The "boomerang" effect of the radicalism in discourse analysis

More documents

Recommendations

Info

the social discourses, but with a diverse theoretical-methodological option. The RDA starts from the assumption that human beings produce discourses and representations of the reality that are ever changeable in relation to the situations, by using various interpretative repertoires. “Interpretative repertoires are used to perform different sort of accounting tasks. Because people go through life faced with an ever-changing kaleidoscope of situations, they will need to draw upon very different repertoires to suit the needs at hand.” (Potter & Wetherell, 1987, p.156) Consequently the RDA is mainly interested in the study of the contextual variability of the discourses and of the bond between the discourses and the contingent goals suggested by the impersonal context. The SRT is interested in the study both of the shared elements and of those dynamically different that characterise the discourses, i.e. of those elements that make the discourse produced by the various social groups recognisable and reveal the taking of position between the multiple and pluralist prospects of the various social discourses. “(...) linguistically mediated social representations to some extent are negotiable and border on our imperfect knowledge of the world. What is made known by what is said in particular context of human discourse is thus a considerable degree contingent upon negotiated specification of linguistically mediated general drafts of contract concerning categorisation. Negotiated specification, moreover, allows for adjustment of categorisations in accordance with private and contextually determined perspectives. And mutual understanding will always entail a residual of presupposed commonality with respect of interpretation or faith in a common world.” (Rommetveit, 1984, p. 357-8) Therefore, for the SRT each participant, although negotiating the meanings of the communication in terms of the situational and immediate interactive context, aims at expressing a point of view that reflects also previous social influences on the hereand-now interaction. The SRT does not deny that the viewpoints may be negotiated, justified or masked inside particular discussions and in terms of immediate particular goals. The TRS merely retains that these points of view are nourished from even previous discourses and social influences, that orient the discursive production developed in the course of a specific interaction. If it is true that the discourses vary in terms of the micro-temporal contexts, it is also true that, in many ways, these same discourses reflect the points of view nourished by previously spoken discourses, reelaborated in connection to a personal, social and collective memory of wider range and in terms of semantic contexts activated by the imaginative capacities. Thus come into play both the articulation between relational micro-contexts and socio-cultural macro-context, and the role of the social and collective memory as well as that of imagination. The structural role of the context is theorised both by the RDA and by the SRT and in both paradigms the context is brought back with priority to the common places of daily life, rather than artificially recreated in laboratories with little ecological validity of the research (although some researches based on DA are performed in the laboratory on adhoc created groups and some developments of the SRT do not rule out also the experimental approach, when the SRs are isolated in the research designs and treated as independent variables). However, the context is considered in a fairly different way. The 36
RDA, and even more the conversational analysis, studies the way in which, in the relational micro-contexts, socially negotiated discourses are produced at a particular time. On the contrary, the SRT studies mainly the way in which belonging to a macrocultural macro-context - and more specifically the multiple belonging to various groups and social institutions - influences the discourses produced in the micro-context of the here-and-now situation. For the SRT the discourses spoken and proven in the microcontext reflect the dynamics of the social exchanges spoken and proven in the macrocontext, but are also in the meanwhile the dynamic element of the social change. The RDA, with its contingentism, seems to neglect the prestructural role of an interiorised discourse that is anchored to cultural membership within a temporal perspective not only autobiographical, but plurigenerational and Historical-collective. With regard to the memory, the position of discursive psychology is rather complex. Despite the recognition that “the role of memory has an important epistemological role”, however once again, the role of "remembering can be seen as a set of social practices related to a range of actions and providing a particular kind of accountability" (Potter, 1996, p. 216). “The study of remembering in conversation affords unique opportunities for understanding remembering as organized social action. Reports of past events are studiable as pragmatically occasioned versions whose variability is due not only to the nature and vicissitudes of individual cognition, but to the conversational work that those versions accomplish.” (Middleton & Edwards, 1990, p. 43) In the view of the SRT, the representations are produced by the communications and by the experiences that take place (in a relatively long interval of time) within specific social contexts. However, the representations (conceivable as situated and able to be situated items of knowledge) orient the behaviour and communications produced in the course of a specific "here-and-now" interaction. On the other hand, to consider the discourse as a total contingent and variable fact, and to deny radically every cognitiverepresentational capacity, it means to overlook the importance of the memory as virtual dislocation of the subject in times prior to the discursive situation “acted” in the hic et nunc. The linguistic repertoires do not have a mental or mnemonic nature, they are acts performed in a particular time and social context: “From the socio-constructinist and discoursivist point of view, the action of rememberig is in the first place, in fact, an action that is undertaken as part of a complex process of negotiation (as much between diverse individuals as in the context of the individual thought) between the possible explanations of the past.” (Mazzara, 2000, p. 35) By denying the pre-structural role of the past, the social individual risks being considered as an entity without memory, "an empty person" (Burr, 1995, p. 59), who is moved solely by his immediate interests. In the meantime a vision to a certain extent "opportunistic" and "cynic" of the man is expressed (although, in a discursive vision, such a definition - referring to a value criterion - would be devoid of any basis). However it is evident that - although subject to the games played in the interpersonal situation - the memory of the previously performed actions (and of the discourses previously spoken) may influence the social practices produced in a particular time, 37
Page 1 and 2: EAESP SMALL GROUP MEETING Theory an
Page 3 and 4: A scientific dialogue or monologue?
Page 5 and 6: potential for contributing to a soc
Page 7 and 8: identified with the discursive prac
Page 9 and 10: The misunderstanding of the Moscovi
Page 11 and 12: “monologue”, nor “dialogue st
Page 13 and 14: The auto-confutation of radical rel
Page 15 and 16: Sherrard, 1991; Marks, 1993, Figuer
Page 17 and 18: It is undeniable that the articulat
Page 19 and 20: The subject's role in a radical "co
Page 21 and 22: of any structure intra-individual h
Page 23 and 24: The "totalising" and "reifying" rol
Page 25 and 26: No Communication without Representa
Page 27 and 28: transferring messages occurs on the
Page 29 and 30: The refusal of the communication co
Page 31 and 32: Pol-lu-tion, s. Effect of defilemen
Page 33 and 34: "Monological" versus "dialogical" p
Page 35: Although the role of the action and
Page 39 and 40: And even before in Arguing and Thin
Page 41 and 42: Conclusion 41
Page 43 and 44: Augoustionos, M. , Innes, J.M. (199
Page 45 and 46: Jodelet, D. (1991) “L’idéologi
Page 47: Wagner, W. (1998) Social representa

The "boomerang" effect of the radicalism in discourse analysis

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?