Transcript 09 Post Structural A.. - Michigan State University

Post Structural Approaches To
Discourse
•Paul Ricoeur
–Provided one of the first, definitive
criticisms of structuralism.
–Others include Anthony Giddens,
Pierre Bourdieu.
Ricoeur:
• Structure  Word  Event
• LANGUAGE is an object for an empirical science
– WITHIN LANGUAGE two sciences: one of states of
the system one of changes
– IN A (SYNCHRONIC) system there are no absolute
terms.
– THE SIGNS MUST be maintained as a closed
system.
– THE SIGN: UNITY of signifier and signified. - doesn't
stand for a thing.
Structuralism Defined
• IF WE HAVE CORRECTLY separated a language from speech,
the states of a system from the history of changes, the form from
the substance, and the closed system of signs from all
references to a world, we must define the sign not only by its
relation to all other signs of the same level but also in itself as a
purely internal (or immanent) difference.
• STRUCTURALISM can thus be defined as the complete
awareness of the exigencies contained in this series of
presuppositions.
• THE ISOLATED NATURE of langue.
Speech: Discourse
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[TO USERS language i.e.,] Speech is not an object, but a mediator [a means
to communicate].
TO SPEAK is to act [this is termed the issue of "agency"].
TO SPEAK is to overcome the closure of signs in the intention of saying
something about something to someone.
TO SPEAK is the act by which language moves beyond itself,..toward its
reference and toward its opposite. [In use,] Language (langue) seeks to
disappear; it seeks to die as an object [in favor of parole].
THE SYSTEM (langue) has no outside, it is an autonomous entity of internal
dependencies.
THIS [STRUCTURALISM] is a methodological decision which does
violence to (linguistic) experience.
The Task.
• To reconstruct the understanding of language
• To reclaim for the understanding of language what the structural model
excluded and what perhaps is language itself as act of speech, as
saying.
• To develop a phenomenology of speech as opposed to a science of
language.
• Our task appears to be to go all the way with the antinomy
(opposition).
• This would involve producing:
– the act of speech at the very center of a language,
– in a fashion of a setting forth meaning,
– of a dialectical production, which makes
– the system occur as an act and
– the structure an event.
Fairclough: Language and Power
• Power: What is it?
– Foucault: Power versus
Domination
• Power implies control but is
not necessarily bad.\
• Domination implies the
exploitation of one person
by another.
• Critical Language Study
– Critical means a careful look at
language, power and ideology.
Fairclough: Language and Power
• ABOUT CONNECTIONS BETWEEN language use and
unequal relations of power (domination).
• IN CONTRAST to sociolinguistic studies which have
generally set out to describe prevailing sociolinguistic
conventions in terms of how they distribute power
unequally; they have not set out to explain these
conventions as the product of relations of power and
struggles for power.
• MAIN FOCUS ON trying to explain existing conventions
as the outcome of power relations and power struggle.
Comments from papers
• The nature of parole
– Saussure’s version very limited “the executive
side of language”
– More recent views expand it into
communication (discourse)
• Question of the subject (structuralism v.
poststructuralism.
• Ricoeur wrote this when we didn’t have a
very good idea of syntax.
Papers Continued
• Mead v. Whorf
– Role – Self – different societies.
• Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis
• How do disenfranchised groups react to
common sense?
CLS and other disciplines
• LINGUISTICS
– LINGUISTICS HAS GIVEN relatively little attention to actual
speech or writing; it has characterized language as a
potential, a system, an abstract competence, rather than
attempting to describe actual language practice.
– THESE ASSUMPTIONS AND the neglect of language
practice result in an idealized view of language, which
isolates it from the social and historical matrix outside of
which it cannot actually exist.
• Sociolinguistics [narrow sense]
– Shows systematic correlations between variations in linguistic
form (...) and social variables. 
Sociolinguistics [continued]
• Heavily influenced by `positivist' conceptions of social science:
sociolinguistic variation … tends to be seen in terms of sets of facts to
be observed using methods analogous to those of natural science.
• Strong on `what?' questions (the facts of <SL> variation?) but weak
on `why?' and `how?' questions
– Why are the facts as they are? How, in terms of the development
of social relationships of power, was the existing sociolinguistic
order brought into being?; how is it sustained? How might it be
changed to the advantage of those who are dominated by it?
• SL has often described SL conventions in terms of what are the
`appropriate' linguistic forms for a given social situation; whatever the
intention, this terminology is likely to lend legitimacy to `the facts' and
their underlying power relations.
Sociolinguistics Continued
• Key insight: language seen as form of action (this insight is
incorporated into CLS
• Main weakness is its individualism
– Action is thought of as atomistically as emanating wholly from
the individual, and is often conceptualized in terms of the
`strategies' adopted by the individual speaker to achieve her
`goals' or `intentions'.
– Gives the implausible impression that conventionalized ways
of speaking or writing or `reinvented' on each occasion of
their use by the speaker....
– The result is an idealized and utopian image of verbal
interaction which is in stark contrast with the image offered by
CLS of a SL order molded in social struggles and riven <torn
apart> with inequalities of power.
Cognitive Psychology And Artificial Intelligence
• Stresses the importance and active nature of comprehension.
– you do not simply `decode' an utterance, you arrive at an
interpretation through an active process of matching features of the
utterance at various levels with representations you have stored in
your long-term memory.
• Have given little attention to the social origins or significance of
member's resources <similar to context>>.
• STRENGTHS: works with extended samples of real conversation.
• [But] has been resistant to making connections between such `micro'
structures of conversation and the `macro' structures of social
institutions and societies.
• Similar to pragmatics, it gives a rather implausible image of
conversation as a skilled social practice existing in a social vacuum.
SOME RECENT SOCIAL THEORY
• WORK ON IDEOLOGY: Increasing relative importance of
ideology as a mechanism of power in modern society.
• FOUCAULT: has ascribed a central role to discourse in the
development of specifically modern forms of power.
• HABERMAS: theory of communicative action highlights the way
in which our currently distorted communication nevertheless
foreshadows communication without such constraints.
• ALL SHARE THE DEFECT of being theoretical and not overrationalized to apply to specific instances of discourse.
RELATIONSHIP OF CLS to these approaches.
• SEEN AS COMPLEMENTING other approaches.
• CLS OBJECTS to the langue centered presumption of
the state of the discipline.
Main Points
•Subject Position (Roles)
• Power and Struggle
– Power versus Domination (Foucault)
• Members’ Resources (Bourdieau) Capital
• Power Behind Language (Grammar)
• Power In language (Discourse)
• The Social Construction of the Text
Med School: Subject Position
Example of Police Interview: Power
P=Policeman; W=Witness
• P: Did you get a look at the one
in the car?
• W: I saw his face, yeah.
• P: What sort of age was he?
• W: About 45. H was wearing a
….
• P: And how tall?
• W: Six foot one.
• P: Six foot one. Hair?
• W: Dark and curly. Is this
going to take long? I’ve got to
collect the kids from school.
• P: Not much longer, no.
What about his clothes?
• W: He was a bit scruffylooking, blue trousers, black
…
• P: Jeans?
• W: Yeah.
Example of School Master Interview. struggle
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H: Why didn’t you go straight down Queen Street?
Y: I’m not walking down there with a load of coons from St. Hilda’s coming out of
school.
H: Why’s that.
Y: Well that’s obvious, isn’t it. I don’t want to get belted.
H: Well there isn’t usually any bother in Queen Street is there?
Y: No. None of us white kids usually go down there, do we? What about that
bust-up in the Odeon carpark at Christmas?
H: That was nearly a year ago, and I’m not convinced you lot were as innocent
as you made out. So when you got to the square, why did you wait around for a
quarter of an hour instead of going strait home?
Y: I thought my mate might come down that way after work. Anyway, we always
go down the square after school.
His Kind of Loving: Inferencing
Three Pillars of Thacherism: (Authoritarian Populism)
Authoritarian: Traditionally Conservative
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attempt to strengthen the power of the state in areas of: police, military, law and order.
commitment to free market, free enterprise (protect industry from interference from government,
labour unions)
Populist:
• Direct appeal to ordinary people as part of the project.
• Whatever is said in #1 and #2 must be put in terms that ordinary people can relate to.
– authoritarian: government needed for: law and order, anti crime, drugs, control unions.
– free enterprise: government not needed for: regulating business, protecting environment,
– Supports other positions of ordinary people
• where it does not interfere with Authoritarian position.
• thus: pro religion, pro family
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Strategy:
Add to this an aggressive strategy of never backing away from a position, no matter how
ridiculous or indefensible.
Things to watch for in the text.
• Shifting Discourses
• Shifting Pronouns
– Literal meanings of
pronouns v usage.
I
We
You
You
He, She, It They
Michael Charlton and Margaret Thatcher
BBC Radio 3, 17 December 1985.
MC Prime Minister, you were at Oxford in the nineteen forties and after the war Britain
would embark on a period of relative prosperity, for all the like of which, it had hardly
known, but today there are three and a quarter million unemployed, and e:m Britain's
economic performance by one measurement has fallen to the rank of Italy. Now can
you imagine yourself back at the university today? What must seem to be the chances
in Britain and the prospects for all now?
MT They are very different worlds you're talking about, because the first thing that struck
me very forcibly, as you were speaking of those days, was, now, we do enjoy a
standard of living which was undreamed of then, and I can remember Rab Butler
saying, after we returned to power in about 1951-52, that if we played our cards right,
the standard of living within twenty five years would be twice as high as it was then,
and em he was just about right, and it was remarkable, because it was something that
we had never thought of. Now I don't think now one would necessarily think wholly in
material terms, indeed, I think it's wrong to think in material terms because really the
kind of country you want is made up by the strength of its It is its people. Do they run
their industries well? Are their human relations good? e: Do they respect law and
order? Are their families strong, All of those kinds of things. | And you know, it's just
way beyond economics.
Deborah Tannen
Conversational Analysis
o Text versus dialog
o Different questions
arise.
Tannen and Wallat:
Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas
• Linguistic Register:
– Teasing, reporting, conversational
• Frame:
– a sense of what activity is being engaged in
– how speakers mean what they say)
• Footing;
– how participants negotiate interpersonal relationships
– A change of footing often signals a change in frame.
• Knowledge Schemas:
• expectations about people, objects, events and settings in
the world,as distinguished from alignments (footing).
A Semiological Reinterpretation
• Register, Frame and Knowledge Schema
– The register is the signifier of different signs (aka Frames)
– Examples: Teasing, reporting, conversational
– The Knowledge Schema is the signifed. It indicates the type of
context in which the discourse is taking place and provides the
knowledge that is needed to interpret it.
• “In order to comprehend any utterance, a listener (and a speaker) must
know within which frame it is intended: for example, is this joking? Is it
fighting?”
– expectations about people, objects, events and settings in the world,
• Fairclough and Foucault would call this an order of discourse.
Tannen and Wallat continued
• Footing;
– how participants negotiate interpersonal
relationships
– A change of footing often signals a change in frame.
– Involves roles (Subject positions and relations) and
members resources (Fairclough)
• Social Interactions
– Conversations commonly involve the shifting of
frames.
Register (Frame) Types
Conflicting Frames
The mother’s question
invoked the consultation
frame, requiring the
doctor to give the
mother the information
based on her medical
knowledge, plus take
into account the effect
on the mother of the
information that the
child’s life is in danger.
Notice that it is admirable that the
doctor’s sensitivity makes her aware
of the need to use both frames
Mismatched
Schemas
… the
pediatritian has
a schema for
cerebral palsy:
In she knows what a child with CP can be expected to do or
not do… contrast, as emerged in discussion during
a staff meeting, the mother has little experience
with other cp children, so she can only compare
Jody’s condition and development to non CP
people
Tannen
• Different Interact ional Styles
– Role of interruptions
– Zimmerman and West versus Tannen
• Different Cultural Norms
Interruptions
F: How often does your acting group work?
M: Do you mean how often do we rehearse or how often
do we perform?
F:
->Both
M: [Laughs uneasily]
F: Why are you laughing?
M: Because of the way you said it. It was like a bullet. Is
that why your marriage broke?
F: What?
M: Because of your aggressiveness.
Tannen: Properties of JCS
• Topic: a) prefer personal topics, b) shift topics abruptly, c) introduce
topics without hesitance, d) persist if new topic is not picked up,
reintroduce it, repeatedly if necessary.
• Genre: a) tell more stories, b) tell stories in rounds, c) internal
evaluation is preferred over external. Evaluation < Labov’s
Narrational analysis. Internal (in the story); external: stated
explicitly)
• Pacing: a) faster rate of speech, b) inner-turn pauses avoided
(silence is regarded as lack of rapport), c) faster turn taking, d)
cooperative overlap and participatory listenership.
• Expressive paralinguistics: a) expressive phonology, b) pitch and
amplitude shifts, c) marked voice quality, d) strategic within-turn
pauses.
Examples
Wife: John’s having a party. Wanna go?
Husband: OK.
Later
Wife: Are you sure you want to go to the party?
Husband: OK, let’s not go. I’m too tired anyway.
• Indirect: My wife wants to go to this party, since she
asked, I’ll go to make her happy.
• Direct: My wife is asking if I want to go to the party. I
feel like going so I’ll say yes.
Direct and Indirect
percent choosing indirect.
Greeks
48%
Greek-Americans
43%
(Men)
(Men)
50%
44%
(Women) (Women)
47%
43%
Non Greek Americans
32%
(men)
27%
(women)
36%
Exam Questions
1. What are three ways that Structuralism
and Poststructuralism differ?
1. ____________
2. ____________
3. ____________
2. How would a poststructuralist address the
question of language and thought.