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The desire for discourse analysis Alison Lee The Challenge of Discourse Analysis Conference AUT University December 6-8, 2007 the growing, maturing and disciplining of a field the heterogeneity and diversity of the field a preoccupation with method privileging of politics over epistemology Discourse analysis: what are we looking for? What does discourse analysis appear to promise? What problems do we face if we want to work with discourse? Thinking about limits Example: the discursive construction of workplace depression Bandying on about discourse analysis doesn’t cut mustard … Especially when the intricacies of Michel Foucault’s instructions about what constitutes discourse are ignored and all you get is discourse that is stuff out there. The man who reminded us about the awesome materiality of discourse must be turning in his grave. Elspeth Probyn,The Australian Higher Education Supplement, 2005 1. Analytical philosophy -Speech act theory --Principles of information exchange 2. Linguistics - Structuralist linguistics - Register studies and stylistics - Text Linguistics - Pragmatics (Presuppositions, Face and politeness, Reference) 3. Linguistic Anthropology - Ethnography of speaking - Ethnopoetics - Indexicality - Interactional Sociolinguistics - Natural Histories of Discourse 4. New Literacy Studies 5. Post-structuralist theory - M.M. Bakhtin 6. Semiotics and cultural studies - Semiotics and communication studies -- cultural studies 7. Social Theory - Pierre Bourdieu - Michel Foucault - Jürgen Habermas 8. The sociology of order in interaction - Erving Goffman (Interaction order, Frame analysis, Footing, Face) - Conversation analysis - Ethnomethodology What is the itinerary of desire in my knowledge, and in the choice of my objects of study? Who is the other to whom desire is addressed, and how is this other constituted in relation to (one)self? The desire for method The desire for transcendence What is paradoxically interesting about the ‘mastery’ approach ... is that it flatters the text equally with itself. The two, as it were, look as if they are in a conspiracy to defraud ‘ordinary’ readers. The text’s meaning is ‘deep’-but the commentary’s skill is more than equal to that depth. This is the characteristic mode of explanation and owes some allegiance to traditional natural science models. The text, like nature, is an infinite mystery. But the commentary, like the mathematical gesture, presumes to unlock that mystery, privileging, in one move, both itself and, to a lesser extent, its object. (Hodge & McHoul, 1992) Thinking about limits Pierre Bourdieu, Thinking about Limits, Theory, Culture and Society, 1992 A scientific fact is conquered, constructed and confirmed. A researcher needs to practise radical doubt in relation to the constitution of their object of inquiry. ‘Conquering’ Very often the positivist epistemological tradition attempts to escape from the problem I pose by means of the notorious operational definition. Imagine constructing a research programme into European intellectuals. How are you going to choose your sample? Everyone knows how to construct a sample, It’s no big deal, and can be learnt in any course on methodology: drawing white balls or black balls, anyone can do the job. But how do you construct the box that the balls are in? Nobody asks that. Do I just say ‘I call intellectual all those who say they are ‘intellectuals’? How do we construct the limits? Sociologists, especially positivists, who are so hard to please in matters of empirical proof, are negligent, uncaring and incredibly lax when it comes to questions of epistemology. When it comes to coding data, for example, they employ the most naïve systems of classification. … Afterwards, there are some very clever exercises on the computer. But what is put into the computer is the prethought, ready to think with just a few alterations. ‘constructing’ Ordinarily we speak of ‘choosing a subject’. There are all sorts of books .. on ‘how to do a thesis’, ‘how to choose a subject’. In actual fact, the construction of the object is the fundamental operation. When you are within the pre-constituted, reality offers itself to you. The given gives itself, in the form of the notorious data. This is one of the reasons the given is so dangerous. ‘Confirming’ Clearly, these constructed objects, and the system of hypotheses that allows their formation, must be constantly tested against reality and subjected to verification. To construct an object is to construct a model, but not a formal model destined merely to turn in the void, rather a model intended to be matched against reality. Questions for discourse- analytic research According to this analysis, the text, like the scientific fact, has to be struggled over (and ‘conquered’), constructed and confirmed. The word-world relation must be constituted in this process, rather than being seen or deemed to be given. I) How are the problems that are to be subjected to discourse-analytic methods constituted? 2) How is the object of inquiry ‘apprehended’ and then constructed as the ‘subject’ of the research? 3) How is the implicit model of the world thus constructed to be tested against reality? What criteria of adequacy to that reality are to count? The discursive construction of workplace depression Presenting desire: to change therapeutic treatments for people suffering with depression in the workplace initial epistemological framework the problem – how do I do it? How do I set the limits? What’s in, what’s out? the break the construction: research question, theoretical framework -> choice of available methods the confirmation