Television Discourse and Governmentality: Considering Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall as Citizen Projects
by Michael Thorn
Cineaction #82/83 (Hosted on Free Library)
...
This analysis will use a Foucauldian governmental approach that borrows from political economy. A governmental approach is a context-specific approach that analyzes cultural institutions, products, and discourses in terms of tactics and strategies of influence and control where power and knowledge work together to regulate, manage, problematize, and maintain and/or change behaviour and thought. (3) This approach assumes that "discourses structure action, belief and conduct" (4) and it has been applied to both film and television. (5) It also assumes that discourses compete with each other as "wills to knowledge" and "wills to power" in what Foucault calls "truth games." (6) Understood in this way, discourse is both more and less than ideological. That is, this approach understands that tactics and strategies can be resisted, rejected, and contested both by those addressed and by others seeking to address the same audience. As Foucault says, "[t]he power relationship and freedom's refusal to submit cannot ... be separated." (7) However, this approach also understands that the types and forms of knowledge and power used to underlie the "truth" of any particular discourse will still have an impact on that text's ability to maintain, control, or change thought. A governmental analysis of discourse in film, television, and new media, then, is not so much concerned with how the spectator is hailed to accept as true, uncritically, a certain ideology, or, alternatively, how a certain discourse can be deconstructed to reveal its inherent contradictions, or even how a multiplicity of spectator positions can frame a text in different ways; rather, this approach is concerned with the methods, practices, and knowledges used to try to persuade spectators to accept as valid particular perspectives--perspectives seeking to maintain, control, or change enough thought about an issue or problem so as to have an impact on that problem. As such, this approach should also work to uncover the political, economic, and institutional influences reinforcing these discursive tactics and strategies. This is why the discipline of political economy is perfectly suited to dovetail with a governmental analysis. According to Vincent Mosco, political economy is the study of "the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources." (8) How discourses, especially media discourses, are constituted politically and economically prior to and during distribution and consumption have definite effects on their governmental influence. For Mosco, the key entry point for political economy is the process of commodification, but this process must also be understood in relation to processes of spatialization and structuration. (9) While this paper does refer to the profit-driven commercialization of Canadian television, a process of commodification, and also to the relationship between the regional politics of Vancouver and the national politics of Canada, a spaclalized relationship, the political economic emphasis in this paper will be on how the discourse of the Da Vinci series participates in structuring and promoting certain kinds of social relations, particularly power relations; in this case, as they pertain to the relationship between certain governmental institutions (the police and coroner's office) and certain vulnerable populations in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (drug users and sex-trade workers). Of course, for Foucault, technologies of power intersect with technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, and technologies of the self. (10) As such, the Foucauldian emphasis here will be on how the narrative sign system of the show is constituted with the power to influence and change thought and action (or the self) on the issue of harm-reduction through productive influences. In other words, this paper will use as its entry point that intersection where the show's explicit textual meaning meets both its socio-political context and (some of) the creative elements of its production. 1 am using this as my entry point to highlight the show's obvious political agenda, which seems to operate above and beyond any desire of the show's producers to generate profit.
To Read the Entire Essay
Showing posts with label Michel Foucault. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michel Foucault. Show all posts
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg: Market Mysticism
Market mysticism
Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg
Eurozine
Faith in the "efficient markets hypothesis" is largely to blame for the massive deregulation of the late 1990s and early 2000s that made the crisis more likely, if not inevitable. Two economists excoriate the ideology of self-regulating markets and its pseudo-scientific foundations.
...
What is worse, the false concept of rationality on which mainstream economic theory is based, also underpins mistaken conclusions about the proper extent of market regulation. As a result, contemporary economic models produce two extreme positions: exclusion of any active role for the state or radical state interventionism.
As Michel Foucault convincingly showed, language is power. Aware of this, the neo-classical economists carried out a real coup d'état. They created a para-scientific jargon that helped them to direct social choices in a very dangerous and unproductive direction. The premises that form the basis of their models became in great part inscrutable to anyone lacking a PhD in economics, and debate was infused with terms that mean one thing to the uninitiated and quite another to economists.
The concept of rationality forms the foundation of this discourse. In everyday language, rationality means common sense or reasonableness. By contrast, for economists, a "rational individual" is not merely reasonable; he or she is someone who behaves in accord with a mathematical model of individual decision-making that economists have agreed to call "rational". The centrepiece of this standard of rationality, the so-called "Rational Expectations Hypothesis" (REH), presumes that economists can exactly model how rational individuals comprehend the future. The unreasonableness of this standard helps explain why macroeconomists and finance theorists find it so hard to account for large swings in market outcomes.
Indeed, economists' incoherent premises have led them to embrace absurd conclusions – for example, that unfettered financial markets set asset prices nearly perfectly at their "true" fundamental value. If so, the state should drastically curtail its supervision of the financial system. Unfortunately, many officials worldwide came to believe this claim, known as the "efficient markets hypothesis," resulting in the massive deregulation of the late 1990s and early 2000s that made the crisis more likely, if not inevitable.
In recent years, another school of thought, behavioural economics, has uncovered mountains of evidence that market participants do not act as conventional economists would predict "rational individuals" to behave. But, instead of jettisoning the bogus standard of rationality underlying those predictions, they interpret their empirical findings to mean that many market participants are irrational, prone to emotion, or ignore economic fundamentals for other reasons.
The behavioural view suggests that large swings in asset prices serve no useful social function. If the state could somehow eliminate them through massive intervention, or ban irrational players by imposing strict regulatory measures, the "rational" players could reassert their control and markets would return to their normal state of setting prices at their "true" values.
This is implausible, because an exact model of rational decision-making is beyond the capacity of economists – or anyone else – to formulate. Once economists recognize that they cannot explain exactly how reasonable individuals make decisions and how market outcomes unfold over time, we will no longer be stuck with two polar extremes concerning the relative roles of the market and the state.
An alternative theory of markets is needed, and its basis should be the fact that participants must cope with ever-imperfect knowledge about the fundamentals of economic change. This obvious feature of capitalism is completely ignored by the dominant market models, though it is the main explanation for asset-price fluctuations in market-based economies.
Such an alternative approach also leads to a new way of thinking about the respective roles of the state and financial markets. So long as price fluctuations remain within reasonable bounds, the state should limit its involvement to ensuring transparency, curbing monopolistic behaviour, and eliminating market failures. But when price fluctuations become excessive, as they did in the run-up to the recent crisis, the state can implement measures to limit their amplitude (though it always has a greater problem coping with imperfect knowledge than the market does).
A combination of passive and active roles for the state along these lines would leave markets to allocate capital while holding out the possibility of reducing the social costs that arise when asset-price swings continue for too long and then end, as they inevitably do, in sharp reversals.
To Read the Entire Essay
Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg
Eurozine
Faith in the "efficient markets hypothesis" is largely to blame for the massive deregulation of the late 1990s and early 2000s that made the crisis more likely, if not inevitable. Two economists excoriate the ideology of self-regulating markets and its pseudo-scientific foundations.
...
What is worse, the false concept of rationality on which mainstream economic theory is based, also underpins mistaken conclusions about the proper extent of market regulation. As a result, contemporary economic models produce two extreme positions: exclusion of any active role for the state or radical state interventionism.
As Michel Foucault convincingly showed, language is power. Aware of this, the neo-classical economists carried out a real coup d'état. They created a para-scientific jargon that helped them to direct social choices in a very dangerous and unproductive direction. The premises that form the basis of their models became in great part inscrutable to anyone lacking a PhD in economics, and debate was infused with terms that mean one thing to the uninitiated and quite another to economists.
The concept of rationality forms the foundation of this discourse. In everyday language, rationality means common sense or reasonableness. By contrast, for economists, a "rational individual" is not merely reasonable; he or she is someone who behaves in accord with a mathematical model of individual decision-making that economists have agreed to call "rational". The centrepiece of this standard of rationality, the so-called "Rational Expectations Hypothesis" (REH), presumes that economists can exactly model how rational individuals comprehend the future. The unreasonableness of this standard helps explain why macroeconomists and finance theorists find it so hard to account for large swings in market outcomes.
Indeed, economists' incoherent premises have led them to embrace absurd conclusions – for example, that unfettered financial markets set asset prices nearly perfectly at their "true" fundamental value. If so, the state should drastically curtail its supervision of the financial system. Unfortunately, many officials worldwide came to believe this claim, known as the "efficient markets hypothesis," resulting in the massive deregulation of the late 1990s and early 2000s that made the crisis more likely, if not inevitable.
In recent years, another school of thought, behavioural economics, has uncovered mountains of evidence that market participants do not act as conventional economists would predict "rational individuals" to behave. But, instead of jettisoning the bogus standard of rationality underlying those predictions, they interpret their empirical findings to mean that many market participants are irrational, prone to emotion, or ignore economic fundamentals for other reasons.
The behavioural view suggests that large swings in asset prices serve no useful social function. If the state could somehow eliminate them through massive intervention, or ban irrational players by imposing strict regulatory measures, the "rational" players could reassert their control and markets would return to their normal state of setting prices at their "true" values.
This is implausible, because an exact model of rational decision-making is beyond the capacity of economists – or anyone else – to formulate. Once economists recognize that they cannot explain exactly how reasonable individuals make decisions and how market outcomes unfold over time, we will no longer be stuck with two polar extremes concerning the relative roles of the market and the state.
An alternative theory of markets is needed, and its basis should be the fact that participants must cope with ever-imperfect knowledge about the fundamentals of economic change. This obvious feature of capitalism is completely ignored by the dominant market models, though it is the main explanation for asset-price fluctuations in market-based economies.
Such an alternative approach also leads to a new way of thinking about the respective roles of the state and financial markets. So long as price fluctuations remain within reasonable bounds, the state should limit its involvement to ensuring transparency, curbing monopolistic behaviour, and eliminating market failures. But when price fluctuations become excessive, as they did in the run-up to the recent crisis, the state can implement measures to limit their amplitude (though it always has a greater problem coping with imperfect knowledge than the market does).
A combination of passive and active roles for the state along these lines would leave markets to allocate capital while holding out the possibility of reducing the social costs that arise when asset-price swings continue for too long and then end, as they inevitably do, in sharp reversals.
To Read the Entire Essay
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Evangelos Tziallas: Torture porn and surveillance culture
Torture porn and surveillance culture
by Evangelos Tziallas
Jump Cut
Surveillance is everywhere, and its social ubiquity has led to it being a common element or mode of representation in contemporary moving image culture. As Thomas Levin has argued,
“By the 1990s…cinematic narration could be said, in many cases, to have effectively become synonymous with surveillant enunciation as such.”[1][open endnotes in new window]
Surveillance has become a mode of visual production, as in reality television shows like Big Brother (US, 2001) or films like Timecode (2000); it has become a narrative and thematic element, as in Caché (2005), Disturbia (2007) The Borne Ultimatum (2007); and sometime it serves as both a mode of production and narrative theme, as in The Conversation (1974), Sliver (1993), The Truman Show (1998), or the British sitcom Peep Show. When surveillance functions as both mode of production and major script element, as Levin puts it,
“It is this ambiguity—between surveillance as narrative subject, i.e. as thematic concern, and surveillance as the very condition or structure of narration itself—that will become increasingly characteristic of the cinema of the 1990s.”[2]
The prevalence of surveillance in contemporary media is now so vast that, for the purpose of this paper, I would like to focus on a small group of films that exemplify contemporary discourses on surveillance in a specific way. This group of films is collectively known as “torture porn.”
The label “torture porn” refers to a loose association of feature fiction films featuring scenes of extreme violence and torture. David Edelstein coined the phrase in his 2006 New York Magazine article as he quickly surveyed a common trend of violent representations in popular cinema. The catchy term became a trendy buzzword and now torture porn is considered a horror sub-genre in its own right.[3] Although I will in part investigate torture porn as a cinematic sub-genre, my goal is to demonstrate the centrality of surveillance in these films as shaping narrative elements, modes of presentation, and iconographic motifs in ways that convey deep anxieties about the alteration of “the gaze.”
Surveillance in torture porn allegorizes larger cultural and political trends in panoptic (the few watching the many) and synoptic (the many watching the few) subjectivities. Surveillance metonymically encompasses looking and the complex and ambivalent nature of looking and being looked at, and these elements of human social life are currently undergoing radical transformation due to technological advancements spurring on a “culture of surveillance,” or “surveillance culture.” As Nicholas Mirzoeff has noted,
“Surveillance” and the larger category, “image,” are merging together into surveillant images. If these two methods of representation have united, then this union requires us to investigate how the act of looking follows this social and technological change and what the ramifications of this merged, or altered, cultural gaze are. Looking is biological; gazing is cultural. As culture evolves, so too does the gaze.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Evangelos Tziallas
Jump Cut
Surveillance is everywhere, and its social ubiquity has led to it being a common element or mode of representation in contemporary moving image culture. As Thomas Levin has argued,
“By the 1990s…cinematic narration could be said, in many cases, to have effectively become synonymous with surveillant enunciation as such.”[1][open endnotes in new window]
Surveillance has become a mode of visual production, as in reality television shows like Big Brother (US, 2001) or films like Timecode (2000); it has become a narrative and thematic element, as in Caché (2005), Disturbia (2007) The Borne Ultimatum (2007); and sometime it serves as both a mode of production and narrative theme, as in The Conversation (1974), Sliver (1993), The Truman Show (1998), or the British sitcom Peep Show. When surveillance functions as both mode of production and major script element, as Levin puts it,
“It is this ambiguity—between surveillance as narrative subject, i.e. as thematic concern, and surveillance as the very condition or structure of narration itself—that will become increasingly characteristic of the cinema of the 1990s.”[2]
The prevalence of surveillance in contemporary media is now so vast that, for the purpose of this paper, I would like to focus on a small group of films that exemplify contemporary discourses on surveillance in a specific way. This group of films is collectively known as “torture porn.”
The label “torture porn” refers to a loose association of feature fiction films featuring scenes of extreme violence and torture. David Edelstein coined the phrase in his 2006 New York Magazine article as he quickly surveyed a common trend of violent representations in popular cinema. The catchy term became a trendy buzzword and now torture porn is considered a horror sub-genre in its own right.[3] Although I will in part investigate torture porn as a cinematic sub-genre, my goal is to demonstrate the centrality of surveillance in these films as shaping narrative elements, modes of presentation, and iconographic motifs in ways that convey deep anxieties about the alteration of “the gaze.”
Surveillance in torture porn allegorizes larger cultural and political trends in panoptic (the few watching the many) and synoptic (the many watching the few) subjectivities. Surveillance metonymically encompasses looking and the complex and ambivalent nature of looking and being looked at, and these elements of human social life are currently undergoing radical transformation due to technological advancements spurring on a “culture of surveillance,” or “surveillance culture.” As Nicholas Mirzoeff has noted,
“Since the 1970s, one of the striking phenomena that have come to make visual culture seem a vital topic has been the convergence of spectacle and surveillance.”[4]
“Surveillance” and the larger category, “image,” are merging together into surveillant images. If these two methods of representation have united, then this union requires us to investigate how the act of looking follows this social and technological change and what the ramifications of this merged, or altered, cultural gaze are. Looking is biological; gazing is cultural. As culture evolves, so too does the gaze.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
True Literacy
(Reflection/compilation by Michael Dean Benton)
Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.
According to H.L. Goodall our "textual positions”--“language choices you make to represent what you see”--the selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs... also decisions of use or not using, humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors, provide clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it. This writing is a sign of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not).
Goodall, H.L. Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Furthermore, these words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts.
Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt in their essay Intoxicated Midnight and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor as Poet state that:
As these words become weighted down with multiple meanings a paradoxical effect take place that causes language-users to assume that these words are stable in their meaning and these assumptions can easily lead to misunderstandings or manipulation:
Related Quotes:
In any case, I consider it to be an urgent task to disengage from concepts that are being deadened by routine use the meaning that they regain both from a re-examination of their history and from a reflexion on their subjective foundations.
That, no doubt, is the teacher’s prime function—the function from which all others proceed, and the one in which the price of experience is best inscribed. If this function is neglected, meaning is obscured in an action whose effects are entirely dependent on meaning, and the rules of psychoanalytic technique, by being reduced to mere recipes, rob the analytic experience of any status as knowledge and even of any criterion of reality. (Lacan, 33)
Burke’s four-part methodology—which he calls indexing—is designed to permit one to locate, describe, analyze, and interpret the four kinds of structure one finds in verbal works. These are structures of identifications, or what goes with what; structures of opposition and polarization, or what versus what; structures of progression, or what follows what; and structures of transformation, or what becomes what. (Rueckert, 235)
True literacy means examining one’s society, not simply manipulating surface features of text. (Schilb, 187)
[The "discourse city" would be] a new logic of ‘collaboration’ … [that] would celebrate four qualities of urban societies: it would allow for differentiation without exclusion; appreciate variety; encourage erotic attraction to novel, strange, and surprising encounters; and value publicity in public spaces … where people stand and sit together, interact or mingle or simply witness one another without becoming a unified community of ‘shared final ends’ (Miller, 285, 299)
Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and power they bring with them. (Foucault, 1972: 46)
Relations—thinking about our particular situation in the world map out the various relations that you interact through on a regular basis.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming. (Lacan, 86)
What [was] ignored was the possibility that we live in multiple and fragmentary worlds, worlds that overlap, compete, and transform themselves continuously, worlds provided by family, ethnic community, neighborhood, profession, political affiliation, and so on. A more accurate portrayal of the modern condition, and perhaps of the postmodern and premodern conditions as well, would have emphasized the way identity is shaped by the voices of these multiple worlds in which we live, each of us an unstable, occasionally harmonious but more often cacophonous chorus of these voices or—to return to the spatial metaphor—a mosaic or quilt, made up of nits and pieces of past identities that were themselves assemblages of fragments. (Halloran, 114)
[The] American “individual,” rather than being an adventurer, is in reality most often a man or woman whose circle of reality is drawn no larger than family and friends. The individual has little interest, indeed, little energy, outside that circle. The American individual is a passive person, and monotonous space is what a society of passive individuals builds for itself. A bland environment assures people that nothing disturbing or demanding is happening ‘out there.’ You build neutrality in order to legitimate withdrawal. (Sennett, 65)
The expression and site of ideas [Foucault] calls discourse, is for him an active and dialogic, rather than a passive and monologic, process. Any discourse at any given moment in time is structured as much by the assumptions about what constitutes it as a discourse as by the boundaries of language itself. Discourse in a Foucauldian sense, then, combines linguistic utterance, whether spoken or written, with the underlying non-linguistic structures—such as the cultural, social and economic—through which utterances are realized or suppressed. Within education, for example, institutional practices control the access of individuals to various kinds of pedagogic discourse. (Clark, 4)
Clark, Urszula. War Words: Language, History and the Disciplining of English. NY: Esevier, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. translated from the French by A.M. Sheridan Smith. NY: Harper & Row, 1972.
Halloran, Michael S. “Further Thoughts on the End of Rhetoric.” Defining the New Rhetorics. ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993: 109-19.
Lacan, Jacques. “Function and Field of Language.” Ecrits. NY: W.W. Norton, 1977: 30-113.
Miller, Susan. “New Discourse City: An Alternative Model For Collaboration.” Writing With: New Directions in Collaborative Teaching, Learning, and Research. ed. Sally Barr Reagan, et al. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994: 284-99.
Rueckert, William H. Encounters With Kenneth Burke. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.
Schilb, John. “Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition.” Contending With Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. NY: MLA, 1991: 173-188.
Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. NY: Norton, 1990.
Words/concepts are defined through the context of their usage and their relation to/interaction with other words/concepts.
According to H.L. Goodall our "textual positions”--“language choices you make to represent what you see”--the selection and arrangement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs... also decisions of use or not using, humor, sarcasm, irony, and inventive analogies/metaphors, provide clues to the way in which you “see” the world and how you act in it. This writing is a sign of what you have lived through (experiences) and helps others to relate to you and your positions (or not).
Goodall, H.L. Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
Furthermore, these words/concepts go through a process of social accretion in which the more they are used the more meanings attach themselves to our usage of these words/concepts.
Allan Irving and Ken Moffatt in their essay Intoxicated Midnight and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor as Poet state that:
Dialogue in Bakhtin's view is more than just two people talking; the more a word is used in our speech the more contexts and nuances it gathers and the word's meanings proliferate with each encounter. Our utterances (another of Bakhtin's words) do not forget but rather carry fragments from all our previous speech acts as well as the significance from the current context and this includes even forms of intonation. All utterances are double-voiced, bringing meanings with them, perhaps trailing them, but spoken into the here and now into the ongoing dialogues of our lives. "Every word," Bakhtin wrote, "gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life."
As these words become weighted down with multiple meanings a paradoxical effect take place that causes language-users to assume that these words are stable in their meaning and these assumptions can easily lead to misunderstandings or manipulation:
Words are used as signs, as stand-ins, arbitrary and temporary, even as language reflects (and informs) the shifting values of the peoples whose minds it inhabits and glides through. We have faith in "meaning" the way we might believe in wolverines--putting trust in the occasional reports of others or on the authority of once seeing a pelt. But it is sometimes worth tracking these tricksters back (Snyder, 8)
Snyder, Gary. "The Etiquette of Freedom." The Practice of the Wild. NY: North Point Press, 1990: 3-24.
Related Quotes:
In any case, I consider it to be an urgent task to disengage from concepts that are being deadened by routine use the meaning that they regain both from a re-examination of their history and from a reflexion on their subjective foundations.
That, no doubt, is the teacher’s prime function—the function from which all others proceed, and the one in which the price of experience is best inscribed. If this function is neglected, meaning is obscured in an action whose effects are entirely dependent on meaning, and the rules of psychoanalytic technique, by being reduced to mere recipes, rob the analytic experience of any status as knowledge and even of any criterion of reality. (Lacan, 33)
Burke’s four-part methodology—which he calls indexing—is designed to permit one to locate, describe, analyze, and interpret the four kinds of structure one finds in verbal works. These are structures of identifications, or what goes with what; structures of opposition and polarization, or what versus what; structures of progression, or what follows what; and structures of transformation, or what becomes what. (Rueckert, 235)
True literacy means examining one’s society, not simply manipulating surface features of text. (Schilb, 187)
[The "discourse city" would be] a new logic of ‘collaboration’ … [that] would celebrate four qualities of urban societies: it would allow for differentiation without exclusion; appreciate variety; encourage erotic attraction to novel, strange, and surprising encounters; and value publicity in public spaces … where people stand and sit together, interact or mingle or simply witness one another without becoming a unified community of ‘shared final ends’ (Miller, 285, 299)
Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and power they bring with them. (Foucault, 1972: 46)
Relations—thinking about our particular situation in the world map out the various relations that you interact through on a regular basis.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming. (Lacan, 86)
What [was] ignored was the possibility that we live in multiple and fragmentary worlds, worlds that overlap, compete, and transform themselves continuously, worlds provided by family, ethnic community, neighborhood, profession, political affiliation, and so on. A more accurate portrayal of the modern condition, and perhaps of the postmodern and premodern conditions as well, would have emphasized the way identity is shaped by the voices of these multiple worlds in which we live, each of us an unstable, occasionally harmonious but more often cacophonous chorus of these voices or—to return to the spatial metaphor—a mosaic or quilt, made up of nits and pieces of past identities that were themselves assemblages of fragments. (Halloran, 114)
[The] American “individual,” rather than being an adventurer, is in reality most often a man or woman whose circle of reality is drawn no larger than family and friends. The individual has little interest, indeed, little energy, outside that circle. The American individual is a passive person, and monotonous space is what a society of passive individuals builds for itself. A bland environment assures people that nothing disturbing or demanding is happening ‘out there.’ You build neutrality in order to legitimate withdrawal. (Sennett, 65)
The expression and site of ideas [Foucault] calls discourse, is for him an active and dialogic, rather than a passive and monologic, process. Any discourse at any given moment in time is structured as much by the assumptions about what constitutes it as a discourse as by the boundaries of language itself. Discourse in a Foucauldian sense, then, combines linguistic utterance, whether spoken or written, with the underlying non-linguistic structures—such as the cultural, social and economic—through which utterances are realized or suppressed. Within education, for example, institutional practices control the access of individuals to various kinds of pedagogic discourse. (Clark, 4)
Clark, Urszula. War Words: Language, History and the Disciplining of English. NY: Esevier, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. translated from the French by A.M. Sheridan Smith. NY: Harper & Row, 1972.
Halloran, Michael S. “Further Thoughts on the End of Rhetoric.” Defining the New Rhetorics. ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993: 109-19.
Lacan, Jacques. “Function and Field of Language.” Ecrits. NY: W.W. Norton, 1977: 30-113.
Miller, Susan. “New Discourse City: An Alternative Model For Collaboration.” Writing With: New Directions in Collaborative Teaching, Learning, and Research. ed. Sally Barr Reagan, et al. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994: 284-99.
Rueckert, William H. Encounters With Kenneth Burke. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.
Schilb, John. “Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition.” Contending With Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. NY: MLA, 1991: 173-188.
Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. NY: Norton, 1990.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Urszula Clark: War Words -- Language, History and the Disciplining of English
Clark, Urszula. War Words: Language, History and the Disciplining of English. NY: Elsevier, 2001.
Foucault does not deny that tradition and continuity act as forces of influence upon an idea, but rather that they are not enough in themselves to act as significant forces in creating change. The expression and site of ideas he calls discourse, is for him an active and dialogic, rather than a passive and monologic, process. Any discourse at any given moment in time is structured as much by the assumptions about what constitutes it as a discourse as by the boundaries of language itself. Discourse in a Foucaudian sense, then, combines linguistic utterance, whether spoken or written, with the underlying non-linguistic structures—such as the cultural, social and economic—through which utterances are realized and suppressed. Within education, for example, institutional practices control the access of individuals to various kinds of pedagogic discourse. (Clark, 4) {MB—see Foucault, 1972: 46, which she references; also Bakhtin; Irving/Moffett}
The historical process of cultural institutions, of which the education system is a part, has also been investigated by Raymond Williams. In Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams divides into three the elements which are responsible for what Inglis (1995) calls the value-loadings of discourse: residual, dominant, and emergent. These elements co-exist in varying degrees at any cultural moment. By the ‘residual’ Williams does not imply archaic elements of past culture which survive. Rather, they are experiences, meanings and values which have been formed in the past but cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture. Even when in opposition to it, they are still present and potentially active within it. ‘Emergent’ culture involves the making of new forms and discourses, in the process of which there occurs pre-emergence, where expression is active but not yet fully articulated. Furthermore, the very existence of subordinate and repressed cultures point to the fact that culture is not a unitary phenomenon. Non-dominant, discursive elements interact with dominant ones at various times, co-existing with, being absorbed or destroyed by them, as well as challenging, modifying or even displacing them. Consequently Williams views historical time as dialogic and multi-dimensional. According to Williams, then, any analysis of cultural formations is an attempt to explain how cultural value is ascribed, and has to take into account the interaction between legislation in the form of the state ascription of value and historio-cultural processes. (Clark: 5)
Because of its association with value, feeling, and experience as expressed through language, and particularly as literature and the national language, English as a school subject quickly came to be more than the transference of a particular body of factual knowledge. It also came to be concerned with contemporary beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies: that is, with cultural knowledge and how to live. (Clark: 5)
Consequently, issues about English, particularly when it comes to constructing policies about language, are at one and the same time an outcome of power struggles and an arena within which they take place. Therefore, any attempt to outline the formation of an idea such as that of English as a school subject and its relationship with language has to take account of both the struggles ‘outside’ as well as ‘within’ the subject. (Clark: 6)
For Bernstein, ‘text’ can refer to the dominant curriculum, dominant pedagogic practices as well as any pedagogic representation, be it written, visual, postural, sartorial, spatial. … {MB—Likewise} the term ‘text’ is used to refer to anything that occurs or exists in a classroom, from the slightest movement of an individual, materials and books, to the spatial and visual settings of that classroom. … Thus, the importance of Bernstein’s theory … is that it provides a framework within which the formation of English as a curriculum subject in general, and issues of language in particular, can be considered. As such, it considers not only the subject’s discursive practices and the texts privileged within it, but also how they came to be constituted and constructed in the way they have. (Clark: 10)
In other words, for a theory of cultural reproduction to be complete, it has to explain how a text came to be constituted as it is and accorded a privileged status as well as what is transmitted. (Clark: 11)
Black English or Ebonics, because of its categorization as a variety of English, is excluded from recognition as a minority language. Consequently, it ranks below all others in terms of linguistic hierarchy to such an extent that it does not feature in issues of linguistic democracy at all. Learning to be literate in American society, therefore, also carries with it the dual aspect of learning a specific cultural literacy (Hirsch, 1978; 1987) and what it means to be an American, based upon a Eurocentric language and culture, a ‘white’ way of being. Thus, any challenge or change to the norms associated with learning to be literate, such as that posed by the Oakland Resolution, represents nothing less than a challenge or change to what it means to be American. (Clark: 229)
As one of the subjects most closely associated with the reproduction of culture and cultural values as these are generated through language, and with concepts of language themselves constructed around the central notion of standard English, battles over language are always and inevitably to do with battles over culture, identity and Williams’ notion of ‘ways of being’. Ultimately, they are also struggles for control of the pedagogic device itself. Williams makes the point that “A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world. The received categories—‘word,’ ‘reality,’ ‘nature,’ ‘human’—may be counterpoised or related to the category ‘language,’ but it is now commonplace to observe that all categories, including the category of ‘language,’ are themselves constructions in language…” ({MB-Raymond} Williams, 1977: 21). Education is thus never neutral, but a site of cultural reproduction as much as any other. Nevertheless, systems of education also contain within them the seeds of their own transformations. Just as reproduction is historically configured at any given moment in time, today’s acquirers become, in turn, tomorrow’s reproducers and producers of knowledge. Schools then, and the curriculum they teach, are at one and the same time sites of cultural reproduction and of potential future transformations. (Clark: 257-258)
Foucault does not deny that tradition and continuity act as forces of influence upon an idea, but rather that they are not enough in themselves to act as significant forces in creating change. The expression and site of ideas he calls discourse, is for him an active and dialogic, rather than a passive and monologic, process. Any discourse at any given moment in time is structured as much by the assumptions about what constitutes it as a discourse as by the boundaries of language itself. Discourse in a Foucaudian sense, then, combines linguistic utterance, whether spoken or written, with the underlying non-linguistic structures—such as the cultural, social and economic—through which utterances are realized and suppressed. Within education, for example, institutional practices control the access of individuals to various kinds of pedagogic discourse. (Clark, 4) {MB—see Foucault, 1972: 46, which she references; also Bakhtin; Irving/Moffett}
The historical process of cultural institutions, of which the education system is a part, has also been investigated by Raymond Williams. In Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams divides into three the elements which are responsible for what Inglis (1995) calls the value-loadings of discourse: residual, dominant, and emergent. These elements co-exist in varying degrees at any cultural moment. By the ‘residual’ Williams does not imply archaic elements of past culture which survive. Rather, they are experiences, meanings and values which have been formed in the past but cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture. Even when in opposition to it, they are still present and potentially active within it. ‘Emergent’ culture involves the making of new forms and discourses, in the process of which there occurs pre-emergence, where expression is active but not yet fully articulated. Furthermore, the very existence of subordinate and repressed cultures point to the fact that culture is not a unitary phenomenon. Non-dominant, discursive elements interact with dominant ones at various times, co-existing with, being absorbed or destroyed by them, as well as challenging, modifying or even displacing them. Consequently Williams views historical time as dialogic and multi-dimensional. According to Williams, then, any analysis of cultural formations is an attempt to explain how cultural value is ascribed, and has to take into account the interaction between legislation in the form of the state ascription of value and historio-cultural processes. (Clark: 5)
Because of its association with value, feeling, and experience as expressed through language, and particularly as literature and the national language, English as a school subject quickly came to be more than the transference of a particular body of factual knowledge. It also came to be concerned with contemporary beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies: that is, with cultural knowledge and how to live. (Clark: 5)
Consequently, issues about English, particularly when it comes to constructing policies about language, are at one and the same time an outcome of power struggles and an arena within which they take place. Therefore, any attempt to outline the formation of an idea such as that of English as a school subject and its relationship with language has to take account of both the struggles ‘outside’ as well as ‘within’ the subject. (Clark: 6)
For Bernstein, ‘text’ can refer to the dominant curriculum, dominant pedagogic practices as well as any pedagogic representation, be it written, visual, postural, sartorial, spatial. … {MB—Likewise} the term ‘text’ is used to refer to anything that occurs or exists in a classroom, from the slightest movement of an individual, materials and books, to the spatial and visual settings of that classroom. … Thus, the importance of Bernstein’s theory … is that it provides a framework within which the formation of English as a curriculum subject in general, and issues of language in particular, can be considered. As such, it considers not only the subject’s discursive practices and the texts privileged within it, but also how they came to be constituted and constructed in the way they have. (Clark: 10)
In other words, for a theory of cultural reproduction to be complete, it has to explain how a text came to be constituted as it is and accorded a privileged status as well as what is transmitted. (Clark: 11)
Black English or Ebonics, because of its categorization as a variety of English, is excluded from recognition as a minority language. Consequently, it ranks below all others in terms of linguistic hierarchy to such an extent that it does not feature in issues of linguistic democracy at all. Learning to be literate in American society, therefore, also carries with it the dual aspect of learning a specific cultural literacy (Hirsch, 1978; 1987) and what it means to be an American, based upon a Eurocentric language and culture, a ‘white’ way of being. Thus, any challenge or change to the norms associated with learning to be literate, such as that posed by the Oakland Resolution, represents nothing less than a challenge or change to what it means to be American. (Clark: 229)
As one of the subjects most closely associated with the reproduction of culture and cultural values as these are generated through language, and with concepts of language themselves constructed around the central notion of standard English, battles over language are always and inevitably to do with battles over culture, identity and Williams’ notion of ‘ways of being’. Ultimately, they are also struggles for control of the pedagogic device itself. Williams makes the point that “A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world. The received categories—‘word,’ ‘reality,’ ‘nature,’ ‘human’—may be counterpoised or related to the category ‘language,’ but it is now commonplace to observe that all categories, including the category of ‘language,’ are themselves constructions in language…” ({MB-Raymond} Williams, 1977: 21). Education is thus never neutral, but a site of cultural reproduction as much as any other. Nevertheless, systems of education also contain within them the seeds of their own transformations. Just as reproduction is historically configured at any given moment in time, today’s acquirers become, in turn, tomorrow’s reproducers and producers of knowledge. Schools then, and the curriculum they teach, are at one and the same time sites of cultural reproduction and of potential future transformations. (Clark: 257-258)
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