The Role of Language in the Development of Other-Oriented Cosmopolitan Sensibilities

• In Event: 35.063 - Revitalizing Ethical Education in Today's Globalizing Ethos

Abstract

The intensification of global mobility today has challenged the boundaries between individuals and communities. Consequently, various scholars have attended to cosmopolitanism from below and the ways in which individuals negotiate with multiple others in an everyday world of flux, cultural mixings, and clashes. Less attention, however, has been paid to the fundamental role that language plays in facilitating such everyday cosmopolitan encounters. This focus is crucial given that language, expressed via various semiotic modes such as speech, gesture, and image, is the most elemental way of connecting with the other. There is therefore a need to examine how, aside from its role in communicating meaning, language’s intersubjective, ethical dimension facilitates cosmopolitan sensibilities.

In the first part of this paper, I examine the roots of an other-oriented cosmopolitan impulse in language through the works Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. Unlike structural linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Ferdinand de Saussure who had studied language as a system of rules for communicating meaning as well as previous philosophers such as Descartes and Kant who had theorized language and reasoning in the consciousness of a singular subject, Habermas focuses on the ways human beings make various rational claims through everyday speech acts. Underlying the claims one makes to another is the most primordial element in language which has to do with an innate need to relate to others. While Habermas envisions language as a means to foster solidarity and hospitable ways of engagement through dialogue, Levinas develops this further arguing that language facilitates recognition of the right of the other over one’s linguistic claims resulting in one’s claims being open to criticism and revision. Language then conditions one to be in vulnerable relation to the other and positions one to respond responsibly to the other.

In the second part of the paper, I discuss how Habermas and Levinas’ theorizations of an other-oriented communicative intent in language to be prioritized above its instrumental intent provide a powerful critique of language policies in Singapore. More specifically, I examine English language and literature secondary syllabi and their related policies from the moment the country became independent in 1965 to the present. I argue that changes in language policies point to an emphasis on instrumental and strategic uses of language governed by a form of economic rationality that conceives language as a means to enhance the subject and its critical and creative prowess as well as the state and its quest to remain globally competitive by developing the linguistic capital of its citizens. This subject and state-centric perspective of language leads not only to shallow engagements with the other, it can more dangerously result in objectifications of the other and a failure to recognize the other as fully human.

I conclude by suggesting how a different conception of language and language education, one that is other-oriented and premised on an ethics of responsibility for the other, can be more clearly highlighted in the curriculum.

Author

• Suzanne S. Choo, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education