Lectures as Communicative events

There are lectures as 'communicative' events and lectures as lectures. The latter very badly reminds me of the 'art for art sake' ideology which can even be more harmful if applied to social studies academia.

I have always had the uneasy feeling when academic people are accused of just discussing things that they only know of. This is also supported by what is called as academic discourse which is a (the?!) dominating feature of academic journals.

Well, I certainly don’t deny that such thing is not all together merely there to cause distance (which is not even a bad thing per se according to Bourdieu when asked why his discourse is so hard to follow while he criticizes academic discourse for creating a haven). However, I feel very sheepish when there is too much of academic formalities in the air.

There is something about the style of presenting an argument or lecture which can make it more interesting, more fruitful and more rewarding, what I would call being more committed to contextualising the lecture and having internal conversation with audience. I simply see that some people are good at that and some are not.

Ruth Wodak, 2006

Mediation between discourse and society: assessing cognitive approaches in CDA
Ruth Wodak, Discourse Studies, 2006, Vol 8(1):179-190

Ruth Wodak is one of the few CDA scholars whose work is based on huge data and empirical material. That is, she is the one who has actually been DOING a lot of CDA rather than discussing the theoretical bases of it. Obviously this is neither to say that she has not been dealing with theoretical front nor it means that all the others have done is only theory.

On the same note, in my own experience, after 1996 when I was introduced to CDA and when I was badly in need of some sample analyses I realized that I couldn’t find a lot and that is another reason I find her work interesting and practical. Wodak's analysis and style seem to be more inductive, bottom - top kind of analysis. While she incorporates a lot of theories and models, she also comes to a lot of new and novel understandings by actually doing the research. I find that not only interesting, but also academically healthy and necessary in a field like CDA.

I her newest article published in ‘Discourse Studies’ she talks about how cognitive models are important in understanding and accounting for social phenomenon in discourses of Racism, Anti Semitism, Xenophobia and the like.

She asserts that almost all the scholars are convinced that mental models exist even though nobody can actually look into the 'black box' (180). And in response to Fairclough and Chouliaraki's 1999 criticism she points out that the situation is the same for cognitive models concepts and ideology concepts. However, this doesn’t solve the problem and make it two problems for a person like me.

Later on, she asserts that there is a need to develop a model of analysis which can combine Cognitive, Linguistic, and sociological categories together. This can probably account for the gab between discourse and society. (181)

At the same time she argues that the question for us as 'researchers' should be ‘what conceptual tools are relevant for a particular research question’ rather than 'Do we need a grand theory'. This is exactly what happened to me when I was doing my research on Conservative and reformist ideology in Iranian's press. I was very insecure as I wasn’t sure if I have covered all that there is and couldn’t see a common theory to put all the approaches together. I finally came to the idea that I had to pick what is relevant to my particular study.

She goes on and supports the validity and necessity of cognitive models using a lot of empirical data and says:

‘These empirical results strongly suggests the assumption of a cognitive link between language/discourse and society’ (183)

She also, like Van Dijk asserts that it is naïve to think that there is a one to one link between social variables and linguistic realization.

Towards the end of the article there is an interesting point which is reminds of an issue that I have been thinking about. She says that the nature of mental models is in a way that when they are formed it is very difficult to change them and that is why by raising the critical awareness about a wrong or prejudiced use of language or discourse or even metaphor we can not necessarily change the mental model.

To me it is a very salient point that by enforcing a certain unprejudiced discourse ( if such a thing ever exists) we are not taking care of the mental model which is causing that certain discourse rather we are just forcing it to a more complicated and sophisticated levels. It is like a hide and seek game that we as Critical researcher play with those ideologies or mental models.

Wodak says in this regard:

‘These examples also prove, on one hand , that superficial changes of language might not be effective; on the other that deeply embedded cognitive concepts have to be assumed to explain why prejudices have such long, even ‘eternal’ lives (Adono 1973/1950) (page 186)

In a research group session once I said that it seems that humans have not learned enough about how and why something like Holocaust happened and that it is not addressed well in the society. What I meant was that, we are just treating that seriously prejudiced ideology as a something wrong swing which took place at a certain time and place while to me we should look into how this process started and how it worked not just as an isolated incidence but rather as something which can happen today too. I like the Bauman’s account of ‘Holocaust and Modernity’ in this regard.

What we see in a society, as far as I can tell is a whole project of ‘nicification’ of the society in a sense that we don’t refer to things which are controversial and resort to staying polite and nice and that is it. This is also apparent in the use of language (probably because we have raised the critical awareness by criticising the wrong usages) in a sense that wrong ideologies are becoming more and more embedded into the language in an increasingly complicated rate and manners and we as CDA analysts look for the traces with more and more complicated techniques but the ‘evil’ stays alive.

I have thought about this not only in the sense of discourse analysis but in the way a modern society is run. If you take England for example we see that everything is done in smooth soft and polite manner but it doesn’t mean that all these niceties are genuine and real rather it might feel that it is a way of life only.

When I was in South India more than several times I encountered European tourists who felt very liberated in the crowdedness of India. There was no need to necessarily say nice where it was not expected or way of life. I noticed interesting changes in the mode of encountering of a person who may not be able to act the same in his most probably modern country. And they loved the feeling there.

I don’t want to take this any further now partly because it is just an observation but at this point I could not help remembering this observation of mine.

I am open to any accusation that my observation has been skewed as a single subjective observant but it is, nevertheless, what my mental model/ subjective participant construct told me to see!!!

Discourse, Context and Cognition

Van Dijk, Discourse Studies, 2006, Vol,8(1):159-177

In this recent article Van Dijk develops his cognition theory and shows how this cognition which mediates between a discourse and the process of understanding/ production is different and more special than the conventional context. That is why different people in the same context might produce different discourse.

He calls this 'subjective participants' constructs'. As potential criticisms of his model he mentions two potential ones: one is that the analysis of this subjective participants' construct there is a lack of empirical proof on existence of such a thing and the other thing is that this is closely related to private or personal processes and that in the study of discursive social interaction we should attend to 'public’ dimensions of discourse. (Page 161)

To the first criticism he gives the other example of constructs that we know exist even if there cannot be any concrete empiricist knowledge about them e.g. grammar which enables us to understand and produce a language and we all agree there is such a thing.

The second criticism as far as, I could understand still holds and is not addressed. To me it is the question of how this is going to help us in our CDA analysis. I agree that theoretical level work is absolutely essential but how does existence of such construct help in short term goal oriented CDA or long run critical awareness plans. This is not accounted for in the articles.

Van Dijk asserts that in the concept of context we should go beyond just the common sense definition of it. He calls this notion of context 'traditional contextualism' he argues:

'Societal, political or cultural constraints … do not directly influence discourse at all' (162)

His example here is one of Tony Blair's speeches and says if this traditional context definition were the only objective condition for him to say what he says then all PM's in the same context would have said the same thing which is highly unlikely.

Another argument is that the analysis of context in its traditional sense is a boundless one. That is, there is no limit on how far such account of context can go in regards to a given situation. For example in his example of Blair's speech we can go on and on in accounting for political, sociological, anthropological aspects of parliamentary democracy in general and UK context in particular and as he says:

'Any sound theory of context should make explicit how such an account can be constrained' (162)

I find both these arguments every interesting and compelling. I just have a small question here when he says:

‘If these [context in traditional sense] would operate 'objectively' or even deterministically on discourse, all speakers in 'the same situation' would say the same THINGS and in the same way' (same page)

I understand 'the same way' and that not all speakers would speak in the same way however, I have a little problem as to whether they would not speak about the same 'things'. Is it not true that when you are constrained with your party, your position, your background, and all those other contextual constraints you would say the same things? I mean if some body else was there instead of Blair with exactly the same situation politically culturally etc. He would raise the same 'propositions' even though he would not talk about them in the same 'way'. I find this a bit confusing.

Van Dijk elaborates on the mental constructs and explains how these constructs act as interface of social structure and discourse and later on he incorporate the mechanism by which knowledge comes to play a role. In a section titled as context are not observable-but their consequences are' he accounts for the critic of empiricists.

Later on he asserts that mental models in psychology offer a lot of understanding and insight on the process of understanding and production of discourse;

'Mental models represents people's experience and people’s episodic memory is thus populated by mental models. These are subjective and probably biased representations of ‘reality’ and may also feature evaluations of events or situations (opinions), as well as emotions associated with such events-as is typically the case by dramatic or traumatic events of our lives’ (page 169)

He also asserts that there are a lot of common grounds for mental models. Although they are culturally based some elements might be universal. He says that Knowledge element of context models is uncountable universal. The more formal, normative and institutional a context is the more context models overlap ad understanding is possible while in informal situation there is more of idiosyncrasy and differences but this is overcome by sharing the same background and experience among friends couples etc. This is why the probability of misunderstandings is higher among intercultural informal settings rather than formal. (173)

He agrees that there is a similarity between this notion and what we can find in case grammars or semantic models. It reminds me of Chafe case grammar or functional grammars that I went through in my Masters.

Towards the end he proposes some areas that the research in context models should look into like finding more empirical understanding, deconstructing what context models consists of, which element are formed before the others, and how they control discourse.

Conclusion

‘Context models are the missing link between text and talk and their environment’ (174)

Van Dijk's Academic Autobiography

The academic autobiography that Van Dijk has written is a very useful and friendly account of how he has developed his academic interests and work. This along with what Ruth wrote on Critical Discourse Analysis in the same style can help a person like me to see the historical development of CDA in general or personal versions of CDA during the course of last 15 or 20 years.

Van Dijk gives an analysis of his cognitive mediated production and understanding discourse and mentions how he has been convinced that he should look into psychology for answers. He also talks about his favourite topics of Knowledge, Context and Ideology.

There are two not-necessarily-academic points which are interesting to me in this article. First is to see how a critical discourse analyst or a critical scholar in general becomes an activism by publicly denouncing racist remarks of Gerrit Komriji in Netherland and trying to show that he has also been writing more racists material anonymously. Consequently Van Dijk is sued by the writer and is cleared afterwards. This brings some more consequences because Komriji tries to convince the University of Amsterdam to fire Van Dijk and of course tries to ridicule discourse studies and his academic credits.

He says:

'when years later Publish a book on the whole affair (van Dijk 2003) with extensive arguments and demonstrations of involvement of the famous writer in this affair, no publisher dared to publish the book and when I published the book on my own account, the press suddenly fell silent, despite its obviously burning topic not a single book review of the book was published, so that the book was totally unknown and ignored by public at large-selling hardly more than 150 copies' (Page 24)

This important to see that Academic studies of this type is not very much far from becoming a social activist and that we are not just sitting around and discuss things which we only know of. Rather what we do can take a form of action in raising the awareness among public at large.

The second point that is very much related to the first one is the image of CDA in general in society and political arena. That is the subject matter of studies of this kind is not usually favoured (least to say) by political figures, policy makers and budget planners thus in Van Dijk's words:

'financial for this kind of research was [is] very hard, if not impossible to get, also for my assistants and PhD students working on this topic'(page 24)

Although Van Dijk is talking about a specific case here, one cannot deny that it is generally the case that there is a hidden or overt tendency not to fund studies of this kind. Let's say no government likes to fund a study which is going to prove that the ministers are racist or any other unpleasant traits of that kind. The extend on how far these policies can go against researchers of this kind from mere lack of interest to allocate funding to open act of hostility and coercion, of course depends on the context of the country where such a study takes place. To make it more relevant I should refer to my own line of work in my Masters in Iran where there was/is a clear tendency not to encourage studies of that kind along with the advice of keeping a low profile when you do things like that. (This probably is expected for a country like Iran or rather in Middle East where there is a risk in doing any critique even at social level) That is why my only option in doing a PhD like is to be on my own with no official attachments and hence having no financial support.

Fairclough and Wodak 1997

Among some books and articles which have become classic sources in CDA there is an article by Fairclough and Wodak 1997. To me It is a really comprehensive and yet concise account of what CDA is and how it is done. I like this one very much.

I had the intention to translate this one along with a couple more by Van Dijk and Leeuwen and publish it as a collection on CDA in Iran but the process got too complicated and I had to leave the idea.

Critical Realism

I have read Fairlough and Chouliaraki's 'discourse in later modernity'. It is a theoretical account of where CDA should go now and what element needs to be considered. Some chapters were hard for me to follow. It is incorporating what is being talked about these days as Critical Realism into CDA and the most important element is that discourse is considered to be one moment of social practice rather than the explicit or implicit assumption that it is everything. To me it has always been like that and social practice could never be reduced to discourse only although it is also possible to justify that it is only discourse. I went to Dr. Fleetwood lecture of critical realism too. It was a very good discussion.

Quantitaive Method

I have thought of using some quantitative measurements of the discourses that I will analyze. I am not quite sure yet but even Google search might bring some interesting results in terms of the number of the results we get for some specific key vocabulary and all. I am aware of the limitations and will not make any generalization based on them but still think it can add something to the research.

Bourdieu

The discussion on Bourdieu was especially important in the way it explains some important qualities of sociological phenomenon of the Iranian society, more specifically the community in Tehran. What Bourdieu talks about is the character of a middle class society and the sources of power which it defines for itself. The concepts of economic habitus and cultural habitus makes sense to me and the latter one specifically helps me understand many social rules and laws inherent in the present society in Tehran where culture and education is severely sought after and there are too many distinctions among people living even in the same city of neighbourhood and all other characteristics of a middle class society. This tendency to be distinct of any body else to me is a key factor to understand many issues about Iran.

Somewhere in his interview type account of his ideas (Sociology Quarterly 93, sage) he throws light on a phenomena which was keeping my mind busy for a while and that is the tendency in Iran to go for more special forms of art and entertainment as if this brings more cultural capital to people and he says 'the process of those instruments [cultural practices] secure profits of distinction for themselves and the rarer these instruments are the greater the profits.' (page 2 the art of standing up to words) and that explains why arts and being special in taste have a big role in present society in Iran where the competition for cultural capital is the most severe and in a sense economic habitus has to lead to cultural otherwise it loses a lot of its value.

Somewhere else he explains why he uses very complex language while being critical of academia of creating a safe haven by a highly specialized discourse they use which keeps none academia out. He says that sociology like some other disciplines (I would add linguistics here) is like talking about the obvious talking about something which goes without saying and that is why sociology has to resort to invented words which are thereby protected, relatively at least, from the naive projection of common sense. (Page 21, the sociologist in question).

He also talks about opinion polls and questions their validity. He talks about the mechanism by which opinion polls are flawed and that questions are manipulated and a lot of important data is not counted which is interesting but I am more interested in the concept of opinion. How it is formed and whether there is such a thing as independent opinion in the broadest sense.

Bourdieu's account of the society is very deterministic and sad to me. Not that it wants to be deterministic but in the way that it tells you the truth that we can never separate ourselves from the habitus struggle and we are in of way or another playing the game. This in turn makes me philosophically claustrophobic. The struggle to seek enlightment and to be practical is always skewed in favour or practicality. I raised this question that I see a paradox in what we do in academia as long as we cannot separate ourselves from this game we are doing the habitus game and when we are doing that game we cannot talk about enlightment communication or communicative dialogue ( this is exactly what I have had problem with since I came here)

I went to lecture of Dr. Christ May and the same point came up and he confidently said that what you do as a researcher is a project that you do and you need to look at it as an examination, nothing else and you should curb yourself not to go to deeper and deeper level and have to be practical. He went on and gave example of how he has been successful by sticking to the ideology of practicality. I guess it was no coincidence that the word 'sell' was part of his active discourse very much. So his approach toward marketisation of knowledge was that it is ok and indispensable and it would be a waste of time to try and change structure, just learn how to make it through it. I have to agree with this but cannot deny that it does not make me feel good.

In the middle of the class on Bourdieu I suddenly felt inundated with the fact that I have never been instrumental and that has cost me a lot in life. I admit that Bourdieu makes me sad in his explicitly showing the blatant truth on where we stand and what we can and cannot do.

Contemprary Sociology

I have learned a lot in Andrew Sayer's class on contemporary debates in sociology. By now we have covered Max Weber, Bauman, Karl Marx, and Bourdieu. I guess the sequencing is very meaningful and interesting as one seems to lead to another.

I liked Bauman’s account of Holocaust and Modernity and his account of how modern bureaucracy led to unique mass murder of a group and that this only happened because bureaucratic modernisation came to have a big role for the first time in the history of mankind. Bureaucracy in a sense that what is done is defined as a project in a hierarchical order of people and groups who work together to produce or perform a certain project without any value judgments needed or permitted on the part of almost all people involved in that certain end result. This is going back to Weber’s teachings and the dichotomy that he recommends to move from traditional to modern account of life. Here, Bauman argues that modern bureaucracy treated mass murder as a project to do and brought different levels to it in a professional way thus, individuals or groups were no longer responsible for they were just doing their duty and did not need to evaluate the end product either. That is why the job which would otherwise take 200 years to do in a traditional manner took a few years!!(not sure how many years exactly). This couldn’t have happened in any other way than having a modern apparatus as no hatred would last for 200 years in a row! This is the analysis which is presented as a counter effect of the earlier movements in scientification of everything and the dichotomisation of Max Weber in dividing what can be considered science and what falls into the category of non science.

Then we have gone to Marx and his account of how bourgeoisie is formed in capitalist society and that the capitalism is aggressive and expansive in its nature and always needs to look for new markets and this leads to the proletariat or working class to be comodificated by this process and become a sort of paid slave whose value is always competitively coming down. This phenomenon is seen in other sectors of the society like education providers like universities in functioning more and more as an institution which sells a commodity, ‘education’.

Later on I attended a lecture by Bob Jessop and I learned more about Marxism and Bob’s interest in it as he suggested that we talk about our projects and he would tell how Marx could be incorporated in that study and what it could offer. I particularly noticed that he among others refer to Sweden system and how the structure has been able to introduce a more socialist format which is still bring prosperity and welfare without having to give in to capitalism to take over. The discussion on how people in Europe with more or less leftist background try to resist the inroads of capitalism in favour of more national and traditional models has been taken up in some other settings too.

Among what I have been discussing here and there my discussion with my Greek flatmate who has a good theoretical background of leftist ideology has been very revealing to me. The more knowledge oriented economy of Finland and Sweden made sense to me and I could make sense of how capitalism brings societies to their knees to beg for more and more capital to come to the economy of a country and how these changes are against the benefits of working class and lower classes. In the same line the resistance against what is called globalisation makes sense in a way that it is not just about protesting against one single treaty of agreement but it is a protest and outcry against a hegemony which has established itself as the only working hegemony in the new world. Yet, I do make distinction between what I can call cultural globalisation and world village concepts and the economic globalisation the fist would make me feel better about the future and the latter makes me a cynical onlooker.

I found the book Communist Manifesto very interesting discoursally I am not aware if any discourse analysis type of study has been done on that document but to me it seems like a very interesting piece to do a discourse analysis not necessarily Critical Discourse Analysis though. The tone of the book is very strong and compelling with some strong and explicit proclamations. Some of those rule and slogans do not strike a positive association in many of us now because we know what came out of those in the hands of some rulers in Soviet Union or Poland. For example there is an explicit denial of individuality and alternative way of thinking and all other analyses are labelled as coming from bourgeoisie.

The copy that I found in the library was like 50 years old and there was an attached analysis written on the manifesto a few decades after the original book. That pamphlet should also be very interesting to discourse analysts. The Pamphlet is still very pro Marx analysis and borrows some ideologically strong language that Marx used in the book. The pamphlet talks about how Marx was wrong in prediction that the proletariat revolutions will start from within developed countries like Germany or England and the fact that Marx was not paying attention to Russia then it continues to explain why the revolution did not start from where Marx had thought it would and I should say I found the explanation logical enough.

There is no bibliography, no references, no academic tone, no expected jargon and nothing of the features which usually brings about a lay man vs. scholarly distinction as is the mainstream thing to do in academia. As linguist that was the first interesting feature of the book to me was the uniqueness of the discourse which would not fall into what is conventionally called ‘scientific’. In the beginning of the class I mentioned it without having any intention of degrading or undermining it but by the reactions that got from other students I realized that the word 'scientific’ still carries a load of positive associations and if you say something is not conventionally scientific it means you are trying to bring it down. That is not what I expect to see at least in sociology department or ‘Lancaster’ where everybody is attacking positivism and quantification of science and there is a prefix 'critical' for almost all the disciplines and trends.

I will write about Bourdieu later.

Start up

This is meant to be a scrape book for me in trying to keep my thoughts organized and pin down what goes on in my mind in the course of a PhD that I am hopefully to do at Lancaster University. I will try to keep certain important elements of my life out of this and keep this focused on recording what I read in regards to my research.

My supervisor has specifically asked me to jot down something on everything I read in terms of how it inspires me in the methodology and content of my research. I am going to use this as my notebook to keep track of the relevant stuff I read with mentioning my perceptions and understandings along with page numbers and all.

Lancaster, a small town it might be, is a big and risky decision in an already complicated life. In getting through 'the maze' I would need to call in all my 'resources' in the broadest possible sense where the most important sense is, of course, God.


PS. I thought I might add this email that I wrote to Ruth in pointing out some advantages of doing this weblog thing.


Dear Ruth,
In line with what you advised me to do in keeping a journal of the materials that I read, I have decided to do it online in a form of weblog. I have had some experience in doing this as I had a weblog when I was in India and was writing about my day to day experience and situations in India. There are some advantages in doing this.

Firstly you can read what I write and if needed comment on the specific topic or idea.
Second thing is that it will be available for any body else who might be interested
to join in the discussion.
Thirdly, I won't have to write that in pen and paper type coz I am not good at that and my handwriting sucks!!
Fourth, When I write here I am forced to be a little more formal than in my notebook and this can be a good point (although it is taking more time)
Fifth, I will do the action of writing more and this is good for me.
Sixth, it will be a very good collection after a while.

Here is link to my weblog on CDA there is a comment section at the end of each posting through which you can leave your comments for me.

WWW.LANCASTERMAZE.BLOGSPOT.COM

Important
I am writing this as a student and there will certainly be a lot of points which I get wrong or have not sufficient information about. Yet, because it is a personal thing and I don't intend to promote it I have given myself the liberty to write my views freely and raise any questions that come to my mind. Once again my comments might be naive, wrong, or too strong at times yet that is the whole idea in the first place. Please consider it as just a scrape book.

I have been posting on the weblog since last week and there are several posts already. In the first post I have talked about what this weblog would be and I hope I can stick to it. This will strictly be on my academic experience here in Lancaster although in theory there is no such thing as isolated academic experience. Here is the link to the first posting.

http://lancastermaze.blogspot.com/2006/02/start-up.html

I hope you like it.
Best
Majid