Belonging and language

Abstract

This article contributes to a growing debate within the field of early childhood education about the concept of ‘belonging’. It continues from earlier discussions that commented on the adoption of Belonging as a key term in the development of a national curriculum for the early years in Australia in 2009, as well as increasingly common references to belonging in various aspects of debate within the field. The article focuses specifically on the idea of belonging as it has emerged within existentialist philosophy in the 20th century, and more recent post-structuralist theories, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. The article ties belonging to language as a means of redefining approaches in early childhood education to the notions of place and context, so as to more rigorously connect ‘belonging’ to the philosophical debates of the 21st century.

Introduction

The term ‘belonging’ has emerged in recent years as a concept deserving increasing theoretical attention in the field of early childhood education and care. Writers such as Tina Stratigos (2015) and Karen Guo and Carmen Dalli (2016) have begun to establish the complexity of this concept as it enables educationists to draw out its implications for policy and practice in the early years. Stratigos et al. (2014) and Sumsion and Wong (2011) have variously pointed to the significant risk that such terms become ‘meaningless’ if used without appropriate attention to the theoretical explanations pertinent to their use (p. 29).

In earlier discussions on the term ‘belonging’, I have pointed to the likelihood that it could be used to promote the idea that children ‘belong’ to (e.g. join, are members of) a social context, in order to ‘exist’, to ‘be’ and to ‘become’ in an ontological sense. Here I am addressing the nature of that social context, by arguing that the social ought to be comprehended through the prism of a theory of language.

I note, to begin with, that Sumsion and Wong (2011) have already established the broad psychological literature relevant to the ways in which educationists and psychologists have approached ‘belonging’. The problem that may be raised in connection with psychological approaches to educational concepts, and particularly to ‘belonging’, is that ideas, such as ‘thought’ and ‘thinking’, which lie at the centre of the goals and premises of both psychology and education as scientific practices, gain meanings that appear to be self-evident. This is a problem because it means that a barrier or orthodoxy emerges around these terms, preventing them from being interrogated in any manner that is not consistent with the prevailing theoretical doctrines of psychology.

The same problem may be detected in reference to theories of language in early childhood education, and in education more generally, where a ‘resistance’ to the theorisation of language is probably most visible as debate about whether one or another approach to literacy pedagogy is better: such debates are interpreted here as being underpinned by a pragmatism, which directs educators to regard language theory as inherently aimed at better literacy outcomes among children, rather than any discussion as to what language is, in general (Snyder, 2009).

Within these debates, educators may recognise a fundamental orientation of educational practice to pragmatic goals, which in turn are manifestations of the thinking that drives educational policy in advanced Western economies. The present discussion contributes to a broader explanation of the ways in which pragmatism might be recognised as a form of resistance, a barrier to analysing orthodoxies within educational practice. In my discussion, ‘belonging’ is heuristically employed to make visible a counter-position to the seemingly self-evident logic of pragmatism. The first example I draw upon outlines some of the philosophical issues pertinent to ‘belonging’ in its relation to the concept of place, as it emerges as a metaphysical term. In the second part of the article, I analyse concepts of language, so as to more carefully situate ‘belonging’ within a new set of philosophical discourses.

The concept of place

In order to outline the way in which the term ‘belonging’ could be adopted more rigorously to describe a place that a child might occupy, and to address that idea of place with respect to belonging, it might initially be relevant to explain the conditions of a place, or of the concept of place. My comments on place are limited to the metaphysical foundations of that concept, rather than treating it as if it were an empirical thing, a geographical concept.

Where modern psychology assumes that sense-certainty provides the data of experience, in a manner preceding thought, or providing an object of thought, this would be because the world is where we find ourselves. And yet, the question will arise, what is the world, in terms of a ‘place’? Much contemporary philosophy recognises an early Greek world-view, in which Plato made ‘thought’ serve the task of becoming a virtuous man. Here the fact of a world or cosmos in which humans exist – a place of all places – is already granted.

The question that these early Greek thinkers were addressing was in fact, what is it to ‘be’? How should we grasp the very fact that we can think of ourselves, whereas, they assumed, animals cannot do so? (Heidegger, 1962). Western philosophy (and psychology in particular) tends to privilege an idea of thought that is teleological, that is, paradoxically, it takes human cognition to precede experience, bearing within it the purpose of rationalising sense-experience (Large, 2002: 133). Of course, this also means that if thought precedes experience, if it holds a purpose that is antecedent to experience, ‘thought’ is a cypher for a divine plan. This is the perspective from which I am here analysing the idea of ‘place’: it is an idea produced for the sake of making sense-experience fit a world view.

We can expand our comprehension of this world view by thinking of ‘place’ in relation to a search, undertaken by ‘man’, for an original source, a moment when something begins, that is, a fundamental cause (Irigaray, 1993: 34). ¹ Nature is often given as the name for this ‘cause’. In his Physics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (1983) declared that ‘nature is a principle of change and alteration’ and that if inquiry is made into nature, ‘it must not escape us what CHANGE is.’

Change is thought to be something continuous, and the INFINITE is the first thing that presents itself to view in the continuous … further, [it is thought] that there cannot be change without PLACE and VOID and TIME. (p. 1)

The idea of place enters philosophy as a term meant to indicate a position, that is, something that can be fixed, and constant; the idea of position enables us to address what is existing, what is present, that which does not change or move, because as Aristotle points out, ‘everyone supposes that things that are are somewhere’, which is to say that his interest in place is that it designates a manner of referring to evidence of existence. ‘Again, those who assert that there is void say that there is place; for the void would be place deprived of body’ (Aristotle, 1983: 20–21). Place is not an empirical concept: a place cannot be physically seen, because it abstracts from the objective evidence that something positively exists; the ‘where’ of that existing is secondary to the essence of existing.

Place therefore crosses between essential content and objective content of a thing.

We have no distinction between a point and the place of a point; so that if not even a point’s place is different [from itself], then neither will the place of any of the others be, nor will place be something other than each of these. (Aristotle, 1983: 21) ²

I take this observation that place is not an empirical concept to imply that ‘belonging’ is not an empirical concept either, since it is effectively a synonym for the necessity of having a place, in order to be, to be present (e.g. ‘I am here!’) to have evidence of existing. Belonging is a metaphor for having or being in a place.

We could extend the logic developing from Aristotle’s observations, to suggest that belonging could also be described as ‘being’ in-a-context, or, that the theory of belonging must refer to the problem of how to describe existing, the presence of a thing, with special respect to the position of existence. Further, we might wish to question whether the position of existing can be contextualised outside the realm of metaphysics, since what Aristotle has just allowed us to observe is that if we exist, we must be designated a place in which to exist, but that that place is not something we can observe. So, there is a gap opening here between the possibility that existing is a fact, and the impossibility of observing the place where this existing happens.

The upshot might be that I exist as a human being, but that my existing is not something anyone can observe. I appear, but only as something other than myself, as a sign-of-myself, that is, only as objective content of a thought or idea, which in-itself is no-thing, at least nothing that can be observed. The sign would mark the otherness of me, trace my presence.

Place, being and belonging

My ‘presence’ is now predicated on the split between being and not-being, since ‘presence’ can only ever be marked by way of a sign, which is not me, and therefore, paradoxically, my presence is always a reference to something other than myself.

Now the problem of defining belonging expands, into a breakdown of the concept of place, such that we must address a metaphysical conception of existence or ‘being’. To ‘be’ would become an antecedent premise for ‘belonging’; next, we acknowledge that the relationship between the two, ‘being’ and ‘belonging’, would stem from a reference to ‘place’ or even ‘context’, as if the latter always presents a condition for existing.

The fact that we have already taken recourse to the idea of ‘presence’, and the basic problem that presence is always broken into pieces that designate the fundamental alterity or difference of ‘being’ from itself, establishes a warrant for considering ‘belonging’ more deeply in relation to another of Aristotle’s principles, that is, time.

If I say ‘I belong to my family’, for example, there is an inherent premise of my statement, which is that my family also exists (I do not exist in isolation) and, more specifically, that my family continues to exist, it is constant rather than transient. Now we may proceed to question whether my statement that ‘I belong to my family’ is a metaphysical statement: ‘yes’, it is metaphysical, insofar as it demands adherence to an idea of my presence, as well as that of my family, even though it remains a possibility that everyone in my family is absent, or dead, for example.

My family, the thing to which I belong, does not actually need a factual existence, in principle, since I ‘belong’ to my family, regardless of whether or not it exists in fact.

This distinction between the thing that exists in fact, and the metaphysical thing to which I belong, is the same distinction that I made earlier between the forms of being: the ‘presence’ of my family can only ever be marked by way of a sign, which is not the same as ‘my family’.

Furthermore, the idea of presence invokes the concept of time, as a metaphysical basis on which to make a statement about myself. Time is not just a continuity, as Aristotle remarked. Time is first of all, not an empirical conception, as the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1979) explained: ‘for neither co-existence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation a priori’ (p. 47). ³

This speaking about myself (as to where I belong) involves a metaphysical operation by which I am not in the same place as myself, so as to refer to ‘myself’ as an object, which means that I must split myself, in order to think my ‘self’, as other than me. This usually entails my name, which is a sign for me. That sign that is other than me, a name on which I am predicated. As such, I can only ‘exist’ on the basis that I am exterior to myself, located (in a place) outside me.

If my statement that ‘I belong to my family’ is analysed from this perspective, the possibility emerges that I am saying that the outside to which I refer, when I am speaking about my ‘self’, is the same as my ‘family’ (e.g. my family name signifies the group to which I belong).

But if we were to take my family as an empirical thing, something that can be observed, in a constant sense, we would encounter another problem, since my family is not a geographical position, such as on a map: my family is not like Melbourne or London or Istanbul. Another way of saying this might be to say, my family does not occupy a fixed and immoveable place; I experience belonging-to-my-family as a struggle, between the idea that ‘family’ is constant and the fact that it is only ever transiently present to me. The word ‘thing’ can convey an impersonal quality of objects; from this perspective, my family would be imbued with a generalised, structural objectivity (Large, 2002). Further, to think how my family ‘is’, how it exists, will now involve an activity: ‘I’ want this activity to reassure me that ‘I’ am constant, that I exist in a succession of moments that follow each other in a temporal sense. Yet, I am contending with the fact that my family is only ever transiently present to me. So, to make myself a part of my family, to belong to it, ‘I’ must overcome the transience, which is the lack of presence (i.e. absence). This may also be stated as that part of belonging that is a ‘longing’ for presence.

Belonging and things

As ‘longing’ to belong, the concept of belonging would then express an urge towards the apprehension of Being, from the perspective of not-being: at least, a not-being, the quality of which is broken off from Being unified as a thing, a completed presence. Being is now a memory, or a past. I was a complete thing, and now, because that to which I belong is transient, my constant presence is at risk: I apprehend myself as belonging to this unity, and the wholeness of that unity-with-family is broken. So, there would be a disjunction between Belonging and Being as permanence. ⁴ Belonging would signal the incompletion of a context in which that urge towards unity were being expressed.

This is part of a shift, away, from the classification of humans as impersonal things. It allows me to pause long enough to recognise that I have been treating my family as if it were an ensemble of things, and that, as part of that ensemble, I too am a thing. When we read about belonging we may interpret the text as an opening onto a discourse about the way that humans exist, which is no longer dominated by presumptions about the thought of a cognitively defined subjectivity. Belonging is no longer a term that necessarily assumes that ‘I’ can only be framed by pragmatism, where language is already a ‘didactic assignment that no human being can bypass’ (De Man, 1982: 13), where ‘I’ am dedicated to the intuition of objects as things, and words are instruments I employ to describe those objects (including myself).

The metaphysics of Being involves a breakdown of presence, of a constant state otherwise known as permanence; Martin Heidegger and others name the ‘event’ of Being an apprehension of the splitting of my ‘self’ into different ‘places’. I am appropriating the term belonging so as to signal that event that breaks up presence into different moments in time. Similarly, Jacques Derrida refers to the Shakespearean phrase ‘the time is out of joint’. Derrida (1995) says, ‘at stake is presence and event: what comes to pass or what takes place’ (p. 17). What Derrida means is that the attribution of being, the claim that something is, marks the place where a transition occurs between metaphysics and language. Not between metaphysics and physics, so much, because that would be to identify ‘what takes place’ as a physical event, whereas Derrida is helping us to mark off the special relationship between metaphysics and language. It is in language that the transition occurs, because we cannot engage in the thinking of ‘belonging’ or any other concept, without the priority of language for thought.

Now this account of the relationship between language and thought demands a deeper, more meticulous explication. Since the Greeks, Western philosophy took thought to be the natural expression of Being: even that speech was the externalisation of a thought, that already inhabited Being, that is, Being was conceptualised as inherently rational, and naturally (spontaneously) manifests itself as self-expression.

This image of an inherently rational ‘self’ is necessary, in order to account for the nature of individuality, and in particular, a self-will, a freedom to think and act. And yet, we may apprehend a conflict between that idea of freedom and ‘belonging’: urges and impulses that we need someone or something would here be regarded as constraints on freedom. This is a problem that was perhaps most explicitly articulated by the enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that babies are born free, but are almost immediately inserted into a fettered existence, required to use language: language became, for Rousseau, a primary instance of social laws, which impede nature. Here we encounter an opposition between Nature and Culture; Rousseau regarded mothers, and educators more generally, as the instruments by which a natural and authentic freedom is impeded (Derrida, 1997: 168).

By comparison, contemporary psychologists have reformulated this binary opposition with respect to the value of what babies can or cannot do before they can speak: their approach depends on treating speech as a primary evidence of cognition. ⁵ They break human development into pre-linguistic and post-linguistic phases. The idea of human development is premised on an assumption that we exist in time; and that, ‘being’ is the continuous succession of moments working inevitably towards stages of human cognition. To develop ‘correctly’ is to fulfil an idea of human purpose, that precedes experience.

In the first part of his career Jacques Derrida investigated the tendency for Western philosophy to identify thought with speech, and in so doing, to relegate writing to a secondary, or supplementary position (Derrida, 1978, 2011). We can attribute the psychological priority of speech over writing to the fact that, until the 20th century, theories of language and theories of consciousness were not synchronised, at least not in Western contexts. This effectively means that older theories of consciousness, which supplied the basis for the meta-narratives of psychology, failed to account for the way in which language makes thought possible. In these older theories, humans acquire thought more or less spontaneously, as a dynamic relationship between sensible experience and the capacity to intelligibly apprehend the objects of experience.

Language and linguistics

Once it became possible to incorporate language rigorously into theories of consciousness (beginning with Freud), it also became possible to analyse the conditions in which to apprehend the value, and the function, ascribed to speech, in theories of language. One such explanation is provided by the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (2002), who analyses the moments of supposedly pre-linguistic experience. She analyses Freud’s Oedipal hypothesis and explains that for the child – the same infant (always hypothetically male) whom Freud had positioned in a relation of dependence upon his male and female parents – there is a pre-discursive moment:

at that time, man has no language. He is its plaything without power to play with it. He does not yet benefit from the signifier. But the discourse of the other leaves its indelible traces in him, constituting him as signifying matrix. A discourse of love whose content is provided by himself. And, in this primitive dyad that man forms with the other, he is by turns signifier and signified. But he is not yet structured as <1> by the signifier, and a fortiori has not mastered the double face of the sign. (Irigaray, 2002: 9)

The reader should recall that at this point in Irigaray’s analysis, the child is only conscious of the primary caregiver and the sounds of her language, which are as yet meaningless, except as empty forms to which he himself ascribes his own content. There is no relation (to-mother) as such, because a relation hinges on the recognition of a division or split between me and mother.

It is as if the infant has not realised, even after he is born, that he is no longer in the womb. The delivery and reception of mother’s speech sounds forms a framework or matrix, alongside smell, touch, and so on, that ‘love’ will subsequently come to occupy, in Irigaray’s terms (remembering that Irigaray distinguishes rigorously between male and female experiences in this context; cf. Hirsh et al., 1995).

To describe that point of division, that point where a world of relationships opens to the child, a division of the matrix into its cellular components, the child registers an exchange between different elements of that matrix. He realises that mother is speaking to a second being (supposedly, the father); and because of this differentiation between mother and father, the nature of the original ‘love’ matrix is shattered; this is treated by Irigaray as analogous to the ‘event’ to which Heidegger and Derrida each refer, that breaks up Being, or presence, into different moments in time. Now, the child’s experience is that of separation, or differentiation: this is assimilated to the signifying specificity of <I> and <you>.

The initial monologue becomes the possibility of dialogue. However, this opposition of and <you>, of <you> and, remains <one>, without potential for inversion or permutation – the father being only another <you> – if the father and mother do not communicate with each other. (Irigaray, 2002: 10)

In order for the child to elevate himself from the subordinate position of a third, the onlooker who is excluded from this dialogue, it is necessary for the child to identify the <I> with the <zero> that he already is.

Situated in this space, the child is excluded from communication while at the same time integrated into it. This requires him to go through a first death, an experience of nothingness. The subject immediately constitutes itself as an I/0, if not a you/0, through identification with the father, or with the mother, senders or receivers of the exchange at which he is present. (Irigaray, 2002: 10)

Both ‘I’ and ‘You’ will necessarily be equivalent to either ‘one’ or ‘zero’, in order for this ‘circuit of exchange’ to function. But the child finds itself in between one and zero, relentlessly, which effectively constitutes the event of Being: a breakdown, or abyss, that grounds the activity of belonging, that is, longing to be, as unified, whole, re-united with the origin, a fantasy that apprehends the past. ⁶

The context of discourse

‘A past that has never been present’: one is broken off from the illusion of occupying a place, of the certainty of what one has always been (Derrida, 1982: 21). To ‘be’ is only ever an event of catching oneself, in between, ‘out of place’, so to speak, as both something and nothing, both <1> and <0>.

In employing Derrida and Irigaray for the sake of analysing the relationship between belonging and language, I posit belonging as an apprehension of disunity, the trauma resulting from a misapprehension of unity (me-and-mother). I am proposing that to ‘belong’ would be the experience of a dislocation, an identification of oneself with the necessity, or the urgency towards unity, or any of its co-ordinates, that is, ‘love’, ‘family’, and so on. In psychological terms, ‘belonging’ might be an instance of the ‘drive’ or internal impulse to satisfaction of needs and so on.

In terms of the relationship between belonging and language, one intrinsic problem will be to apprehend language in relation to a distinction, between (1) an approach that is inherently pragmatic: language as an instrument of the mind, something that the mind uses to express itself to an Other, that is, a means of communication and (2) an approach that is inherently ethical: language as a kind of play, in the sense of an activity in which the ‘self’ is not, and cannot be, a ‘player’ (in the sense of one who uses language to win).

I am conscious that within the field of early childhood education, the concept of ‘play’ has very specific connotations, and I am pointing deliberately to a different set of references for ‘play’ that may or may not overlap with those prevalent within early childhood discourse. In particular, I am taking ‘play’ in reference to an activity of differentiation.

The play of difference [between sounds, or phonemes, which compose words in their audible function] which, as Saussure reminded us, is the condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign, is in itself a silent play. Inaudible is the difference between two phonemes which alone permits them to be and to operate as such … the difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the word. (Derrida, 1982: 5)

Where ordinarily we might take ‘play’ to refer in a general sense to different forms of imaginary interaction, here ‘play’ signals that aspect of a structure that is pivotal; it is the rule that governs interactions, but which is silent or absent. Derrida offers the example of difference, the rule that allows us to distinguish one sound from another. This play ‘keeps itself beyond this opposition’ (between this sound and that sound): it is the condition of the possibility of oppositions. To regard language as a form of play runs counter to the world view in which language exists because humans speak. It rather describes a structure, or context, in which activities of language (thinking, writing, speaking, etc.) can unfold.

Belonging will be conditional upon the second approach to defining language: having acknowledged the event of Being, we can further recognise that each time ‘I’ am active at the scene of language ‘I’ am ‘already letting [myself] be vitiated by the mark’ of what I am not. ‘I’ can only ever be equivalent to ‘nothing’: to represent myself through the pronoun (‘I’) is to accept the effects of the sign upon my own Being: to ‘divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present’ (Derrida, 1982: 13). ⁷ But why is this an ethical approach to language?

Ethics and belonging

The ‘I’ that would believe in its own presence is an ‘I’ that assumes the freedom to do so. There is an inherent ethicality of autonomy included in a concept of self we have inherited from Western metaphysics. It includes the immanent capacity to intuit an exterior world of sense-experience: an ‘I’ that relies on the background of a constant and permanent ‘world’, as a ground for its own existence. This consciousness forgets that it is already broken into pieces in order to speak of itself, as if it were whole. Pragmatism recognises the autonomy of a self-consciousness, a cognitive being, whose world is constructed internally, in thought of the world. For this (pragmatic) self-consciousness, alterity is routinely negated. This is because whatever is an object that I apprehend is initially only a form whose content I must supply. I give it meaning. As other than me, it is nothing. As meaningful to me, it is the same as me, it becomes familiar, part of my world. Otherness is annihilated in order to reconstitute an economy of the Same. Pragmatism is an ethics that allows an autonomous subject to be free; here, autonomy is paramount.

By contrast, Derrida is addressing that economy-of-the-same by way of language, in order to expose the play of difference, that ‘silent play’, that must be dissimulated in order for the consciousness of self to return to itself.

When language is a play of differences, the alterity of the Other cannot be subdued and mastered: rather, language as a ‘play of differences’ regards Otherness as an obligation or duty that one cannot resist, since it is built into the procedure by which I think my ‘self’ as present. This means that in ethical terms, the only freedom available is one that respects alterity, preserves it, rather than annihilating it.

Effectively, pragmatism clings to and reproduces a genitive relationship between the teacher and student: one causes the other, one is always autonomous of and privileged over the Other. Difference is obliterated in order to return the world to me. This is comparable to Freud’s Oedipal conflict, in which a child carries out aggression towards a parent in order to replace him; in the same way, pragmatism regards pedagogy as a ‘cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially and contiguously involved’ (De Man, 1982: 3). The Other is constructed at an internal level for my purpose, that is, to guarantee the permanence of me as an activity, thinking my-self as a self-consciousness.

In Derrida’s ‘play’, the ‘I’ encounters itself as ‘Other’, and holds on to the thought of that which it does not know about itself; it is this encounter in itself that silently shapes the form of conscious activity. ‘It is the encounter, the only way out, the only adventuring outside oneself toward the unforeseeably other. Without hope of return’ (to self) (Derrida, 1978: 95). An economy-of-the-same relentlessly repeats me as constant, always present, whereas the play of difference collapses that impulse to return into a sense of belonging, or dislocation. This belonging yields a different sense of permanence: it must always begin, repeat, to encounter one-self anew.

This means there are two different kinds of freedom: the pragmatist understands freedom as annihilation: a negativity borrowed from Hegel (1969) which is synonymous with the motion of time (this is what we normally understand by the term ‘becoming’: a reconciliation of opposites, Being and Nothingness). The second is a freedom that is the unfolding of relations, so as to hold open an interval, between, such that my identity is not predicated on the annihilation of yours.

Ethics here might be apprehended as the subversion of attempts to fuse me with the Other, whether it be the impulse to unify me-with-mother, or me with an old-me, the same-me. To challenge the causal effects inherent to pragmatism, there would be a substitution of ‘of’ with ‘to’: a relation between you and me is not constructed at a cognitive level by me, by my-self, for the sake of returning me to myself. You are not of me, in the sense of an idea that I produce to accommodate you as a thing in my world. ⁸ Rather, a relation between you and me is and remains a relation to-the-Other, whom I do not and cannot know; or, as Irigaray (1996) puts it:

I recognise you means that I cannot know you in thought or in flesh. The power of a negative prevails between us. I recognise you goes hand in hand with you: you are irreducible to me, just as I am to you. We may not be substituted for one another. (p. 103; emphasis added)

It is not possible to know, in general, or to talk about knowledge, without accepting the necessity of ‘lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it’ (Derrida, 1978: 111), and so to address the analysis to the site of analysis, the procedure by which writing, speech, thought, and knowledge all supposedly take place. The point is that the identification of that site cannot be an ethical procedure if it entails destroying exteriority, annihilating the Other so as to keep me whole and safe.

Conclusion

From this perspective, I propose that ‘belonging’ can signify an ethical responsibility to the Other, by way of language, or by way of a recognition that the context to which each subject belongs is intersubjective in nature. The sign must mediate every relation that subjects hold to, with each other, in a sense of the response to-the-other, or as Levinas (1991: 7) describes the sign, as ‘one-for-the-other’, that is, of the respons-ible. As a thinking of our context, belonging would therefore direct us to ethical respons-ibility, a place of intermediation where we respect alterity; we do not impose ourselves, dominate, reduce the other to the same, but ensure the element of respect, as a desire that does not seek to consume or destroy.

Martin Heidegger used the term ‘belonging’ to refer to an alertness, to the responsibility humans have to their own Being (from outside of Being, in a sense, addressing themselves to Being and what it is to be) as a question that only humans can have about the meaning of existence. Levinas (1969) adapts this theory in order to raise it as an ethical responsibility, not just an ontological one. For Heidegger (1962), it was necessary that we, as humans, in order to think our humanity, should question what we take as familiar, homely: the nature of our dwelling in-the-world:

when tradition becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence. (p. 43)

This is a sense of tradition that I am applying to pragmatism within educational discourse. To address ‘belonging’ from this perspective affords a concept, relevant to children in particular, who feel out of place, or un-homely. Heidegger saw the way humans dwell on the earth as a kind of intimacy, that is constantly in a state of tension ‘between belonging and estrangement’ (Polt, 2006: 84). So ‘belonging’ denotes an estranged familiarity with the world, with our existing, that has to be addressed again and again, especially from the perspective of language: otherwise we would not be able to engage consciously in our existing.

The way forward in thinking about ‘belonging’ is through a deconstruction of intersubjectivity that enables us to have a deeper regard for the intermediation of language. This sense of ‘belonging’ attempts to leave open that possibility, wherein the familiar, the everyday – for which our encounters are necessarily cursory and shallow – remains alive, preserved, while it is addressed, thought of, visited upon, by the subject.

For Derrida, placing a word or concept under erasure means to ‘rub it out’ or change it, while simultaneously retaining its original meaning or concept. By erasing without erasing, the original meaning haunts a new meaning, a new context. (Anderson, 2012: 4)

This also means that it is most accurate to comprehend context – that place to which we belong – as incomplete, shifting, infinite. Like the text, like language, it is not possible or ethical to totalise the meaning of a relationship (between you and me), even if we are speaking about a book with a defined quantity of words: rather, the text consists, as a discourse, of an ever-unfolding ‘history of its operations, its readings’ (Bernasconi, 1988: 24).

A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harboured in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception. And hence, perceptually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances? (Derrida, 1981: 63)

This passage allows me to reinforce a point raised in my discussion of Aristotle, at the beginning of my article, in which it became apparent that the notion of place is always a reference to a metaphysical position that is definitively imperceptible, non-empirical. This imperceptibility addresses the demand for a pre-symbolic and recasts that concept as an effect of psychological discourses and values that fail, in a manner that is philosophically naïve, to acknowledge their own ontological assumptions. If the baby’s world is not perceptible to us, it does not mean that it is not enveloped in the very same language cues, along with all of the material elements of which those cues are composed. The baby ‘belongs’ to an impermanent context. So with the text, so with belonging: the ideas that humans contend with in trying to appraise our location in the world, and the sense of a home, of acceptance, of familiarity, as well as of their correlates, un-belonging and un-homeliness, all lead us back to the metaphysical nature of our thought.