Structured Visions

Remember Christina from Episode 7? She's the one who spared no time at all in getting as far away from Awayville, USA as she could. This week we return to Christina, and we get introduced to her mom… the redneck. Not that Christina's embarrassed about that, or anything.

Revisiting Christina's conversation gives me the opportunity to illustrate more specifically how my approach to discourse analysis both draws on and differs from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). (Episodes 55 and 56 provide a bit of background for this discussion, if you'd like to learn more.)

Get a copy of the transcripts here.

I first offer a CDA-style analysis of Christina's remarks about Awayville. I'm using the approach to CDA developed in Norman Fairclough's work (Language and Power is a good introduction) and Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough's Discourse in Late Modernity.

I explain that a CDA approach would recognise this conversation as a text that was co-produced by three social actors. It might note that Christina's representation of her hometown in Extract 1 draws upon two discourses – a discourse of socioeconomic pressure and a discourse of 'rugged individualism'. One effect of her juxtaposing these is that it enables her to 'blame the victims'. In other words, the people who suffer because of decisions made by local governments are blamed for not getting themselves out of a bad situation.

CDA contributes to social change through its consciousness-raising effects. In the example I've given, I've encouraged listeners to start paying attention to other texts in which individuals are implicitly blamed for what are, in effect, structural inequalities.

Then I move on to illustrate my own approach to discourse analysis. My perspective on texts is rather different. Instead of seeing texts (conversational, written, performed, etc.) as products of communication processes, I treat them as artefacts that reveal particular ways of structuring information.

I'm looking for patterns in the grammar. Look at this clause, for instance, from Extract 2 (line 1):

• they're all into Nascars

Now compare it with this clause from lines 4-5:

• my mo:m is all about Nascar

There's a repetition of grammatical and lexical structure here. The non-repeated elements show how this structure changes. It moves from the general (non-specific, third person plural they) to the unique, in the form of the specific referent, my mo:m.

Also, have a look at the 'middle-o(f)-nowhere' towns. These show up in both extracts.

In Extract 1, it takes this form:

• they closed it [the army depot] and so now all these people who live like in the little towns outside like in the middle o(f) nowhere (lines 13-15)

In Extract 2, it looks like this:

• she moved to this little like western North Carolina middle-o(f)-nowhere town and it's like she belongs there (lines 34-35)

The movement in both clause complexes that mention middle-o(f)-nowhere towns is from a material action process (closed in Extract 1 and moved in Extract 2) to a relational process (live in Extract 1 and belongs in Extract 2). The pattern reveals a type of transformation that has to do with the relationship between people and their local economies and their socioeconomic status.

In the first extract, people only thrive when their local economies thrive – and later we learn it is their responsibility to divest themselves of their low socioeconomic status.

In the second extract, we have an image of an individual who thrives because she moves to an environment that supports and accepts her without requiring her to change her status.

Did you catch that? There's a moment of transformation there – where we can begin to re-imagine social structure.

The old social structure looks something like this: generic groups of people move in and out of environments which are either supportive or hostile. The environment can change from being supportive to hostile at a moment's notice, without any regard for the people affected.

The new social structure? An individual moves into a new environment that feels like a good match. The environment shapes itself to embrace this new person, such that she belongs. The individual and the environment are in a mutually beneficial relationship.

My approach to discourse analysis is one that begins by revealing the oppressive social structures that are often masked in discursive configurations. I use the tenets of CDA to help me with that. And then I move on to seek out new social structures – welcomed and welcoming alternatives to these hostile worlds. Where do I find these? In the patterns of the texts themselves.

To engage in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the linguistic methodology I discussed last week, requires understanding language primarily as a form of communication that can be manipulated to represent the world in different ways. Indeed, language is often understood as a form of communication that is unique to human beings, and linguists describe the specific 'design features' that make human languages different from forms of animal communication. (See George Yule's textbook, The Study of Language, for a summary.)

I've said that my work differs slightly from CDA, one of these differences has to do with my particular take on language. For me, language is not first a foremost a form of communication. (Sperber and Wilson's book on Relevance Theory is where that idea first sparked for me.) I see language instead as primarily a way of structuring information. And while human beings may be the only creatures who use this structuring device as a mechanism for communication, they are certainly not the only ones who have access to language. Drawing upon Alan Watts's description of the earth 'people-ing', I paint a picture in which the earth has been structuring information for squillions of years, in the form of water molecules, single-celled organisms, mosses, DNA, etc. Human languages represent a new way of structuring information. Not only is it new, it's also distinct – cut off – it's a structure that does not allow immediate access to the other information structures the earth has produced. These information structures are stored in texts produced as conversational, written, performed or electronic forms.

Analysing these texts, then, gives us a way of identifying the new possibilities that are emerging from the earth's new structuring system.

Remember last week when I said that my way of doing CDA is to consider the text as a mid-point, rather than an endpoint? What I meant is that we have the opportunity to explore incipient social structures in their processes of becoming.

And remember when I said CDA can be depressing? Well, my way of doing CDA can be depressing too, especially when you recognise that some of the social structures that are emerging have the power to destroy the earth's own ecosystems and bring about violence to its inhabitants. But it's not only a depressing story. Some of the new structures – especially the fleeting ones – offer real promise for more welcoming, integrated new ideas.

This week I discuss the branch of linguistics – Critical Discourse Analysis, or CDA – that most informs my approach to grammatically analysing texts. It's the 'critical' part of CDA that appeals to me most – an aim of most practitioners of CDA is to explore the role language plays in maintaining or challenging social injustices.

To give you an idea of how CDA usually works, I analyse a recent news item from Fox News. (Click on the headline below for the full article.)

Doing CDA requires being explicit about what critical position you're coming from when you interpret the text. The position I bring to my analysis of this piece is a feminist one. I put forward my view that the article (a) downplays the structural inequities in an institution in which there is a phenomenal gender gap and (b) draws implicitly upon the assumption that such inequities are 'natural', or to be expected.

The grammatical analysis of conversational texts that you've heard me do in these podcasts, though, is different from 'traditional' CDA in an important way. In CDA, the text is seen as an end product, and CDA explores the processes by which the text came into being. CDA is rooted in Marxist thought, and an analogy is helpful here. A Marxist perspective on a garment in a department store might raise questions like, what were the conditions under which this piece of clothing was manufactured, and how does it come to be priced so low? What workers were involved in producing this item? Were they treated fairly? How were the paid for their labour? A t-shirt is seen as the end of a long line of manufacturing process, and exploring those processes is likely to reveal systemic social injustices.

Similarly, Critical Discourse Analysts view a text as a product of a set of language processes that involve construing reality in a particular way and drawing upon assumptions that mask damaging ideologies about the social world.

It can get a little depressing.

How is my own work different?

I too, start from the position that social injustices structure the social world, and I too, want to do something about it. But rather than assuming that the text is the 'end product' and going backwards to look at the processes of its construction, I assume that the text is a 'midpoint'. The work I do is looks forward, not back. My idea is that the analysis of the grammar of a text can generate new possibilities for more welcoming, inclusive social structures. If CDA reveals the sinister secrets hidden in the production of a text, my work reveals the germs of new, transformative ideas that I believe are also hidden there.

This perspective requires a radical new look at language and society. Join me in an upcoming podcast for more!

Our explorations in phenomenology have led us to understand consciousness as submerged in the world of perception. I have made a case for understanding this phenomenological world not as material world, but as a social world. I keep drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's image of the blindfolded person who uses a stick to gain perceptual experience of the objects in a darkened room. In today's episode I play with the idea that it is language, or grammar, that serves as the 'stick' by which social bodies move through and perceive the social world.

The episode moves from green coffee cups (not coffee green cups) to those blue suitcases, to the mainstream three pretty girls in a young woman's account of being bullied at school. It's the personal account that's most important. My favourite way to explore the structure of the social body/world is to go megalocal: to examine personal, intimate accounts of people's felt sense of belonging or not belonging.

Here's a transcript of Maryam's account:

Remember Episode 51, when we made our way, blindfolded, around a room with nothing more than a cardboard tube to guide us? We delve deeper into the depths of phenomenology this week – almost literally – taking seriously Sara Ahmed's description in her Queer Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty's perspective, in which 'bodies are submerged, such that they become the space they inhabit' (Ahmed 2006, p. 53). Ahmed's critique encourages us to reorient our phenomenologies, to understand the spaces in terms not only of what is oriented to, but also in terms of what is backgrounded, what is beyond reach for certain bodies.

My own perspective on phenomenology is this: yes, consciousness is always embodied, and bodies are always submerged. But let us not assume that consciousness is embodied in human bodies and that these bodies are submerged in the material world. My take on human bodies and the material world is that these are always just beyond our reach – that consciousness rarely attaches itself to the human body, and that the human body and the material world are both inevitably other.

My idea is that consciousness instead attaches itself to a social body. Whether we navigate a room blindfolded with a cardboard tube to guide us or manipulate the perceptual field with our gaze, it is almost always a social world we are submerged in, and it is almost always a social body that our consciousness affixes itself to.

Today I celebrate 52 weeks of religiously produced Structured Visions episodes! Enjoy a glass of bubbly with me while I share with you some of the motivations behind making the podcast and what I find so enjoyable about it. I also express my gratitude some figures who have been inspirations for me along the way:

Tara Mohr, whose work on callings, and whose dedication to promoting women's Playing Big made me recognise this way of honing my voice, exploring ideas on the public stage and 'shipping' my ideas (to use Seth Godin's term).

Elizabeth Gilbert, whose ideas about creativity I've found to be remarkably helpful in my academic career. In Big Magic, her book on creativity, she writes 'I've always found like this is so cruel to your work – to demand a regular paycheck from it, as it creativity were a government job, or a trust fund'. This podcast has been my attempt to serve creativity rather than asking it to serve me.

Caroline Casey of KPFA's Visionary Activist Show, whose wisdom and enthusiasm are encapsulated in one oft-repeated quote: 'Imagination lays the tracks for the reality train to follow.' So many of my ideas are rooted in this principle – and I'm very grateful to Caroline Casey for giving such exuberant voice to her own ideas.

And speaking of religiously producing podcasts, I'm grateful to Rob Bell for his RobCast, and for his appreciation for the art form of the sermon. I reveal in this episode how my own love of the sermon nearly led me down the route of religious vocation.

Special thanks as well to Professor Sara Mills, Dr Liz Morrish, Dr Erika Darics and of course, my magnificent brother from the new world, Michael Clark – your retweets and comments are much appreciated!

We return to Kafka's tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the 'you' in Kafka's 'Message from the Emperor' – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that's attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, intent upon sending 'you' a message, were the human body?

In this episode I invite listeners to imagine that between the social body and the human body is an insurmountable distance.

To explore this idea requires us to delve into philosophical inquiry about consciousness and human bodies. For that, I rely upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there's no distance between the body and consciousness.

I'm proposing not only is there a distance, but that distance is insurmountable. And I wonder aloud: what if the human body has some meaning, or some 'message' beyond being an instrument of consciousness or perception? What if we understood the human body to be the 'other' that Levinas tells us we have a responsibility to?

We've been building up to some exciting ideas in these podcasts, many of which came to a head in Episode 47. Here are some of the key points:

I've been recommending that when we think about social structure we draw upon a different binary than those that are often used. Rather than individual-society, or self-body, I've proposed human body and social body. Thinking in terms of these two elements as two types of body makes it possible to explore how they interact with each other. It also enables us to focus in on to what extent this relationship shows what Emmanuel Levinas calls a responsibility to the other. To what extent do the human body and social body interact responsibly (in Levinas's terms)? To what extent do they acknowledge each other's otherness? To what extent are they witnesses to the ungraspable 'beyond' that each other represents?

For Levinas, this witnessing of the alterity of the other comes about through an encounter with the face. And I've proposed that the 'face' of a social body is the grammatical construction of descriptions of the social world.

But the image of the face may be a bit misleading. Talking to someone face to face is often understood as a way of understanding the 'true meaning' behind what they're saying. It's certainly not used (in everyday parlance, anyway) to mean something like 'apprehending that which goes beyond meaning' or 'witnessing that which can never be understood'.

What we need, I've decided, is a fable – one that will give us a felt understanding of otherness. I draw upon Malcolm Pasley's (1992) translation of Kafka's 'Message from the Emperor' in The Transformation and Other Stories. At first glance, it seems to be a story of a message that never arrives. Instead, it's a story of a message that could never arrive. If circumstances were different, it might be able to. Did you notice that we've moved into the realm of the irrealis? It's in the irrealis that we begin to understand the other – a world that moves just beyond our view whenever we look at it. And yet somehow the irrealis encourages us to keep looking.

Tune in again next week for more on Kafka's 'Emperor'!

What do you do when your social vision doesn't match that of those around you? Or if you come from a planet where the social world is a lot more harmonious than the one you're noticing on earth? You could try ethnography. Ethnography and the spirit of exploration in today's episode.

I reached into my mailbag during today's podcast and found this letter from a faithful listener.

OK, it was my brother.

Or, as he likes to call himself, 'the magnificent brother from the new world'.

Jodie,

I'm catching up on podcasts and am in the middle of listening to #47. I hope you don't mind but I have a question. In regards to your concept that we try to figure out the problems by going beyond our own perceptions and experiences to solve social ills which takes a lot of work and intelligence. (If I interpreted that correctly). Have you thought about the idea that by the time we figure out a solution there is a whole new problem? Or that when we try to fix things they actually become worse. I think of the Arab Spring as an example. Any thoughts?

Hope you are well.

Love,

Mike

This episode is dedicated to my brother and to problem solvers everywhere.