Undoing Truth in Language Teaching: Toward a Paradigm of Linguistic Aesthetics

Foucault’s work has provided critical applied linguists many tools for deconstructing dominant understandings of language. However, his work has not been significantly engaged with by scholars who have attempted to develop alternative pedagogical approaches outside of these dominant understandings of language. Specifically, these alternative pedagogical approaches continue to be embedded within a discourse of truth that is antithetical to Foucault’s project. This recovering the linguistic truth paradigm of applied linguistics may be inadvertently complicit in the development of new regimes of truth aligned with newly emerging relations of power. A more thorough engagement with Foucault’s work related to developing an aesthetics of existence offers insights into developing a paradigm of linguistic aesthetics that is more aligned with Foucault’s conceptualization of truth and that is resistant to these newly emerging relations of power. A fictional classroom is described to demonstrate the characteristics of this paradigm of linguistic aesthetics.