Discourse - Sara Mills

"Dialogue is the primary condition of discourse; all speech and writing is social." - Macdonnell in Mills (9)

"Ideological struggle is at the heart of discourse." - Pecheux in Mills (12)

Mills, Sara. Discourse: the New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Mills traces the variety of approaches different disciplines have taken toward discourse over time, especially in terms of definitions and the affordances these provide.  She pays particular attention to the contributions of Michel Foucault and makes a distinction between discourse theory and discourse analysis.  She particularly notes approaches from cultural/critical theory, linguistics, and social psychology (which she presents as a fusion of the first two).  From my own synthesis of her collected information, discourse(s) shape our sense of reality, is/are multiple, relate to language in context and dispersed agency, and are authorized by and result in unequal power structures.

She shows ways that discourse and ideological approaches can inform each other as well as underlying conflicts between the two (ideological approaches like Marxism having a utopian trajectory while discourse is more about tracing) and uses this to identify discourse's contributions to both feminist and colonialist/post-colonialist ideologies.  For feminism, discourse allows for individual agency other than simply a victim position for women under a vague patriarchal power discrepancy although it could move feminists away from a preoccupation with subjectivity and subjection.  For post-colonialism, discourse helps to highlight the "systematic nature of representations," and post-colonial theory also critiques a homogenous view of colonial texts to acknowledge different interpretations and resistance to these texts.

episteme: the sets of discursive structures as a whole within which a culture formulates its ideas (51)

#Discourse #Empire #Critical

Words and Stones - Daniel Lefkowitz

"Unicorns are powerful social symbols, even if we can never pet them" (Lefkowitz 114).

Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and Stones: The Politics of Language and Identity in Israel. New York: Oxford, 2004.

Lefkowitz represents historical recursiveness in discourse as a spiral that accounts for both hegemonic and resistant practices.  With this spiral, he accounts for three important aspects of sociolinguistic symbols on pg. 6:

• The meaning of a symbol may change over time.
• The meaning of a symbol may differ for various socially positioned speakers.
• The meaning of a symbol at any particular time recalls earlier and differently positioned meanings.

Through his ethnographic study drawing on sociolinguistics, interpretive anthropology, and symbolic interactionism, he shows how three main social groups "compete for the emergent Israeli identity" and identifies these groups as Palestinian Arabs, Mizrahim, and Ashkenazim (16).  He also makes an important distinction between identity and discourses of identity on pg. 88:

• identity: process - abstract, provisional, internal, and individual
• discourses of identity: project - concrete, durable, overt, public

In terms of social identity, language has two key contributions he identifies on pg. 12:

• Speakers use language to create - as well as reflect - their social identities.
• Language-use constitutes social action, which has material consequences for social relations.

By operating within a discursive frame of national instead of class-based (against national ideology) or racial (taboo) discourse, Palestinian Israelis as well as differences between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews become invisible. He uses Bauman & Briggs to talk about "text" as dynamic process on pg. 98:

• recontextualization: performing a canonical text (script) in social interaction; dialogical application
• entextualization: textualizing unscripted performance through semiotic techniques; structuring symbols
• narrative: culturally valued ways of relating objective events; embedding speech in cultural discourses, pragmatic interaction, and affective relations

This book deals with negotiation of language and identity in ways that are complimentary to translingual ideologies, but brings an interdisciplinary approach from Anthropology.  The recognition of symbolic competition and power indexing connects to Voloshinov's ideas of the "multi-accented sign."  He also draws on Geertz, Bourdieu, Jakobsen, Bakhtin, Anderson among others to show how discourse ethnography reveals status hierarchies.  Interestingly, he also discusses positionality of the researcher and participants, especially for conducting interviews using national assistants as a modification of Labov's sociolinguistic interview.

 Figure 1.1 "The Discourse Spiral" from this book on pg. 6 with a flattened third dimension of social position

Figure 3.1 "The Space of Israeli Identity" from this book on pg. 89 showing the hierarchy of indexed power as identities are structured discursively

#language #negotiation #identity #empire #discourse #researchmethods #semiotics #narrative

Translingual Practice - Suresh Canagarajah

image of lavendar ink on water by Luigi Crespo from Frederick, MD, USA (Mont Blanc Lavender on Water) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Canagarajah, Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Canagarajah privileges practices and processes over products, form, and function (since the first set of terms can encompass the second).  He sees communicative participants using all their available resources, including ecological, contextual, social, and semiotic.  They use these resources to co-construct and collaborate a successful communicative event.  These practices are social, emergent, and take place in contact zones.

While acknowledging contributions of different approaches to English such as World Englishes, English as an International Language (EIL), and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), he sees translingual practices as emergent from strategies and examples he specifically mentions are accommodation, clarification, glossing, and creating shared indexicals (73).  Processes that motivate and necessitate these strategies and practices are contact, mobility, and sedimentation.

His use of "ecological" seems to map onto - or at least relate strongly - to Pennycook's idea of "local" and practice in his book Language as a Local Practice as well as Butler's ideas of performativity.  

 #translingal #semiotic #social #English #empire