CHAPTER 2: DISCOURSE AND SOCIAL THEORY
Requirements for a Social Theory
What we say, what we do, and the sense we and others make of our words and deeds mark us as members of a community. Our viewpoints and our habits of action define the historical period in which we live, the cultural traditions that have shaped us, and the typical life experiences within the community of people of our age, gender, and social position. Our discourse,what we mean by saying and doing, deploys the meaning-making resources of our communities: the grammar and lexicon of a language, the conventions of gesture and depiction, the symbolic and functional values of actions, the typical patterns of action that other members of our community will recognize and respond to. But in different historical periods, in different cultural traditions, for people of different ages, genders, and social positions, both these resources and the typical, recognizable patterns in which people use them are different.
In order to understand how the discourse of every moment shapes the changing resources and patterns characteristic of a community, we need a general social theory. We need it to help us identify the kinds of differences in how people talk and act, and to relate these different patterns of behavior to one another. We need to understand what the different possible positions in our society are, how they differ in terms of people's actions and their meanings, and how they imperfectly fit together to make the whole of a diverse community.
Equally, we need a general social theory to help us understand how the discourse habits of the community around us both shape our own discourses and viewpoints and provide us with resources for saying and doing things that are new but still make sense to others.
A social theory is of no use to us for these purposes if it is only a static picture of how some one community seems to some one observer at a particular moment of its history. The role of discourse in society is active: it not only reconfirms and re-enacts existing social relationships and patterns of behavior, it also re-negotiates social relationships and introduces new meanings and new behaviors. Social systems change. The social theory we need must show us a dynamic community: it must show us how and why social relations are always changing, and also how they can seem, for certain periods, to remain relatively fixed.
The social theory we need must also be a criticaltheory: it must describe social processes in ways that show how power is exercised in the interests of the powerful, and how unjust social relations disguise their injustice. Discourse functions ideologically in society to support and legitimate the exercise of power, and to naturalize unjust social relations, making them seem the inevitable consequence of commonsense necessity.
Finally, and most fundamentally for our purposes, a social theory must show us how to connect each individual social event with the larger patterns of social relationships that persist from one event to the next. We need to be able to relate the discourse, the words and deeds of the here-and-now, to the Discourses, the social habits of speech and action in the community as a whole. We need a unitarytheory which integrates and connects micro-social events with macrosocial structures and processes.
In short, we need a social theory which is dynamic, critical, and unitary. These three requirements are actually closely interdependent on one another. It is the relation between events and social systems that makes communities dynamic; when we connect the discourse of each event with the Discourses of the community, we see the motor of social and cultural change. When we focus on how change occurs, we find we need to connect individual events with larger patterns in social systems. But we cannot do either of these things if we do not look critically at our own commonsense assumptions to see how they are themselves part of the culture around us, how they function ideologically to lead us away from conclusions that might be dangerous to the status quo.
However much we pride ourselves on being objective social scientists, or pretend to be merely observers, we are all insideour social system. We are all positionedwithin that system so as to have only one point of view on it, or only a limited range of viewpoints during our lives. None of us are simultaneously both male and female, old and young, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, literate and illiterate, straight and gay, European, Asian and African. Our traditions, our theories, our assumptions, our interests, our values, our logic, our language, our experiences, our discourses are all characteristic of where we fit inside this larger system. We cannot get outside of it (except perhaps to move inside some other system), so we must be able to account for why we see the system as we do. Pierre Bourdieu, for all that he holds back from some of the more radical implications of this basically postmodern view (cf. Lyotard 1984, Harding 1986), calls this the principle of reflexivesociology (Bourdieu & Waquant 1992).
Social Theories of Discourse
If discourse plays a critical role in social dynamics, then social theories about discourse should point the way to a dynamic, critical, unitary social theory.
Unfortunately, most theories of discourse are not social theories. Indeed most theories of discourse are mainly linguistic and psychological, paying relatively little attention to the question of who says what when, why, and with what effects. The social context of discourse, and issues of discourse as social action are largely ignored. Instead discourse is mostly seen as the product of autonomous mental processes, or it is simply described as having particular linguistic features.
Why is this? Granted, some people are simply interested in linguistic description for its own sake, and others want to use discourse as a tool for understanding what they call the mind. But why are our theories of linguistic description, and our theories of mind, ones that ignore the social functions of language, the social origins of human behavior, and the social position of the linguist or psychologist? The answer, I believe, lies in the ideological functions of the discourses of psychology and linguistics in our own society and its history. Social perspectives on any human phenomenon are potentially dangerous to the interests of power.
In modern times, in European cultures, we have preferred theories that claim to be universal, theories that do not admit that they may see the whole world, but can only see it from one culture's viewpoint. We have constructed a notion of "human nature" based on our own views of what is worth paying attention to in the activities of humans. We have rooted our psychology in a fanciful connection to biology and the unity of the human species. We have rooted our linguistics in this psychology. We have taken our modest successes in the atypical domains of physics and chemistry (where the objects of interest do not have the kind of complexity for which cultural differences in viewpoint can matter very much; cf. Harding 1986; Lemke 1993b; Salthe 1985, 1993) and used this to make plausible our impossible claims about the universality of our views of language and mind.
We have not questioned the fundamental assumptions of our own cultural tradition: whether an objective science of matters human and cultural is possible in principle, whether the notion of mind as associated with both a biological organism and a social person is tenable, whether social systems can usefully be thought of as being composed of individuals as such, whether our subjective experience of ourselves as actors and perceivers is the product of the discourses and practices of our culture rather than a universal human given.
Some, but not many, have asked whether our taste for universalizing theories may have arisen from the need of European societies to justify their domination of other cultures by force in the past few centuries. Or from the need of upper-middle class, middle-aged, European males to legitimate their domination by force of workers, peasants, women, children, elders, slaves and various cultural Others in their own society. It is not just common sense, but science as well, especially the sciences of the human and near-human, which we must subject to skeptical, critical examination to determine their ideological biases.
We will return to these questions in more detail in Chapters 5 and 7. Our task here is to identify the modern exceptions, the major theories of discourse which have emphasized its social dimensions. I want to discuss particularly the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Michael Halliday, Basil Bernstein, and (though not a discourse theorist) Pierre Bourdieu. Each of them seems to have arrived at what I see as the same basic solution to the problem of connecting discourse to Discourses, events to larger social relations and processes. Each has also contributed greatly to our resources for analyzing the social functions, including the ideological functions, of discourse.
Bakhtin and Heteroglossia
I begin with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (esp. 1929, 1935, 1953) in part because he was the first of these five to try to construct a social theory of discourse, and so his work seems to us today the most original, even idiosyncratic. He worked as part of a group of scholars in the period immediately following the Russian Revolution, a time when Marxist ideas were widely respected, and when there was a temporary crack in the monolithic ideology of European culture. In this period, Vygotsky (e.g. 1963) began to ask about the social origins of mind, standing the received wisdom of psychology on its head. Bakhtin, along with V.N. Voloshinov, P.N. Medvedev, and others wanted a theory of language and literature that saw it too as having a social origin and character, and not as being merely the autonomous product of individual minds.
What, for Bakhtin, are the fundamental elements of language as a social phenomenon? Words? Sentences? Speakers? None of these:
"The actual reality of language/speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, nor the isolated monologic utterance, nor the psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances." (Bakhtin-Voloshinov 1929/1986: 94)
An utterance, a moment of discourse, as a social event, as an act that contributes to the social activity of discourse: this for Bakhtin is the starting point. But what of the meaningof this event? For Bakhtin our meanings do not arise in individual acts of will in which we are the sole determiners of our utterances, because a verbal act "inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the same sphere, both those by the same author and those by other authors" (p.95). The utterance always originates in and functions as part of a social dialogue(whether the other participants in this dialogue are considered to be actually present or are only implied):
"The linguistic significance of a given utterance is understood against the background of language, while its actual meaning is understood against the background of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions, points of view, and value judgments." (Bakhtin 1935/1981: 281).
This is a view of meaning that came later to be called the principle of intertextuality (cf. Kristeva 1980; Lemke 1985, 1993d), because it sees the meaning of each particular utterance or stretch of discourse as arising in the relations betweensayings and social viewpoints, and not in relations among linguistic forms as such, or among speakers as individuals. We make sense of every word, utterance, or act against the background of (some) other words, utterances, acts of a similar kind. This implies, of course, that it is very important to understand just whichother texts a particular community considers relevant to the interpretation of any given text.
In what he says, Bakhtin distinguishes between a narrower, formal linguistic, or semantic view of meaning and a broader more social view. The former depends on features of the language itself, and we will later call it the semantic meaning potentialof the utterance as a linguistic form. It tells us what this utterance couldmean, across a variety of contexts, insofar as it is interpreted consistently with very general principles of grammar and word meaning. But the latter is what the utterance actually does mean, as a social act, in the context in which it is used here and now. And that in turn depends on a whole social system of utterances made in various times and places, a system of texts written or said from different viewpoints, embodying different opinions and values. The notion of the utterancefor Bakhtin is a bridge between the linguistic and social, the event-meaning and the larger social systems in which that event has its meaning for us.
Bakhtin went on to develop this view of the utterance into a more general view of discourse as always implicitly dialogical, as always speaking against the background of what others have said or written in other times and places. He describes the struggle to make a word or utterance one's own, to place it in a new context as a new social event, so that its meanings are as much our own as another's. Along the way he began to see that the background against which an utterance means is not simply a set of isolated, unrelated utterances. He saw the diversity of language, how the utterances of people from different times and places, and different social positions, were systematically different:
"Language is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete ideological conceptualizations that fill it. ... Actual social life and historical becoming create within [a language] a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological belief systems ... [within which] are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content, and each with its own different sound." (p.288)
What he calls at this point "bounded verbal-ideological belief systems" he elsewhere glosses as the "social languages of heteroglossia" or as distinct social voices. He illustrates what he means by referring to the stratification of language in actual use into a variety of "social class dialects, languages of special groups, professional jargons (including those of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and novelists), genre languages, the languages of generations and age groups, of the authorities, of literary and political movements, historical epochs, etc." (1935/1981: 262-3, cf. 289).
"All the languages of heteroglossia ... are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific worldviews, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values. As such they may all be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another, and be interrelated dialogically." (1935/1981: 291-2).
Here Bakhtin is articulating his critical insight that the various social voices, the various characteristic discourses of different social groups, have specific, ultimately sociological, relations to one another. All the social relations of groups, their alliances of mutual support, their conflict in opposition to one another, are created, re-created, negotiated, and changed in the social dialogues of our discourse with one another.
What Bakhtin calls social languages or voices we have been calling Discourses, or now more formally, discourse formations. These are the persistent habits of speaking and acting, characteristic of some social group, through which it constructs its worldview: its beliefs, opinions, and values. It is through discourse formations that we construct the very objects of our reality, from electrons to persons, from words to "discourse formations". And we necessarily do so from some social point of view, with some cultural system of beliefs and assumptions, and some system of values, interests, and biases. But we do this notas individuals alone, but as members of communities, and however we do it, whatever discourse formations we deploy to make sense of the world, ourformations always have systematic sociological relations to theirformations. We speak with the voices of our communities, and to the extent that we have individual voices, we fashion these out of the social voices already available to us, appropriating the words of others to speak a word of our own.
In the theory of heteroglossia, all the key elements of a social theory of discourse are present, including a dynamic model:
"Language and languages [i.e. heteroglossic discourse types] change historically primarily by means of hybridization ... the crucible for this mixing always remaining the utterance." (1935/1981: 358-59).
The notion of hybridization is that particular utterances, even though the product of a single speaker, may contain within them elements of more than one dialect or discourse formation, thus producing new possibilities, which, if taken up by other speakers, can lead to linguistic and cultural change.
How has Bakhtin built his bridge between the event (the utterance) and the social system of heteroglossia (the social relations of various constituent groups in a society)? First by the principle of intertextuality: that the meaning of an utterance or event must be read against the background of other utterances and events occurring in the community. And second by introducing an intermediate notion between the social event and the system of social relations: the social language or voice characteristic of a particular group in the community.
The principle of intertextuality needs to be further specified. We need to understand just howmembers of a community read one text against the background of some, and not other, texts to construct its meaning. And the principle of heteroglossia will need ultimately to tell us more both about how different social groups come to speak and act differently, and about the relations between the discourse habits of a group as such and the discourse habits associated with the various activities in which members of the group engage. But Bakhtin's principles are foundations on which we can build such a social theory of discourse.
I doubt that I would have recognized the significance of these principles when I first read Bakhtin in the early 1980s if it had not been for the familiar ring they had. I had already encountered, I realized, these same principles, in different terminology, in the work of Halliday, Bernstein, Foucault, and Bourdieu.
Halliday and Bernstein: Register and Code
Bakhtin's notion of the social languages of heteroglossia was modeled on the diversity of the regional and social dialects of Russia in his time, and so for him these forms of discourse were associated specifically with the groups of people who used them. The British linguist Michael Halliday, some forty years later, was trying to describe the linguistic differences associated, not with different communities of speakers, but with different activities in social life. We all recognize, as did Bakhtin, that the language of mathematics is different from the language of sports or politics. Halliday sought to characterize these differences more specifically, or, as he would say, more delicately.
Unlike Bakhtin, however, Halliday had at his command a very powerful semantic analysis of the grammar of his own language (English). He recognized that the language of a sports report, a sales transaction, and a newspaper editorial differed not simply in their vocabulary, and not simply because these uses of language are more likely for people in some social positions than others, but because the frequencies of occurence of many grammatical and semantic features in these texts were skewed by the nature of the different activities in which language was being used.
From this came his now well-known theory of registers: the functional varieties of language, characteristic of particular activities in which language is used, defined by systematic differences in the probabilities of various grammatical and semantic features in the texts of each register (Halliday 1977, 1978; see also Gregory 1967). Where the fieldof the activity differed, as say between politics, sports, or mathematics, there were characteristic differences in the frequencies of say action verbs vs. relation verbs, or active vs. passive voice; where the tenorof interpersonal relationships (including intimacy and power relations) differed, there were corresponding differences in mood (interrogative requests vs imperative commands, say) or in modality (simple polar verbs vs. modal auxiliaries indicating possibility or doubt); and where the differences were those of mode, as between speech and writing, or the language of participation vs. that of observation, there were differences in how information in one clause was highlighted or backgrounded and linked to information in other clauses (thematization, cohesion, etc.).
Though register theory was initially only about differences, about variation in linguistic features from one sort of activity or situation type to another, people quickly found it useful to speak of the registerof this or that activity. More delicate analysis (e.g. Gregory & Malcolm 1981) showed that while Halliday's arguments apply statistically to the whole of a text, that within a text, as we move from one section to another, there is smaller-scale (phasal) variation in how the text constructs its meanings. Texts have internal semantic structure, which further reflects the detailed functions of each particular stage in the activity that gave rise to the text, or which the text is describing or enacting.
Halliday, along with Ruqaiya Hasan (e.g. Halliday & Hasan 1989, Hasan 1984b) and Jim Martin (1985, 1992), have since tried to work out more detailed connections between register variation and the internal structures of texts of different kinds. These kinds, or genres, also identified by Bakhtin (1953), from familiar literary ones such as sonnets and folktales (e.g. Propp 1928) to expository genres like the scientific research article (e.g. Bazerman 1988) to spoken genres such as those characteristic of the dialogue of the sales transaction (e.g. Mitchell 1975, Ventola 1987) or the dialogue of the classroom (e.g. Lemke 1990) are again all characteristic of activities rather than of groups of people as such.
Halliday's social theory of discourse suggests that our uses of language are inseparable from the social functions, the social contexts of actions and relationships in which language plays its part. Halliday suggests that language be viewed as a system of resources, a set of possible kinds of meanings that can be made, and that we then examine which kinds of meanings actually get made in the course of which human activities, by which social participants. This is what is meant by seeing language as a social semiotic, a resource to be deployed for social purposes.
This view is quite consistent with the key principles we have identified from Bakhtin. It makes it possible to identify a number of the grounds on which a community may find one utterance or text relevant for the meaning of another (that it is of the same register, or the same genre; that it was constructed in the course of the same kind of activity, etc.; cf. Lemke 1985). It also introduces an intermediate notion between the text or utterance, and the social system: the system of registers and genres in a community. Implicitly it shifts the emphasis toward seeing the fundamental elements that define the community as its system of activities or social practices, rather than viewing it directly as a system of different types of individuals.
But there is obviously one link missing: how are we to understand the differences in language-using habits between those of different ages, genders, social classes, subcultures, etc.? Halliday was greatly concerned with this question, and in the 1960s and 1970s both he and Ruqaiya Hasan collaborated with Basil Bernstein, a sociologist working in the field of education, in order to forge this missing link. Bernstein (1971, 1975) called it code, or later, semantic coding orientation. It was greatly misunderstood in its day, especially in the United States, where great efforts were being made at that time to show that all social dialects, especially those of oppressed African-Americans, were powerful resources for meaning-making, and not merely clusters of random mistakes in grammar. Bernstein tried to point out something that is now largely taken for granted: that the schools expect people to use language in certain ways, and that these are by and large the ways of the upper-middle class, putting the members of other social classes at an automatic relative disadvantage.
Bernstein argued, as has now been quite well established by the later work of Hasan (e.g. 1989b, Hasan & Cloran 1990), that the communities formed by members of different social classes learn to use language differently, so that even in what seems to be the same social activity (say, mothers questioning or scolding their children), even after we have taken register difference into account, there are further differences in the frequencies and characteristic combinations of grammatical and semantic options that are taken up by members of different social classes. Hasan has shown similar sorts of difference according to gender as well (e.g. 19..).
These are not small differences. They stand out in plots of Hasan's data so strikingly that statistical tests of their significance are hardly necessary (though of course they have been done). And these differences are not simply statistically significant, they are socially significant, as the large body of research on language in education shows (e.g. the pioneering study of Shirley Heath 1983, and the many studies done by Bernstein's research group, 1971, 1975, 1987).
Bernstein is a sociologist, and he was not interested in merely describing linguistic differences. He wanted to embed them in a more general social theory in which one could see how differences in social class position led to differences in habits of language use, which in turn tended, in the context of a society and particularly an educational system shaped by those of the more powerful classes, to assign children of the less powerful classes to jobs and lives in which they would not wield power. Bernstein, too, sought to connect discourse to larger social relationships and processes. While his model emphasizes the reproduction of social relationships rather than social change and social dynamics, it otherwise represents an impressive general synthesis (see Bernstein 1981). And here once again we find an intermediate notion, code, or semantic orientation, that serves to bridge between the event and the larger social system.
So far, all of these social theories of discourse have begun from the discourse side, that is from the text or utterance, and sought to explain its features by their social origins or functions. We turn now to two theorists who are mainly interested in the larger social system, but who have also introduced intermediate notions very similar to those of Bakhtin, Halliday, and Bernstein in order to connect that system to specific texts of discourse and action.
Foucault's Discursive Formations
Michel Foucault saw himself primarily as a historian: not as someone who sought to retell the past as it had been, but as someone who tried to describe how we today construct our continuities and discontinuities with many pasts. The texts and artifacts of the past are objects in our present-day world, and it is by way of our present-day notions of similarity and difference, continuity and discontinuity, that we construct their historical meaning in the present day, and for the present day, by construing relationships among these objects and ourselves.
For most historians, the primary objects of the past are texts, written documents surviving in various archives. Modern scholars have also learned to read painting and statuary, architecture and battlefields as texts as well. Historians, like anthropologists, are philologists; they need to find ways of reading texts even though they are not members of the communities that made these texts and in which the texts had their original meanings. Those original meanings are not recoverable; we can never know if we have reconstructed them or not. But we can still learn from them, learn from the ways in which they are different from the texts we make today. What is critical in this enterprise is how we put together different texts: which texts go together, and why, and how? A diary, a set of tax records, a chronicle, a taxonomy of diseases, a treatise on alchemy, a record of a trial for witchcraft.
Foucault sought to build a general model of how our picture of the past, of our continuities and discontinuities with it, depends critically on our sense of the possible ways in which texts can be combined. He was building, in one sense, a general theory of intertextuality for the practice of history, and so in part for the practice of social science. Of all the theorists considered here he is the one most concerned with change. He reflexively situates his own discourse inside the systems he analyzes, at least insofar as he recognizes that how a historian looks at texts is itself part of a discursive formation built over historical time out of foundations that may include those same texts. When Foucault points out the ideological functioning of some way of speaking, he usually does so because, having seen its historical continuities and discontinuities with other ways of speaking, he can no longer regard it as a natural or inevitable product of common sense necessity (e.g. Foucault 1980).
Foucault's major theoretical statement is The Archeology of Knowledge(1969), and this is usefully read in the context of his analysis of the emergence of social science discourse in the modern world (The Order of Things, 1966). Foucault's analysis of the principles of intertextuality is thoroughly postmodern (despite misunderstandings of it in the 1970s as a version of structuralism) and probably the most sophisticated possible in our time. Only its failure to engage with linguistic analyses of discourse limits its usefulness. It is not possible to know in terms of linguistic features of texts exactly how to interpret many of Foucault's theoretical principles, and while he sketches the general principles, there are no explicit examples to show us how to actually analyse the relations of specific texts. These are of course implicit in much of the rest of his work, but we have to recognize that his notion of a discursive formationcannot be equated exactly with any linguistically defined notion of a discourse formation.
For our purposes, however, this is not necessary. We are interested in how Foucault uses the notion of the discursive formation to help bridge between texts and social systems, and we can see that functionallythe discursive formation is an intermediate notion of exactly the same kind as the others we have identified. Here, for example, is Foucault's version of the principle of general intertextuality:
"At its very root the statement (enoncee) has a dispersion over an enunciative field in which it has a place and a status, which arranges for it possible relations with the past and opens up possible futures. ... There is no free, neutral, independent statement; a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, plays a role among other statements, is part of a network of statements. ... There is no statement that does not presuppose others; that is not surrounded by a field of coexistences, effects of series and succession, a distribution of functions and roles. If one can speak of a statement as such, it is because a sentence or proposition figures at a definite point, with a specific position, in an enunciative network that extends beyond it." (Foucault 1969: 99).
The enunciative field or network specifies, roughly, the rules of use of a statement in various contexts in relation to other statements. Another way of saying this is that statements tend to be used together in certain typical patterns (discursive practices) and to form systems (discursive formations) that relate statements to one another according to a variety of principles.
"A discursive practice can be defined as ... a body of anonymous historical rules, always determined in the time and space that defined a given period, and [which determines] for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function." (1969: 117).
A discursive formation for Foucault is defined by four kinds of relations among statements: those which determine what sorts of discursive objects (entities, topics, processes) the discourse can construct or talk about; those that specify who can say these things to whom in what contexts; those that define the relations of meaning among statements, including how they can be organized to form texts; and finally those that tell us what the alternative kinds of discourses are that can be formed in these ways and how they can be related to each other as being considered equivalent, incompatible, antithetical, etc.
Foucault's notion of the discursive formation is thus more powerful than any of the notions we have encountered previously because it includes the rules for how these others are to be related to one another (i.e. what kinds of heteroglossic relations can exist among these narrower notions of discourse formations).
Finally, we need to hear Foucault on discursive change:
"A change in the order of discourse does not presuppose 'new ideas', a little invention and creativity, a new mentality, but transformations in a social practice, perhaps also in neighboring practices, and their mutual articulation. I have not denied the possibility of changing discourses: I have deprived the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it." (1969: 209).
That is, discursive change is cultural change, it is systemic change. It is not the province of individual action, though it may originate in an individual event; it requires that a social community change its ways of speaking and doing.
We see that for Foucault as well as Halliday the focus is on social practices, habits of activity characteristic of a community, not on individual acts of intentionality. For Foucault, the discursive formations that tell us what people are saying and doing in a historical period are systems of doings, not of doers as such. Foucault provides a discussion of what he calls the "subject-positions" defined by a discourse formation, the social roles of the speakers of these discourses. He seems to suggest to many people that we can use the notions of discourse formations to define individual subjects insofar as they are participants in a discourse. We will return in Chapter 5 to this complex question.
For now the important point is that one can give, as Foucault does, very complex and subtle accounts of social relationships and their historical changes in terms of discourse formations. And by reading Foucault against the background of Bakhtin, Halliday, and Bernstein, we can see once again how intermediate notions of a particular kind help to connect texts or events and the social systems in which such texts can occur, do occur, and make sense.
If there is one element of this synthesis that is still rather weak, it is the problem of how to relate discourse formations seen in overview as characteristic of societies and their cultures with the actual lives of individual people who enact these discourses, and in enacting, potentially change them. Bernstein has begun to give an account of this process: how we are each socialized into the discourse patterns and habits, the coding orientations, characteristic of our social class, gender, subculture, etc. But the theorist who has made the fullest effort to provide a general theory of how people of different social categories acquire their social habits is probably Pierre Bourdieu.
Bourdieu and Discourse Habitus
By now it should be getting pretty clear just what all these intermediate notions which bridge between texts or events on the one hand and larger social systems characteristic of whole communities, on the other, have in common. They are all notions of what is typicalin a community: typical habits and patterns of discourse and action. Every text or event is unique, but it can also be seen as an instance of some kind or type of text or event that recurs in a community and is recognizable as such. Most general are what we might call activity formations, the typical doings of a community which are repeatable, repeated, and recognized as being of the same type from one instance or occurence to another. A baseball game, a train ride, writing a check, making a phone call. We could also call these action genres. Among the special cases of action genres are speech genresand written genres, but these are clearly also definable as the products of the activities that produce them. Genres are rather specific in their properties, having definite beginnings, ends, and stages along the way. Notions like register and discourse formation can be made a bit more general to handle kinds of language apart from such neat packaging, and so also can activity formations.
What is important here are the relations between text or event and formation or genre, on the one hand, and those between formations or genres and larger issues of social structure and process on the other. Every text or event takes its meaning in part from being seen in the community as an instance of one or more formations. We interpret it against the background of other instances of the same formations to see how it is distinctive, and we contrast it with instances of other formations. But different formations (codes, genres, registers, voices of heteroglossia, discursive formations) are not just different: they have systematic relations to one another, and those relations define and are defined by the larger social relationships of classes, genders, age groups, political constituencies, and significant social divisions of every kind. The model is recursive: each level is defined by its relations to the other levels in the model. So, for instance, social class is defined by the fact that not all activities in the community are equally likely to be practiced by all people. People are defined by the activities they participate in, and significant social categories of people by the intersections of groups of related activities, including the discourse practices by which we label people as members of social categories.
Models of this degree of complexity and recursiveness appear to be necessary when dealing with human social systems (see the final section of this book, "Making Trouble", and also Chapter 6 for some of the reasons why, and for a fuller discussion of how the various levels of the model integrate with one another).
A social theory which has the requisite degree of complexity (except perhaps for underplaying the role of discourse and the inherent dynamic features of the system that lead to its continual changes) is Bourdieu's (1972, 1990) theory of social habitus. Bourdieu has made some special contributions to social models. One of these is his efforts to link social abstractions like the habits, attitudes, preferences, dispositions, and actions characteristic of a social class, gender, age group, etc., to the actual life-trajectories of bodily persons.
Bourdieu has noticed, as have many others trained as he was in social anthropology, that members of different cultures not only talk differently (using different languages, discourse formations, coding orientations), but they even walkdifferently. They carry themselves differently, with a body hexisdistinctive to their culture (and gender, and age group, etc.). This suggested to Bourdieu that cultural and subcultural dispositions of all kinds are literally embodiedin people. Bourdieu here rejects the great Cartesian split which seems so clearly to function ideologically in the discourses of the human sciences. He takes something usually thought of as belonging to the domain of "mind": how we perceive things, how we feel about them and react to them, our habits and preferences and attitudes and dispositions to action (including to discourse) and makes them matters of body. By the same move, he renders unnecessary the dichotomy between matters characteristic of groups, communities, social categories like gender and age, etc. and matters characteristic of individuals. He speaks of culture as directly embodied in persons. Persons with such dispositions to action embodied in them tend to act in ways that reinforce these dispositions, or in many cases complementary dispositions, in others. Thus social relationships also become embodied. Cultural habitus for Bourdieu is an embodied system of sociologically structured and structuring dispositions.
We acquire these dispositions in the course of living our lives, interacting with the social and material (especially the human- made) environment, which consists of other people acting out of these dispositions and the material effects of such actions in the world. We do not all acquire the same dispositions of course, for we live different lives, have different characteristic experiences, participate in different activities with different frequencies, and occupy different roles in the activities in which we do participate. The dispositions of the habitus are more alike for those who lead more similar lives, and progressively become less alike for those who typically engage in different roles and different activities. Habitus can be as specific as the dispositions acquired by a trained athlete or dancer, dispositions specific to their sport or their style of dance training. Or it can be as general as the dispositions that distinguish males and females, or workers and managers.
Bourdieu's other special contribution is his emphasis on the distinction between synoptic and participatory views of human activity. Synoptic views stand outside of the process of enactment of an activity, generally describing it after it is finished, or as an ideal formula that applies to the typical case. Participatory views (I also use the term dynamicview in this sense) look at human action from the viewpoint, not of an outside observer, but of a participant, for whom every aspect of the on-going action is contingent, dependent on the next move, the next response or reaction, and so on the various strategies by which we get through the activity, bringing it to some sort of, usually conventional, conclusion. The notion of habitus or embodied cultural disposition also links these two perspectives together. The habitus is what shapes our responses to the myriad unpredictable contingencies of the moment, and shapes them in such a way that, on the whole, when the synoptic accounts are totaled up, things have turned out in the way typical of goings-on in our community. The habitus mediates between a synoptic view of activity formations characteristic of a community and a dynamic view of the processes by which these activities are actually enacted on specific occasions by human actors.
We should not be surprised then that Bourdieu has extended Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia in much the way that I have in my own work (cf. Bourdieu 1991, Lemke 1988c and next chapter). He regards the social relationships among discourse voices as being structured by, and in turn contributing to the structuring of, the social relationships of power among different positions in the social field (defined by social class, by age, by gender, etc.).
Bourdieu's basic metaphor for this is an economic one. He construes an economics of linguistic transactions in which utterances or discourses are the products which producers offer on a market to potential consumers. Each producer, by virtue of membership in a subcommunity or position in the larger web of social relations (what I will sometimes call a casteor subcaste), has some linguistic habitus, some embodied system of dispositions to speak in a particular way. The link to material embodiment is most evident in the case of social "accent" or norms of pronunciation, and from there to social dialects (including lexicon and grammar), semantic coding orientations (cf. Bernstein and Hasan references above), and even genres and discourse formations, is a reasonable progression.
So a speaker speaks partly in ways typical of his or her social position and caste membership: in accent, in grammar and lexis, in semantic dispositions, and in likelihood of using particular genres and registers to produce discourses of recognizable types with definite viewpoints on their subjects. Bourdieu also recognizes that this process of discourse production maps forms and contents onto one another, so that in the finished product we can no longer distinguish them. In fact, in many cases there are no intertexts, no alternatives available in which we could see the same content in a different form, or vice versa, since we cannot in general find just any social or political point-of-view combined with any statement about the world.
Bourdieu provides us with a way of connecting the relations among the contents and viewpoints of various discourse formations, or social voices of heteroglossia, with the relations among the social positions of their authors. Since his view of linguistic habitus includes, as it should, interpretive, or consumer, dispositions toward discourse as well as producer dispositions, he can also show us that we all evaluatethe worth of discourses, and even of utterances, from our own social viewpoints. These evaluations are part of the meaning a linguistic act or text has for us, a critical part of its/our textual politics. We evaluate some accents as better or more prestigious than others, some dialects as better, some realizations of the norms of a discourse type as better. In doing so, we hear and read (and ourselves produce) language always against the social background of these evaluations.
While evaluations may differ from one caste to another in a society, there are generally dominantnorms of evaluation, which are those of the dominant caste, and which are to some extent accepted as natural by members of other castes. In any case, everyone knows up to a point what these dominant norms are and speaks and evaluates at least in relation to them if not always strictly according to them. They are facts of social life. And they are what they are because of the overall power of the dominant caste to maintain their dominance in discourse as in all else.
Bourdieu takes this so much for granted, referring only to the "field of power," as the social background for these relations among discourses and their evaluations, that we do not seem to get in most of his work any very explicit grounding of textual politics in the politics of coercive power. Bourdieu's view of power is multiplex: there is economic power, symbolic power of many kinds, social influence -- each grounded in its own sort of capital and in caste-specific dispositions to acquire and use that capital. But like most of us, Bourdieu looks rather little at the most primitive forms of capital: physical strength, weapons and the dispositions to use them to control the behavior of others. Because there are so many other ways in which social control of behavior is exercised in modern society, we prefer to overlook the most basic one, and so we may miss the important ways in which coercive power grounds the efficacy of all other forms of power, and the role of bodily materiality in this as well.
Bourdieu's sociology seems generally well suited to help us bridge from particular texts and events to larger macrosocial structural relations, particularly from the intermediate formations themselves (of which Bourdieu has relatively little to say) to, on the one hand, the materiality of situations and human participants (by way of the embodied dispositions of the caste-specific habitus), and on the other, the relationships of social power among significant social groups. But it is inevitable, in this picture of the relationships between discourses and the social positions of their authors, that Bourdieu's discourse also is limited by his social position. I have already suggested that as an upper-middle class intellectual, he may be overinclined to emphasize the role of symbolic capital and less disposed to focus on that of coercive power.
Whether it can be laid to his own social positioning or not, we should also be aware that Bourdieu's view of social processes, however dynamically he sees the constitution of social structure, remains basically a static view. He is not concerned primarily with longterm historical change, or indeed with radical and revolutionary change. It is indeed hard to imagine anything but the most gradual and piecemeal changes in social life as Bourdieu describes its basic mechanisms. I believe as well that his discourse embodies a masculinist disposition, which, while very sensitive to the general social domination of females by males, still tends to see all of social life as a competitive struggle for profit and distinction in a way particularly characteristic of masculinist perspectives in our culture (see also Lemke 1993c). And it is not surprising either that little attention is given to the viewpoints on social life of the very young or the very old, currently still the most invisible of the basic biases of our intellectual culture.
The social theories of discourse presented in this chapter fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. They develop essentially similar approaches to the roles of intertextuality, cultural formations, and the web of social relationships in the discursive construction of meaning. Taken together, they also point to additional factors which need to be better theorized: the materiality of meaning-making processes, the discursive construction of individuality and subjectivity, the role of coercive power in the social order, the politics of our own theories. We will return to these basic issues in later chapters. It is time now to move on to some specific texts: to analyze how they mobilize the resources of language and discourse to accomplish social, and very distinctly political, ends.