and should be studied within communicational situations; (3) Communication always involves specific individuals.

(After Yan, 2022)

The integrationist echoes are seen in the following statements from Badwan:

"Challenging universalism"; "Creating room for lived experience, often masked under concerns forbjectivity and rigour"; "Nexus thinking - not just thinking about the verbal or the written, we need nexus thinking that joins the dots between language and body and nature and objects and places and race and ethnicity and sexuality" (55:30 - 56:32)

Instead of saying the following on JL Austin's famous quote:

"If we reverse doing things with words we could also explore the possibilities of doing words with things. Creating new linguistic possibilities as result of engaging with and attending to matter and materiality and things." (26:25 - 26:46)

a reading of integrationism may have prompted Badwan to amplify Roy Harris's comments on Austin as reported by Jones (2018: 129):

"The main flaw” with the work, according to Harris, “is Austin's failure to consider to what extent being able to ‘do things with words’ is parasitic on being able to do things without them”. He goes on: “Doing things without words is what we need to understand first, before there is any chance of understanding what makes it possible to do things with words as well"

Note I have no idea if Badwan has not read integrationism, she may well have and thought it of no import but the fact that resonances between her puzzlements and integrationists concerns are so strong yet she does not cite any integrationist work then it seems to me as if she has not read that particular literature.

Finally Badwan comments on Pennycook's position:

"Alistair Pennycook has a different view on that he argues that we need to re-organise language, not always at the centre but at the periphery as part of a larger understanding of semiotics and politics. I wouldn't argue for putting language on the side and decentering language or re-organising language. I would argue for expanding the scope of relevance. So language remains central but central in a different way" (57:19 - 57:48)

means that it is more difficult for her to give up what she admits is the most difficult thing to give up - the notion of "representational thinking" - that is the difficulty "not to turn everything to words". Such a position would add further difficulty to supporters of post-humanism:

"Saussure’s langue (the static linguistic system) has been discarded [by the post-humanists], and with it the idealized fiction of the homogeneous speech community, but the third-person perspective on the sign has not gone. Post-humanism cannot afford to fully embrace the Harrisian notion of the radically indeterminate sign" (Pable, 2022:109)

What integrationists mean by the radically indeterminate sign is that there is no fixed code of form or meaning as seen from the third person. Every individual knows exactly what they mean when communicating but a third person (or language analyst) cannot know this.

References:

Jones, P. E. (2018). Integrationist reflections on the place of dialogue in our communicational universe: Laying the ghost of segregationism?. Language and Dialogue, 8(1), 118-138.

Pablé, A. (2022). Language and radical anthropocentrism: the view from the Harrisian supercategory. Semiotica. 247: 87–114.

Yan, R. (2022). Translanguaging space: prolegomena for an integrational critique. Fórum Linguístico, 19(1), 7248-7262.