The Refrain of the A-grammatical Child

• In Event: 65.079 - Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 65.079-16 - Language and Semiotics Within "New Materialist" Research Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives
The paper critically interrogates the figure of the child and its relation to language, as an entry point to the question of what a materialist theory of language might involve, and how it might be put to work in qualitative methodology.

Theoretical framework
The paper is informed by the figure of the child in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly as elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus (hereafter ATP) (1987). The Deleuzian child is a figure of destratification and resistance to dominant narratives – a resistance that is inextricably bound up with the materiality of the child’s body and its relation to language. Not yet fully striated by the rules of grammar that order and subjugate the world, children challenge ‘the hegemony of the signifier’ (ATP, 15) by remaining open to multiple semiotic connections. ‘Gestural, mimetic, ludic and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from … the dominant competence of the teacher’s language’ (ATP, 15).

The paper focuses in particular on the refrain or ritornello, a concept explicitly associated with the figure of the child. The rhythm of the refrain or ‘little song’ establishes ‘the beginnings of order in chaos’, marking out a fragile territory that ‘is in danger of breaking apart at any moment’, yet in its improvisational aspect, also has the deterritorialising capacity to ‘open onto a future’. Deleuze and Guattari give the instance of the child who hums to himself as he walks fearfully in the dark (ATP: 311). The refrain is pre-eminently a-grammatical and a-signifying: it accomplishes a ‘“holding together” of heterogeneous elements’ (ATP, 323).

Mode of inquiry
The paper is primarily concerned with methodological and conceptual development. However it also raises issues of relevance to empirical research, by identifying semiotic practices that are usually overlooked or dismissed as insignificant in research on child language and education.

Materials
The theoretical framework is brought to bear on examples of ‘the refrain’ identified in a corpus of video recordings of young children in the earliest years at school, assembled during an ethnographic study.

Conclusion and significance
Materially-engaged, a-signifying semiotic practices such as those identified in/as the refrain do not fade as children grow up: indeed they disrupt the very notion of growing up as a linear process (Hickey-Moody, 2013). The child, it is argued, exemplifies the ‘rebel becomings’ that, for Deleuze, insist in language and open it onto the new (Deleuze, 2004; MacLure, 2013). Materialist methodologies need embrace such practices, which also haunt qualitative ‘data’, but are generally dismissed as ‘junk’ or degraded material that distracts from truth, meaning or authenticity.

References
Deleuze, G. (2004), The Logic of Sense. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987/2003) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum.
Hickey-Moody, A.C. (2013) Deleuze’s children. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45, 3: 272-286.
MacLure. M. (2013) Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6): 658-667.

Author

• Maggie Maclure, Manchester Metropolitan University