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Chapter
3 Discourse Theories And Critical Cultural Analysis
The social situation
of discourses also helps us focus on the institutions in which speech
takes
place, and how their organisation distributes power to different
participants
to join in discourses, or be forced to be addressed by them. In the
terms of
this chapter, organisations like hospitals or even entire education
systems
embed acts and sequences of communication and the positions and
viewpoints
permitted in them: 'institutions...prompt people to speak...and store
and
distribute the things that are said' (Macdonell 1986: 4). These concrete
embodiments have a history, of course, and it becomes possible to
analyse it --
how discourses replace each other in public life, for example, and how
the
institutions in which they are embedded develop and change. This
provides
another insight for Macdonell -- particular discourses bear traces of
rival
discourses in them, since they are often shaped by the need to oppose
earlier
ones, or address earlier agendas, or distinguish themselves from
earlier or
competing contemporaneous ones. Focussing on
discourses as units of study, therefore, seems to promise much
progress. Speech
(including writing, of course) is not being seen as simply determined
by an
economic structure or class position, but is granted some autonomy,
creativity
and effects of its own, including an ability to operate 'between
classes' in
Macdonell's phrase. On the other hand, linguistics is being combined
with
critical social investigations instead of being an abstract study of
the
structural relations between signs. The latter development
explains why early developments were seen as 'poststructuralist',
since the whole analysis shifts away from general structures of
language and
meaning in structuralist linguistics to specific concrete languages or
'sociolects', the actual words and expressions found in concrete texts,
rather
than some 'grammatical ideal', as Thompson puts it. We can now study
'concrete
forms of differing social and institutional practices' rather than
'language',
for Macdonell. We have progressed towards sociology or marxism, in
other words,
compared to the more general change toward the 'new semiology' in Barthes
(which we examine in chapter 4). Finally, although we
have not discussed it at all here, there are the benefits of the much
more
general 'linguistic turn' in social theory: briefly, studying language
in use
is more promising in several ways than trying to study individual
consciousness
if we are interested in the effects of ideology or culture (see
Bernstein
(1985) on critical theory’s variant). However, there is no need to
study such
language in use formalistically, purely as language, as abstract
linguistic
rules. Instead, we need to rethink the relation between linguistics and
sociology or marxism.
Pêcheux and his
associates asked a small sample of students to read and interpret a
particular
policy document to reveal how words like 'planning, political change,
radical
reform' could be (rather artificially I thought) incorporated into
quite
different political 'corpora'. A 'corpus' is a new linguistic term referring to a cluster of language, so to
speak. It is 'constituted by a series of discourses ...which are
assumed to be
"dominated" by stable and homogenous conditions of production'
(Thompson
1984: 239. For the original, see Pêcheux 1982). The terms used in this
document permit this kind of ambiguity because they bear traces of past
political struggles over them and, as Macdonnell explains, this led
Pêcheux et al. to suggest that this residual ambiguity could be
reactivated, so to speak.
This leads to a more optimistic possibility than had been granted in
Althusser’s famous work on ideological
state apparatuses, which stressed the
overwhelming power of those apparatuses. Now, those 'hailed' in
particular ways
by the apparatuses do not have to conform to the identities on offer
but can
'counteridentify' (a kind of inversion in our terms -- see chapter 2)
or even
actively 'disidentify'(a more radical kind of break involving a
rejection of
the whole mechanism). The other experiment
was carried out using the work of a marxist linguist from a different
tradition, but we can use it to make a similar point. According to
Woolfson
(1976), Volosinov's work also traces class struggle, and the effects of
a
partially separate 'sign community', in the 'multiaccentuality' of the
sign.
These persist, despite struggles by various ideologues to remove these
traces
and the contradictions they produce. Woolfson proposed to demonstrate
these
linguistic struggles and their effects on experience by asking Glasgow
Corporation bus crews to read some press reports of political events
and record
their discussions. Woolfson claims to have found the effects of
hegemonic
ideology, but also some limited potential resistance, in the critical
remarks
made by the workers, the way they both used and challenged and
reinterpreted
the clichés of the reports, and performed a kind of
'counteridentification' by
inverting and playing back terms like 'parasites' to refer to ministers
instead
of workers. This kind of work,
mixed rather curiously with a sociological study of political deviancy,
led to
some well-known early explorations of the television audience and its
ability
to resist or even oppose the 'codings' found in news or 'current
affairs'
programmes (see Harris 1992) ( and see Hall on coding here). Other linguistic work
can not be absorbed so easily into marxism, though, and has to be
supplemented
or reinterpreted. Both Macdonnell and Thompson perform work of this
kind on
different discourse theorists (including ethnomethodologists and some
sociolinguists
interested in educational discourses for Thompson), although Macdonnell
favours
Althusser and Thompson Habermas to provide an different integrating
frameworks.
One mystery arises for me in this integrative work, though, in that
some
obvious sociological studies of social class and language are omitted
-- those
of Bernstein for example (see Atkinson
1985 for some clues about how this work
too might be subsumed more general critical concepts). Critical linguistics One
study cited by Thompson does make progress in terms of detail,
though, compared to the rather preliminary pieces in Pêcheux or
Woolfson, which
are designed to integrate marxism with linguistic concepts rather than
to do
much concrete analysis. Fowler and others (e.g. Fowler et al.. 1979)
offer
intriguing analyses of a number of actual strategic texts (to use the
terms we
introduced earlier), including materials deployed by 'middle
management' on a
management training course. The language used
orders the peculiar and contradictory social world of the middle
manager,
Fowler et al.. argue, preserving a certain tactical ambiguity about
their
precise roles, for example (by pursuing two kinds of terminology
referring
separately to 'who is called what', and 'who does what', or by
preferring the
abstract noun 'management' and using usually passive verbs instead of
nominating precise agents and active verbs). You might find local
examples,
perhaps, and I have one here which reports that 'Change was welcomed by
the
Registrar's Department...'. In another example,
one very close to my own experience in scores of consultations with
staff in
various educational organisations, Fowler et al.. note that
'spatialisation of
the ideological problem [of control and its legitimacy] pervades the
syntax' (1979:
88) leading to the plethora of management diagrams and charts, or the
widespread use of the 'line-management' metaphor to describe who
reports to
whom exactly. Such apparently harmless obsessions help conceal the real
issues
of where decisions are taken and by whom. The chapter goes on to
list various techniques found in writing and speech to represent
'management'
as a benevolent group who happen to have emerged to fulfil vital
abstract
functions -- pronouns like 'we' are preferred to 'they'; 'modal verbs'
like 'can'
or 'think' (as in 'We think we can grow our college in the future', to
take
another local example) give a nice ambiguity to the issue of whose
permission
has been sought, and whether or not decisions have actually been taken
yet.
Various 'distancing devices' (like 'that would be difficult if...') or
'stalling devices' (including the very fashionable slight stutter at
the start
of spoken replies) both give the speaker time to think and create an
impression
that 'an extra amount of editing was applied by the speaker to the bit
of
speech that follows' (1979: 92), and, one might add, it alludes to an
upper-class upbringing or participation in elite schooling, in Britain
at
least. Detailed analysis
follows of the substantial amounts of ambiguity that expresses itself
in the
avoidance of the present tense, for example (endlessly deferred futures
or
cautious subjunctives are common in my experience): 'linguistic
equivocation
mirrors the tension of the real situation' (Fowler et al.. 1979: 92). I
also
like the process referred to as the 'reclassification' of the
'syntactical
problem' in management-speak, especially the way descriptions become
activities, so that describing oneself as a manager becomes
self-sufficient, a
term requiring no further investigation or elaboration, one which takes
on a
sense of importance and status immediately. Later chapters examine
the ways in which various communication professionals deal with
'awkward facts'
or anomalies when they construct press releases or television news
programmes.
What the authors call 'modal' activities can use indirectness and
distance to
code power relations, for example, while various 'transformations' can
hide or
displace agency, objectify events, classify actors in various disputes,
and
'raise' or emphasise particular marginal aspects of a story. Very
simple
linguistic variations are used to perform these transformations: in one
example, a story beginning 'South African police shot several black
demonstrators today...' is transformed in to the much more passive and
objective version 'Several black demonstrators were shot today in Of course, considering
television (and film) introduces other possible ways to analyse
discourse in
this sense, and we have discussed some of the issues about visual
representations and cinematic narratives in earlier chapters (and see critical realism file) . We also know of
newer work on the television audience as 'active', which raises new
possibilities for research in Fowlerian critical linguistics. Do the
actual
readers of middle-management texts or organisational diagrams fall
under the
spell of these techniques, or do they too 'resist' in any of the ways
we have
described? Is there a growing cynicism among those ‘consulted at’? Can
we see
the emergence of charismatic management seminars styles or documents as
a
response? There is also another
highly detailed study in Thompson (1984), this time of political
discourses
associated with Nazism, as analysed by the French theorist Jean Pierre
Faye.
This one is of special interest methodologically speaking as well as
substantively,
and ,while re-reading it recently, I found many implications to pursue
beyond
the immediate ones for Nazism. Faye compares very favourably with the
well-known studies of Thatcherism in British cultural studies (in Hall
1988,
for example -see reading guide here), and
offers a much more rigorous theoretical structure and one
which demonstrates a clearer grasp of the connections between political
narratives and actual events. One can also compare Faye’s approach with
the
similar-looking ‘topographical’ analysis of Faye offers a complex
analysis of the complex and developing narratives used to consolidate
the power
of the various groups in German politics in the emergence of Nazism.
The
narratives develop in response both to the raw materials available and
to
external events. The linguistic raw materials include various sets of
terms
used in political oppositions (like ‘conservative’ and ‘revolutionary’,
or ‘völiksche’
and ‘Semite’). Linguistic practices available to the developers of
narratives
include transformations and weavings of these terms, so that Hitler is
able to
label himself as a ‘conservative revolutionary’ and to claim the middle
ground,
or Goebbels is able to identify the narrow interests of the far right
with some
sort of mass sentiment. As narratives change
and develop, they influence actual events. One example concerns the
Nazi
‘economic miracle’ engineered by Schacht as President of the Reichsbank
(Thompson 1984: 223--4). The spoken discourse embraced by Schacht
apparently
stressed the virtues of personal constraint and savings as a source of
recovery, while his actual practice involved secretly channelling large
sums of
money to the armaments industry. This could be glossed as expenditure
on
‘public welfare’ eventually. Such glosses permitted this expenditure,
which was
a real element in the economic recovery of Thompson and ‘depth hermeneutics’ Thompson’s
own position develops out of these detailed readings and
critiques, and from his own earlier (1983) work which centred largely
on
Ricoeur and Habermas. His position is of particular interest to us
since it
offers a firm rejection of the notion that social life is best studied
as a
variant of linguistic behaviour, and it goes on to develop a thoroughly
sociological or materialist account, based on an extension of Giddens
with
liberal helpings of Habermas. The problems with
linguistic approaches can be sketched by re-considering work like that
of
Fowler et al.. Although it is insightful (and even rather amusing or
rather
useful in helping sceptics perform exposés of current managerial
practices), it
is very abstract. The grammar of the
sentences is the major focus, rather
than the contents themselves. As we have seen before, content, a social
context, a position of power and domination are smuggled in, so to
speak, with
the chosen example of management-speak. We know the context already, as
indeed
we do with the example developed by Faye (or, for that matter, those
analyses
of advertising developed by Barthes). The same combination of an
implicit
context, and a focus on a specific linguistic feature (grammar, syntax,
narrative ,or semiotic for the ‘structuralist’ examples) affects much
of the
work we have reviewed so far. What results is a kind of partial methodology
-- the specific linguistic features somehow generate the effects of the
examples without any further analysis (or with only limited analysis in
the
better examples). Thus ‘modalization’ or whatever is implicit in the
power
relations of management, narrative explains the acceptability and thus
the rise
of the Nazis, albeit in a very complex manner. We can anticipate a
little and invite readers to consider whether or not Barthes or the
postmodernists operate in the same way, this time with largely
(post)structuralist linguistic terms. As a clue, Thompson (1983) argues
that
the formal split between connotation and denotation in Barthes’
analyses of
modern myths (discussed in the next chapter) is not sufficient on its
own to
explain the persistence of concrete ideologies, while our own later
chapters
consider whether the mere flourishing of terms like ‘intertextuality’
is
sufficient as an instant analysis of actual films or videos. There is
usually
an implicit social theory lurking somewhere in these exercises, of
course Thompson (1984)
suggests we need a far more explicit analysis both of discourse and of
social
structure if we are to undertake a critical analysis of ideology
(whether
postmodernist have abandoned this project altogether is something we
shall
discuss). His own model involves a further development (after a
critique) of
Giddens’s ‘structuration’ approach which we outlined briefly in chapter
1. It
seems we now need to develop a three-fold model of everything to go
beyond
Giddens’s radical dualities, and we need much more concrete analytical
tools to
specify the effects of social structures in particular. Thus Thompson offers
us a threefold model of the social system with the levels of ‘action’
and
‘social structure’ in Giddens supplemented by a definite level of
social
institutions. Giddens’s split between ‘virtual’ and ‘structural’
dimensions is
replaced by a more concrete division at each level. Thus we have
actions as
both reflexively-monitored general flows of activity and as concrete
actual
action-events, institutions as both ‘specific’ (e.g. the University of
London)
and ‘sedimented’ (‘the university system as such’), and social
structures as
both the elements necessary for any social life (a production system)
and
specific social formations (capitalist production) (1984: 129). Power is still built
in to the model, and takes different forms at each of the three main
stages: an
ability to act (at the level of action), a capacity to act
(institutional
level), the conditions which limit the range of institutional
variations (structural
level). These specific types of power replace the Giddens notion of
rules and
resources, which, we have already argued (chapter 1) are too general,
and too
dependent on Giddens’s own root metaphor (the use of a language -- see
Thompson
1984 chapter 4 on Giddens). Here, we reinstate properly specific
sociological
categories, so to speak. Having cleared the
ground, we can now see how ideology works, mainly to obscure the
relations
between the concrete and the general levels of action, institution and
structure we described in the penultimate paragraph. It is in the
interests of
domination (expressed in the ‘systematically asymmetrical’ conditions
for
action associated with the class system, but also with race and gender
and with
rather vaguely specified ‘other’ forms) to legitimise existing actions,
institutions and structures. Dominant groups also dissimulate (conceal
or block
knowledge of processes or possibilities) and reify (by offering no
concrete
histories of the structures which exist). We must pursue our
enquires by analysing these forms of domination at the three levels,
and here
we can usefully incorporate people like Goffman on the situational
specifics of
action, or Bourdieu on the institutional contexts (of educational
institutions,
for example, to pick up one of my favourite topics). Marxism or
Gouldner’s
critical sociology seems to be useful at the structural level. Although
this is
impressive, of course, one cannot help thinking of the pursuit of the
complex
(which we have discussed in others) by ‘bolting on’ additional layers
and
analyses, however. We can also analyse
discourses. Here, analysis of narratives could be useful (not only as
in Faye,
but also in Barthes on myth -- and, presumably, in some of the examples
of
ideological narratives and representations we discussed in the last
chapter).
Thompson also wants to include critiques of grammatical structure as in
Fowler et al.., and something that looks rather like what came to be
known more
fashionably as ‘deconstruction’ -- the
interrogation of texts and the exposure
of their ‘contradictions, ... inconsistencies, ... silences and lapsus’
(1984: 137) Thompson wants to go
beyond such ‘internal’ discursive efforts, though, and to revitalise
Ricoeur’s
‘depth hermeneutics’ here (which we met, very briefly in chapter 1).
This
interprets existing discourses in a much less formal ‘structural’
linguistic
manner than some of the alternatives discussed above, and keeps open
the
possibility of the explanation of discourses (by refusing to stay
exclusively
inside the text, by going out to the structural and institutional
contexts
outlined above). As we saw, this draws upon the production
contexts of texts, their socio-historical locations (134) and ‘lines of
force’,
and what might be termed the ‘social existence’ of texts after they
have been
written. They come to take on an ideological (e.g. legitimising) role
as when
different readings are quietly privileged by dominant groups. Thompson
refers
again here to the specific report discussed by Pêcheux which we
have considered
above, but we might think of the plagiarism example in the last chapter
(where
a student essay was rendered as ‘evidence’ for some judicial
interpretation).
To take another specific example, a struggle is underway in a local
school to
organise a debate about ‘opting-out’ of local government control: one
party
wants to take a statement of Government policy as some ‘factual’ or
‘naturalistic’ text apparently without a (party political) history, to
structure the necessary meetings with parents as mere ‘information
sessions’
where they can learn about this neutral text, and to manage rival
policies as
‘outside disruptions’ to this impeccably non-political exchange of
information! Finally, Thompson is
well aware that analyses of this kind are clearly ‘political’ ones
themselves.
There can be no attempt to pretend that we are doing social science
here. Nor
can we pretend that a neutral ‘philosophical’ or historical critique
can be allowed
to slide over into a political one in the hope that no-one notices (not
an
uncommon development in my experience). Thompson moves on to the ground
staked
out by Habermas to suggest that the only real
way to ground such critical work
is in some idea of genuine ‘generalisable’ or universal interests,
(briefly)
ones that would be generated if all the participants concerned were
able to
discuss matters freely and without any external constraint. As with Habermas,
Thompson realises that this is going to look rather an empty and
abstract
procedure, and that there are going to be real problems in using this
sort of
procedure to connect to complex actual political situations. Certainly,
no theorist
can simply expect any political action
to follow immediately from the analysis, and, in situations where there
are
asymmetrical power relations already, which would simply prevent any
chance of
unconstrained discussion, the only option seems to be a rather
defensive
‘counterfactual assertion’, an insistence that there is another way. However, these issues
haunt any such endeavours, and at least we have an explicit discussion.
An
‘aversion against the universal’ in Lyotard, say, ( to use Honneth's term) pours scorn on the
possibility
of unconstrained discussions to establish generalisable interests, but
that
leaves only an abstract and formalistic way to ground analysis -- some
support
for a general pluralism, some attempt to ‘fuse’ in some unclear way
some
activities with an indefinable ‘différance’ or to claim them as
alluding to the
realm of the sublime, as we shall see.
Poster (1984) sees
Foucault as offering an account of a much needed ‘mode of information’
to
complement marxism’s ‘mode of production’ and to analyse the new ‘forms
of
language experiences that now inhabit our social landscape’ (167)
(including
new forms of electronic surveillance and interactions with computers).
Foucault
is exactly the person to pursue the project at the centre of the work
in this
chapter -- ‘to ‘make intelligible a level of analysis consonant with
emergent
[‘linguistic’] forms of social relations’(168). However, as we shall
see, these
enterprises have other consequences, including the need to abandon much
of the
usual material on power, ideology, domination by classes, the classical
subject, and a good deal more. We end this chapter
with Foucault as a transitional figure, in other words, like Barthes,
one who
shows some of the less desirable consequences, for marxists, of
attempting to
develop new forms of ‘linguistic’ analysis. He will also serve as an
exponent of
‘post-structuralist’ writing, which we have discussed briefly at the
start of
this chapter. To borrow from Poster’s discussion again, we can define
this
approach as offering readings that insist on the preservation of
differences or
discontinuities (between the past and the present, for example, or
between
different processes at work at the same
time). This leads, in turn,
to a reflexive awareness of the way in which conventional readings
(including
marxist or freudian ones) impose unities and smooth out differences.
Post-structuralists are sceptical about what might be seen as the
politics of
such orthodox readings which claim to act in the name of some universal
reason
or subject but which find themselves complicit in new forms of
domination.
Referring to marxism, in Poster’s work, this leads to a number of
problems,
including intellectual elitism, the privileging of the claims of the
proletariat over those of other equally oppressed groups, and an
unfortunate
alliance with the very forms of dominating reason (like liberalism)
that were
allegedly transcended (poster 1984, especially chapter 2). Foucault’s own
attempts to avoid these dominating readings are not always successful,
argues
Poster, especially when he refuses to account for the specific
positions,
contexts and politics of his own work -- a refusal of the function of
author is
no real substitute for such analysis. However, there is an attempt to
develop a
suitable style of analysis which keeps to post-structuralist tenets,
and the development
of suitable concepts (especially ‘discourse/practice’ as the unit of
analysis
rather than some essentialist category like ‘man’ or ‘mode of
production’. This
partly explains the strange and frustrating nature of Foucault’s
descriptions
too, as a number of commentators suggest (e.g. White in Sturrock 1979,
to whom
we have referred already). With those warnings in
mind, let us begin with a look at some attempts to borrow Foucauldian
analysis
for a more general marxist project. He has been seen quite frequently
as
providing the means to both concretise and 'elaborate' the basic
gramscian concept
of 'hegemony' in British 'cultural studies', for example, to extend and
modernise such analysis, and to fight off the problems that came to
attach
themselves to marxism after the early attacks by postmodernism (see
Harris 1992
for some examples). In one of the clearest
and most readable cases, Hargreaves (1986), uses Foucauldian themes to
explore
the ways in which discourses about sport, fitness and athletics and
their
organisation can be seen as 'disciplinary technologies' designed to
enforce some
suspect concept of a 'normal person' in a peculiarly contemporary
manner -- by
persuading people to regulate, manipulate and police their own bodies
in a
revisited version of the Protestant work ethic. This example, apart
from giving us all good reasons never to visit the Sports Centre again,
gives
some idea of the tremendous detail of description of the mechanisms in
Foucauldian analysis to which we return below. Yet there are problems
in such
‘elaborated gramscianism’, as a former exponent later came to realise.
Bennett
(1990: 246) argues that ‘the theoretical assumptions from which
Foucault and
Gramsci proceed are so sharply contrastive as to belie any significant
points
of contact’, and goes on to list the main differences -- Foucault
abandons the
‘ideology/truth’ problematic of Gramsci (and, one might add, the purely
negative prohibitory or ‘juridical’ concept of power), advocates a
‘grid’ of
power relations as fundamental to social life, rather than the
‘State/civil
society couplet’, denies the possibility of a ‘unified source of
opposition’ as
opposed to the gramscian ‘project of counter-hegemony’ and so on. For
Bennett,
Foucault does share with gramscianism the need to attend to concrete
detail,
however, although even here one might still entertain doubts about
whether the
point of the detail is to confirm a (very flexible) concept of
hegemony, or to
protect difference and deny totalisations. No-one discusses what
might be called ‘local domination’ in quite the same specific way as
does
Foucault, but then his objects of study provide wonderful levels of
detail
themselves, and perhaps the credit should really go to the designers of
the
disciplinary technologies and apparatuses in the first place, and the
records
they have left of the principles they have used. We can illustrate the
range of
the approach with reference to the example of prisons and punishment.
The other
main ‘applied’ example -- sexuality-- appears briefly in our
discussions of
sexual identity in later chapters. Bentham might have
used dubious abstractions in his general theory, but he displayed a
wealth of
detailed planning and insight in his
plans for a rational prison system. Panopticon was a system
designed to
keep every prisoner under individual surveillance and control from a
central
position (which accounts for the characteristic star shape of some of
the older
British prisons like Pentonville), and to offer detailed ways to modify
and shape
their behaviour, including maximum opportunities to repent in
isolation, and a
system of providing mattresses graded in thickness and comfort and
awarded
according to progress made towards repentance and reform. Embedding
indeed! In a way which inevitably
evokes later work by Goffman on ‘total institutions’, all creature
comforts
were administered in this close 'payment by results' manner in order to
shape
the behaviour (and the intentions) of prisoners towards the desired
end, and
Bentham included detailed costs and procedures to inform the conduct of
the
administrators of the system. The whole system is a triumph of
bourgeois
rationality, as good as any in Weber’s work on the Protestant ethic,
and, of
course a triumphant demonstration of Bentham’s utilitarianism Foucault argues that
such technologies did not appear as an obvious alternative to the
earlier
system, nor is there a tight link to social evolution or to changes in
the mode
of production. Instead, we have the emergence of a more general
discourse/practice
in its own right, so to speak, one which appeared in other areas of
social life
too. This discourse/practice not only reflects conceptions of
punishment it
activates them, calls them into being, generates the actual prisoners
and
regimes it describes. Finally, we are to see these developments as
perfectly
rational in their own terms, with obvious critical implications for our
own
systems of discipline and punishment -- perhaps these are equally
historically
relative, equally dependent on a discourse/practice that appears normal
to us. Bentham was also an
educational reformer, and he produced plans for a rational teaching
system,
based on a number of precedents and other people’s systems, but again
developed
to an amazingly detailed extent. In Chrestomathia Bentham
proposes a
thoroughgoing simplification and rationalisation of school subjects,
for
example, as well as detailed designs for a rational teaching scheme
involving
the older pupils teaching the younger ones, with periodic testing and
seating
in classes ranked according to merit. The scheme would be more fair and
rational than the brutalised and scandalous teaching regimes in
existence in
Bentham's day, (which involved a good deal of flogging, for example)
and far
more cost-effective. Nearly two hundred
years after this sort of proposal, I have argued elsewhere (Harris 1987),
Bentham's design is coming to fruition in the modern forms of
'individualised
teaching', educational technology, and above all in features like
modularisation, continuous assessment regimes, and the electronic
monitoring of
a range of student activities like attendance at lectures or library
use (all
of which will be coming to your university soon, if they are not
already in
place, I predict). These changes are already foreshadowed in
discussions long
ago in establishing early 'distance education' systems like the UK's
Open
University, I have argued, where again a well-meaning interest in the
problems
of educating effectively combines perfectly with an interest in
cost-effective
management. Other writers have
pursued the tracks of Panopticon into modern industrial practices, into
attempts to manipulate intentions and behaviours in ‘just-in-time’
regimes, for
example (see Sewell and Wilkinson 1992). Thus the labour process
becomes more
visible in such regimes partly because the drastic reduction of stocks
‘reduces
the scope for workers to “hide” any defect’ (1992: 279), and because
‘management must erect a superstructure of surveillance and control
which
enhances visibility and facilitates the direct and immediate scrutiny
of both
individual and collective action’ (282). Sewell and Wilkinson include
‘the
impact of teleconferencing on managerial self-discipline’ (286) as
further
examples of a ‘mechanism of Power/Knowledge which can bring out
the
minutest distinctions between individuals’ (287). This sort of analysis
works perfectly well within marxism (indeed, I drew upon 'critical
theory' in
my critique of educational technology rather than Foucault), but
Foucault
cannot be assimilated entirely, as we have seen. Macdonell rebukes him
for his
inconsistency on important issues (like whether the class system and
class
struggle does lie behind all the specific cases he examines). Without a
consistent position, she argues, we have a rather arbitrary shift of
positions
from one analysis to the next, and, to pick up on a major problem
noticed by
other commentators, no real account of organised resistance either. On the last point, the
work of DeCerteau became popular, in
cultural studies at least, for offering an
account of activities like 'poaching, tricking, reading, speaking,
strolling,
shopping, desiring' (see Frow 1991 for a critical discussion) as
techniques of
resistance to the disciplinary technologies. We have already seen
Fiske's
development of this kind of argument. Poster (1984) cites additional
studies of
prison life which provide even more detail and which do include
prisoner
resistance (including the formation of prisoner subcultures, to make a
link
with an earlier chapter). Foucault's innovations
include an 'archaeological' method and a form of historical research he
calls
'genealogical' (defined succinctly in Two Lectures in Foucault
1980 or
in Poster 1984). This is a method of using the radical difference of
past
practices to undermine the rationality of the present, as we have
suggested,
and neither of these is the kind of rigorously marxist materialist
analysis
Macdonell would like, of course. Nor does Foucault's specific analysis
of power
(or rather power/knowledge couplets) lead to organised marxist
politics, as we
have seen, but points instead to more localised struggles to expose the
workings of disciplinary technologies and to permit the excluded
(prisoners,
nurses, patients) to speak. This can look excessively 'pragmatic' or
opportunistic to marxists. Foucault suggests, as
we have seen, that marxism (and all the other grand theories) are
discourses
themselves, however. Although intellectuals, in Secondly, French
marxism in particular was every bit a disciplinary technology as any
bourgeois
discourse, partly because marxists were keen to embrace the title of
'science'
in the bourgeois tradition (and to enjoy all the fruits of public
recognition, university
posts and so on). Foucault (1980: 85) wants to ask the usual questions: 'What types of knowledge do
you want to disqualify ..[by this] demand? Which speaking discoursing
subjects
-- which subjects of experience and knowledge...do you then want to
"diminish"...? Which theoretical-political avant-garde do you
want to enthrone?' You can see that this
sort of questioning will lead to the familiar accusations that marxism
ignores
feminist struggle or non-class political movements. Foucault means to
include
victims of clinics or prisons too, however, and refers to the
disinterest of
his marxist colleagues. The French Communist Party dominated marxist
thought at
the time with its own suspect political agenda and its association with
tainted
Soviet practices (like using psychiatry to control political
dissidents). This
sort of work fits my own arguments that British gramscian marxism also
ended
with an uncritical adoption of the disciplinary conventions of the
university
(although it can be absolved from any involvement in the Gulag, of
course). However, the argument
is not all simply critical of marxism, as ever -- Foucault himself
seems to
need to refer to the class system as the final embedding mechanism to
explain
the precise course of dominant discourse about sexuality, for example,
according
to Macdonnell, and, perhaps to overcome a certain acknowledged lack of
integration or 'discontinuity' in his work. We have here the old
problem, in
other words of wanting to address the major struggles in society while
refusing
to provide any compelling theoretical reason to do so. Why not study any
discursive struggle, why not continue to amass further isolated studies
of
'subjugated local knowledges' in institutions like local cricket clubs,
churches or garden centres? Foucault knows why -- it would make his
work look
'fragmentary, repetitive and discontinuous', a mere scholarly
indulgence, ' a
typical affliction of those enamoured of libraries, documents,
reference works,
dusty tomes, texts that are never read...[an addition to the] ...great
warm and
tender Freemasonry of useless erudition' (Foucault 1980: 79). CONCLUDING
SECTION We
have reviewed a number of approaches in this chapter which can help
us to see the problems and prospects of extending marxist analysis into
the
area of modern culture. The attempts involved various linguistic
theories
designed to analyse ‘discourses’ in this rather special sense of
‘socially
located speech’. Various options were discussed which attempted to
deploy and
control such analyses, to combine them with materialist (marxist or
critical
sociological) analyses of social structures. The attempts have
generated work
of great interest and some considerable ability to grasp the detail of
the
practices of cultural or ideological domination. We have also hinted at
a dissatisfaction with sort of work, though, most specifically via the
work of
Foucault. He exemplifies best of all in this collection of work the
problem in
that to fully grasp the specificity of modern cultural forms of
domination, a new
beginning seems necessary, the deployment of new concepts and new
interests. We
shall see another highly influential writer -- Roland Barthes--
treading the
same trail away from marxist problematics altogether, in the next
chapter.
There is a sense in which we have tested marxist approaches to
destruction in
this chapter: it is not so much that we have refuted them decisively,
but more
that we have exhausted them, perhaps. Forget Marx? Poster’s
(1984) commentary on the links between Foucault and Marx
begins with a critique of Marx’s approach which has become familiar. I
came
across a similar critique first in the work of Habermas (1972 chapter 2
especially pp.33--40, and 1974 chapters 1 and 6 for example) in fact,
so it
might be possible to extend the discussion slightly into his work too.
There
are serious problems with the labour theory of value, for example, in
explaining modern societies. We have outlined the basics in chapter 1,
and many
sociology students will be familiar with the usual criticism of Marx’s
work --
that it is ‘economic reductionist’. This is not just a political flaw,
though,
which privileges the politics of class over, say, those of gender. It
mean that
Marx’s main explanatory devices and schemas no longer work. The reasons are not
too difficult to spot. Wealth these days is produced in a variety of
ways apart
from the classic mode of labour producing surplus value in
manufacturing
industry. There are problems arising from the widespread deployment of
machinery which add value in their own right. There are also ways of
creating
wealth that do not seem to depend any longer on the direct exploitation
of
labour. A recent scandal in If the exploitation of
labour is no longer central to capitalism, nor can be an analysis based
upon it
as a central motif. The effort needed to ground and conceal the
exploitation
system in legal and ideological systems becomes more marginal, possibly
(although notions of private property and free trade were well to the
fore in
the Barings scandal!).The classes generated by exploitation need be
central no
longer, and other forms of division and inequality might emerge: apart
from
anything else, this leaves bankrupt the marxist account of the
inevitable end
of capitalism as the proletariat come to be aware of themselves as an
active
political agent., a ‘class for themselves’. More technically, the
model of domination based on alienation, commodity fetishism, or the
exploitation of labour ceases to be the main organising concept for the
analysis of ideology, of culture or of discourse. We need new models of
communication as well. In Poster, Foucault supplies just such a new
account of
the ‘mode of information’ as we have seen. Habermas, somewhat
before, had already turned elsewhere, to bourgeois (American)
sociology, to
symbolic interactionism, and later to Parsons. He was able to insist
that
these writers had correctly identified a separate sphere of human life,
an
interest in interaction or communication in its own right.
This sphere could not be collapsed back into
a marxist interest in ‘work’ or production, where communication was
more
instrumental, so to speak, more purposive rational (to borrow Weber),
more
ideological in classic marxist terms. We have seen this
tactic before, though, and we know that it seems to stave off one
problem, only
to raise others. We are left with rather uncomfortable -looking lists,
or
models of different levels. Above all, we are left with a suspicion
that
analysts have grasped complexity at the expense of incoherence covered
by some
of the devices we discussed at the end of chapter 1 (‘bolt ons’, for
example,
involving the quiet tactical switch into another discourse altogether). In Habermas, this
worry led to a massive effort to synthesis the different approaches. To
be
terribly brief, he was to argue, at a fairly early stage, for the
existence of
three separated universal ‘interests’ which defined the human condition
--
‘quasi-transcendental human interests’ in work, interaction and
emancipation or
critique (as in the famous Appendix to
Habermas 1972). Each of the different
approaches in social science could be fitted into the scheme as
pursuing
interests in work or interaction, as we have hinted, leaving critical
theory
uniquely qualified to pursue the third. This rather evasive
system was to give way to a scheme based on types of communication,
however.
Communication offers, after an evolutionary process at least, a
universal
capacity to reflect upon different types of knowledge in different
spheres, to
think in terms of different sorts of validity for that knowledge, and ,
above
all to question the claims to validity of specific utterances and
arguments
(McCarthy 1984 or Dews 1992 offer much fuller summaries). This system
too is
highly controversial, of course, and we have hinted at Lyotard’s
critique
already (and we shall see his alternative in chapter 5). Marxism, and its
characteristic interest and critiques fits into this scheme but it is
no longer
the dominant approach. Marxism is not just plainly wrong or limited for
Habermas, of course -- apart from certain philosophical errors,
especially in
the way Marx deals with Hegel (see Habermas 1974, chapter 4), it is
partly that
in Marx’s day, the other types of communication were ‘clamped’ to
production
and exploitation much more firmly than they were. Habermas leads us
back to
some of the discussions we have had on culture in (post) modernity here
-- the
spheres of culture have become much more autonomous since the early
days of
capitalism. We can link these
points to later work on ‘embedding’. This would be far too technical
and
neutral a term to describe the ways in which ideas are connected to
social
practices for serious marxists, of course, but it enjoys a certain
current
popularity. The sort of analysis we have pursued with Thompson’s ‘depth
hermeneutics’ or with Foucault represents the high points of attempts
to
describe how social life is embedded in a general structure of
domination. Many writers now feel
that is the wrong level upon which to operate, that general social
constraints
have become attenuated in complex and pluralistic societies. This is
one sense
in which culture is now thought to be 'disembedded'. However, there is
still
lots of work on what might be thought of as more local concrete
embeddings, in
institutions, organisations or in discourses, and I have tried to
outline some
of the more interesting examples. These show considerable variability,
but we are still far from the picture of
complete
drift and disembedding, the playful relativism that some see as
characterising
social life. Forget Foucault? As
we saw with Foucault, though, general theory is not easily left
behind, even if we wanted to run the risk of endless repetition and
incoherence, and it tends to be smuggled in, especially at the level of
choosing examples to analyse in the first place. It should also be said
again
that none of the alternatives are without problems. The work reviewed
here
offers some of the clearest recognitions of some of the major problems
of
analysis. In many ways, those problems have also not been transcended
or
resolved in the newer approaches, but have been just left aside in a
flight
from ‘seriousness’ and the model of the severe and responsible analyst
operating with an awareness of a wider political context to their
deliberations. For Baudrillard, for
example, all these serious endeavours are passé, and so is
Foucault's whole
corpus of work (and Marx's of course) for that matter. We are simply
best off
forgetting them, since the game has already moved on, away from all
'productivist'
theories, designed to create meaning and system. Foucault described the
mechanisms of power in tremendous detail, and was right to emphasise
its
positive side -- but his clinging to emancipatory politics, even in the
form of
a role for intellectuals in 'sapping' disciplinary technologies is
politically
and methodologically naive. Just like Marx, he
failed to realise that the critique of power only helps to validate it.
Indeed,
constant talk about power, and constant minute analysis of it is about
the only
thing left which is holding everything together for Baudrillard -- the
real
system has long ago declined into a mere simulation of power. The
painstaking
reconstructions of Foucault or Habermas (and others, like Deleuze), and
their
connections with the real remind Baudrillard of the relation between
beautifully produced and detailed pornography and actual sex:
pornography does
not simply represent actual sex, but informs, initiates, or even
constructs it.
Constant argument
about the productive (as in 'world-producing') role of power/knowledge,
discourse, desire, economic production, or universal pragmatics is at
best a
gesture -- an 'accumulation against death'. In political terms,
fascists were
the last to develop such a fascination with power, and to try and
mobilise it
on a total scale, to impose their political will on reality, according
to
Baudrillard. The implication, of course, is that Foucault and Habermas
are
conceptual fascists, so to speak, and like many of Baudrillard’s
provocations,
this is hardly new -- both writers have long recognised the dangerous
connections between cognitive and real domination ( to phrase it in the
terms
of Adorno’s critical theory). We end, therefore,
with Baudrillard promising a philosophical position of great
abstraction, able
to fit grand theories together, to reconcile, for example, Marx and
Nietzsche
(see Kroker 1985) and to show the fundamental similarities between
thinkers who
had thought themselves opposed. Let us just anticipate some of the
further
discussions in chapter 5, though, if only to deny Baudrillard some
triumphant
‘last word’. From a participant's
point of view, we have also reached absurdity. Here is a great French
thinker
who can see no differences of any importance between pornography,
fascism and
Habermas's social theory. Baudrillard's comments seem so unattached and
remote
as to be pointless, far too clever and innovative to be dispensed with,
but
irrelevant, simply to be left to one side while the rest of us get on
with our
lives. In his interview with
Lotringer, Baudrillard shows all his remoteness and brilliance. We
discuss his
evasiveness in connection with sociology in chapter 4, and he is
apparently
equally unconcerned about feminist analysis: 'I consider women to be
the
absence of desire. It is of little import whether or not that
corresponds to
real women. It is my conception of "femininity"' (Baudrillard and
Lotringer 1987: 95). And what can and should one do with statements
like ;'The
drama of love is entirely in men, that of charm completely with women'
(96). I
know, of course, that one is meant to grasp these generalisations as
poetic,
but if one plays Baudrillard's game back and takes them literally we
are left
with something that really can be safely forgotten. Baudrillard's
interview also contains much insight into the dangers of taking his
sort of
radical 'coolness' to excess: 'The giddiness I'm talking about ended up
taking
hold of me...I felt I was going totally nuts...Dying doesn't do any
good. You
still have to disappear'. (Baudrillard and Lotringer 1987: 81--2). Let Lotringer have the
last word: 'I wonder if there isn't a kind of "skidding" endemic to
theory. When theory manages to complete itself, following its own
internal
logic, that's when it disappears. Its accomplishment is its abolition'
(127). |