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Language & Power:

Summary & Revision

2013

The module description:

This module addresses a number of perspectives on the relationship between language and power. It sets up a dialogue between theories and methods from social theory, critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. It examines the dynamics of language and power in, for example, gender & sexuality, race & ethnicity, education, informal, institutional & mass-mediated discourse, and global & local interaction. The module also helps students to conduct their own analyses.

The module design:

Wks 1-3: Language & power • Basic terms of reference in the (interdisciplinary) study of language & power Wks 4-8: Descriptive case-studies of lang & power • Trajectories & scales – broadening out • Genre & social change – narrowing in Wks 9-10: Researching language & power • Steps and procedures in the analysis of data – CDA & linguistic ethnography Wk 11-12: Resum é & small group tutorials 3

Language & power:

Basic terms of reference in this enquiry

 

Blommaert 1/3:

“Power... like ideology, democracy, freedom, etc. is one of those terms that suffers from permanent lack of specification”.

But

“That ... has not prevented generations of scholars from thinking and writing on it – Plato, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Althusser, Gramsci, Arendt, Foucault, Bourdieu” • “The major distinction...is between hard and soft power - ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of power are typologically distinguished but procedurally connected: they operate in synergy with one another, and power is a system of composite forms. Machiavelli codified this well: his ‘Prince’ needed to be strong and gentle at the same time, cunning, smart, tolerant and well-meaning as well as ruthless, impulsive and brutal; he needed to look at immediate dangers as well as at long-term risks; and he should never be perceived as not in power.” 5

Blommaert 2/3: Marx & Marxists

•

“Systemic

power has been... the mainstay of Karl Marx’s work.

Capital

describes a system of production which systemically exerts power over the working classes. The power system described by Marx... is one in which power is

distributed

over a wide variety of actors: the state collaborates with industrial capital and with the social classes that have immediate benefits from it, against those who have no benefits from it (the working classes).” • “A crucial ingredient of this systemic power, less theorised by Marx than by Gramsci, Althusser and Lenin, is

ideology

. As Gramsci said, a regime can only be successful if it has acquired ‘soft’ power.” 6

Blommaert 3/3 - Foucault

• “Power and knowledge became one. The birth of the modern prison went alongside the emergence of modern criminology, psychology and psychiatry, and sociology. These knowledge domains – épistèmes – provided ‘rational’ arguments for sustaining a particular power regime, which became, in Foucault’s terms,

capillary power

(power that stretches into the smallest and most private aspects of life),

biopower

(power that controls the way we live our lives as physical entities, through hygiene, public health, formal education), and

governmentality

all aspects of life)” (the bureaucratisation of

=> “The subject & power”

Foucault on the subject & power 2/1:

• “a relationship of power… is a mode of action which… acts upon the actions [of others]: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or future” (1982:220) • “To govern… is to structure the possible field of action of others” (1982:221) But power always entails a degree of agency… • “Every power relationship implies, at least

in potentia

, a strategy of struggle” (1982:221) 8

Foucault on the subject & power 2/2:

Three types of struggles (p 212-3): • against forms of ethnic, social, religious

domination

(prevalent in feudal societies) • against forms of economic

exploitation

separating individuals from what they produce (C19) • against

subjection,

“that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others” – now becoming more and more important

So what have linguists got to say about this?

Fairclough 1989 1/2

• cites Foucault: ‘Orders of discourse’ => medics treating patients as technical objects (1989:62) • offers refined descriptions of the workings of power - politeness and modality can be seen as strategies of mitigation • identifies technologies of power/knowledge as discourse types (e.g. the gynaecological examination) • observes their colonisation of new institutional domains – e.g. counselling as a discourse type in workplaces & schools

although

Fairclough 1989 also (2/2)

• talks of class exploitation and ‘power holders behind discourse’ (exploitation rather than subjection in the terms of Foucault 1982) • sees e.g. standard language as an instrument serving the interests of the ruling capitalist bloc (1989:58) (whereas Foucault would go into the way it operates as a mechanism of ‘normalisation’, and a pervasive discipline) • sees himself stepping

outside

power, speaking truth (Foucault doesn’t belief this is possible – “The belief that one is resisting repression, whether by self knowledge or by speaking the truth, supports domination, for it hides the real working of power” (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982:169) 11

How about Cameron?

Cameron 1995

• treats ‘gender’ as a problem to be explained, rather than taken for granted (which matches Foucault’s approach to the analysis of ‘power’) • emphasizes gender as an identity that is constructed in interactional relationships (cf Foucault on power as ‘action upon actions’) • explores the links between science and power in self-help manuals, which involve the subjection of their readers, drawing on a sociolinguistics which emphasises ‘difference’ and which reifies gender by treating it as natural

Is that fair to e.g. Holmes 1992?

Holmes 1992

• looks beyond the content of speech, showing how meaning and action are shaped by who, how, where, when, and with whom, as well as what.

• attends to individuals, repertoires and lived experience?

• tends to naturalise power relations with the use of terms like ‘appropriate’, and sees language as a reflection of society rather than as a set of practices contributing to its construction

So....

.... that’s

• Foucauldian social theory –

iscourse with a big D • Sociolinguistics –

iscourse with a little d • Sociolinguists figuring out what social theories of power might mean for their approach to research

Let’s now put these ingredients to work in...

Descriptive case-studies

a) Broadening the horizons with trajectories & scales and then b) focusing in with genres in social change 15

Mehan 1996 & Briggs 1998

both show us that • words, texts and styles differ in their capacity to circulate between settings, bestowing or challenging authority, and • the ability to shape texts that travel across settings is itself a significant form of power.

Mehan 1996

• shows how Shane gets absorbed into the disciplinary regime of ‘Learning Disability’ • offers an ethnographic account of Foucault’s knowledge/power in action, following how people, representations, practices and material artefacts interact together over a sequence of events • describes the struggle between discourses as ways of seeing & talking (mother & teacher vs psychologist) • shows how verbal texts become instruments of power that can carry across contexts, helping to objectify ‘Shane the person’ into ‘Shane the case’ and ‘Shane the statistic’

Briggs 1998

• brings ‘

hard

power’ sharply into focus as well 17

Mehan, Briggs &

us

:

Through these two academic papers, • Mehan and Briggs branch away from activist intervention in the circuits of power that have the most direct influence on the subordination of Shane and Herminia Gomez • Instead, they try to intervene in the knowledge/power regimes that legitimise the classifications of Shane & Herminia. These papers problematise the psychological, legal

and

conversation analytic Discourses that authorise (or hide) this subordination, and • when these two texts circulate into our class – which is itself part of the power/knowledge complex that ultimately affects Shane and Herminia – we ourselves are drawn into these relations of power (cf Foucault on 18 our inability to step outside power).

Although they do not explicitly discuss it, the structure of the papers by Mehan & Briggs shows that

Time is a crucial element in the description of language-and-text-as-power

(Foucault: “a relationship of power… is a mode of action which… acts upon the actions [of others]: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or future”

but time isn’t a single unitary process

In neural firings, utterances, committee meetings and life span educational development (cf Lemke 2000), the beginnings, middles and ends of events, activities, artefacts, people and processes happen over very different time-scales 19

The interaction of multi-scalar processes, systems or discourses

• There are often interdependencies between higher and lower scale systems and processes (Lemke) • Well established and long time-scale Discourses and disciplinary procedures get enacted/activated through a host of short and mid-length activities and processes (observations, tests & meetings etc etc), and they may pick out and amplify the actions of individuals who can then become their victims: – the Discourses associated with ‘learning disability’ end up claiming Shane, just as the power/knowledge regimes of colonialism (inc. racism informed by anthropology) contribute to Herminia’s incarceration 20

Tusting, texts, scales & power:

• Instead of giving us a narrative, Tusting 2010 offers us a snapshot of the contemporary ‘textualised workplace’.

• She shows how everyday activity is permeated by power relations which operate through the production, circulation and reception of texts – a plethora of texts that seek to organise identities and social relations over scales/spans of time and (physical & social) space that range from the long term and widespread to the very brief and local (also Briggs 2005, Smith 1996).

• Foucault talks about

capillary power

– ‘action-upon-action’ that stretches into the smallest and most private aspects of life. Tusting shows us this, describing how Thea’s subjectivity – inc. her career aspirations, her termly work, her moment-to-moment perceptions of the children – is ‘interpellated’ by these workplace texts… 21

but

Haarstaad & Fløysand:

• Small scale processes aren’t necessarily disempowered when they are connected up to broad, long and well-established Discourses.

• H&F focus on a group of people – the farmers in Tambogrande – whose voice didn’t initially carry very far. • But with NGO support, they generated narratives that managed to ‘jump scale’, up into networks with a much wider reach, effectively challenging the discursive accounts provided by the mining industry • Again, the formulation and circulation of semiotic texts plays a significant role achieving the linkage across scales and directing its effects (contrast the farmers’ ‘lemon’ with ‘tapón’ in Briggs 1998) 22

Zimmerman 1998 on identity

provides a helpful way of orienting our analyses to the ways in which social processes with different time-scale continually intersect: • discourse (interactional) identities operate in short time-scale processes (utterances and acts) • situated (institutional) identities operate within medium length time-scale processes (meetings, interviews, lessons) • transportable identities operate within quite long time-scale processes (careers, generations, genders) 23

The papers by Mehan, Briggs, Tusting, Haarstad & Fløysand, and Lemke all invite us to widen our horizons, looking beyond the here-&-now traditionally privileged in sociolinguistics (cf Holmes?),

whereas

Fairclough and Rampton on genre:

• the Fairclough and Rampton papers zoomed in on

genre

as a good site for studying (multi-scale) power relations • Both referred to quite long and broad scale processes – “the conversationalisation of public culture, where relationships in public based automatically upon authority are in decline – people’s self-identity, rather than being a feature of given positions and roles, is reflexively built up through a process of negotiation” (Fairclough 1995:137) • But they differed in their approaches, and the distinction between CDA and linguistic ethnography now becomes significant 25

Fairclough 1995:

• argues that the genre (or ‘discourse type’) of consumer advertising has been colonising professional & public service (orders of) discourse on a massive scale, generating many new, hybrid, partly promotional genres, involving e.g. visual images at the expense of verbal semiosis (1995:139) • illustrates this with a comparative text analysis of two genres: – job advertisements in old vs new universities in 1992 – Lancaster University’s prospectus in 1967-8 vs 1986-7 vs 1993 26

Rampton 2006:

• offers more of an ‘online’ account of a genre as it actually unfolds in interaction: ‘Genres…. guide us through the social world of communication: they allow us to distinguish between very different communicative events, create expectations for each of them, and adjust our communicative behaviour accordingly’ (Blommaert) • situates this in a politics of genre: Genres play a central role in socialisation, and become a matter of intense concern to education policy-makers. At the same time, there is actually no “timeless closure” or “unlimited replication” intrinsic to any genre, and so a great deal of ideological work is often needed if the preferred genres are to remain steadily in place.

• describes a clash between teacher-talk as promoted both in education policy discourse and in research (power/knowledge), and what actually seemed to happen

• Genres have been described as "the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language“ (Bakhtin 1986:65), and • regardless of whether you want to do some Critical Discourse Analysis or linguistic ethnography, they could provide a useful starting point for your own assignments. 28

Doing CDA or linguistic ethnography

• • Possible guidelines: Fairclough 2001 on 5 steps in CDA analysis, or Rampton’s ‘Notes towards the ethnographic analysis of power in a communicative event with which you are familiar’ (also Harris & Rampton 2010 [though you won’t need to make recordings of your own]) => socially situated accounts of discourse & language which attend to relations of power and draw on non-linguistic literatures and/or ethnographic knowledge in their accounts of larger scale social process 29

Reprise:

The module design: Wks 1-3: Language & power • Basic terms of reference in the (interdisciplinary) study of language & power Wks 4-8: Descriptive case-studies of lang & power • Trajectories & scales – broadening out • Genre & social change – narrowing in Wks 9-10: Researching language & power • Steps and procedures in the analysis of data – CDA & linguistic ethnography Wk 11-12: Resume & small group tutorials 30

The module leads into your own account of language & power, and to get there, it seeks to provide you with descriptive terms and theoretical frameworks that allow you to navigate the relationships between:

• social theory, sociolinguistics and different conceptions of power • big

D D

iscourse and

iscourse with a little

• events and the texts that circulate through & beyond them • micro-, meso- and macro- scale processes • CDA and linguistic ethnography • language, discourse and society as media and