Maggie MacLure

Review: Language and Discourse: The Embrace of Uncertainty Author(s): Maggie MacLure Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1994), pp. 283-300 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1393232 . Accessed: 15/04/2011 11:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis. . 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Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to British Journal of Sociology of Education. http://www.jstor.org British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1994 283 REVIEW ESSAY Language and Discourse: the embrace of uncertainty MAGGIE MACLURE, University of East Anglia Discourse and Social Change Norman Fairclough, 1992 Cambridge, Polity Press Writing, Schooling and Deconstruction: from voice to text in the classroom Pam Gilbert, 1989 London, Routledge Making the Social Text: poetics and politics in social science discourse Richard Harvey Brown (Ed.), 1992 New York, de Gruyter Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough? Malcolm Arnold 1. We Need the Eggs Reviewing recent trends in language and discourse is a tough assignment, not just because of the size and diversity of the field, but also because of the fraught response that mention of 'discourse' often prompts-especially if it's linked with that other bad word, postmodernism. Some people find some of the key propositions of contemporary work in discourse pretty hard to swallow: for instance, the idea that truth is the creature of language, rather than the other way round; that there's no first, last or deepest thing Out There that tethers language to reality; that our solid sense of self is a textual thing-the product of genres, not genes; that there's as much rhetoric as reason in research. Especially unpalatable to many people is the notion that power, oppression and struggle are forged in discourse. For if there really were 'nothing outside the text', how would we, how could we intervene politically? But there's also a certain ambivalence. It's getting harder to ignore the claims by the likes of Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Bakhtin or Geertz about the complicity of language 284 Review Essay in the workings of reality, society, power, knowledge, identity. Indeed, some of the terms and tactics of discourse-based theories are proving very useful for a whole range of critical and emancipatory enterprises. Deconstruction, for instance, is being done strategically by feminist and post-colonial theorists to destabilise the old us/them oppositions that have shored up the dominant discourses of western culture. Likewise, Foucault's exposure of the regulatory force of such innocent linguistic acts as naming and categorisation, and his identification of the 'technologies of power' exercised in discursive practices such as examination and confession, have given a powerful edge to social and educational critique. The trouble is, to embrace discourse theory is to court what many people see as the abyss of epistemological doubt and political paralysis sketched above. As a result, the 'linguistic turn' in the social sciences is kind of everywhere and nowhere: fascinating yet frightening, essential but impossible. I'm reminded of the old joke about the guy whose brother thinks he's a chicken. 'Why don't you take him to a shrink?' somebody asks. 'I would', says the guy, 'but we need the eggs'. This review essay is mainly about [1] why people might need the eggs of contempor- ary discourse-based theory but often find it hard to swallow the chicken. My interest is in work within education that can loosely be described as poststructuralist in orientation, or which has been influenced by poststructuralist currents [2]. Definitions are tricky, since poststructuralism could mischievously be defined in terms of a suspicion of definitions. But I take it that a work is locatable with respect to poststructural notions if it (a) takes some kind of sceptical position towards the relationship between language and reality; and/or (b) understands discourse/language not just as a reflection of 'the social', but as deeply implicated in the constitution of the social and cultural world; and/or (c) considers 'meaning' to be ambiguous, contested, shifting, and never finally resolvable by recourse to an 'external' world of objects and certainties. As already noted, those sorts of propositions are both attractive and repulsive to educational theorizing, which is still, in its many forms, more or less committed to the modernist projects of emancipation, progress and resistance to oppression, and which still sees the exercise of reason and the possibility of truth as the intellectual cornerstones of those projects. Poststructural theories of discourse are deeply challeng- ing to modernist projects, not least because they have an inbuilt potential to unravel their own arguments. Taking texts apart might be a powerful weapon of critique when directed 'outwards' towards the powerful public languages of policy, politics and the media, by enabling us to reveal the rhetorical strategies and suppressions that deliver the supposed truths and certainties in such discourses. But how to stop short of applying this deconstructive logic 'inwards', to the truths, models and findings of our own discourses of education? My argument below is that poststructuralist theories always present both a threat and a promise for educational enquiry, and that this is reflected in various strategies-textual ones of course-for handling that threat. In referring to various books and articles below my interest, then, is not just in the substantive areas they address in discursive terms-e.g. policy, professional discourse, classroom practice-but in the different kinds of rhetorical deals that they strike with the devil, in order not to be undone by the deconstructive logic. These strategies range from (most obviously) silence about the traps for the unwary, through confession (admit complicity in asides and footnotes but proceed as before) to a variety of strategies for rescuing the core values of the paradigm. Lastly, there is the ludic strategy-the attempt, not to sidestep the dangers of deconstruction, but to throw oneself wholeheartedly into the paradoxical and reflexive game of meaning: to refuse to resolve Review Essay 285 ambiguities, to disobey the rules of genres, to stop making sense. This is the kind of radical poststructural 'turn' that really gets up people's noses. I don't mean to disparage some or all of these textual strategies, nor to suggest that there could be a 'purer' or less mediated kind of intercourse between education and the discourses of uncertainty. Indeed, I think there are probably no final solutions to the problems raised by the double-edged embrace of those discourses. But I think it's worth trying to learn more about those encounters. Deconstruction tells us that if we look to such skirmishes and truces on the borders of paradigms, we may learn a lot about what those paradigms take, and make, themselves to be. The books listed at the beginning are not given separate and individual reviews. Instead, they are woven into the discussion as exemplars of particular issues. I single them out for special mention mainly because they are interesting and challenging examples of recent work, for those who want to read further. The three books are referred to below by the initials in their titles: thus DSC, WSD and MST. 2. Taking Texts Apart: (1) interrogating policy texts and public discourse One of the most obvious uses for discourse theory is the critique of policy texts and public discourses. Like any other texts, policy documents, government pronouncements, news coverage and the like can be subjected to 'close reading', to reveal the devices that are used to claim authority and impartiality; to recruit the reader/listener to the author/speaker's viewpoint and anathemise opponents; to consolidate knowledge claims by marginalising, suppressing or smoothing over contradictions. Stronach (1992), for instance, 'reads' the recent Howie Report on the future of Scottish upper secondary education as an oscillation between appeals to two opposing economic/educational 'identities'-the romantic ideal of the rounded and accomplished Scottish student (male, of course)-the 'lad o' pairts'-and a more modem European sensibility. Stronach highlights the textual manoeuvres that give a gloss of coherence, consensus and commonsense to a collection of mutually contradictory educational fantasies. Ball's (1990) analysis of education policy in England and Wales characterises it in terms of a struggle amongst competing discourses and their associated forms of knowl- edge/power (after Foucault). Ball is especially interested in the discourses of the 'New Right' and the way these have operated, via a 'discourse of derision', to pathologise educational ideals such as progressivism and comprehensivisation (Ball, 1990, p. 18). Ball and his co-workers have brought a discourse-based approach to several policy issues, such as the reception of national curriculum documents within secondary school departments (Ball & Bowe, 1992), and the operation of 'parental choice' (Bowe et al., nd). The latter study is a critique, not only of the discourses of policy texts such as the Parent's Charter and consumerist guides to 'good schools', but also of the accumulating body of research. Their argument is that much of this research operates, collusively if unwittingly, 'inside the discourses of choice and consumption' that characterise the policy/con- sumerist texts themselves, and therefore never succeeds in 'breaking out of the discourse' to achieve analytic or critical autonomy (nd, p. 14). Stronach & Morris (1994) find a similar kind of discursive complicity in evaluations of vocationalist reforms. A new kind of 'conformative' evaluation has developed in the UK, they argue, as a result of the volatile policy contexts of the 80s and 1990s. This 'policy hysteria'--a postmodern condition of multiple and contradictory innovations, and wildly oscillating policy stances--generates evaluations that are 'short-term, complicit, impres- 286 Review Essay sionistic and formative' (6). Complicity with the goals and values of the project is achieved (and concealed) via a number of textual devices in evaluation reports-for example, portraying negative findings as the harbingers of an imminent upturn; fore- grounding the 'good news' and relegating the bad to subordinate clauses; using 'hooray words' such as progression, ownership, whole school and entitlement to 'substitute for critical analysis, and at the same time give advocacy a sense of direction' (pp. 12-13). Stronach & Morris suggest there's something funny going on, then, around the language of reform: they note elsewhere the development of a language of ' "enterprise", "relevance", "student-centredness" that came to have as many definitions as it had voices' (p. 3). MacLure & Stronach (1993a, p. 180-81) noted a similar kind of 'dispersion of meaning' around words such as 'work' in (first generation) National Curriculum documents. Fairclough is likewise interested in shifts of meaning within and across policy texts. He too picks up on 'enterprise', as an instance of state-sponsored 'semantic engineering', initiated by Lord Young, British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the mid 1980s. Fairclough argues that Young invested the term 'enterprise' with a particular set of meanings (linking it, for example, with notions of 'self-help' and 'self-reliance'), and traces an 'intertextual chain' leading from Young's speeches, through official DTI brochures, and thence into a wide range of texts in health care, education etc (DSC, pp. 131-33). This is one instance, according to Fairclough, of a widespread process of 'colonization of orders of discourse'. A related textual phenomenon, according to Fairclough, is that of 'overwording'-a dense profusion of words or phrases with similar or related meanings. It is, it seems, a phenomenon to be viewed with suspicion- 'a sign of "intense preoccupation" pointing to "peculiarities in the ideology" of the group in question' (DSC, 193; citing Fowler et al. 1979, p. 210). Fairclough's example is the skills-based vocabulary of the 1988 Kingman Report on English in UK schools (DES, 1988), with wordings including competence, effectiveness, mastery, facility, expertise and skill [3]. There seems to be a lot of mileage, then, in applying textual criticism to policy texts and discourses. It looks promising as a vehicle for public accountability and critique, by making the knowledge claims and authoritative postures of policy makers open to 'interrogation'. It also provides an analytic purchase on cycles and processes of reform. There are a number of further questions that could be asked. Does text-based policy analysis necessarily imply the radical (postmodern) version of the 'linguistic turn' that I sketched at the outset? Or are people using discourse methods simply as one more tool for doing whatever is their usual disciplinary business-policy sociology, ethnography, critical theory or whatever? Is there any reason why they shouldn't do that? Is this kind of work 'deconstruction'? Does it matter? Taking just the latter question for the moment: the very idea of distinguishing 'proper' from improper kinds of deconstruction would be to erect just the kind of 'violent hierarchy' (Derrida, 1981) that is the target of deconstruction, in one of its versions at any rate. So nobody can afford to be doctrinaire. But it is worth keeping an eye, I think, on the 'dispersion of meaning' around the term deconstruction itself, precisely because of the vast number of 'intertextual chains' to which it now belongs, from architecture to literary theory, from film reviews to political commentary. It has even become a movement in fashion.[4] Within social science/edu- cational discourse, there is a tendency, I think, for deconstruction to be used in a vernacular sense roughly analogous to 'analysis' or 'critique', alongside more specialist usages drawn from poststructuralist literary theory or French philosophy. Again, I don't think this matters, except to the extent that it would be helpful to know whether its use in particular cases is an index of a broadly poststructuralist or reflexive text-based Review Essay 287 orientation, and hence some kind of a departure from the canonical forms of qualitative or critical enquiry. It might just be a bolt-on term that does not really disturb the linguistic economy of the paradigm-but gives it a little gloss of contemporaneity [5]. Standing on the Outside: the strategy of silence There is the further question, already flagged above, of whether it's possible (epistemolog- ically? politically? pragmatically?) to deconstruct only in an 'outwards' direction-to take other texts apart as a critical/analytic method, without doing it to your own arguments too. Ball is fairly sanguine about the possibility of 'standing' somewhere 'theoretically and methodologically' outside the charmed circle of language in order to carry out a study that he nevertheless considers to be 'deconstructive' and fundamentally about 'taking things apart' (1990, pp. 1, 2). Others are less confident, and more critical of the possibility of 'arresting' the deconstructive impulse before it starts to lap around the edges of one's own discourse. Deniivo is scathing about arrested or 'quasi-deconstructive' readings in anthropology which covertly stand outside the 'web of significations they themselves have spun', and which thereby become mere explications de texte (MST, pp. 39-48). This dilemma of deconstruction is a theme to be revisited below. The deconstructive energies of the works discussed above are aimed 'outward', then-towards the worlds of policy and media. No real crisis of representation here: intertextuality [6] just offers an empirical handle on rather incorporeal notions such as policy drift; or a device for decoding the linguistic fingerprints left along the intertextual chain by the usual ideological suspects (the New Right; bureaucratisation; managerialism ...). Fairclough's metaphors of linguistic colonization, marketization, overwording and semantic engineering seem to point to a nostalgic longing for a state of linguistic grace, where language might be purified of ideology, plural meanings and ironic relations with reality. Discourse is not 'irredeemably ideological', he reckons, and in any case some kinds of discourse are more heavily ideologically 'invested' than others: '[i]t should not be too difficult to show that advertising is in broad terms more heavily invested than the physical sciences' (p. 91). This pronouncement might come as a surprise to sociologists of scientific knowledge [7], who have demonstrated repeatedly how scientific discourses are shot through with ideological and rhetorical 'investments'. In fact there is an ambiguity throughout Fairclough's book, reflected in his (for me, unconvincing) attempt to reconcile Foucault and Gramsci. He oscillates between, on the one hand, a constitu- tive position that denies a pre-existing realm of meaning and an external reality, and on the other, a hegemonic position that still spies some ground to occupy 'outside' language from which to perceive reality and repel ideology. It is relatively easy, perhaps, to sideline the reflexive problems of deconstruction, when a strict boundary can be maintained between inside and outside. When the focus of attention turns 'inwards', to the discourses of education, that boundary between inside and outside, us and them, starts to get harder to police. 3. Taking Texts Apart: (2) internal affairs Let's turn, then, to work that directs its attentions 'inward', interrogating the educational discourses of theory, research, practice and professionalism. Gilbert's Writing, Schooling and Deconstruction is an extended critique of the prevailing models of writing development in Australia and the UK, and an exploration of an alternative approach based on 288 Review Essay deconstructionist principles. She starts with a review of the hugely influential literature on writing development that still continues to hold sway in teacher education and writing research, and shows how the core values of authorship, authenticity, spontaneity, personal voice, creativity, expression and ownership have been relentlessly promoted. What happens to theories of children's writing development, she asks, if you ta