Emergent Life: Opening Our Lives to Differenciation and to Response-Ability, as We Turn Our Critical Gaze on the Enunciative Regularities That Hold the World the Same

In this article, I explore a range of concepts that enable those of us who work with children to break free from some of those enunciative regularities that function to hold the way things are, in place. The term “enunciative regularities” comes from Foucault, who advocated breaking open words and propositions to find what work they do, what systems they perpetuate. The way we speak the world into existence, and the ways we interpret that mode of speaking, can be taken for granted, by us, as the unquestionable truth of the world and of ourselves. We are, in general, not very accomplished at turning our reflexive gaze on the words and propositions that we are enmeshed in, and thus are not readily able to break them open. Turning our critical gaze on those enunciative regularities is vital, I suggest, if we want to bring about change in the way we order the world—and the ways the world orders us. The work of philosophy, in developing new concepts, enables us to look and to listen differently, and to creatively evolve beyond some of our unquestioned enunciative entrapments.