Tracing new ground, from language to languaging, and from languaging to assemblages: rethinking languaging through the multilingual and ontological turns

ABSTRACT

This paper traces recent theorisation stemming from the multilingual turn and brings this into dialogue with assemblage thinking, discussing the critical potential of bringing these perspectives together to explore what language is and how it is understood. The argument maps salient features of the multilingual turn which have extended the fields of applied and socio-linguistics beyond a preoccupation with separable languages embedded within a code-based depiction of linguistic behaviour. Within this body of research, we highlight the influential theoretical frames of (trans)languaging and metrolingualism, which position language as a dynamic process – and practice – rather than a product. We then begin to think through language/languaging as assemblage, a process which heralds an ontological shift. In so doing, we consider the ontological turn within and beyond linguistics to extend the potential of critical language studies, breaking with hegemonic language ideology via a radical reconsideration of the temporality, complexity and materiality of language.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• languaging
• translanguaging
• metrolingualism
• assemblages
• ontology
• Deleuze and Guattari

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Notwithstanding this shift, much theorisation on multilingualism perpetuates hegemonic categories used to describe linguistic behaviour. These categories, themselves products of socio-political developments, have been critiqued as historically determined abstractions of cultural tradition (Orman, 2013) which not only reproduce reductionist language ideologies but are potential impediments to the development of more comprehensive understandings of language.

2 Gramling (2016) further explains the linguistic context of pre-modern Europe, stating that

most non-elite medium-distance travelers had neither a conceptual map nor a pertinent reason for identifying a neighboring region’s speech as structurally foreign from their own. Difficulties in understanding would tend to strike the traveler as features of acoustic or social friction in the flow of communication, rather than as results of any discrete language barrier. A modern structuralist’s potential rebuttal—that this happy traveler just doesn’t understand the fundamentals of linguistics yet—misses the emic, practical point about situated knowledge in pre-modernity, while also indicating a more general disinterest in, or discomfort with, vernacular modes of language use beyond the reach of systemic or philological models. (p. 8)

3 For example, the ability to use prestigious language codes, such as North American/British English or Iberian (Castilian) Spanish, is discussed as a form of widely-recognised capital, contributing to a healthy trade on linguistic commodities.

4 As Li (2018) defines, the addition of the trans prefix expands the term by referring to

the fluid practices that go beyond, i.e., transcend, socially constructed language systems and structures to engage diverse multiple meaning-making systems and subjectivities; the transformative capacity of the Translanguaging process not only for language systems but also for individuals’ cognition and social structures; and the transdisciplinary consequences of re-conceptualizing language, language learning, and language use, and working across the divides between linguistics, psychology, sociology, and education (p. 27).

5 Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) explain that metrolingualism paves the way for the ‘reconstitution of language and an alternative way of being in and through ludic and other possibilities of the everyday’ (p. 246).

6 Bennett’s (2010) notion of vibrant assemblages has been utilised as an entry point to assemblage thinking in the language context (see Appleby & Pennycook, 2017; Pennycook, 2017; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017). Whilst Bennett’s work is not seminal in materialist ontologies or theorisation of the assemblage, it provides a particular perspective on the assemblage, agency, and matter (one which we do not aim to critique per se in this paper).

7 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) further explain that

[a]n assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously […] there is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders […] (pp. 22–23)

8 DeLanda (2006) states that a unity is a ‘seamless totality’ (p. 9).

9 The term assemblage, as a translation of agencement, has potential to generate confusion; while it captures that ‘an assemblage/agencement consists of multiple, heterogeneous parts linked together to form a whole’ (Müller, 2015, p. 28), it is perhaps not so clear from the translation that assemblages themselves create agency (Bennett, 2010; Müller, 2015).

10 DeLanda (2006) further summarises the composition of assemblages, stating:

unlike wholes in which parts are linked by relations of interiority (that is, relations which constitute the very identity of the parts) assemblages are made up of parts which are self-subsistent and articulated by relations of exteriority, so that a part may be detached and made a component of another assemblage. Assemblages are characterized along two dimensions: along the first dimension are specified the variable roles which component parts may play, from a purely material role to a purely expressive one, as well as mixtures of the two. A second dimension characterizes processes in which these components are involved: processes which stabilize or destabilize the identity of the assemblage (territorialization and reterritorialization). […] [A] third dimension will be added: an extra axis defining processes in which specialized expressive media intervene, processes which consolidate and rigidify the identity of the assemblage or, on the contrary, allow the assemblage a certain latitude for more flexible operation while benefiting from genetic or linguistic resources (processes of coding and decoding). (pp. 18–19)

11 Referencing Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, Müller (2015) gives the following metaphor for the assemblage:

everything seems linked to everything else: there are new, unexpected realities at each turn, entities congeal just to fall apart in the next instance and desire to reach an elusive goal (the castle and the end of the trial) recomposes them anew every time. (p. 29)

12 As Deleuze (1990) continues,

[o]ne speaks always of bodies and their mixtures, but sounds have ceased being qualities attached to these bodies in order that they may enter into a new relation with them, that of denotation, and that they may express this power of speaking and of being spoken. (pp. 181–182).

This constructed denotation enters into the assemblage anew – as the particle transfers from body to sign to body (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

13 This, of course, is an acknowledgment of the unavoidable impasse of writing about language from within language itself – of speaking within and across the assemblage.

14 So-called ideational elements of the language assemblage are deposed from their position of standing above and looking down at physical milieu and time-bound interactions (MacLure, 2013). Conceptually, as Dewsbury (2011) posits,

[t]he body-brain-material assemblage operates an exciting proposition […] through readings of neuroscience and alternative philosophies of nature the relationship between thought and matter is placed in conceptual tension such that thought is matter and matter is thought. (p. 151)

15 Here, phenomena result from the intra-action of an ‘object’ and ‘measuring agencies’ which identify it (Barad, 2007):

[…] it is through these agential cuts and through specific intra-active practices that boundaries, categories, and “properties” of phenomena are established, and it is also through these cuts that specific concepts—specific material-discursive articulations of the world—become meaningful. (Højgaard & Søndergaard, 2011, p. 346)

Barad’s (2007) notion has been taken up in different ways across domains of research (see for instance Taylor, 2013; Warfield, 2016), grounded in an acceptance of entanglement and relationality, rather than separability. As neatly summarised by Warfield (2016), Barad’s agential realist approach ‘is interested not in interactions between predefined entities, but the intra-actions that occur within the entanglements of phenomenon [sic] that enact boundaries, which then demarcate entities as separate from one another’ (p. 2).

16 Greenhough (2012) notes the following in the content of geography, which we argue is applicable to assemblage thinking in language studies:

[w]e need to attend to the agencement of the academic geographer, who, while contingent, partial and open to new possible relations, nonetheless remains subject to the tendency of falling back into ‘relatively stable forms and relations’ (such as the mantra of race, class, gender, and sexuality). This is a problematic already acknowledged in attempts to develop novel methodologies for engaging with more-than-socially constructed worlds […] We face the problem of how to tell non-linear geographies from within the resilient assembled tool-kits of academic research, writing and publishing. (p. 204)

17 Linguistic behaviour encompasses ‘the integration and orchestration of neural, bodily, situational, social, and cultural processes spanning a diversity of time scales […] animated by the dynamics of living, feeling, moving bodies, not abstract forms’ (Thibault, 2017, p. 76). Further, the identification of linguistic behaviour is itself premised on such processes spanning a diversity of time scales.