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Note that this particular corner of the site is constantly
being revised. End of the present round of works: April 2006. Delays possible. |
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Note that this particular corner of the site is constantly
being revised. End of the present round of works: April 2006. Delays possible. |
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One starting point is the following quotation from M. Stubbs' textbook (Stubbs 1983:1), in which discourse analysis is defined as (a) concerned with language use beyond the boundaries of a sentence/utterance, (b) concerned with the interrelationships between language and society and (c) as concerned with the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication.
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The term discourse analysis is very ambiguous. I will use it in this book to refer mainly to the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study the organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that discourse analysis is also concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction or dialogue between speakers. |
Another inroad into the development of a discourse perspective is more radically antithetical to the concerns of linguistics "proper". Here the focus is on the situatedness of language use, as well as its inalienably social and interactive nature - even in the case of written communication. Coming from this end, the sentence/clause as a primary unit of analysis is dislocated irredeemably and "moving beyond the sentence" becomes a metaphor for a critique of a philological tradition in which the written has been reified as paradigmatic of language use in general. In this version, discourse analysis foregrounds language use as social action, language use as situated performance, language use as tied to social relations and identities, power, inequality and social struggle, language use as essentially a matter of "practices" rather than just "structures", etc. Not surprisingly, there is also a point where discourse analysis as an inroad into understanding the social becomes a theory which is completely detached from an empirical engagement with the analysis of language use. Note that I do not wish to argue against this latter possibility. To do that would mean that one misses out on a number of important philosophical and social-theoretical debates and developments of preceding decades.
Discourse analysis is a hybrid field of enquiry. Its "lender disciplines" are to be found within various corners of the human and social sciences, with complex historical affiliations and a lot of cross-fertilisation taking place. However, this complexity and mutual influencing should not be mistaken for "compatibility" between the various traditions. Nor is compatability necessarily a desirable aim, as much is to be gained from the exploration of problematical and critical edges and from making the most of theoretical tensions. Traditions and crossover phenomena are best understood historically - both in mutually supportive and antagonistic terms and as subject to developments internal to specific "disciplines".
Finally, the table below lists the
various approaches which are discussed in this overview. The list is ordered alphabetically.
It does not pressupose a ranking in terms of importance.
 LIST OF REFERENCES
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The term "natural language school" refers to a particular tradition in analytical philosophy which is characterisised by a belief in the possibility to formulate the conditions for a logical, truth-yielding language on the basis of the study of meaning in natural language (as opposed to, artificial or mathematical languages). Note that at that juncture in the history of Anglo-American philosophical writings, philosophy saw its raison d'être in the development of adequate instruments for scientific enquiry rather than in terms of tackling the great moral-ethical and social issues of the time. Somewhat ironically, it was precisely the search for the "true scientific utterance" which lay at the root of speech act theory, the theory which foregrounds the social actional aspects of all language use and, by doing so, has arguably rendered void all subsequent attempts to formulate the conditions for a type of speech which would be purely truth-oriented.
Further on in
his essay, Austin abandons the distinction between constatives and performatives
and replaced it by (i) a new distinction between three different "aspects" of an utterance
against the background of (ii) a generalised claim that all utterances are really performatives.
This generalised claim is the key assumption of speech act theory (the theory of "how to
do things with words"), viz. by making an utterance, language users perform one
or more social acts. These are called 'speech acts'. The threefold distinction is that
between different types of action. For instance, by speaking an utterance
(locution), you may perform the social act of
making a promise (illocution - what the speaker
does by using the utterance) and, as a result, convince your audience of your
commitment (perlocution - what the speaker's
done, having made the utterance).
Speech
act theory (Austin, Searle): It was the particular search for the (purely) constative
(utterances which describe something outside the text and can therefore be judged true or false) which prompted John L. Austin
to
direct his attention to the distinction with so-called performatives, i.e. utterances which are neither true or false but which bring
about a particular social effect by being uttered (e.g. "With this ring I thee wed" - by speaking the utterance you perform the act). For a performative
to have the desired effect, it has to meet certain social and cultural criteria, also called felicity conditions.
An number of further imporant elaborations of speech act theory lie in the work of John Searle. One is that he allocates a central place
to communicative intentions (this is based on the assumption that a speaker has wants, beliefs and intentions
which are indexed in the performance of utterances). At the same time, he develops a typology of speech acts, which for him, is rooted in
the range of illocutionary verbs that occur in a given language (Click 
for an overview of speech act categories in British English). A third contribution of Searle is the development of a
theory of indirect speech acts. This concept is based on the observation that by uttering, say, what appears to be a
statement (e.g. "It's hot in here."), language users often indirectly perform another type of illocutionary act (in
the case of the example: voice a request to open the window).
/ 
The undeniable merit of speech act theory lies in advancing a view of language use as action. In Searle's
words (Searle 1969:17)
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[A] theory of language is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a rule-governed form of behaviour. Now, being rule-governed, it has formal features which admit of independent study. But a study purely of those formal features, without a study of their role in speech acts, would be like a formal study of the currency and credit systems of economies without a study of the role of currency and credit in economic transactions. A great deal can be said in the study of language without studying speech acts, but any such purely formal theory is necessarily incomplete. It would be as if baseball were studied only as a formal system of rules and not as a game. |
Yet, already in Searle's elaboration of the theory, there is an asocial, mentalist turn in the characterisation
of intentions as mental states stripped of all social content. At one point, Searle (1983:11
) even states that the
state of intentionality is "a biological phenomenon and is part of the natural world like any other
biological phenomenon"
Linguistic anthropologists have criticised the universalistic claims of Searlean versions of
speech act theory, showing its limited applicability to non-Western modes of communication (e.g. by drawing attention to discourse types
which exclude any kind of intention as in John Du Bois' studies (e.g. Du Bois 1993 )
of oracles among the Azande (Sudan) and the Yoruba (Nigeria); see also
Alessandro's Duranti's work (e.g. Duranti 1993 )
on the Samoan conception of meaning which holds speakers responsible for the social consequences of their
acts of speaking rather than for intentions ascribed to them). However, such a critique requires an elaboration
in its own right to the extent that it is based on assumptions of cultural uniformity at the expense of variability and contradiction. Thus, as Verschueren
(1985 ) notes,
depending on the data context examined, speakers of English can be seen to hold
conceptualisations of speech actions rather similar to those which linguistic anthropologists invoke to bring
out ethnocentric bias. Lack of situational
diversification equally underlies critiques of speech act theory coming from conversational analysts: can speech acts
be identified at all independently of the interactional sequences in which the utterances occur?
One of the central problems which is indeed
raised by an "antipersonalist" critique of speech act theory is whether the speaking
subject can be seen as the origin of meaning. The latter is presupposed
by the centrality of the concept of communicative intentions. It is in some respects
a result of speech act theory's roots within analytical
philosophy, esp. its reliance on a rational view of
a "whole" subject which is seen as the source of social action
(compare also with Michel Foucault's insistence
on a reversal of the speaker-utterance relationship). Compare, finally, also with debates over whether illocutionary force
is a matter of speaker intention (as in Searle's version of speech act theory) or of hearer interpretation (as is more or less presupposed
in Austin's stress on hearer uptake - e.g. unless an utterance is recognised as a command,
can it have that force?). Some researchers now tend to stress that speaker intention is
really a matter of conventionalised interpretations associated with particular moves in
specific situations of language use.
The strict separation between locution and illocution in Austin's work can be criticised from
within Derrida's writing. This criticism has a bearing on important debates within linguistics.
First, for the act of speaking (locution) to
be valid as a locution, an utterance must be grammatical and draw on a recognisable lexical wordlist. In this reading, a locution
has meaning independently of the context in which it is used. Using the utterance in context amounts to lending it a particular
force (illocution). In contrast with this view, one can argue that utterances tend
to pre-empt a particular context of use as well as
stress the extent to which "constatives" exist by virtue of "performatives".
As Defoort (1996: 61 and 75 - my translation) explains
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Derrida calls Austin's claims original, but they cannot be called conclusive. According to Derrida, the force of an utterance is already
there in the locution and we never succeed in strictly separating force from meaning: meanings have force and forces
have meaning. Although this discussion is not developed explicitly in Signature Evénement Contexte, it
is presupposed like a running thread through the text. It constitutes an irreversible turn in Derrida's thinking.
[...] Throughout history philosophers - Austin included - have searched for pure locution. They appear to show an unconditional, almost innate respect for the neutral representation of reality. They regret the existence of forces which can only distort this representation. Austin does criticise the preference which this tradition has always had for "assertions" which can be expected to be true or false in their reflection of reality, but even he could not distance himself from the concept of "pure locution" and its representational function. This explains why he felt it necessary to secure a separate place for the idea of "locution".
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That this debate is not simply an academic exercise becomes clearer when one considers its consequences for the projection of the illocution/locution-distinction on a division of labour between "semantics" (focusing on the meaning of utterances - seen out-of-context) and pragmatics (the use to which utterances are put in context). Derrida's account begs the question whether there can still be room for a semantics which is not pragmatics?
Finally, as Jaworski and Coupland (1999:16 ) point out, the aim of laying
down the felicity conditions for all illocutionary verbs in English comes with a risk of arbitrary
essentialism, if it means that the contextual variability which is inherent in the actual social
conditions under which particular speech acts are performed is disregarded (cf. ethnography of speaking's warning against premature "closure" in the relationships between contextual
and textual categories).
The
study of principles for the exchange of information (Grice):
The work of the philosopher H.P. Grice is mostly
associated with the theory of the cooperative principle and its
attendant maxims which together regulate the exchange of information between
individuals involved in interaction. Grice's endeavour has been to establish
a set of general principles, with the aim of explaining how language users
communicate indirect meanings (so-called conversational
implicatures, i.e. implicit meanings which have to be inferred
from what is being said explicitly, on the basis of logical deduction).
The cooperative principle is based on the assumption that language users
tacitly agree to cooperate by making their contributions to the talk as
is required by the current stage of the talk or the direction into which
it develops. Adherence to this principle entails that talkers simultaneously
observe 4 maxims:
for a few examples)
The major weakness
in Grice's theory is probably that it paints a rather rosy picture of the
social conditions of communication. Although he admits that there are many
situations in which speakers do not cooperate, the theory nevertheless
sees cooperation as the universal cement in social transcations. This way
Grice also glosses over obvious and less obvious differences in power and
status between interactants (See also Pierre Bourdieu).
A second weakness is undoubtedly that
Grice's scheme requires a symmetry in background knowledge
between the talkers for it to explain the successful transmission of implicatures.
If the speaker's premises for logical deduction are different from the
hearer's, the hearer may infer someting which was not intended by the speaker
or only approximates it. Is it justified to assume the existence of such
a high degree of symmetry? Probably, not. Hence, one may have to think
of introducing a theoretical distinction between implicatures 'as intended
by the speaker' and implicatures 'as recognised by the hearer and attributed
to the speaker'. Note that the concept of sequential
implicativeness (see conversational analysis)
offers an outcome here. Each turn in a conversation counts as a particular
interpretation of the turn immediately before it. This gives the talkers
the chance to update their knowledge of their co-interlocutor's background
assumptions and thus 'restore' a certain degree of symmetry. Additionally,
there is the routine aspect and repeatable nature of lots of exchanges.
This makes the communication and interpretation of certain implicatures fairly
conventional, and in many cases rather predicable. Nevertheless,
it is instructive not to underestimate the impact of asymmetries on the exchange
of information (both with respect to what is being talked about and with respect
to what speaker and hearer assume about each other's orientations towards
the exchange of information - e.g. goals of the interaction, what is crucially at stake
within an interaction, degrees of expected cooperation, etc. Compare in detail with interactional sociolinguistics.
(back
to list)
Structuralist
linguistics: To the extent that structural
linguistics has developed into the study of language use (rather than the
linguistic system), nowadays often making use of large electronic corpora of texts
for studying the distribution of particular structures and uses, it can
be said to have developed a discourse analytical perspective.
More recent theoretical explorations within systemic-functional linguistics
(Martin 1992, Martin & Rose 2002
The study of stylistic
variation and registers is based on the observation
that language variation depends not only on the
social and geographic origin, position and trajectories of the speakers
(traditionally the concern of variationist sociolinguistics). It also varies
according to the activity in which one is engaged in (e.g. giving a
sermon, writing up a research article, addressing parliament, etc.).
Diatypic variation of this kind is grasped
through the notion of style
(Crystal & Davy 1969 )
or, within the systemic-functional framework, register (Halliday et al. 1964, Halliday 1978, Halliday 1985 ).
In both models, language use is seen as an effect of situational variables.
Crystal & Davy talk about 'dimensions of situational constraint', whereas the Hallidayan
framework views register as a "configuration of the semantic resources which members of
a culture associate with a situation type" (Halliday 1978: 111) and which correspond
to a configuration of features in the context of situation.
Both planes of analysis are seen as organised metafunctionally.
First. Configurations of semantic resources count as probabilities in the selection of
lexicogrammatical options at the textual, interpersonal and ideational levels of meaning.
Register is thus seen as a meaning potential (cf. 'systemic-functional' as 'a system of
meaningful functional distinctions from an insider's perspective').
Second. The same metafunctional diversity is echoed in the analysis of situational context, with
corresponding distinctions between:
)
have extended the model with two additional, higer planes of analysis:
genre and ideology. Genre is seen as a
staged, goal-oriented social process realised through register: a sequentially-organised
pattern of register patterns. One underlying motivation has been that in a given
culture, not all combinations of field, tenor and mode variables occur.
The introduction of the still-higher plane of ideology,
finally, is motivated by an observation borrowed from
the work of the British sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein:
meaning potentials are not evenly distributed across participants in a given
social-cultural space. The plane of ideology thus has to do with the system of
coding orientations which position speakers/listeners in such a way that
options in genre, register and language are made selectively available
(with divisions along lines of class, gender, ethnicity and generation).
Social power then depends on the range of options available to a user,
the extent to which these can be used for purposes of control, submission or negotiation,
and the degree to which these options can be taken up in order to transform the
context which makes them available. "Interpreted in these terms, all texts manifest,
construe, renovate and symbolically realise ideology, just as they do language,
register and genre." (Martin 1992:581 ).
The introduction of the plane of ideology aims to account for a dialectic of difference,
systemic inertia and evolution. In addition, it are the "tensions produced by the unequal
distribution of meaning potential that forces a culture to change"
(Martin 1992:575 ).
Certainly in the Crystal & Davy-type
of stylistics, language use is seen as an effect of contextual variables - a trait
shared with a lot of work in variationist sociolinguistics. This leaves little
room for a view in which language use also contributes to the creation of context
(e.g. becoming a police suspect usually begins
with being addressed in an interrogative, sincerity-doubting mode).
Compare with post-structuralist theory,
conversation analysis, linguistic
anthropology. More recent versions of the systemic functional linguistic model
(e.g. Martin 1992 )
come with a fairly explicit recognition of the context-creating and transforming
capacities of textual resources in a programme oriented to combatting
inequality. Looked at from a different angle, there is narrowing in other respects:
social practice is "bundled together and reduced to the 'context' of language and the focus is on
how language internalises them, in a one-sided way which gives no account of how they [social practices]
internalise language or how language constitutes part of the 'context' for them [...]
The apparatus also pushes the analyst to the side of the system [...]
the analysis of texts is overwhelmingly an account of what choices the text makes
from the potential of the system, of the text as an instantiation of the system"
(Fairclough & Chouliaraki 1999:141 )
Text
linguistics: Early text linguists concentrated
on the development of various paradigms for the study of how sentences
interconnect. They have drawn attention to the various linguistic devices
that can be used to ensure that a text "hangs together" (cf. the concept
of textual cohesion). Such devices
include the use of articles, lexical repetition and personal pronouns to
refer back to entities mentioned earlier in a text and the use of linking
words to establish a particular logical relationship of, say, contrast,
concession or addition between two or more sentences in a text. Other text linguistic
themes include:
Pragmatics,
as a sub-discipline of linguistics, can be said to thematise the relationships
between language use and the language user in a situational context (cf.
the adjective "pragmatic" refers to the capacity of a social actor to adjust
to situational circumstances). Initially, pragmatics was mainly bracketed
by analytical philosophy, as the first themes it
developed were indeed speech act theory and the
study of principles of information exchange. Since,
however, a number of further thematic strands have been added, with a certain
amount of import from sociology:
for an example analysis).
for a schematic overview). A politeness perspective can also be detected in the
an analysis of many indirect speech acts. For instance, the use of an indirectly formulated
request such as (son to dad) are you using the car tonight? counts as a
face-respecting strategy, among other reasons, because it leaves room for the
interlocutor to refuse by saying sorry, it is already been taken
(rather than the more face-threatening you may not use it).
In this version of politeness, speaker and hearer face are simultaneously
attended to.
By far the most influential theory of politeness phenomena is that of P. Brown and S. Levinson, Their theory is based on a particular interpretation of E. Goffman's writings on the role of "face" in social interaction (Brown & Levinson 1987:63):
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Our notion of 'face' is derived from that of Goffman and from the English folk term, which ties up face notions of being embarrassed or humiliated, or 'losing face'. Thus face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction. In general, people cooperate (and assume each other's cooperation) in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being based on the mutual vulnerability of face. |
According to Brown & Levinson, one can subsequently
distinguish between two types of face wants: positive
face and negative face. Positive face
refers to the desire to be appreciated as a social person. Negative face
refers to the desire to see one's action unimpeded by others. Corresponding
to these two face-types, language communities develop strategies to attend
to positive and negative face wants. These strategies are referred to as
positive and
negative politeness strategies. With particular
reference to negative face wants, Brown & Levinson have developed the
concept of a face threatening act
to refer to verbal acts
which intrinsically threaten face and may therefore require face-redressive
action (Click
for a schematic overview of available options) .
According to Brown & Levinson, there is a direct correlation between the amount
of face work speakers put in and particular situational variables: (a)
power, (b) social distance and (c) the gravity of the imposition (cf. a
request to borrow someone's car usually involves more face-work than a
request to use that person's pencil).
Brown & Levinson predominantly see face wants
in individualistic terms. Their speaker is a rational model person, who, when interacting,
adopts rational goals of which she is conscious. The underlying assumption is
that the behaviour of interactants displays a sensitivity towards a satisfaction
of mutual face wants. In contrast, one may stress the situational diversification
of systems of politeness as well as their conventional nature. See, for instance,
Bourdieu who sees politeness in terms of conventions
which reflect the determinate nature of power relations in a social space.
Subcription to these conventions counts as an act of political concession.
Compare also with critiques of speech act theory.
Brown & Levinson
are preoccupied with “losing face”, but there is hardly an equivalent discussion
of “gaining face”. This choice of metaphor has been criticised as
ethnocentric.
The relevance of "face" in
interactional analysis can be extended beyond Brown & Levinson’s particular utterance-oriented
interpretation of it. Suggestions for this can be found in Goffman’s own work.
In addition, one can think here of situations where speakers enter into confrontations with institutions in order to (re)claim
certain entitlements. In terms of scope, this takes us beyond a pre-occupation with the "local" face-related dimensions of individual utterances towards a more
"global" analysis of the face work dimensions of complete exchange sequences or encounters, especially disputes (see
Sarangi & Slembrouck 1997 )
) for a lucid
argumentation to this effect).
(back
to list)
Linguistic anthropology is a cover term for mainly Northern American approaches which contextualise language use in socio-cultural terms. According to Hymes (1964:xxiii)
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its scope may include problems that fall outside the active concern of linguistics, and always it uniquely includes the problem of integration with the rest of anthropology. In sum, linguistic anthropology can be defined as the study of language within the context of anthropology. |
Linguistic anthropology's origins lie in the wider anthropological concerns with indigenous peoples, societies and cultures in the United States, Canada, Meso-America and also farther away. Although its ancestry is in what was initially a US government-funded programme of documentations and descriptions of (mainly) American Indian indigenous languages, myths and historical narratives, linguistic anthropology, in its present form, is the result of a "paradigmatic shift" established in the 1960s (see ethnography of speaking and interactional sociolinguistics). In Duranti's (2001:5) words,
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[...] linguistic anthropology as it is practiced today [...] is also more than grammatical description and historical reconstruction, and it is also more than the collection of texts, regardless of whether those texts were collected in one's office or under a tent. It is the understanding of the crucial role played by language (and other semiotic resources) in the constitution of society and its cultural representations. |
Nowadays, many linguistic anthropologists have a double agenda:
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| to move away from "salvage linguistics" that documents for science another dying language, while tryng to understand what losing a language means for those who face that loss; to move away from a "salvage ethnography" that analyses memory culture, while trying to understand current social dynamics against the backdrop of long-announced and externally perceived cultural death. |
In quite a number of cases, this shift in perspective has foregrounded inequality, power relationships and (language) ideologies - also in the sense of raising issues of appropriation and entitlement in the contact situation between linguistic anthropologist and researched communities.
Ethnography
of speaking develops out of a wider
appeal (in the mid 1960's) for "studies that would analyse in detail how language is deployed as a constitutive feature
of the indigenous settings and events that constitute the social life of the societies of the world", as anthropological
linguistics could "no longer be content with analysing language as an enscapsulated formal system that could be
isolated from the rest of a society's culture and social organisation."
(Duranti & Goodwin 1992a:1 )).
First of all, some notes on ethnography. Ethnography is a principal mode of
anthropological enquiry, but there is no unified conception of it. According to Alessandro Duranti (1997:84-5), ethnography is first of
all a method. It offers a set of valuable techniques with allows researchers to connect linguistic forms with cultural practices.
Its integration within other methods for the documentation of speech patterns sets linguistic anthropologists aside from
other researchers into language and communication:
However, ethnography can also be captured as a particular research ethos (in the sense that expertise in it is generally
assumed to come with accumulated experience in fieldwork) with rather far-reaching theoretical implications
(in the sense that it presupposes a particular epistemological orientation). One common tenet is undoubtedly the need
for involved participation and distanced observation as starting points for all analysis. In Hymes' (1980
As a first approximation, we can say that an ethnography is the written description of the social organisation,
social activities, symbolic and material resources and interpretative practices characteristic of a particular group
of people Such a description is typically produced by prolonged and direct participation in the social life
of community and implies two apparently contradictory qualities: (i) an ability to step back and distance oneself
from one's own immediate, culturally-biased reactions so to achieve an acceptable degree of "objectivity" and (ii) the propensity
to achieve sufficient identification with or empathy for the members of the group in order to provide an insider's
perspective." )
view, etnography can be characterised as an interactive-adaptive
method of enquiry. It
Note that Hymes links the latter with a general mission of anthropology, expressed in terms of a desire to "overcome the limitations of the
categories and understandings of human life that are part of single civilisation's partial view" (1980:92
).
Note that he also formulates the validity of ethnographic insights in terms of accurate knowledge about the meaning of particular behaviours,
objects, institutions for those who participate in it. Ethnography, in Hymes' view, is essentially a participant-driven approach but it would be a
mistake to assume that it is based on an illusory metaphor of pure induction: "[T]he more an ethnographer knows
on entering the field, the better the result is likely to be" (1980:92 ;
compare with some versions of conversation analysis). Ethnography is perhaps best thought of as an epistemology which constantly moves between what is local/specific
and the general, between knowledge already acquired and new data. Nor does ethnography exclude critical concerns. Consider
in this respect also Hymes (1980:100):
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| It [Ethnography] is a mode of enquiry that carries with it a substantial content. Whatever one's focus of inquiry, as a matter of course, one takes into account the local form of general properties of social life - patterns of role and status, rights and duties, differential command of resources, transmitted values, environmental constraints. It locates the local situation in space, time, and kind, and discovers its particular forms and center of gravity, as it were, for the maintenance of social order and the satisfaction of expressive impulse. |
Ethnography stresses the necessity of knowledge that originates in
participation, ordinary communication and observation. This provides a major point of discontinuity with many European traditions in discourse analysis -
at least to the extent that the latter show a tendency to isolate textual material as "objects" for analysis, drawing reifying
boundaries around it. Instead, ethnography values a careful treatment of context (the explicitation of context itself is
an epistemological problem), insisting that it is impossible to separate speech data from the history under which
it was obtained (see also natural histories of discourse). As Scheper-Hughes (2000:132
)
points out,
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| the question often posed to anthropologist-ethnographers about the dangers of 'losing one's objectivity' in the field is really quite beside the point. Our task requires of us only a highly disciplined subjectivity". |
Ethnography stresses connections between sites and media of discourse, in ways
which encourage a participant-oriented rather than a more narrowly text-oriented approach to "meaning". Consider in this
respect Hymes (1980:95):
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| A key to the significance of a type of television programme may not be in the amount of time the family set is on, but in the family pattern of speaking around it. Is the set on, but ignored? Does someone insist on and get silence? Is the program essentially a resource for continuing conversation? |
In a programmatic vein, ethnography - as it presupposes a dialogic situation of contact as its
primary locus for research activity - also carries with it the potential for helping to overcome divisions of society into
those "who know" and "those who are known". Because it presupposes an inversely-oriented pair of asymmetries
(the ethnographer will be "one-up" on accumulated scientific expertise but will be "one-down" on insiderness - especially
in the early stages, and, vice versa, the informant may acquire scientific expertise
in the course of the research), ethnography is arguably better-suited for critical research
with interventionist and emancipatory ambitions than critical paradigms which are based exclusively
on a knowledge-based advantage of the researcher when it comes to determining foci, priorities and
desirable goals (see also Slembrouck 2001
).
The "learning" aspect also sets ethnography apart in terms of how one determines
what needs to be researched. Agar (1996: 119-120, 126) elaborates the latter point
in the general context of "hypothesis-testing":
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| It's not necessarily that ethnographers don't want to test hypotheses. It's just that if they do, the variables and operationalisations and sample specifications must grow from an understanding of the group rather than from being hammered on top of it no no matter how poor they fit. [...] things like the learning role, the long-term intensive personal involvement and the holistic perspective are what set ethnography apart - they enable us to learn what people are like rather than seeing if a minute piece of their behaviour in a context we define supports or does not support our ideas of the way they are like." |
Finally, ethnography raises issues of representation, in a way which problematises
the relationship between "scientific" and "everyday" modes of representing categories, relationships, connections, etc.
Note in this respect (Hymes 1980:98):
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| The general problem of social knowledge is two-edged: both to increase the accumulated structural knowledge of social life, moving from narrative to structurally precise accounts, as we have commonly understood the process of science, and to bring to light the ineradicable role of narrative accounts. Instead of thinking as narrative accounts as an early stage, we may need to think of them as a permanent stage, whose principles are little understood, and whose role may increase. [...] If narrative accounts have an ineradicable role, this need not be considered a flaw. The problem is not to try to eliminate them, but to discover how to assess them. [...] The question of narrative brings us to another aspect of ethnography. It is continuous with ordinary life. |
Ethnography of speaking offers a radically descriptive orientation for the accumulation of data on the nature of ways
of speaking within speech communities. Hymes' own formulation of the project is really a preliminary listing of fundamental notions and concepts that must be addressed within an adequate
descriptive theory for sociolinguistic enquiry. As he puts it, "what is presented here is quite preliminary [...] one might call
it 'toward toward a theory'. Some of it may survive the empirical and analytical work of the decade ahead." (Dell Hymes,
1972:52 ).
This looseness, I think, is best understood in terms of drawing attention to relevant concepts that were
around at the time, stressing the potential connections between them, but also in terms of not pre-empting the
outcomes of empirical and analytical work still to be undertaken. However, as a theoretical position, Hymes'
project singles out diversity of speech as the hallmark of sociolinguistic enquiry (1972:39).
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Underlying the diversity of speech within communities and in the conduct of individuals are systematic
relations, relations that, just as social and grammatical structure, can be the object of qualitative
enquiry. A long-standing failure to recognise and act on this fact puts many now in the position
of wishing to apply a basic science that does not yet exist.
[...] A general theory of the interaction of language and social life must encompass the multiple relations between linguistic means and social meaning. The relations within a particular community or personal repertoire are an empirical problem, calling for a mode of description that is jointly ethnographic and linguistic. |
A brief and extremely cursory overview of the fundamental notions which Hymes lists:
| Settings |
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Key |
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| Participants |
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Instrumentalities |
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| Ends |
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Norms |
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| Act sequences |
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Genres |
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Note that Dell Hymes formulated the so-called SPEAKING-framework almost as a footnote, announcing it as a purely mnemonic code word, whose use may have little to do with an eventual theory or model. The grid refomulates the sixteen components, reducing them to the eight letters of the term "speaking".
Ethnopoetics
The origins of the
concept of indexicality
lie in Charles Peirce's distinction between three types of sign-based
meaning relationships. Unlike symbols (characterised
by an arbitrary form/meaning-relationships) and icons (which reproduce some
aspect of a referent), an index is characterised by an existential
relationship with the referent (classical examples include: smoke indexes fire). The category of
signs that function indexically can easily be extended to a range of
linguistic expressions such as demonstrative pronouns (e.g. this, that,
those), personal pronouns (e.g. I, you, we), temporal expressions (e.g.
now, then, yesterday) and spatial expressions (e.g. up, down, below,
here) - in short, deictic elements (sometimes called 'shifters') function
indexically. The property of indexicality can be argued to extend to much
of linguistic communication - as language is full of examples which are
"existentially connected" to particular aspects of social and cultural
context.
According to Michael Silverstein (1992:55), indexicality can be understood in spatial imagery:
| In a topological image, indexicality is by definition what I call a radial or polar-coordinate concept of semiotic relationship: indexical sign-vehicles point from an origin that is established in, by and at their occurring as the here-and-now "center" or tail, as it were, of a semiotic arrow. At the terminus of the radial, or arrowpoint, is their indexical object, no matter what the perceptual and conceptual dimensions or properties of things indexed. Strictly, by virtue of indexical semiosis, the "space" that surrounds the indexical sign-vehicle in unboundedly large (or small), characterisable in unboundedly many different ways, and its indexical establishment (as having-been-brought into being) almost limitlessly defeasible. |
One strength of the concept of indexicality is
undoubtedly that it draws attention to meaning-making processes which in terms of "existential"
connections which users definitely make between sign and the social world which they inhabit
but which are hard to pin down precisely in terms which allow firm generalisations. In this
reading, speech act force assignment can be understood in indexical terms, i.e. as a matter
of a situated establishing of a meaning relationship between a particular utterance and
a social act that has come into existence (as different from saying: such and such an
utterance have such and such a force in a context-independent way - without having to address
the question "for whom?"). A similar analytical radicalisation can be claimed for
applications of indexicality in the area of code-selection and switching. What is
"existentially assumed" (inferred as "social facts") about a speaker when s/he selects a
particular code or switches between codes (e.g. display of competence, display of
group membership, oppositional alignment, situational conformity, etc.).
In as much as it may be difficult
for researchers to pin down what exactly is being indexed, it is unmistakably so
that something very consequential is being indexed.
Duranti (2001:26 )
makes the point that Silverstein's concept of metapragmatic awareness
provides a framework for thinking
about the power of specific linguistic forms to reveal or to hide (from speakers'
consciousness) their indexical value. This concept of metapragmatic awareness has
its origin in theories of linguistic relativity and its underlying assumption
about the unconscious nature of linguistic knowledge. In Silverstein's version,
features of language structure can either favour or hinder native speakers' ability
to interpret pragmatic value. One point to be made in passing here is that
this enables a critique of the use of existing lexicalisations of speech
acts for inventory of speech acts in a language (there may be speech act forces
which cannot be lexicalised in a speech act force verb). But there is more.
Linguists have tended to dismissive of native speakers'
failure to distinguish between, say, gender as a part of linguistic structure, and,
gender in the sense of particular objects/entities being associated with [+/- (fe)male]
as part of a "natural order" in the "world out there". The latter has been seen as
folk linguistic reasoning (and intrinsically uninteresting to the student of
language - except to raise it in order to demystify it). In Silverstein's view, however,
one is interested in how speakers make sense of language use and the world. So, rather than
disqualify certain informant perceptions as "folk theory", the interesting question
is: why do these perceptions occur and why do they show up in this area? It is
indexicality which provides the pivotal concept here.
In a view which accepts that cultural categories of experience may be extended to
areas where no such linkage can be presupposed, the question how speakers orientate
themselves (i.e. "where do speakers establish existentially-informed meaning
relationships?") matters more than answering accurately the question "does the
category at this point really apply?" - in the sense that an answer to the second
question should be subsumed in an answer to the first question, rather than being primary.
One question which continues to hover around the profileration of applications of the concept is, of course,
what are the limitations of the concept?
According to John Gumperz
(Gumperz 1999:453-4), interactional sociolinguistics originated
in criticism of earlier work in the etnography of communication which explained cultural diversity in terms of
differences between bounded language-culture systems. Instead, interactional
sociolinguistics has its origins in
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| the search for replicable methods of qualitative sociolinguistic analysis that can provide insight in the linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of today's communicative environments, and document its impact on individual's lives. |
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| Linguistic and cultural boundaries are not just 'naturally' there, they are communicatively and, therefore, socially constructed. Thus, they cannot be essentialised and treated as self-contained islands in research on communicative practices. Apart from interaction as such, ideology, power and history are all central to the way diversity works; depending on how these factors interrelate in specific circumstances, interaction can serve either to accentuate or attenuate the effects of diversity. |
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| a type of ethnography of communication that focuses on what people do in specific types of situations, how they react to others and how they talk about it [...] Basically, I regard myself as a linguistic anthropologist for whom the study of interaction is integral to his more comprehensive ethnographic investigations of the often taken-for-granted ways in which local populations deal with issues they encounter in going on about their affairs. |
The concept of contextualisation is based on a reflexive notion of context, i.e. context is not just given as such in interaction, but it is something which is made available in the course of interaction and its construal depends on inferential practices in accordance with conventions which speakers or may not share. A crucial role in this is how talkers make available and act on so-called contextualisation cues, which John Gumperz (1999:461) defines as
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| any verbal sign which when processed in co-occurrence with symbolic grammatical and lexical signs serves to construct the contextual ground for situated interpretations, and thereby affects how constituent messages are understood. |
Typical contextualisation cues are code switching, style switching, prosodic choices, rhythm,
particular lexical or syntactic choices, etc. Gumperz distinguishes between two levels of inferencing: (1) global inferences oriented to
the "activity type" (what an exchange is about, what topics can be brought up,
what should be conveyed (in)directly, etc.) and
(2) local inferences oriented towards "preference organisation"
(what is intended by one particular move and what is what is required by way of response).
By focusing on regularities in intercultural and interethnic encounters
(especially in institutional contexts of gatekeeping such as selection interviews),
interactional sociolinguistics seeks to explain "unwarranted" institutional outcomes
in terms of a speaker/listener's failure to recognise or respond to particular
culturally-bound conventions of interpersonal communication - for instance,
continuing with the example of selection interviews, how differences in discursive
behaviour may have informed judgements of ability and how explanations for this have
to be sought in, say, an Asian interviewee's failure to contextualise certain
prosodic cues in the native English interviewer's questions but also the
gatekeeper's failure to anticipate differential contextualisation
practices ( Click here for an example analysis).
This way, interactional sociolinguistics also foregrounds how interpretations of talk
are interactionally fed by and feed into larger "macro-communicative" orders.
More recent versions of the approach also focus on the role of "ideologies of
language" in inferential processes.
One of the major strengths of interactional sociolinguistics is its insistence on the occurrence
of asymmetries in the communicative background of talkers. It cannot be taken for granted that speakers and hearers
share the same inferential procedures or contextualise cues in the same way. Such sharing has to be demonstrated
in analysis and one of the main aims indeed is to show how diversity affects interpretation. Compare (and contrast!) with
the study of information exchange in analytical philosophical traditions.
A second strength is undoubtedly that, while interactional sociolinguistics takes on
board the need to examine in detail the sequential positioning of turns at speaking, it does not share
conversation analysis's restrictive concern with overt wording.
A third (and perhaps the most important) strength
lies in its "pivotal" outlook - a concern with micro-processes in a way which can throw
light on broader social processes and cultural issues - coupled with a dynamic
conception of 'context' which recognises open-endedness and resists a neutralisation
of a particpant's perspective. The latter is reflected in attendant linguistic
anthropological developments of the concept of (re)contextualisation.
As Silverstein (1992:75) notes:
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[...] the indeterminacies that emerge from a broadened and semiotically systematised understanding of 'contextualisation' [are] consistent with Gumperz' insightful recognition that indeterminacy is a shared dilemma of interactional textuality for both the analyst of and the participant in discursive interaction. |
For Gumperz (1992:50 ),
contextualisation cues function indexically (e.g. they share
many of the characteristics of shifters; they foreground the discourse-level signalling
processes which render human interpreters central to the process of interpretation);
however, what sets contextualisation cues apart is that they are not necessarily
lexically based (e.g. code-switching and prosody signal relational values quite
independently of the 'propositional meaning' of particular
lexical strings; click here for an illustrative analysis).
One uneasy question which surrounds the
interactional sociolinguistic framework is: when observing asymmetries,
what is "institutional" and what is "cultural"? For instance, routine
organisational or institutional 'knowhow' may be taken for granted by one
party but remain unknown to the other.
Natural
histories of discourse is a discourse-oriented perspective on
the study of culture. In their editorial introduction to the volume with the same title, Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (1996:2-3)
link up the term 'natural histories of discourse' with a focus on
| contextually contingent semiotic processes involved in achieving text - and culture. These are recoverable in some measure only by analytically engaging with textual sedimentations. Each chapter in our collective natural history thus focuses on certain analytic moments in the entextualising/co(n)textualizing process. |
The perspective of "natural histories of discourse" takes issue with the anthropological idea of "text-as-culture" to the extent that the latter allows the analyst of culture to extract a portion of ongoing social action and draw a reifying boundary around it, before enquiring into its structure and meaning (cf. the idea that culture is embodied in a set of texts which are handed down from generation to generation). To equate culture with its resultant texts is to miss the point that the thingy-ness of texts is but one stage in ongoing cultural processes and although that thingy-ness may appear to have a quasi-permanent shape (which is by no means always the case), it travels from context to context and as a result, it will enter into new orderings between texts and be surrounded by changed conditions of commentary and explanation. Being sensitive to the natural histories of discourse invites attention to strategies and modes of entextualisation (e.g. transcription, copying, paraphrasing, citing, editing, recording in a new medium, etc.) and how these are constitutive of processes of (re)contextualisation (i.e. create a (new) context for). Further,
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The image of texts, and also of culture, derving from this latter insight is one a labile and mercurial insubstantiality, in which the text is figured by its always new and present co(n)text. It seems to lose touch with its past, the past, indeed, becoming a projection from the present. But is text entirely an illusion, like a three-dimensional projection from a two-dimensional image? Does textuality completely efface the traces of its antecedent co(n)texts of figuration? |
)) or, text-artifacts may be
presented as having emerged from social interaction and as strategically re-insertable
into social interaction under changed contextual circumstances (for instance, in
the reading practices advanced in law school setting, focusing on precedents and
case histories as contextually-volatile textual artifacts - see Mertz 1996
)).
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New Literacy Studies is a cover name for an approach
which has developed from the mid-1980s onwards (e.g. Barton 1994 , Street 1993
)
and which links up the study of literacy with a critical analysis
of communicative practices - seen as situated social and historical practice. New Literacy Studies is critical
of binary (essentialist) dichotomies between spoken and written language use and between oral and literate
cultures. It also foregrounds plurality in the occurrence of situated types of literacy.
It relies on methods of institutional discourse analysis but it also has something very
specific to contribute to this domain:
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Post-structuralist thinkers conceive of the social space (organisations, institutions, social categories, concepts, identities and relationships, etc.) and the world of material objects as discursive in nature. This claim, also commonly known as there is nothing outside the text, has often been misconstrued, as if it would entail an idealistic denial of the existence of the material world. In the words of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985:108):
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The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of 'natural phenomena' or 'expressions of the wrath of God' depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence. |
A second, basic tenet of post-structuralist theory of discourse is that
the process of meaning making in relation to people and objects is caught
up in an infinite play of "horizontal" difference/equivalence. Meaning is never
finally fixed; it is always in an unstable flux.
Thus, the stress on openness is balanced (at least in the work of Laclau and Mouffe and a number of
others) by the assumption that objects and social subjects and the relations
between them may emerge in partially stable configurations which last for a longer or shorter
period of time. Privileged discursive points which partially fix the meaning
in a chain of signification are called nodal points
(Lacan's point de capiton, lit: quilting points; in Jacob Torfing's words (1999
Echoing S. Freud & J. Lacan, this is called the moment of over-determination in articulatory practice. The constructions of nodal points which partially fix meaning are crystalised in particular discourses and this makes
social hegemony possible. However, a discourse can never succeed in completely imposing social order and continues to be subvertable by a contingent surplus in meaning outside itself ('a discursive
exterior'). Note that Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theoretical model has a political ontology: its teleology centres on an understanding of how historically-specific dislocations 'break' a chain
of signification, leading to the undermining/creation of old/new social antagonisms/hegemony
in the disruption/establishment of old/new nodal points. Their theory is post-Marxist in the
abandonment of class-essentialism and in the recognition of the contingency of
social struggles. The openness/partial closure of the social is expressed in
terms of a field of tension between meaning fixations and discourses being constantly overflown by a contingent infinitude of ambivalence.
Laclau and Mouffe challenge
the 'closure' of the [structuralist] linguistic model, which reduces all elements to the internal moments of the system. This [closure] implies that every social action repeats an already existing system of meanings and practices, in which case there is no possibility
of constructing new nodal points that 'partially fix meaning', which is the
chief characteristic of an articulatory practice.
,
98-99), points "which sustain the identity of a certain discourse by constructing a knot
of definite meanings" - e.g. god, nation, party, class, etc.). Nodal points are capable
of concealing ambiguities. They are
not characterised by a supreme density of meaning, but rather by a certain empyting
of their contents, which facilitates their structural role of unifying a discursive terrain [...]
What happens is this: a variety of signifiers are floating within the field of discursivity; suddently some master signifier intervenes and retroactively reconstitutes their identity by fixing
the floating signifiers within a paradigmatic chain of equivalence.
One of the achievements
of post-structuralism is the radical way in which it has placed discourse
analysis at the heart of the social-scientific endeavour. Its consequences
for disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history, law, social psychology,
sociology, etc. have been enormous. For instance, a post-structuralist
logic advocates the view that "historic facts" or "legal facts" are discursive
constructions. As a consequence, scientific historic writing falls within
the scope of, say, narrative analysis, while judicial decisions can be
viewed as outcomes of discursive practices which are socio-historically
contingent (in this respect, post-structuralism shares a number of characteristics
with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology
- despite obvious differences in the underlying assumptions). Needless
to add, a "truth/rationality"-crisis has been one of the effects.
One of the weaknesses
of post-structuralist discourse theory is undeniably its failure to be explicit about
how to engage with the analysis of actual instances of text or social interaction-in-context.
Note that this is not a straightforward matter of complementing discourse theory with
empirical analyses of text and talk. The main challenge here seems to be how to reconcile
the need to be explicit about methodology with a non-essentialist and non-positivist view
on the production of knowledge. One proposal (Howarth 2000
) is based on an elaboration of Michel Foucault's genealogical method: to focus on the deconstruction of conditions of possibility of
dominant problematisations in a specific socio-political context, in short, an interest
in dissolving power/knowledge complexes.
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Semiotics
and communication studies: The term semiotics
is first of all to be associated with the name of its founding father,
F. de Saussure, who argued that language is just one among many systems
of signs (e.g. visual forms of communication). Linguistics, therefore,
should be seen a sub-discipline of the wider, overarching discipline of
semiotics, the science of sign systems. For a number of years, semiotics
was largely bracketed by the concerns of departments of communication and
media studies (incl. film studies). This is not surprising, as, initially,
these were the only academic departments which studied media texts and
for whom "visual text" is just as important as "verbal text". The term
semiotics also features strongly in the work of the French post-structuralist
literary scholar, Roland Barthes, who studied fashion, boxing, etc. as
sign systems. Compare also with the work of John Fiske, who, in one of
his essays, reads the spacing of "zones" on Cottlesoe beach in Western
Australia as a text constituted by populations of beach users (families,
surfers, nudists, bathers, pet animals, etc.).
The neglect of the
non-verbal text is one of most blatant shortcomings in 90% of research
into language use. A rectification of this situation is urgently called
for, if language researchers do not want to be overtaken by history! Semiotics
provides one avenue for developing such a programme.
Cultural
studies:Cultural
studies is a vast field. Its origins are usually associated with two founding
figures, Raymond Williams and R. Hoggart and their particular angle on
the 'high/low culture'-debate in the 1950s. They agreed with earlier views
(e.g. T.S. Eliot) that literary criticism can offer a critique of culture
in the sense that the culture of a society can be 'read' in a literary
critical way, but they disagreed as to the object of enquiry. For Williams
and Hoggart, culture should not be restricted to the Great Works of Art.
Instead the focus should be on everyday behaviour and expressions - culture
"as it is lived". One very important centre of development has been the
CCCS (the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies, founded by
Hoggard in 1964). When Stuart Hall became director in 1972, he gave the
centre a new interpretation by introducing the ideas of French
structuralism, by relying on a sociological method on enquiry and by
linking up CCS with political struggle in the Gramscian sense. CCS
is mainly interested in mass culture and consumer society. Its programme
can perhaps be captured in terms of a critical and political response to
social, economic and political changes in Western, late capitalist societies.
For CCS, culture entails the totality of everyday social existence. Its
work has been characterised by a strong Marxist and post-Marxist undercurrent
(especially the British and the Australian variants) which was pretty orthodox
Marxist in Williams' days, explicitly Gramscian in the work of S. Hall
and associates, but in other centres also strongly influenced by the ideas
of the Frankfurter Schule. Its most salient research
themes have been (i) ethnicity and identity (in particular, the "new ethnicities"
- e.g. immigrant identities in Britain) and (ii) an analysis of the 'New
Right' - e.g. the transformation of the welfare society in Thatcherite
Britain).
/ Discourse is central to CCS,
but its daily use of the concept is subject to the same restrictions as
post-structuralist theory. There has been a lot of (theoretical) work on the discourses
of postmodernity, but CCS does not offer a paradigm for text analysis as
such. However, there are very intimate ties with communication
studies and semiotics (cf. CCS's interest in popular film). CCS's links
with linguistically-oriented discourse analysis are in many respects indirect
- giving research a particular orientation and direction and mediating
certain key insights. Let me just list a few:
CCS's development of the
"multiple, fragmented identities"-theme deserves mention in its own right
because it provides an important theoretical correction to certain prevailing
assumptions within sociolinguistic research. For instance, in her Lacanian
reading of social identity, Angela McRobbie suggests we stress the (negated)
"absent" as much as we do the (affirmed) "present". To her, identity is
not just a matter of "who/what one is", but also "who/what one is not", "who/what one
could be" and "who/what one would like to be".
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Michel
Foucault is often called a philosopher
and a social theorist, sometimes a historian and a literary critic, but also
a post-structuralist thinker. One can see these identities merge into a single project,
at least, if we can agree to call him "a critical historiographer of the
humanist discourses of modernity". For Foucault, the humanist discourses
of modernity are knowledge systems which inform institutionalised technologies
of power. Foucault's main interest is therefore in the origins of the modern
human sciences (psychiatry, medicine, sexuology, etc.), the rise of their
affiliated institutions (the clinic, the prison, the asylum, etc.) and
how the production of truth is governed by discursive power regimes. The
latter, however, should not be understood exclusively in "language"-terms
(cf. the attention he pays to the power-dimensions of the ways buildings
are designed). Foucault's work can be divided into three stages: archaeology,
genealogy and post-modern
ethics. Note that the first two stages involve a
metaphoric reading of a particular sub-discipline of history.
),
archaeological analysis reveals that
the notion of a subject who exists prior to language and is the origin
of all meaning is an illusion, created by the structural rules that govern
discursive formations. In the words of Foucault (1973:172):
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If there is one approach that I do reject [it is the one] which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity - which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. |
Some implications of the subject-statement reversal:
),
it is probably not correct to ascribe such a view on the socialising capacities
of language use to Foucault himself. Note that this
"detail" is often overlooked in discourse analytical research, even when it claims
Foucault as a major theoretical source. In that sense, one can talk about
traditional conceptions of subjectivity having been "let in again
through the backdoor".
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The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history's destruction of the body. |
Here Foucault (1984:83) moves to the core of the institutionalised power techniques in modern societies, in particular the role of its key "discursive technologies": (i) the "confession" (cf. the salience of counselling & therapy-oriented practices in institutions) and the (ii) "examination" (cf. the salience of all kinds of recordkeeping for different purposes as central to everyday, routine practices and decision-making within modern institutions).
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Through the formation of a 'critical ontology of the self' it is possible to formulate an alternative ethical standpoint from which individuals can begin to resist the normalising force of the 'government of individualisation'. The idea of an ethics of the self redefines Foucault's relation with a tradition of Enlightenment thought which he rereads through the figures of Kant and Baudelaire. From his reinterpretation, Foucault is able to deploy the concepts of autonomy, reflexivity and critique and, thereby, overcome some of what have been regarded as the nihilistic implications of his earlier work on discipline. |
As an afterthought, two "facts" about Foucault, which are worth keeping in mind: (i) his rejection of the concept of "ideology" and (ii) his particular perspective on "power".
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[T]he problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which comes under the category of scienficity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically, how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. |
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Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here and there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do invididuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. |
One of the recurrent themes in Bourdieu's work is that of an enquiry into the social conditions of possibility
for particular practices - ultimately part of an enquiry into the production of social distinctions (artistic,
cultural, educational, linguistic, related to fashion, etc). When taken to the domain of language study, these
questions imply a displacement of an autonomous linguistic object of enquiry, focusing instead on the conditions
for the production (and recognition of) legitimate participation, legitimate language and a view in which language
use is always invested with value - appropriacy and well-formedness beyond grammatical acceptability
(Bourdieu 1984:103-104):
From a perspective of language studies, the French sociologist/anthropologist,
Pierre Bourdieu, is perhaps most readily associated with the key concepts
of linguistic/symbolic capital and
linguistic habitus,
their positioning in linguistic markets and their role in the production
of communicative legitimacy (with attendant effects of social reproduction, domination, exclusion and situated
silencing). This, however, has to be seen as part of a larger project, which his close collaborator, Loïc Wacquant,
summarises in terms of overcoming "the antinomy between subjectivist and objectivist perspectives, social
physics and social semiology, so as to produce a unified, materialist science of human practice and symbolic power"
(2002:53 ).
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La linguistique le plus avancée rejoint actuellement la sociologie sur ce point
que l'objet premier de la recherche sur le langage est l'explication des présupposés de
la communication. L'essentiel de ce qui se passe dans la communication, n'est pas dans
la communication: par exemple, l'essentiel de ce qui se passe dan une communication
comme la communication pédagogique est dans les conditions sociales de possibilité
de la communication. [...] [L]a communication
en situation d'autorité pédagogique supposes des émetteurs légitimes, des récepteurs
légitimes, un situation légitime, un langage légitime. Il faut un émetteur légitime, c'est-à-dire quelqu'un qui reconnaît les lois implicites du système et qui est, à ce titre, reconnu et coopté. Il faut des destinataires reconnus par l'émetteur commes dignes de recevoir, ce qui suppose que l'émetteur ait pouvoir d'élimination, qu'il puisse exclure 'ceux quit ne devraient pas être là'; mais ce n'est pas tous: il faut des élèves qui soient prêts à reconnaître le professeur comme professeur, et des parents qui donnent une espèce de crédit, de chèque en blanc, au professeur. Il faut aussi qu'idéallement les récepteurs sois relativement homogènes linguistiquement (c'est-à-dire socialement), homogènes en connaissance de la langue et en reconnaissance de la langue, et que la structure du groupe ne fonctionne pas comme un système de censure capable d'interdire le langage qui doit être utilisé. [...] Un langage légitime est un langage aux formes phonologiques en syntaxiques légitimes, c'est-à-dire un langage répondant aux critères habituels de grammaticalités, et un langage qui dit constamment, en plus de ce qu'il dit, qu'il le dit bien. Et par là, laisse croire que ce qu'il dit est vrai: ce qui est une des façons fondamentales de fair passer le faux à la place du vrai. Parmi les effets politiques du langage dominant il y a celui-ci: 'Il le dit bien, donc cela a des chances d'être vrait.' |
Bourdieu's sociological critique of linguistics entails a threeway displacement of concepts (1976:646):
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In place of grammaticalness it the puts the notion of acceptability, or, to put it another way, in place of 'the' language (langue), the notion of legitimate language. In place of relations of communication (or symbolic interaction) it puts relations of symbolic power, and so replaces the question of the meaning of speech with the question of the value and power of speech. Lastly, in place of specifically linguistic competence, it puts symbolic capital, which is inseparable from the speaker's position in the social structure. |
One fairly accessible entry into Bourdieu's theory of capital has been developed in Bourdieu (1986 ). Its
starting point is the observation that the social world can be viewed accumulated history. Unless one wishes to
reduce this history to a series of short-lived mechanical equilibria (in which the actors can be treated
as interchangeable), its understanding requires the introduction of the notion of
capital and the attendant concept of accumulation. Capital is accumulated labour (in a material form or in an incorporated
form). It takes time to acquire but once acquired it can be invested into a new situation - in this respect, it does not
matter whether one talks about money or forms of behaviour. Capital is acquired by individual actors and it can be accumulated
exclusively: this brings out a dimension of the invididual as a strategic player in the social world, acting on
perceptionsa of value, profitability, etc. Capital is also a force which is reflected both in objective structures.
It creates a set of conditions embedded in the reality of the social world and it determines the chances to durable
success for specific practices within that world. Finally, capital is what makes the societal game into something
different from a game of pure chance. Only at the roulette table one comes across a virtual world in which anyone can
acquire a new financial and social status overnight in a situation of perfectly equal opportunity, unhampered by
mechanisms of gradual acquisition, profitable investment or conditions of hereditary transfer. In contrast, capital
needs to be invested in a particular way, it needs time to become profitable.
Bourdieu's reliance on a framework which revolves around the concept of 'capital' in its various manifestations is not based on a straightforward simile which seeks to explain social processes in education, art, etc. through a logic which in its purest form is to be found in our understanding of economic markets. Quite the contrary, Bourdieu's institution of the concepts of 'social capital', 'cultural capital', 'symbolic capital', etc. is based on a reversal of the reductionism which limits the logic of the markets to what is narrowly economic and which conceives of the artistic, the educational, etc. as 'desinterested'. Bourdieu's point is that one must do theoretical and analytical justice to the diverse forms of capital in their various manifestations (and not just the one which is recognised by economic theory).
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A particular definition of the economic has been imposed upon economic practices. This definition is a historical invention of capitalism. By reducing the universe of exchange transcactions to the exchange of goods which is oriented objectively and subjectively towards a maximisation of profit (i.e. based on (economic) self-interest), other forms of exchange have implicitly been defined as non-economic and desinterested. [...] In other words, the accomplishment of a so-called science of market laws, which is not even a true science of the economic field (to the extent that it takes for granted as natural the foundations of the order which it purports to analyse, e.g. private property, profit, wage labour, etc.) has prevented the development of a general economy of practices, in which the exchange of commodities is just one specific type of exchange. |
Thus, the point about linguistic capital is not only that symbolic exchanges can be compared conceptually to economic
transactions, but also that linguistic capital is a field-specific form of capital, which, under certain conditions
can be transformed into other forms, while it cannot be reduced to any of these other forms (e.g. linguistic dispositions allow the acquisition of
educational qualifications which in their turn will promote access to prestigiuous jobs with prospects of entry into
attractive social networks). Important from a sociolinguistic point of view, are then the processes of control
over the value of symbolic resources which regulate access to other social, cultural and economic 'goodies'
(Heller & Martin-Jones 2001:2-3 ).
In this way, Bourdieu's cautions us against the objectivism of economistic reductionism and
the subjectivism which reduces social transactions to communicative events:
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As such we must simultaneously hold on both to the idea that economic capital is the root of all other forms of capital and the idea that these transformed, hidden forms fo economic capital can never be reduced completely to this definition, because their most specific effects are produced precisely where there rootedness in economic capital is hidden from view (not in the least from their owners) and this, even though only in the last resort, is the foundation of their specific effects. The real logic of capital, transformations of one type into another, and the laws of accumalation to which they are subjected cannot be understood well unless one leaves behind two opposite points of view which are inherently equally limited: economism which, because of its final analysis in which all forms of capital are reduced to economic capital, pays insufficient attention for the specific workings of other forms of capital; and semiologism (present examples are structuralism, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology), which reduces social exchange transactions to communicative events and ignores the naked fact of universal reduction into the economic. |
Perhaps one can conclude that Bourdieu seeks to establish the specificity of non-economic forms of capital by
radically applying an analysis of economic capital to it, be it with a focus on sets of perceptual differences (it is the quality
of the negation of forms of economistic logic which make up the specificity of non-economic forms of capital). These perceptual differences are indeed
treated as clandestine apparancies (their apparent character can be exposed through an analysis in terms of economic capital). However,
at the same time, they are not treated as redundancies (the workings of, say, social capital cannot be shown or explained unless
subjective differences from the logic of economic capital are taken seriously as factors which constitute the difference). For instance,
the ways in which cultural capital masks itself is essential to our understanding of it as capital. Note that such an overcoming of a
subjectivist/objectivist antinomy is repeated in Bourdieu's definition of habitus.
Through the notion of linguistic habitus,
Bourdieu, refers to individual differences in practical linguistic competence.
Habitus refers to a speaker's competence as a strategic player: their ability
to put language resources to practical use but also to anticipate the reception
of their words and to profit from this. However, at the same time, habitus is
seen as an internalised disposition of objective structures: a system of choices
influenced by inhereted and accumulated asset structures (e.g. the language
brought to school because of one's social background rather than merely a matter of
individual aptitude). The formation of a habitus is continually
being sanctioned by relative successes/failures in the market of linguistic
exchanges. An early formulation of this position
(Bourdieu 1976:654) reads:
Very importantly, the concept of a "habitus" presupposes a theory
of linguistic practice, rather than a theory of the linguistic system
(which Bourdieu radically rejects as an abstraction completely
detached from the "fields of social action"). Habitus receives multiple
definitions: Habitus is discourse adjusted to a situation, a market, a field.
Habitus is capital. Habitus is hexis - it refers to a set of internatilised
bodily dispositions. Habitus is schematic knowledge, because it generates
practices and regulates their evaluative reception. Finally, habitus encompasses
ethos (cf. Goffman's claim that the interaction order is a moral order).
In Bourdieu's model, all linguistic situations function like markets.
In 'ce que parler veut dire' (1984:98), he defines discourse through the formula: speaker competence + market = discourse.
A few interesting, further implications:
This view is diametrically opposed to the one advocated by analytical philosophers,
like H.P. Grice, whose models are based on the
assumption that speakers' efforts are always minimally geared towards achieving
understanding (compare also with Habermas' distinction
between 'strategic' and 'communicative rationality').
Some of Goffman's writings can be situated in the context of a sociology of psychiatric
(and other "total") institutions but conducted against the background of action-oriented descriptions
of participant orientations in "normal interactive behaviour" (note that this particular
combination is echoed in Sack's early conversation analytic work on suicide helpline calls
and in Garfinkel's work on psychiatric clinics). Note in this respect Goffman (1967b:47-48):
Thus, one will find in Goffman's writings not only a critique of pyschiatry as moving far too
easily from social delicts to mental symptons, resulting in a failure to assess the
impropriety of acts that bring a person under the attention of the psychiatric care (see
especially Goffman 1967c: 137ff.
It is this concern with situated activity systems which are manifest in
behaviour under conditions of co-presence which are unrelated to transsituational groups
or institutional forms of membership that can be captured under the heading of an interaction order (Goffman 1983:2).
For Goffman, talk is the basic medium of encounters, but talk isn't all: the
state of co-presence is a physical state and it draws attention to the body,
its disposition and display. For Goffman, "the body is not simply used as
an 'adjunct' to communication in situations of
co-presence; it is the anchor of the communicative skills which can be
transferred to disembodied types of messages." (Giddens 1988:257
Layeredness is also presupposed by the attendant
notion of key(ing). Key refers here to a set of
conventions by which a given activity (which is already meaningful in terms of
a primary framework) is transformed into something patterned on this activity
but seen by the participants to be something quite else (Goffman
1974:43-4
Thus, in social-theoretical terms, Goffman's frames occupy a middle ground
which avoids both the extremes of the total
relativism of sheer intersubjectivity (whatever an actor appears to construct at
the time) and that of the objective determinism of a reality which is pre-given
and external to the actor (as if it would be enough for students and lecturer to enter the lecture hall
for a lecture to take place). Frame analysis precisely invites attention to how
the pre-given and the locally-constructed interrelate. Its particular analytical
purchase lies in how interactants attend to the simultaneity of multiple realities, how
they adjust constructions, manage disruptions, etc. Hence, not surprisingly,
Goffman's interest in, on the one hand, impostors, spies, theatrical performances, etc. and, on the other hand, the acting
out of sociability in talk, i.e. phenomena which reveal the transformation of ordinary
action into things seen in a different light. Thus, we read in the opening paragraphs of the introduction to Goffman (1981:2-4)
Footing then stands for a speaker's and hearer's shifting alignments in relation to the events at hand, as a combination of
production/reception format and participation status. A change in footing
Thus, 'footing' brings out the need to distinguish between various speaker roles, for instance, when dealing with
phenomena such as speech report, being a messenger and other types of situations
where a person speaks on behalf of someone else. Goffman suggests, the 'speaker'
can be replaced by a 'production format' which consists of three components:
Goffman proposes similar distinctions following a deconstruction of the category
of hearer which reveals a range of participation statuses. This way, Gofmann distinguishes
between the primary addressee (a ratified
hearer) and an overhearer
(typically a non-ratified hearer, for instance, an accidental bystander). Of course,
ratified participants may be turned into bystanders (e.g. when the talk becomes so centred
on two interactants and chills the involvement of others present in the frame). The reverse
may also occur, for instanse, when a response cry - typically aimed potential overhearers (though not
a specific hearer), becomes the starting point for a conversation. (Click
The term line here refers to a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which someone
expresses their view of the situation and its participants, especially him/herself. Quite
importantly, such a line is seen in terms of effects which are ascribed to an individual as wilfully intended:
Interactants expect each other to behave in a way which is consistent with this image (to be in face
or maintain face). Participants may find themselves in wrong face when
information is revealed which cannot be integrated into the line adopted thus far or they may find themselves out of face when participating in
a contact without having ready a line of the kind participants are expected to take in such situations.The latter two correspond to the everyday expression "to lose face" in Anglo-American
society, but Goffman als draws attention to other culture-specific usages such as "to give face" which occurs when one speaker arranges for another to take a better
line than he would otherwise have been able. Goffman includes social valuables such as dignity, honour, self-respect and contempt within the scope of an analysis of face-work: "[W]hile his social face
can be his most personal possession, and the centre of his security and pleasure, it is only on loan from society; it will be withdrawn unless he conducts
himself in a way that is worthy of it" (1955:213
In conclusion, note that Goffman's essay formed part of an enquiry in to the ritual roles of the self, where the self is seen
both as a kind of image pieced together from the flow of events and as a kind of player in a ritual game. It leads to a particular view on human nature
as a construct - for instance, by linking perception of what persons are "really" like
with a repertoire of face-saving devices as situationally-called for. In more than one respect,
one can trace echoes in this of Foucault's concept of individual subjectivity as a by-product of and as a function of
discourse regimes (1967a:44-5):
In other words, conversation analysts can be seen as sociologists who assume that everyday social
structure is a skilled accomplishment by competent actors
(cf. ethnomethodology). Conversation is one such type of
action and one which is particularly salient in social terms. Moreoever,
conversation can be recorded and described in detail, with transcriptions
providing a yardstick for the replicability of social-scientific analysis.
Thus, one version of the birth of conversation analysis -
voiced in Harvey Sacks's methodological notes (1984:26) -
links the technological advances of the 1960s in an
accidental fashion to the fulfilment of a particular methodological project
(critical of Weber, critical of Durkheim).
At what point exactly this preference for tape-recorded data became invested with
an actively-developed suspicion towards the use of 'unsatisfactory data sources'
in language description (e.g. interview data, observational data obtained through
field notes, invented examples and experimental elicitation) is a matter of hindsight
interpretation. For its practitioners, conversation analysis is a stake within
the methodology
debate of sociology (where does one situate one's sociological
object of enquiry, i.e. society), with a clear preference for the formal properties
of social action, and, in many cases, a suspicion towards any kind of
pre-analytical theorising. For instance, conversation analysts often state their
reluctance to allow categories to enter the analysis other than those entertained
by the participants or revealed in an analysis of the sequential flow of interaction.
This point is often captured through the ironicising image of
rejecting a "bucket"-theory of context
which is contrasted with the preferred
view of context as a project and a product of
interaction. Note in this respect
also the following proviso which John Heritage (1997:168) builds into a discussion
of the structural organisation of turn-taking:
This second, etnomethodological trait within conversation
analysis is distinctly phenomonological (compare with the influence of Schutz's
writings on Goffman). It marks a concern with the competences
(seen as participant orientations) which underlie ordinary social activities.
Note also how this trait receives a radical - and ultimately untenable - reading
in the context of the inductivist positivism which characterises Sacks's formulation
of the ideal of 'primitive science': for instance, Boden
Situations in which linguistic
productions are explicitely sanctioned and evaluated, such as examinations
or interviews, draw our attention to the existence of mechanisms determining
the price of discourse which operate in every linguistic interaction (e.g.
the doctor-patient or lawyer-client relation), and more generally in all
social relations. It follows that agents continuously subjected to the
sanctions of the linguistic market, functioning as a system of positive
and negative reinforcements, acquire durable dispositions which are the
basis of their perception and appreciation of the state of the linguistic
market and consequently of their strategies of expression.
Thus, discourse here surfaces as a general term for language use when interpreted as linguistic practice
adjusted to a market situation. It is defined as language use implicated in an authority/belief-structure.
Le discours que nous produisons, selon le modèle que je propose, est une 'résultante' de la compétence
du locuteur et du marché sur lequel passe son discours: le discours dépend pour une part (qu'il faudrait
apprécier plus rigoureusement) des conditions de réception.
Toute situation linguistique fonctionne donc comme un marché sur lequel le locuteur place se produits et
le produit qu'il produit pour ce marché dépend de l'anticipation qu'il a des prix que vont recevoir ses
produits. [...] Un des grands mystères que la socio-linguistique doit résoudre, c'est cette espèce de
sens de l'acceptibilité. Noun n'apprenons jamais le langage sans apprendre, en même temps, les
conditions d'acceptibilité de ce langage. C'est-à-dire qu'apprendre un langage, c'est apprendre en même
temps que ce langage sera payant dans telle ou telle situation.
). Indeed, the extent to which 'le bien dit' increasingly becomes equated with the speaking
'not so well', the ostensible display of certain dispositions inherited from outside the dominant classes, is
a key theme in understanding the contemporary media scene. (d) At the same time, it is also possible to
think of certain symbolic markets where recourse to the language of dominant groups is
antithetical to situational legitimacy (e.g. how many car owners will trust a mechanic who speaks the standard
language impeccably?).
), but it is important to note that
'le franc-parler existe mais comme un îlot arraché aux lois du marché. Un îlot qu'on
obtient en s'accordant une franchise [...] [Q]uand elle est affrontée à
un marché officiel, elle détraquée'. Situated silencing is thus seen as an
inevitable by-product of linguistic legitimacy: 'parler de légitimité linguistique, c'est rappeler
que nul n'est censé ignorer le loi linguistique [...] Ca veut dire que, s'ils se
trouvent en face de Giscard, ils perdront les pédales: que de facto leur
langage sera cassé, qu'ils se tairont, qu'ils seront condamnés au silence,
un silence que l'on dit respectueux.' (1984:132 )
A speaker's linguistic strategies
(tension or relaxation, vigilance or condescension, etc.) are oriented
(except in rare cases) not so much by chances of being understood or misunderstood
(communicative efficiency or the chances of communicating), but rather
by the chances of being listened to, believed, obeyed, even at the cost
of misunderstanding (political efficiency or the chances of domination
and profit).
Jürgen
Habermas
(back
to list)
The sociology of order in interaction
The writings of the Canadian-born sociologist, Erving Goffman,
are undoubtedly among
the most influential theoretical sources for the study of spoken interaction, but he is
not ordinarily ranked among the major social theorists of the past century. When asked for his
specific contribution, one reply will consist of a brief list of "powerful" concepts (i.e.
interaction order,
frame,
footing and
face)
but it is equally true that the relevance of Goffman's work for discourse
analysis is still in more than one respect left to be explored (for instance, his distinction
between the front and back regions of institutional action, cast as a distinction between
formal public performance (front region) and more informal back region activity "where the
impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course"
(Goffman 1959:114 )).
Data for the paper are drawn chiefly from a brief observational study of mental patients in a modern research hospital. I use these
data on the assumption that a logical place to learn about personal proprieties is among persons who have been locked up for
spectacularly failing to maintain them. Their infractions of propriety occur in the confines of the ward, but the rules broken are quite
general ones, leading us outward from the ward to a general study of our Anglo-American society.
), such
a critique is also couched in a programmatic enquiry into the construction and maintenance of
the self in the rituals of face-of-face interaction. Goffman's sociological method
has been influenced by phenomonology. It borrowed in particular from the work of A. Schutz
on interactive relations, commonsense understanding via types and the situational character
of relevance. Together with Harold Garfinkel, Goffman is at the basis
of ethnomethodology and its further spin-off conversation
analysis.
, Goffman's detailed
enquiries into the micro-forms of practical interactional behaviour are informed by a set of systematic social
theoretical assumptions. Goffman's sociology is one which centers on physical co-presence
rather than on social groups. While groups continue to exist when their members are not together, encounters,
by definition, only exist when the parties to them are physically in each other's presence.
This helps explain Goffman's interest in
)
My concern over the
years has been to promote acceptance of this face-to-face domain as an analytically
viable one - a domain which might be titled, for want of any happy name, the interaction
order - a domain whose preferred method of study is micro analysis. )
In this respect, Goodwin (2000:1491
)
talks about the need to investigate "the public visibility of the body as a dynamically
unfolding, interactively organised locus for the production and display of meaning
and action." Not surprisingly, such a programme will be critical of mentalist versions
of meaning and cognition. According to Collins (1988: 51-52), the aim is to arrive
at the social ecology which is at the basis of any conversational situation. For Goffman,
the basis of language is not a primal
intersubjectivity, a meeting of minds, but rather a common focus on a physical
scene of action. [...] Goffman is looking at human beings the way a biologist would look at birds or
mammals who are in range of each other. Goffman asserts that people must always
pay attention to other human beings in their presence; each one needs to check
out the others, if only to see if it is safe to ignore them.
The major weakness in Goffman's
concept of an interaction order lies in the passive claim to its universality
and autonomy. Giddens (1988:279 ) talks about
the need "to think rather in terms of the intersection of varying contexts of co-presence,
knit together by the paths that individuals trace out through the locales in
which they live their day-to-day lives" so as to shed light on the "modes in
which everyday social activity is implicated in very broad patterns of
institutional reproduction". for example analyses of how actors establish frames and
manage potential disruptions).
). Here we see again Goffman's self-declared
interest in "game play", in con games, deceit, fraud, shows, etc.
Keying brings the frame laminations of scripted situations of make-believe for
purposes of entertainment into the scope of analysis, but note that keying is
equally central to the occurrence (and meaningful recognition) of playful,
ironic moves in 'ordinary' interaction (e.g. an overtly exaggerated and therefore
insincere love declaration between two friends acted out in front of a larger company).
Frame analysis reveals the complexity of mundane social activities
and it brings out the arbitrary nature of any fixed, social-domain or activity-based
dichotomy between what is "staged" and what is "real". It brings out the reality-constructing
capacities of what is staged, but also the staged nature of the everyday tangibly real.
Note in this respect for instance that mass-media communication - including especially
the solidly real called "news broadcasting" - is saturated by frame laminations
which are deliberately and purposefully staged. What's more, an understanding of media communication
is rather hard to arrive at, unless one comes to terms with the constructed pretense of an absence of
mediation and the audiences' routine submission to an illusion of direct communication -
even in situations where such a pretense becomes extremely hard to sustain (a well-known example in this
respect is the live coverage of UN-troups landing on the shores of Somalia in
1994; this coverage was made possible by the primary frameworks provided by the various television crews
which had landed ahead of the troops, they were waiting for the troops ready with camera, spotlights,
sattelite connections, etc.). More generally we can observe with Collins (1988:61)
that
Framing permeates the level of ordinary social action. We live in a world
of social relationships, in which roles are acted out, with various keyings
and deceptions played upon them. This is the core of practical activities and
occupations, of power and stratification. Here again, Goffman leads us to
the brink of seeing the micro-reality upon which macro-structures are based,
though he shies away from the theoretical implication.
In what follows, then, I make no large literary claim that social life is but a stage, only a small technical one:
that deeply incorporated into the nature of talk are the fundamental requirements of theatricality.
"Frame space" offers a more precise perspective
on the nature of norms in interaction. In this view, norms are not learned
rules which speakers carry around in their heads, but they are ways in which
situations unfold, so that participants feel they have to behave in a particular
ways or make amends for not doing so (cf. Collins 1988:57
).
Additionally, one can interpret Goffman's concern with how
activities are layered upon primary frameworks as an invitation to study
in greater detail how technology-dependent "channels of communication" constrain
discourse practice, in ways which take researchers beyond essentialist distinctions
in "medium" such as the one between "speech" and "writing" (for instance, how else can one
assess what the condition of talking over the telephone does to interaction?;
cf. Slembrouck (1995 ); at the same time,
the invitation is for us to move beyond taken-for-granted assumptions about what counts
as a relevant constraining frame. Should the latter be restricted to "channels of communication" or simply entail
any conditions of framing - irrespective their nature? For instance, how does talk
unfold differently if it goes together with an on-line engagement with
textual attributes or the handling of objects while performing a particular
professional task?
Finally, striking a more critical chord, frame analysis
also exposes the limitations of an autonomous conception of the interaction
order. One can think here of the "framing" capacities of code selection, switching
and slippage, including the boundaries which are imposed as result on the
participation framework(s) which apply. For instance, code selection
has primary frame function in establishing the secondary framework of a language class and,
in such contexts, code switching will often mark the transition from one activity to another
or bring out a clash of frames - click for an example of
the latter). Considerations of this kind take one beyond the conditions of physical co-presence, venturing
instead into the role of transsituational processes of identity-formation which connect to groups definable
under conditions of "virtual co-presence" or even "absence".
[…] by a social situation I mean any physical area anywhere within which two or more persons find themselves in visual or aural range of one another.
The term “gathering” can be used to refer to the bodies that are thus present. No restriction is implied about the relationship of those in the situation:
they may all be involved in the same conversational encounter, in the sense of being ratified participants of the same state of talk; some may be in
an encounter while others are not, or are, but in a different one; or no talk may be occurring. Some, all, or none of those present may be definable
as together in terms of social participation, that is, in a “with”.
[...] implies a change in the alignment we take up ourselves and the others present
as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance. A change in footing is another way of talking about a change in
our frame for events. This paper [i.e. the essay on "footing"] is largely concerned with pointing out that participants over the course of
their speaking constantly change their footing, these changes being a persistent feature of natural talk.
These distinctions are not only instrumental in explaining some of the differences
and shifts in speakerhood one commonly comes across
when one is acting as, say, a spokesperson speaking on behalf of someone else,
a reporter who is repeating what someone else has said, etc. or when a person
shifts between such positions within a single stretch of discourse.
An analysis of production format is thus of primordal importance when one is facing situations
where discourse production depends on coordinated team work with
a particular division of labour which is to lead to a finalised product, say, a
television commerical, where a voice-over takes on the role of 'animator' for
a message scripted by an advertising agency ('author') which expresses
the position of the manufacturer ('pincipal').
for a schematic representation of additional distinctions
relevant for the study of the dynamics of participation frameworks).
In many respects the essay on 'footing' can be read as a challenge
to unwarranted theorising which limits a communicative situation to the presence of a speaker
and a hearer engaged in a conversation. Essentializing speaker and hearer suggests that only sound is
at isssue, whereas in fact sight is organisationally very significant, too - sometimes also touch (e.g.
when at a convivial dinner table with competing and quite freely shifting participation
frameworks, speakers feel it necessary to police listenership and rely on pitch raising,
interruption, bodily orientation and touch to "bring back strays and encourage incipient
joiners", 1981, p. 135). Similarly, the development of the category of overhearer/bystander (an original
contribution by Goffman) is the communicative 'anomaly' which forces us to consider the facts of interaction
as relative to a 'gathering' rather than an 'encounter': "[...] in dealing with
the notion of 'bystanders', a shift was tacitly made from the encounter as a point of
reference to something somewhat wider, namely 'the social situation,' defining this as the full physical arena in which persons present are in sight
and sound of one another. (Goffman 1981: 136 ). The sections in the essay titled 'Footing' which deal with podium events (one-to-many)
and the one which enquires into activities where non-linguistic activities provide the organising context for
utterances (e.g. talk connected to an extended joint task such as repairing a car) can
be read in the same way.
Footing offers a more precise perspective
on the nature of role behaviour, which, on finer examination, as Collins (1988:57
) points
out, really consists of multiple voices and a way in which changes in footing
are managed. The concept has been developed further in pragmatics (e.g. Levinson 1983,
1988 ,
Thomas 1986 ) and
within linguistic anthropology - for instance, Hanks (1996:219-10), who captures its importance for enquiries into
language use well:
For our purposes, the details of Goffman's typology are less important than that it pushes beyond the simple
dyad and opens up the possibility of a differentiated approach to multi-party talk. [...] it became inevitable that the speaker-addressee dyad would lose its place
as the measure of all talk. Thus it is not accidental that the decomposition of the roles into animator, author, principal, addressee and overhearer was part
of a broader push toward the study of different types of interaction, including multi-party talk. Once the boundaries of the dyad were breached, the inadequacy
of its two parts became all too obvious. It is also clear in this framework that the relation between an individual and the language he or she speaks is
mediated by social roles. [...] You simply cannot make inferences from utterance forms to human experience without working through the intermediate
level of participant frameworks.
the positive social value which a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume
he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in
terms of approved social attributes.
Regardless of whether a person intends to take a line, he will find that he had done so in effect. The other
participants will assume that he has more or less wilfully taken a stand, so that if he is to deal with their response
to him he must take into consideration the impression they have possibly formed of him.
). In a sense then,
Goffman's essay takes us in more than one respect beyond the concerns of Brown & Levinson's programmatic
formulation of an enquiry into the mutual satisfaction of face wants in relation to (verbal)
politeness strategies adopted in the production of individual utterances.
The intermediary notion of "line" continues to remain undeveloped - it raises issues
of qualitative diversity in the occurrence of ratifiable situated personae with
corresponding face work strategies. Nor has the thematic
lead into the moral character of the interaction order been taken up in linguistic
politeness enquiry. One can also think here of the sections which Goffman devotes
to the "agressive use of face work" which occurs when (1967a:24)
the purpose of the game is to preserve everyone's line from an inexcusable contradiction, while scoring as many points as
possible against one's adversaries and making as many gains as possible for oneself. An audience to the struggle is almost a necesssity.
Throughout this paper, it has been implied that underneath their differences
in culture, people everywhere are the same. If persons have a universal human nature,
they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of
it. One must look rather to the fact that societies everywhere, if they are to be
societies, must mobilise their members as self-regulating participants in social
encounters. One way of mobilising the individual for this purpose is through ritual:
he is taught to be perceptive, to have feelings attached to self and a self expressed
through face, to have pride, honour, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have
tact and a certain amount of poise. These are some of the elements of behaviour
which must be built into the person if practical use is to be made of him as an
interactant, and it is these elements that are referred to in part when one
speaks of universal human nature.
Conversation
analysis: According to Deirdre Boden , conversation analysts are sociologists who have turned the problem of social order upside
down. For them, the crucial question is not how people respond to a social order and its normative constraints, but rather how that order is brought
about in a specific situation, through activities in quite specific time and place. To understand the orderliness of social life, one does not need
abstraction and aggregation, but instead one must turn to the finegrained details of moment-to-moment existence and their sequential organisation.
When I started to do research in sociology
I figured that sociology could not be
an actual science unless it was able to handle the details of actual events, handle
them formally, and in the first instance be informative about them in the direct ways
in which primitive sciences tend to be informative, that is, that someone else
can go and see what was said is so. [...] It was not from any large interest in
language or from some theoretical formulation
of what should be studied that I started with tape-recorded conversation, but simply
because I could get my hands on it and I could study it again and again, and also,
consequentially, because others could look at what I had studied and make of it what
they could, if, for example, they wanted to be able to disagree with me.
Overall structural organisation, in short, is not a framework - fixed once and for all - to fit data into.
Rather it is something that we're looking for and looking at to the extent that the parties orient to it in organising
their talk. will have it that a
description of the social-order-produced-in-context is a member's construct, not
an analyst's construct.
), it takes two turns to have a conversation. However, turn taking
is more than just a defining property of conversational activity. The study
of its patterns allows one to describe contextual variation (examining, for
instance, the structural organisation of turns, how speakers manage sequences as well as
the internal design of turns). At the same time, the principle of taking turns in speech
is claimed to be general enough to be universal to talk and it is something that
speakers (normatively) attend to in interaction.
,
Hanks 1996:218 ).
/ The major strength
of conversation analysis lies in the idea that an important area of interactional meaning
is revealed in the sequence. Its most powerful idea is undoubtedly that human interactants continually display to each other, in the course of interaction, their
own understanding of what they are doing. This, among other things, creates room for a much more dynamic, interactional view on speech acts than is
enabled by analytical philosophy and mainstream pragmatics (Click
for a contrastive analysis of two exchanges in this light). Yet, note in one and the same breath, that there is a problem over the
the kind of participant outlook that tends to be presupposed in conversation analysis. Margaret Wetherell (1998:402)
captures this well when she conducts the "debate" between conversation analysis and post-structructuralism:
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If the problem with post-structuralist analysis is that they rarely focus on actual social interaction, then the problem with conversation analysis is that they rarely raise their eyes from the next turn in the conversation, and, further, this is not an entire conversation or sizeable slice of social life but usually a tiny fragment. [...] |
In short, the problem might be what in practice is regarded as a sequence and why the "sequentially implicated" cannot also include linkage in the form of a display of uptake of what was said during a previous, related ocassion of talk (e.g. through the use of reported speech, speakers may simultaneously display their understanding of the immediately preceding turn in the conversation into which they are engaged and their understanding of what occurred during a previous conversation or textual experience). One may also take a here lead from recent research into complex technological work environments, for instance, a railway control room (Hindmarsh & Heath 2000:76), in which
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personnel have, as a matter of their daily activities, to make reference to, and mutually constitute, the sense and signficance of a continually changing range of 'objects' displayed on screens and in documents [and] talk and bodily conduct is used within organisational activities to produce coherent and sequentially relevant objects and scenes |
Such research suggests that sequence in discourse may be understood in an extended sense, consisting of various "tracks" involving different modalities and characterised by the occurrence of selectively shifting attention producing moments of divergence and convergence with the conversational track(s) which the conversation analyst habitually attends to. By the same token, a shared television experience involving two viewers before a screen (say, watching a football game) may be understood in terms of conversational turns being implicated in both the sequence which is produced between the two talkers and the sequence of images and words coming from the television set and which the talkers' turns show their particular understanding of. Note how this point in one sense at least can amount to closing some of the gaps which over the years have separated conversation analysis from Goffman's early work. So, while conversation analysis originated in Goffman's project, it is also true that it resulted in a narrowing of relevant concerns. Giddens (1988:266) captures both. One half of the observation marks the departure from more narrowly 'linguistic' preoccupations:
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Talk is the basic medium of focused encounters and the conversation is the prototype of the exchange of utterances involved in talk. Using the word 'talk' rather than 'language' is of the first importance to the analysis which Goffman seeks to provide. 'Language' suggests a formal system of signs and rules. 'Talk' carries more the flavour of the situated nature of utterances and gestures embedded within the routine enactment of encounters. In speaking of verbal 'conversations', rather than of 'speech', Goffman stresses that the meaning of what is said must be interpreted in terms of a temporal sequence of utterances. Talk is not something which is just 'used' in circumstances of interaction. [...] In his early work, Goffman both anticipated and helped shape the development of what has subsequently come to be called 'conversation analysis'; in his later writings he has drawn upon it in developing hiw own discussions of talk and interaction. |
The second half of the observation follows on the next page (Giddens 1988:267), where we read that
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Goffman is able to show some of the limitations involved in thinking of talk in terms of statements calling forth replies. Many moves do seem to invoke rejoinders, but there are a variety of ways in which individuals can express intentions, provide approval or disapproval, or otherwise make their views known, without directly committing themselves to turn-taking within the conversation. A key aspect of all talk in situations of interaction is that both speakers and listeners depend upon a saturated physical and social context for making sense of what is said. |
Coming to terms with this idea of the "saturated physical and social context" constitutes one of the biggest challenges facing the discourse analyst. This is not only a matter of what is included (a range of observable phenomena such as talk, gesture, posture, objects which frame action, etc.) but also how we understand their manifestations and relevance. One promising possibility in this respect lies in a dynamic understanding of context, i.e. context itself as "sequentially implicated" but without conversation analysis's overt restriction of "context" to the "surrounding talk". As Goodwin (2000:1519-1520) suggests, context, in such a view,
|
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is not simply a set of features presupposed or invoked by a strip of talk, but a dynamic, temporally unfolding process accomplished through the ongoing rearrangement of structures in the talk, participants' bodies, relevant artefacts, spaces, and features of the material surround that are the focus of the participants' scrutiny. Crucial to this process is the way in which the detailed structure of talk, as articulated through sequential organisation, provides for the continuous updating and rearrangements of contexts for the production and interpretation of action. [my emphasis] |
However, note that such a concern with a dynamic understanding of the processes through which social and physical context are actively constructed by participants (i.e. as displayed to one another) still says very little about the analyst's active role in the construction of "contexts-as-researched" (compare with natural histories of discourse).
/ A one-sided priority on a
participant's understanding of what goes on in interaction and what
that interaction is about also constitutes a pitfall in its own right, if it means
that common sense categories and
understandings of interactional purposes, goals and orderliness are mistaken for
exhaustive explanations of
why discourse displays the properties it does. While it is true that conversation analysis quite rightfully warns
against the risks inherent in a macro leap which erases the participant from the picture of analysis and reduces the
signficance of talk to a mere reflection of an a priori societal and/or cultural context, the converse holds equally
in the case of a failure to recognise contextual relevance beyond the purview of the participant's "local talk"-orientations in
discourse as well for assuming automatically that the categories revealed in the ways that speakers
can be shown to attend to a local conversational sequence are necessarily also members' categories or
exclusively members' categories. Wetherell (1998:402-3) observes:
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Schegloff argues that analysts should not import their own categories into participants' discourse but should focus instead on participant orientations. Further, analytic claims should be demonstrable. Schegloff's notion of analytic concepts uncontaminated by theorists' categories does not entail, however, that no analytic concepts will be applied [...] Rather, concepts such as conditional relevance, for example, or the notion of accountability, or preferred or dispreferred responses are used to identify patterns in talk and to create an ordered sense of what is going on. Presumably Schegloff would argue that this does not count as imposing theorists' categories on participants' orientations since such concepts are intensely empirical, grounded in analysis and built up from previous descriptive studies of talk. [...] the advantage for Schegloff of such an approach is that it gives scholarly criteria for correctness and grounds academic disputes, allowing appeals to data, and it closes down the infinity of contexts which could be potentially relevant to something demonstrable - what the participants take as relevant. [... However,] one problem from a critical perspective is that Schegloff's sense of participant orientation may be unacceptably narrow. [...] in practice for Schegloff, participant orientation seems to mean only what is relevant for the participants in this particular conversational moment. Ironically, of course, it is the conversation analyst in selecting for analysis part of a conversation or continuing interaction who defines this relevance for the participant. In restricing the analyst's gaze to this fragment, previous conversations, even previous turns in the same continuing conversation become irrelevant for the analyst but also, by dictat, for the participants. We do not seem to have escaped, therefore, from the imposition of theorists' categories and concerns. |
The reluctance to admit the presence of 'pre-existing' categories in conversation analysis also brings with it a number of methodological uncertainties. For instance, with reference to a short telephone exchange in which a school employee rings a mother whose son may be a truant from school, John Heritage (1998:163) argues:
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| The assumption is that it is fundamentally through interaction that context is built, invoked and managed and that it is through interaction that institutional imperatives originating from outside the interaction are evidenced and are made real and enforceable for the participants. |
The question can be raised whether such 'imperatives originating from outside' are to be identified prior to the analysis (cf. "I am looking at a particular type of institutional routine or exchange") or should only be recognised as existing because they emerge from an analysis of interactive data (cf. "the data of the exchange tell me that I am dealing with a particular type of routine"). Is it at all feasible to separate these two moments of 'categorisation'? Even when such issues are understood in phenomenological rather than in positivist terms, a recognition of an "ethnographic moment" is in place here.
Social reality is, for ethnomethodology,
an intersubjective accomplishment. In the words of Harold Garfinkel (1972:309):
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I use the term ethnomethodology to refer to various policies, methods, results, risks, and lunacies with which to locate and accomplish the study of the rational properties of practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments or organised artful practices of everyday life. |
Heritage (1984:4,8) paraphrases Garfinkel’s subject matter as "mundane knowledge-in-action" and as "institutionalized conduct". Ethnomethodology's subject matter is:
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[...] the body of common sense knowledge and the range of procedures and considerations by means of which the ordinary members of societies make sense of, find their way about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves. |
For Francis and Hester (2004:23 ) ethnomethodology
thus focuses on ordinary observational competencies: competent participation in a social setting
demands of those involved that they pay attention to and make sense of what is happening around them.
In this sense, observation is not so much a sociological technique in as much as it is a inevitable
and necessary part of competent participation in everyday life. Consequently, ethnomethodology
is viewed as an approach which takes seriously the implications of the routine observability of
social activities (the moment-to-moment orientations of
actors) both as a potential for inquiry and as a precondition for the construction of any type of knowledge.
This yields a reflexive research programme in which the analysis of the observable features of social life
in terms of situated productions by those who are party to it applies equally to sociological
endeavour itself. It is the latter aspect of ethnomethodological enquiry which has led Aaron Cicourel
to systematically develop a socio-cognitive programme of enquiry which is oriented to understanding
the construction of professional, institutional domain-specific and scientific forms of knowledge as
situated productions and which, echoing Schutz (1943 ),
entails a view of rationality which is relative to "typified conceptions of practical adequacy" (1973:23):
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| Whatever is "rational" about administrative activities, law statutes, household budgeting, or fertility behavior, always occurs in the context of everyday experience and typifications based on past conduct. Schutz suggests that the actor makes sense of his environment by creating loose equivalence classes (as opposed to clear-cut true-false categories). The typifications in the actor's stock of knowledge interacts with emergent meanings from a setting to concretize what is likely or unlikely. [...] The practical ratoinality exhibited by the actor is an emergent phenomenon and is not directed by fixed modes of orientation; instead, the actor invokes rules in creating accounts of "what happened". |
Included within the scope of such a programme is any enquiry into “meaning” when language or interactional data is used
for the purposes of qualitative sociological research (e.g. Cicourel's (1973 ) critique of questionnaires and interview data
as intailing a set of interactional imperatives) or when language/inderactional data is examined in its own right (e.g. for the purposes of
developing a theory of semantics, an argumentation developed in Cicourel (1974 ). That the study of how everyday practical reasoning is constitutive of all human
activity, for Cicourel, comes with a number of basic considerations about the meaning of everyday talk (1974:1563):
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[O]ur ability to construct machines or develop complex logical systems always presupposes a necessary reliance on the presuppositions of practical or mundane reasoning with its constraints of indexicality and reflexivity that are inherent in the development and in all uses of the sciences of the artificial. [...] If we hope to construct a theory of meaning that enables us to understand how we assign sense to our everyday worlds and establish reference, then we cannot assume that oral language syntax is the basic ingredient of a theory of meaning. The interactional context, as reflexively experienced over an exchange, or as imagined or invented when the scene is displaced or is known through a text, remains at the heart of a general theory of meaning. |
While ethnomethodology clearly has affinities with ethnography (e.g. it prioritises observation, immersion, contextual dependency and insists on explicating the methods used by members to produce "from within"), it also shares a set of phenomenological assumptions with conversation analysis, even if the question of text and talk comes with different emphases. First. Although it does not exclude detailed, turn-per-turn sequential analysis of talk, ethnomethodology is much more orientated towards examining the role of text and talk in the daily accomplishment of institutional goals and actions, i.e. what Rod Watson calls "texts as active social phenomena". Let me recall the impressively informative list at the beginning of Watson (1987:80):
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Tattoos, bus tickets, pay slips, street signs, time indications on watch faces, chalked information on blackboards, computer
VDU displays, car dashboards, company logos, contracts, railway timetables, television programme titles, teletexts, T-shirt epigrams, 'on'/'off' switches,
£10 notes and other bank notes, passports and identity cards, cheques and payslips, the Bible, receipts, newspapers and magazines, road
markings, computer keyboards, medical prescriptions, birthday cards, billboard advertisements, maps, Hansard, graffiti on walls, music scores,
church liturgies, drivers' licences, birth, marriage and death certificates, voting slips, degree certificates, book-keepers' accounts, stock inventories,
cricket scoreboards, credit cards - these and countless other items that involve written language and diagrammatic forms indicate the
immensely pervasive, widespread and institutionalised place of texts in our society. This list also indicates the extraordinary diversity in the work done by texts - contractual commitments, ratifying work, facilitating work, record-keeping, persuasive work, identity-establishing work, and so on. In fact, one might suggest that virtually every recognisable activity in our society has its textual aspects, involving and incorporating people's monitoring of written or textual 'signs' - texts that, in a wide variety of ways, help us to orientate ourselves to that activity, occasion or setting and to make sense of it. |
Secondly, ethnomethodology is more about the moral-performative dimensions of text and/or talk, e.g. reporting as a persuasive display of professional
competence which renders members' actions accountable. Again, in the words of Garfinkel (1972:323, see also Garfinkel 1967:vi ), the assumption is indeed that:
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Any setting organises its activities to make its properties as an organised environment of practical activies detectable, countable, recordable, reportable, tell-a-story-aboutable, analysable - in short, accountable. |
Thirdly, and finally, ethnomethodology’s focus on understanding the practical rationalities of members' moment-to-moment orientations-in-action is much more sensitive to a programme which seeks to elucidate field-specific frameworks of meaning-making. Such an analytical stance is typically captured through the phrase that utterance 'a' or interactional move 'b' will be "heard" as indexing 'x' (i.e. is viewed as 'existentially' tied to a set of contextual considerations) and this takes us beyond conversation analysis’ interest in how the interactional sequence per se produces its own context (compare ‘hearing a social worker’s utterance as interactionally communicating a diagnosis’ and ‘hearing a social worker’s utterance as interactionally establishing a diagnosis which is specific to a child protection procedure’).
Thanks are due to Ronald Soetaert. He suggested the idea to me to develop
a website of this kind. I am also particularly grateful to a number of colleagues for the many shadow conversations and reading suggestions which continue
to inform this overview: David Barton, Richard Barwell, Mike Baynham, Jan Blommaert, Aaron Cicourel, Jim Collins, Anna De Fina,
Peter Flynn, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Misty Jaffe, Chris Hall, Monica Heller, Vally Lytra, Janet Maybin,
Kay McCormick, Kate Pahl, Utta Papen, Ben Rampton, Srikant Sarangi, Brian Street, Ellen Van Praet, Jef Verschueren and Sue White.
(back
to list)
Acknowledgements
Comments are welcome
at Prof. S. Slembrouck,
English Department, Ghent University, Rozier 44, 9000 Ghent (Belgium).
© Stef Slembrouck (1998, 1999-20012, 2002-20033, 2005-20064)