Structured Visions

Why am I so fascinated by social structure? Perhaps because it helps me to articulate my experience of the world. In this episode I share some of my experiences from my career in higher education in France and Britain. I discuss some students' responses to Mary Bucholtz's sociolinguistic research on nerds.

In this episode I explore the relationship between these sets of concepts: bodies/selves, bodies/souls, selves/individuals, individuals/society. Do we need to understand the self as separate from society – as autonomous – in order to be imagine social change? I review the work of two different theorists' perspectives on these concepts: Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu.

Often the individual is seen as a David figure in relation to the Goliath of society. What if instead we saw society as itself a character in the drama, a character who wants to be transformed? I put forward a new myth of the relationship between the individual and society, where society wants to transform itself, and it sees possibilities for doing so by becoming embodied.

Happy New Year from Structured Visions! Today I discuss a grammar meme that my brother pointed out to me – an illustration of a stern old man saying:

When you say 'I seen,' I assume you won't finish that sentence with 'the inside of a book.'

I draw once more upon Pierre Bourdieu's work, this time his book, Language and Symbolic Power. Bourdieu's image of social structure is one in which individual agents negotiate their worlds by drawing upon different types of capital – economic, cultural, social and symbolic. The variety of any language that comes to be understood as the 'Standard' form is a form of symbolic capital. With his unkind comments, the man in the illustration is engaging in a form of 'symbolic violence' – attacking another's use of a non-Standard variety of English by mocking it and deeming it worthless.

When discussing the notion of 'symbolic violence' with university students who hope to one day be teachers, I was told that kids have to learn to speak properly or they won't get anywhere in life. In other words, they have to learn to value what the educational institution values or they'll be in trouble later in life. But hold on, I responded, doesn't that mean these kids have to submit to symbolic violence? Doesn't it mean they have to devalue their own sense of self? Is it worth it?

As I've mentioned before, there are at least two ways of looking at grammar. Prescriptive approaches view grammar as something that is either right or wrong – it's something to be policed by schoolteachers or by social media memes. Descriptive grammars explore the patterns and structures of any variety of language without making claims about which varieties are better or worse.

I have a perspective on grammar that is different from these two approaches. For me, grammar is the medium by which social structure becomes aware of itself.

When people use language, they produce spoken or written texts, and grammatical analysis reveals how social worlds and selves are constructed. Fascinating things happen when I explore the various selves that are grammatically constructed in texts – and often these fascinating things coincide with embodiment. The comments on the grammar meme revealed a good deal of embodiment in response to 'I seen': people cringed, they shuddered, their ears hurt, their ears folded up. These various forms of embodied disgusts remind me of a conversation I once had with an American student, Jeremy, who was learning French in Strasbourg:

(from Clark 2002)

In Jeremy's account of his classmate's poor French several different selves are produced: the first person singular (it just makes me, like my skin crawl), the generic third-person plural (they, like, make up a word) and the non-personal third-person singular (It's like, what?). The they is the generic group of people speaking French badly. The it is the observing, objective, disembodied authority figure who has the power to evaluate others as incompetent. In Jeremy's account, the first-person (me) shows up only briefly, as a singular embodied self having a negative experience in response to the negatively evaluated performance of others.

The idea that it is the embodied self who takes the hit in authoritative, draconian social structures shows up in one of the comments to the 'I seen' grammar meme.

Every time I hear it I get shivers and a headache. I don't correct because I don't want anyone to feel bad.

This commenter shows an awareness that to correct someone's grammar is to engage in symbolic violence. The self constructed here is one that doesn't want to impose that kind of violence. But violence happens, nevertheless: the text produces an embodied self that suffers – from shivers and a headache – in the face of an authoritative social structure.

If grammar is the medium by which social structure becomes aware of itself, then the social structure here is committing acts of symbolic violence on… itself.

Is that the kind of social structure we want to imagine as we move into 2016? Can we imagine other types of social structure in which such symbolic violence isn't required?

A story of a Christmas miracle involving a pink Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle leads to a discussion of whether Santa Claus is a social fact. According to French anthropologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, 'social facts' are those forces that maintain the integrity of societies – forces that transcend the needs and desires of the individual and require people to support the collective. One of Mauss's examples in his essay, The Gift, is of the kula of the peoples of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. The kula is an elaborate ritualised exchange of two types of object: mwali (carved bracelets) and soulava (mother-of-pearl necklaces). The kula produces a set of obligations for the societies in the Trobriand archipelago: the obligation to give these gifts, the obligation to receive them, and the obligation to pass them on to a third party. These are not mechanistic exchanges: the objects themselves become imbued with magical significance, attributes, names, 'personalities'. Maybe the obligation a father feels when his little girls ask a magical person – Santa – for a magical, but impossible-to-get toy unicorn also counts as a social fact?

For Mauss and Durkheim, the point was to develop a science of the social world which would make it possible to investigate, objectively, those forces that hold societies, collectives and groups together.

I propose a new way of doing social science. Rather than looking at the social facts as they are, I propose that we look to the social world for evidence in everyday conversations, of people's desires for different types of social world. A social science that looks to 'real-world' evidence for ideas about alternative social structures that don't yet exist? That, to me, would be a gift.

Last week I promised I'd explore a paradox in Ally's comments about the 'brazen' women in her halls. To do so, we need the continuation of the transcript of the conversation I discussed in Episode 22:

(Clark 2011, p. 129-30)

Here's the contradiction: at one point, Ally says drinking pints is wrong because you'd never catch any of her friends doing it. These are her friends down south. If a girls was caught drinking a pint of lager, all the boys would just be like 'What are you doing?' She's describing a social structure in which it is not appropriate for women to drink lager. The 'self' she constructs in this part of the conversation is the generic second-person – you – an observing, judging authority figure whose business it is to catch people out doing things they shouldn't be.

Later, though, Chrissy questions her. Chrissy's use of the second-person you is not generic, but specific – it's directed at Ally herself. Would you drink it out of a bottle? When Ally is required to construct a self that corresponds to the first-person I or me, she comes up with a different reason for not drinking lager:

I just don't enjoy the taste.

French theorist Pierre Bourdieu wrote a whole book on taste. Taste, he says, gives us insight into social structure:

this sense of the social structure […], put so well by the word taste – simultaneously 'the faculty of perceiving flavours' and 'the capacity to discern aesthetic values' – is social necessity made second nature, turned into muscular patterns and bodily automations. (1984, p. 474)

Social structure, Bourdieu explains, imprints itself on human beings through bodily dispositions – ways of carrying yourself, of speaking, moving, standing, dressing – and the things you find tasteful and distasteful. Taste may seem like a bodily response – unique to each individual's preference, but really, he says, it's social structure at its least conscious. The things you prefer, the things you enjoy, the things you desire – these are all likely to be social imprints, rather than expressions of some unique aspect of your individual body.

I too am fascinated by the relationship between social structure and the human body, but I have a different way of looking at it. My view of social structure is not one in which human beings negotiate their social worlds, with social structure imprinting itself on their bodies. Instead, I explore the many social structures that emerge from people's everyday conversations, and the many versions of the self that emerge from these structures. When you listen carefully to enough conversations, you realise there are many, many social structures, and many, many selves.

And sometimes, in the course of the conversation, a self will become embodied. Like when Ally's generic you (you'd never catch anyone) becomes a specific I (I don't even drink like lager) – and then becomes an embodied I (I just don't enjoy the taste). When the self becomes embodied in a conversation, possibilities for transformation often emerge. In Ally's case, the transformation is this: the social structure makes its ideology explicit:

I've always thought of it as a guys' drink.

The social structure speaks at this point, and it reveals to us not only its norms (lager is a guys' drink), but also its instabilities – the relationship of the first-person to the idea is a mental process (thought), hedged by the adverb always. Once the social structure speaks, and makes its ideology explicit, it becomes clear that there's room for the ideology to change.

And all that because the self became embodied in the course of a conversation.

This week I give some advice about how to control someone: give them an impossible task to do – like keeping an ice cube from melting on a hot, sunny beach. Then make them think it's actually possible to do that task, and make sure they're invested in doing it.

The 'impossible task' I'm talking about is maintaining the consistency of the self. Why is that so impossible? Because, I argue, the concept of the self can only exist within a particular social structure. When the self gets offended, when its face is threatened, when it's trying to keep up appearances or 'fit in', it's actually carrying the burden of an entire social structure with it. Maintaining the stability of the social structure is an impossible task for one small self.

To illustrate this idea, I draw upon the concept of systems that are self-referential (an idea I learned about from Amit Goswami). Here's an example of a self-referential component of a linguistic system:

This sentence has five words.

The sentence is referring to itself. It could, in principle, refer to itself using the first-person pronoun:

I have five words.

Or, more accurately,

I have four words.

But in order to understand these last two sentences as self-referential, we'd have to understand the 'I' as referring to a component of the system – the sentence itself.

Similarly, we might understand the 'I' in everyday usage as a system referring to itself: a component of a social structure referring to itself. The problem with that idea is that it can make you feel like you have no power to change anything – no power to change an oppressive social structure.

My work is about exploring the paradoxes, disruptions and contradictions in social structure as it shows up in everyday conversations. My view is that it's observing these contradictions and disruptions that makes it possible to imagine new, less oppressive structures.

There's a fascinating contradiction in Ally's conversation about women drinking pints of lager – the conversation I talked about in Episode 20. I don't quite get enough time in this episode to discuss the contradiction – look forward to that for next week! But I do discuss the way social structure unfolds here, and the various types of self that emerge.

This week I question whether the notion of the 'self' is as stable as people seem to want it to be. The instability of the self might be explored in terms of how it is situated within the language system. What words do you use to refer to your self? You might use a pronoun, but which one? Me, I, my, mine, myself? It all depends on its position in the sentence. Also, using a pronoun is always unstable, because pronouns are deictic – that is, they change according to their context of use. The pronoun 'I' can mean Jodie Clark, Madonna, Henry IV or Kermit the Frog, depending on who's speaking.

You might use your name to refer to yourself, but names aren't that stable either. Besides, try referring to yourself using your own name in a business meeting.

Can Jodie ask for some clarification here? Jodie disagrees with some aspects of the proposal you've put forward.

Why is this so weird? It's because in the language system, the 'self' has its meaning only in relation to other selves – the self is not some stable entity with a fixed term of reference.

If the meaning of the self in the language structure is relative, what about the meaning of the self in the social structure? To explore this question, I draw upon Michel Foucault's work, which, he says, is oriented toward creating

a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects (Foucault 2000, p. 326)

'Subject' is a beautifully ambiguous word: it can mean the self, the subject of a sentence, or someone who is subject to another power, such as a monarch. Foucault was particularly interested in how it was possible for people to be subjected to power structures even in democratic societies.

One way to do it, he argues, is to make people constantly obsessed with their selves, to make them feel the need to be constantly vigilant about their behaviour and how well they fit in to society. In his History of Sexuality, volume 1 he discusses how well the 'confession' works to make people self-monitor. The confession shows up, he argues, in many different contexts – it's not just for church anymore.

Once you confess to those behaviours, desires, thoughts and ways of being that are wrong, your self is safe and stable – it is welcomed back into the social structure that divides the world up into right and wrong desires, thoughts and ways of being. My own work, on the other hand, explores unsafe selves. I have the idea that it is those 'selves' that don't fit in that carry with them the potential to transform social structures.

As a great sage (a scriptwriter for Saturday Night Live) once wrote,

Thanksgiving with the family can be hard. Everyone has different opinions and beliefs.

The aftermath of people expressing their different opinions and beliefs at a family meal is beautifully parodied in the sketch, A Thanksgiving Miracle.

In Politeness Theory, personal offence is understood as resulting from a 'face-threatening act' that wasn't appropriately attenuated. The notion of 'face' has been criticised for depending unquestioningly upon a 'Western' notion of the individual: each individual person has a 'face' that can be threatened. Everyday interaction requires that people commit face-threatening acts; the trick is to attenuate them using politeness strategies. (Though no one seems to have told Aunt Cathy that.)

My own work on face appears in a book edited by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group. It explores the idea of face not as 'belonging' to an individual, but instead as a 'boundary formed around different levels of social structure, with the individual as one (and only one) of these structures' (Clark 2011, p 111). It would be more in line with my current thinking to say face is the manifestation of social structure itself. According to this line of thought, the conflict between Aunt Cathy and her nice is not so much two individual people with two different people expressing their 'opinions'. It's more that Aunt Cathy and her niece each locate their existence within a particular social structure. The conflict is not between two individuals, but two different social worlds.

I illustrate this notion by exploring a bit of conversation in which Ally, an 18-year-old uni student from the South of England, describes feeling offended when she discovers that the women in her hall of residence enjoy drinking beer by the pint.

Emmanual Levinas has a different idea about face. His idea is that if I encounter another person, and I do not merely reduce that person to my own, totalising version of the social world, then I am 'faced' with some other form of being that I can not understand. Levinas recommends embracing that not-understanding as a way of accessing the infinite – that is, the world beyond my finite understanding.

If we were to apply Levinas's ideas about face to my idea that face is the manifestation of social structure, than when two social structures meet each other – face-to-face – the potential arises for social transformation. The encounter gives us access to a social world that has not yet been imagined.

And if we're not quite ready for that as-yet-unimagined social structure, well, we can always find solace in Adele. Thanks, Adele!

The notion of the 'paradigm shift' originates from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion: if new evidence comes in that upsets an established paradigm, it is described as an anomaly and often explained away as human error or flawed research design. When enough new evidence comes in – that is, too much to be explained away – a crisis ensues and a new paradigm emerges.

'Paradigm' is a word that's used in linguistics as well. It's used in relation to the term 'syntagm'. Syntagms are linear sequences of language – a string of words in a sentence, for instance. A syntagmatic analysis of the sentence I love broccoli might focus on the order of the words in that sentence. It might also look at ways in which that word order can be changed or added to and still produce a meaningful sentence in English. Add an auxiliary verb and a negative particle to the sequence and the sentence becomes negative: I do not like broccoli. Change the sequence using a cleft construction to alter the focus of the sentence: It's broccoli I love. Add an auxiliary, change the word order and bingo! You're Yoda: Love broccoli I do.

If syntagmatic analysis looks at the linear sequence – the 'horizontal' structure of a string of words, then paradigmatic analysis goes vertical. Imagine, for instance, a column of words or phrases that you could use to replace the final word in I love broccoli. I love cabbage. I love carrots. I love Tina. I love democracy. I love tree toads with big ideas. All the constituents in the broccoli slot share something with the word broccoli – they're all nouns or noun phrases.

My research focuses on how close analysis of the grammatical descriptions of people's social worlds can reveal new ways of thinking about social structure. In times of crisis, when the safe, dependable social structures seem no longer to be in place, descriptions of social worlds can reveal poignant new visions. Consider this courageous conversation between a little boy and his father after the Paris attacks last week. The boy explains to his father that they'll have to move house because 'there are bad guys'. His father's response here represents a syntagmatic shift: 'there are bad guys everywhere'. It's a shift at the level of the sequence – a linear shift – he adds the adverb everywhere to his son's remark, and his son doesn't seem very comforted.

It's the paradigmatic shift that changes the vision of the social structure.

'Daddy, they have guns'.

'They have guns. We have flowers.'

Now the shift is a shift in paradigm: the guns slot is replaced with another choice, flowers.

One piece of evidence is not enough to shift the paradigm, it would seem from the boy's response.

'Flowers don't do anything', he says.

'Flowers are for fighting against guns', says his father.

Now it's the son's turn to shift the paradigm: he replaces fighting with protecting.

'Flowers are for protecting.'

And the paradigm keeps shifting:

'Candles are for protecting.'

Let's imagine a world in which flowers and candles – and the love and solidarity they represent – protect us from the world's fear. Heartfelt thanks to Angel Le and his son Brandon for providing us with that vision.

Social structures are like spider webs – interlinked strands of assumptions about the social world that form conceptual networks to support us as we navigate our daily lives. What would be the effect of exposing social structures as oppressive or unjust? On the one hand, we might feel completely unsupported and ungrounded, like Boris the spider probably felt when I ripped through his carefully crafted web-home in the corner of the living room. On the other hand, we might feel a moment of poignant, freeing clarity, like an 8-year-old who learns that her classmates are lying when they tell her she's ugly.

What convinces us to participate in oppressive social structures, especially social structures in which we're the ones who are oppressed? Karl Marx put it down to 'false consciousness': in a capitalist system, the working classes will continue to be ruled by the dominant classes as long as they cling to false ideas about how the system isn't so bad, after all. For Marx, changing the world requires that people (a) recognise the ways in which these false ideas present an upside-down view of the world and (b) to take action through unification and revolution.

In this episode I speak about the value of prioritising imagination over immediate action when it comes to social change. Doing the research for the book I'm writing now has shown me that when people describe their troubled social worlds, their accounts reveal hints about alternative structures – desires for new, transformative social structures. Doing this work has brought to my attention the need to study these hints carefully, to engage in the work of re-imagining social structure, and to allow action to be led by these new visions of better social worlds.