Transcript Slide 1

Trajectories of Text
Some key points
Ben Rampton
1
Sections of the lecture:
1.Analytic vocabulary: taking stock
2.Entextualisation & power
3.Next steps
2
1. Analytic vocabulary:
where are we?
3
Holmes 2001 helps us looking beyond
the referential content of language,
addressing:
• the who, what, where, when, how
• style, variety, repertoire, speech
function
• domain, diglossia, code-switching,
situational and metaphorical switching,
lexical borrowing
BUT
4
There is a larger contemporary vocabulary
that can strengthen our understanding of the
operation of power
a la 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”
(1982:220); “To govern… is to structure the
possible field of action of others” (1982:221)
Let’s look at what else we’ve got….
5
Mehan 1996 & Briggs 1998
‘How it is that person X comes to be identified
as a case of category Y’:
• how it is that Herminia comes to be identified
as a murderer
• how it is that Shane comes to be identified as
learning disabled
What are our tools for
understanding this?
6
Important ingredients so far
• activity in the here-&-now (Holmes, Fairclough)
• Discourses (with a big D)/ orders of discourse
(Foucault, Fairclough)
Mehan’s ‘politics of representation’ – ‘the social history of
the category of disability’ – the ‘medicalisation of children’s
difficulties in schools’ (255)
– terms for describing people and their skills: the vocabularies;
– the procedures: the tests given out, the format of the ‘Eligibility
and Placement’ committee, the psychologist’s monologic
report
Briggs’ ‘medical and judicial forms of institutional authority’
538
7
What happens when you combine these?
Combining activity + Discourse:
Foucault gets peopled rather vividly
we get a more constructivist view of power in
activity:
“Discourse does not passively reflect or merely describe the
world. Because discourse, use of language, is action,
different discourses constitute the world differently. Events
in the world do not exist for people independently of the
representations people use to make sense of them” (Mehan
1996: 273)
Other shifts and expansions?
8
Shifts and expansions 1:
• we can move from Holmes’ ‘domains’ to
institutions and institutional fields
where particular Discourses have currency
and there are particular sets of practices,
procedures, activities, rules and roles:
– Briggs: criminal trial; legal procedures, criminal
statutes, standards of evidence, police practices of
taking confessions / examining witnesses
– Mehan: Eligibility and Placement Committee
meeting; teacher and psychologist roles, the
placement process, rules for resource distribution in
accordance with student labelling
9
Shifts and expansions 2:
Expanding repertoire (Holmes 2001:7) to
cover Discourses as well as different styles
and varieties,
& calling these resources,
which develop over time, are unevenly
distributed and will have more or less value in
particular situations:
– Mehan: resources of psychology – lacked by mother
and teacher
– Briggs: resources of legal discourse – lacked by
Herminia
10
Shifts and expansions 3:
Not just language as a system of representation
but also
materiality
=
bodies, artefacts & the physical environment
Mehan: the papers that feed into and comes out of the
committee meeting – “frozen, artifactualised texts
such as student records”
Briggs: the corpse, the written testimony, the prison,
the rape etc (cf Blommaert on ‘hard power’)
11
Resumé: Concepts for studying language
& power so far
language
activity
Discourses
institutions & institutional fields
repertoires & resources
materiality
But
Are we locked in the here-&-now?
Briggs on Conversation Analysis:
“Recordings of exchanges that take place within one type of institutional
setting, such as an interrogation, will not prove sufficient to document the
way that discourse circulates within and between organisations and other
contexts. Unless we widen the inquiry in this fashion, we will be unable
to grasp how discourse is produced and received in institutions or how
this ‘talk’ shapes social relations in institutions and beyond” (1998:539)
Terms to help us look backwards and forwards,
beyond the here-&-now:
Sources: Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban
1996; Agha & Wortham 2005; Hall 1980
Intertextuality
Entextualisation
(and recontextualisation)
Trajectories of texts.
13
Intertextuality:
Linguistic features in a text
in the here-and-now
which refer back or forwards
to events that precede or follow them
Briggs 1998:539 – “what is framed as [Herminia
Gomez’s] statement consists of her accusers’ words
14
Entextualisation
• texts can only ever attend to a few aspects of all the
huge plethora of things going on in the interactional
here-&-now. There are always things that they exclude
or erase
• ‘entextualisation’ focuses on here-&-now processes of
selecting what to represent and formulating this in texts
that will carry beyond
• Analysis focuses on (a) the (potentially multiple) people
and processes involved in the design or selection of
textual ‘projectiles’ which have some hope of travelling
into subsequent settings (entextualisation), and also
(b) on the alteration and revaluation of texts as they are
subsequently taken up in different settings
15
(recontextualisation)
Trajectories of text
• “how talk circulates between settings”,
including the way different textual genres
shape recontextualisations” (Briggs)
– e.g. How Gomez’s confession becomes evidence
– e.g. How Shane’s behaviour in class becomes a report
• You need multi-sited ethnography to study
this
• You can see very empirically how some
voices become dominant and others are
silenced
Let’s now follow Briggs 2005 into the study
16
of entextualisation and power
2. Entextualisation & power
17
How the circulation of texts
shapes the social world
• It is obvious that texts try to shape social
action and the social world through their
referential content (cf shopping lists, tickets,
invitations, bills, policy documents etc etc)
• But at a more subtle level,
there are also designs (and effects) on the
social world in their plans for circulation – their
expectations of who will receive what, when,
where and how
18
Let’s look at ‘interpellation’
‘Interpellation’ as power
Althusser:
a police officer shouts out “Hey, you there!” in public. Upon hearing
this exclamation, an individual turns around, and “by this mere onehundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a
subject” (Althusser, 1972: 174). In the act of acknowledging that it
is indeed he who is addressed, the individual recognizes his
subjecthood.
Fairclough:
“since all discourse producers must produce with some interpreters
in mind, what media producers do is address an ideal subject, be it
viewer, or listener, or reader. Media discourse has built into it a
subject position for an ideal subject, and actual viewers or listeners
or readers have to negotiate a relationship with the ideal subject”
19
(1989:49)
Conversation analysis:
• a question => answer or a disclaimer, positioning the
addressee as a knower, as willing to share etc
• complaint => apology or a rebuttal, positioning the addressee
as someone responsible or sympathetic etc etc
Texts and utterances in general make
assumptions about their recipients and
• the ways they see the people and things that the text/utterance is
referring to
• who they actually are as recipients, and what repertoires, resources
and dispositions they will bring to the task of interpreting the text
• their sense of their own responsibility and positioning vis-a-vis the
things depicted
• their sense of what kind of text this is, where it comes from, its
weight
20
• etc
Briggs on ‘communicability’
Texts come with their own ‘itineraries’ built in,
and
• “We... need to ponder not just the content of
messages but how the ideological
construction of their production, circulation,
and reception shapes identities and social
“groups” and orders them hierarchically.”
(Briggs 2005:275)
21
Communicability & power 1:
“communicability refers to [the…] ways in which
people imagine the production, circulation, and reception of discourse…
[These imagined circuits of communication] can be called
communicable cartographies…
Texts represent their own points of origin, modes of circulation,
intended audiences, and modes of reception…
[In doing so, these cartographies…] claim both
to map what is taking place in particular discursive events and processes
and
to reify certain communicative dimensions in particular ways and erase
others,
thereby creating subjectivities and social relations and attempting to shape
how people will be interpellated (Althusser 1971)” (Briggs 2007:556,551)
– think of the psychologists report in Mehan – the authority of psychology; what the
test assesses (IQ etc, not rapport); leads to the committee meeting etc
22
Communicability & power 2:
“communicable cartographies … project discourse
as emerging from particular places (clinics, laboratories, academic
units, etc.),
as travelling through particular sites (such as conferences,
classrooms, newspapers, and the Internet) and activities (doing
interviews, analyzing and publishing data, etc.) and
as being received in others (coffeehouses, homes, cars, and offices)….
In accepting communicable cartographies, …
we accept particular spatializing and temporalizing practices,
recognize specific sets of spaces and temporal contours, and
define ourselves in relationship to them.” (556)
– spatialising and temporalising practices in Mehan?
the psychologist’s test elicitation is more important than the
mother’s interaction, and the test comes before the meeting
23
So as texts get formulated in the here-&-now
they conjure specific social worlds and seek to position
people within them:
“imaginations of communicative processes create categories,
subjectivities, and social relations and position people
hierarchically within them.” (2005:283)
Indeed, this has a significant effect on how
people see themselves “individuals structure their schemes of self-surveillance and
self-control by interpellating themselves as producers,
disseminators, or receivers of particular types of discourse—
or as not being “in the loop.”” (2005:274)
Mehan?:
• who is competent to receive the psychological
24
discourse, who understands it etc
But there are complications….
25
Texts are generally targeted at particular
circuits and networks
Their itineraries don’t reach everywhere –
instead, they operate in specific ‘spheres of
influence’ or ‘social fields’….
26
“forms of communicability are placed
within what Bourdieu (1993) calls
social fields, arenas of social organization
that produce social roles, positions, agency, and social relations
and
that shape (without determining) how individuals and collectives
are interpellated by [them] and occupy them.
Communicable cartographies create positions
that confer different degrees of access, agency, and power,
recruit people to occupy them, and
invite them to construct practices of selfmaking in their terms,
and
they operate quite differently in, say, clinical medicine than in law
courts or television news” (Briggs 2007:556)
27
There’s always a gap between what’s
anticipated and what happens
There is a difference between the
interpretations/projections/schematic expectation
and
what actually emerges amidst the contingencies of
the here-&-now.
Recipients may not accept the construction of social
relations offered in the utterance or text
– this is the distinction Briggs makes between
‘shaping but not determining’ interpellation.
28
Reading against the grain
“communicable maps achieve effects as people respond
to the ways that texts seek to interpellate them —
including by refusing to locate themselves in the positions they offer,
critically revising them, or
rejecting them altogether.
As they receive a text,
people can accept the communicable cartography it projects,
accept it but reject the manner in which it seeks to position them,
treat it critically or parodically, or
invoke alternative cartographies.
However, access to symbolic capital (e.g. medical training),
communicative technologies, and
political-economic relations
restrict one’s possibilities for appropriating or resisting
communicable cartographies and circulating one’s own schemes.”
29
(Briggs 2007:556)
3. Next steps
30
Let’s look at the workplace:
Dorothy Smith
Alignments:
Foucault, feminism and ethnography
Central claim:
Relations of ruling are text-mediated
and involve
text-based systems of
'communication,' 'knowledge,' 'information,'
'regulation,' 'control,' and the like.
•
31
Smith’s experience of being a mother & an academic:
“During the time I wrote my doctoral thesis and… was on the
faculty of a university, I was also a housewife and mother. The
latter … brought into being a consciousness… of the particularities
of children, house, neighbours, the school just a little way up the
road, the supermarket, playground, and all the unlistables of local
being.
My work in relation to the university was organized by… an entirely
different mode of consciousness, connected beyond the local
setting, based in texts, defined by concepts and categories claiming
universality. Through that work, I took part in… the world that
sociology knows as large-scale or formal organization and the
market and governmental relations… indeed all those relations that
are based on the replicable text and increasingly upon electronic
technologies. These collectively I have come to call the 'relations of
ruling' since they are the organizers and regulators of our
contemporary world, supplanting particularized and territorially
based forms of social organization…”
32
What does this actually mean? How can
we really grasp this?
Smith insists that we ground our study of relations of
ruling in “the actualities of people’s lives and
activities” (1996:187).
How far and in what ways do texts operate as
‘organisers’?
Tusting Have a close read of Tusting’s description
of a textualised workplace
33
References
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Agha, A. & S. Wortham (eds) 2005. Discourse across Events. Special issue of
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 15/1.
Bauman, R, & C. Briggs 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on
social life. Annual Review of Anthropology. 19:59-88
Briggs, C. 1998. Notes on a ‘confession’: On the construction of gender, sexuality,
and violence in an infanticide case. Pragmatics. 7 (4): 519-46
Briggs, C. 2005. Communicability, racial discourse and disease. Annual Review of
Anthropology. 34:269-91
Hall, S. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall et al (eds) Culture, Media, Language.
London: Unwin Hyman. 128-38
Mehan, H. 1996. The construction of an LD student: A case study in the politics of
representation. In M. Silverstein & G. Urban (eds) Natural Histories of Discourse.
Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press 253-76
Silverstein, M. & G. Urban 1996 (eds) Natural Histories of Discourse. Cambridge:
CUP
Smith, D. 1996. The relations of ruling: A feminist enquiry. Studies in Cultures,
Organisations and Societies. 2:171-90
Tusting, K. 2010. Eruptions of interruptions: Managing tensions between writing and
other tasks in a textualised childcare workplace. In D. Barton & U. Papen (eds) The
Anthropology of Writing. London: Continuum. 67-89
Wortham, S. 2006. Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification
34
and Academic Learning. Cambridge: CUP.