Structured Visions

I'm still dreaming, in this episode, of a society in which unique selves are possible. Such a dream goes beyond ideas about social inclusion. Inclusion is about fitting in to a pre-existing system – with all the rules and prescriptions such a system holds. My vision is of a social structure that welcomes uniqueness, indeed, one that expects uniqueness, that allows itself to be transformed by each expression of a unique self.

Such a vision makes me dubious about all the imagery that's been showing up in these podcasts. Comparing social structure to computer codes and choose-your-own-adventure novels makes it seem like the selves society constructs are all decided in advance, which furthers the idea of social structure as a closed system.

I also start to become a bit suspicious of the personified Society I keep talking to. Despite its claims to the contrary, I'm certain Society is perfectly capable of making space for unique selves. If I'm going to keep this dialogue going, I'm going to have to be more cunning in my cross-examination. I draw inspiration from – where else? – Reese Witherspoon's performance in the court scene of Legally Blonde. Like Witherspoon's character, Elle, I'm going to have to catch Society in the act of making space for a unique self, even when making space takes the form of an attempt at exclusion.

I get my chance through an analysis of a conversation between three first-year university students, teammates on a field hockey team. Read the transcript and see if you notice anything about the selves that show up in the grammar of Sammy's story:

Now have a look at the clauses of the narrative that are only Sammy's:

1. today, when we came out of the athletics centre
2. it was eight-thirty in the morning
3. and she threw sand in my face
4. yeah and so she skimmed sand
5. chucking it at you
6. and it was like, 'Nemo, no'
7. I had sand in my teeth
8. and it was disgusting
9. I had a good breakfast
10. and I had sand in my teeth
11. and she just ran off laughing
12. and I'm like- 'oh, I've got sand on me'

Did you notice the shifts in Sammy's story between the impersonal selves (the generic second person in clause 5, the impersonal dummy subject in clause 6), and the individual selves (such as the first-person singular and the third-person female singular in clauses 3 and 10)? What I find so interesting here is that the unique, individual selves show up – because they have to – whenever the body comes into the picture. It's not possible, in other words, to throw sand into an impersonal, non-individualised face. It's also pretty hard to imagine impersonal, non-individualised sandy teeth.

When unique selves show up, they're represented as embodied.

It's no good, then, thinking of social structure in terms of something disembodied, like computer code. We need a new metaphor for social structure. Maybe by next podcast we'll have one.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

More this week on the idea that social structure might be personified – and embodied. I analyse a conversation between three students whose identities have been challenged in the classroom setting. Their discussion with me reveals that the relationship between individual and society might be seen in a new way. Specifically, how easy does a given social structure make it for an individual to exist as a unique person?

The conversation is here:

And I also discuss it in my forthcoming book – anyone interested in pre-ordering?

Is the individual determined by society? Or is the individual an autonomous actor, making the most of structural resources to navigate through society? These questions are familiar to Structured Visions listeners, but this week I attempt to make the debate a little less abstract. I replace the notion of 'society' with the image of the classroom, and the 'individual' with anyone who's ever told a story about entering into one. I use these stories to suggest a third way of understanding the individual in relation to society. Let's personify both entities to produce characters in a drama, I say. And let's see these characters as co-constituting, co-creating reality. Better yet, let's envisage this relationship through the metaphor of a bar magnet surrounding by iron filings. The individual 'magnetises' the components of social structure, such that they form a pattern around the individual. How about that for a promising metaphor?

In this episode I discuss… yup, you guessed it! Structure. I've been bandying that word around for quite some time without offering a clear definition. I don't offer any clear definitions here, either, but I do make some associations. Does the word 'structure' conjure up ideas about stability, regularity, consistency permanence? I suggest today that we can study social structure while at the same time allowing for the idea that structures are variable, fluid and multitudinous. What's more, with each new structure emerges a new possibilities for imagining structures – indeed, new ways of thinking about social structure.

I often claim I'm using grammar to identify possibilities for social structure. It would be more accurate to say that I'm using the principles of grammar (specifically, M.A.K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar) to identify the structural properties of texts. Halliday defines 'text' as 'any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the language' (Halliday 2014, p. 3) Studying texts allows me to stop time, and to explore the structural properties of conversations about or descriptions of the social world.

The conversational text I discuss in this episode is one in which Ally, a first-year university student, is talking about her course, which she's not enjoying very much:

I explore what's called the 'thematic structure' of the text. That means looking at each of the clauses, and identifying the 'Themes'. A Theme is a point of departure – the first element of the clause, which sets the stage (as it were) for the message. The Theme of each clause is indicated in bold, below:

• the thing is
• you arrive at your lecture
• you sit down
• the lecturer goes on
• and then you leave
• there's not really much change to like get to know people

The thematic organisation of this text presents a particular shape of a particular social world, one comprised of two entities: a unnamed, generic, unindividuated self (you) and a nameless lecturer. Reminds me of the scenario I painted last week of what it felt like to give lectures at the beginning of my teaching career! Next week I'd like to share some other structured images of classroom settings that emerge from other conversations with students. Is it really the case that each new structure presents new possibilities for transformation? Let's see if I can convince you of that in Episode 29.