Notes on pedagogy series

Nicolás Guagnini

The baby must grow up bilingual. It’s all in the vowels. The O must sound in the bowels, instead of the anglo ou that ends up in the nose. The A must be born in the sternum and not the space between the palate and the nose. I only have four years before formal schooling begins.

Language acquisition must be concurrent with literacy. This is my innovation the second time around, as this is my second child: concurrency. In phonics, the most effective literacy methodology in place, there doesn’t seem to be anything that runs counter to it. At 8 months, he’s recognizing the symbols for those two letters and sounding them in good Spanish. At 10, attempting to write them with chalk at the playground.

The algorithm and AI traffic on sameness, looking for patterns. Production predicated on predictability. Repetition machines. The spell of information as and with grammar. Meme slavery. I must make letters, phonemes, words, that mean more. Making them as images, into images, and those images into objects, to bring about irreducible difference. Only poetry actually does that with language. Of course, fools around the world are pushing chatbots into poetry – but programing chance unto a pattern is but a variant of sameness.

Letters as a language unit actually don’t mean anything. That’s the whole point of De Saussure’s non-hierarchical character of the linguistic sign. What if they do? Or even better, what if I make them do?

Un-typography. A set of rules over-imposed, overwritten even, over a group of letters, challenging their readability as such. Monuments, harlequins, backgrounds making them into monuments, moments and places.