Structured Visions

More about how social structures close down any notion of the unique, transformative individual. When openings occur, they show up as disruptions, problems or embarrassments, as I explain in my analysis of two accounts of walking into a lecture room.

Here’s the transcript:

My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 36: Anybody else know her?

In this week’s podcast I’m sharing a talk I gave as part of the English seminar series at the University of Liverpool. Here are the slides if you’d like to follow along. (Slides 17 and 18 were missing from the original presentation, so you’ll hear me stumbling a little as I try to sort that out.)

Here’s the abstract of the talk:

Many strands of research in linguistics – including critical discursive and feminist approaches – orient toward social critique and social change. Most of these approaches adopt the perspective offered by practice theory, whereby individuals are understood as negotiating social structures through their engagement in a range of various practices. A major weakness of practice theory, however, especially as it has been applied in sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), is that it takes for granted the integrity of the self, the presence of the body, and the coincidence of self and body. Such a premise forecloses the possibility of critically investigating those social structures that disallow subjectivity and that erase the body.

In this talk I illustrate a method of CDA designed to reveal the social structures that emerge in everyday conversation. It looks specifically at structures of heteronormativity in accounts by two participants – Mary and Beth – who recount two very different types of troubling experience in adolescence. Mary’s account reveals a social structure in which entering heteronormativity requires the erasure of both self and body. In Beth’s account, the body serves as mediator of a heteronormative structure: it serves as a protective boundary to maintain the integrity of the self. I aim to show that the methods of CDA can be used to identify different configurations of social structures in everyday conversation, and more importantly, to imagine new, less oppressive structures. Specifically, it makes possible an understanding of self and body as integral – and potentially transformative – components of social structure.

Download Episode 35: Language and the gendered body.

I move from computer programmes to choose-your-own-adventure novels this week: metaphors abound to explore the idea of language/grammar as a system. Systems can be understood as complex matrices of choices at various levels of complexity. At the phonological level of a language, you can understand the difference between the words pat and bat in terms of whether your vocal cords vibrate when you pronounce the first consonant in each word. If you choose voiced (+voice), you get ‘bat’; voiceless (-voice) gives you ‘pat’. These tiny distinctions between phonemes make it possible for the phonemes to recombine in different ways to produce lots of different words.

How about the choices that can be made at higher levels of grammatical structure? What about the difference between active and passive voice in a clause? Think about Nicole’s story:

I had a car. It got wrecked. My dad wouldn’t get me another one.

Why wasn’t Nicole’s story something like this?

My dad gave me a car. I wrecked it. So he wouldn’t get me another one.

I argue that there’s more going on here than just two different construals of the same event. Consider this: using a voiceless bilabial stop (/p/), rather than a voiced bilabial stop (/b/) at the beginning of a word can produce a different word (‘pat’ rather than ‘bat’). Similarly, I’d say, the use of  the passive voice in Nicole’s story produces a different world. It produces, in other words, a slight but significant difference in how the social world is configured. The participants in the two stories appear in different positions, they relate to each other differently, their social responsibilities are different.

The idea that different grammatical choices can produce different worlds makes it possible to explore the many different configurations of social structure that might be possible. That’s an adventure worth choosing! Next week we’ll explore more of these differently structured worlds.

Download Episode 34: Choose Your Own Adventure.

M.A.K. Halliday has this (and a whole lot more) to say about grammar:

Grammar is the central processing processing unit of language, the powerhouse where meanings are created. (2014, p. 22).

In this episode I take the CPU metaphor to new extremes. I claim I’m able to converse with society because I’m just like one of those computer hackers from The Matrix. (‘I don’t even see the code.’) The characters and scenes in The Matrix were formed out of bits of computer code – can we also imagine the characters and scenes of the social world to be made out of bits of grammar? We’d have to imagine grammar as a system, the way Halliday does, and at each level of complexity, a choice is made. Yes or no. One or zero. There are 10 types of people in the world, and at Girl Scout Camp, I became one of the ones who knows binary.

Out of all these choices, out of all these possible systemic systemic construals, one gets chosen at each point. Selves get made from sets of choices. Society personifies itself as a character in a context.

And then it identifies with that character.

And it can’t think outside itself itself.

Until something disrupts it. And it has to face itself – as an other – and new possibilities of social structure emerge.

Download Episode 33: The Grammar Matrix.

Last week I staged a tug-of-war between Society and The Individual, and I let Society win. This week I explain why with reference to a friend’s response to my first book. As I said to my friend, the book analyses homophobic attitudes in a women’s university field hockey club. I told him one of the things I commented on in the book was that the team members I spoke to depicted their lesbian acquaintances as expressing sexual desire. Their straight teammates were never described in terms of their desires. Sexual desire became a dividing practice that separated out gay and straight.

OK, said my friend. I’ve got lots of lesbian friends. I’ll let them know to be careful about expressing lesbian desire.

Why would you do that?

I want to make sure they aren’t discriminated against even more than they already are. You’re telling me that talking about desire makes them vulnerable to exclusion. So I’ll make sure they know about that.

No, no, no! I said. I didn’t do this research to force individuals to change.  It’s the social structures that need to change.

But Jodie, said my friend, I can’t do anything about social structures. But I can talk to my friends – as individuals – and suggest things that will make their lives better.

Well, maybe my friend can’t do anything to change social structure. But I certainly can. I’ve spent several podcasts personifying Society, and now I have Society on speed dial. One quick phone call later, Society and I are having a conversation over lattes.

ME: Society, why don’t you allow for the possibility for uniqueness and individuality?

SOCIETY: Actually, I’m perfectly capable of doing individuality. But there’s a procedure for it. You can just go straight in when it comes to individuality.

ME: There’s a procedure?

SOCIETY: Yes. Look at this transcript of a conversation in which Ally, Sammy and Chrissy are talking about the trials for their hockey team:

SOCIETY: There’s all those people trying to get into the hockey team. You can’t instantly construe them all as individuals. It’s too complex. So you have to sort and filter. You separate out ‘the better players’ from those that aren’t very good ‘half of them…’ And then you can have your individuals. ‘I looked at you and thought…’

ME: Yeah, but the thought one individual is having about another here is that she’s a good hockey player. She’s not a unique individual there; she’s merely a token of a type of person, a ‘good hockey player’.

SOCIETY: Look, that’s the way I operate. I create categories. Individuality is then about identifying with one of the categories. Once I’ve identified with a category, I can’t think outside it. I can’t think the unthinkable.

ME: Levinas says ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks is a desire.’

SOCIETY: Stop throwing Levinas at me.

ME: Tell me a story about desire.

SOCIETY: OK. Here goes, if you’re so insistent. Here’s a story about one of the people who didn’t get into the hockey team, Jen. She’s construed by other members of the hockey team as expressing desire.

ME: Society, isn’t it interesting that the desiring character is the one who doesn’t fit in to the desirable category? If I’m going to convince you to make possible the idea of uniqueness and individuality, I’m going to have to look at the characters you imagine but then reject.

SOCIETY: I hate it when you start analysing those characters and categories I reject.

ME: Sorry about that. Next week the lattes are on me.

Download Episode 32: A Thought That Thinks More Than It Thinks.

The conceptual tug-of-war between Society and Individual ends in this week’s podcast! The Individual surrenders, leaving Society to dream up and personify possibilities for a world in which individual might be possible.

Watch what happens when Society dreams up a Hollie Phillips:

Download Episode 31: Figments of Society’s Imagination.