Linguistic approach

Studying how people use language (e.g. our discourse, in the narrow, linguistic sense) to make the meanings of physics, or economics, or cognitive psychology, in research, in teaching, in writing, in dialogue with colleagues and students, can reveal how these disciplines construe general and special human experience into the categories and relations that characterize their unique disciplinary perspectives. This is linguistics focussed not on form, but on function.

The totemic grandfather of social linguistics and intertextual discourse analysis of this sort is Mikhail Bakhtin (1929, 1981, 1986), a figure who ranks today with Foucault (and perhaps outranks Derrida). Like Foucault, Bakhtin takes a larger view of discourse than simply language in its narrowest sense. Discourse is a mode of action, almost synonymous with meaning-making itself. The units of discoure for both of them are units of meaning, or units of human activity that make meaning (utterances), and not linguistic units per se (clauses, sentences). Their perspective is semiotic. Semiosis is the process of making meaning by deploying the resources of social systems of signs in a community. While linguistic signs (words, clauses, texts) form such a semiotic resource system, so do many nonlinguistic, or only partly linguistic modes of human action. We can make meaning with dance, gesture, and movement; with pictures, diagrams, and typefaces; with songs, meals, and clothes. Most fundamentally, we make meaning with action. Linguistics made the first breakthroughs in the study of how we make meaning by deploying semiotic resources, but the general processes, it appears, apply to all meaning-making activity.

The postmodern, semiotic, constructivist view talks about meaning, not about truth. It talks about how discourses define phenomena, not about how phenomena are described by discourses. It always wants to know what people do that makes sense of what we ordinarily call an object or phenomenon. It situates meaning-making practices and the systems of semiotic resources deployed in those practices in the domain of the social, the cultural. Indeed, it sees social and cultural systems exactly as systems of such practices, systems of doings, and not systems of doers per se. The doer, the notion of a human individual, is as much a meaning-construction as anything else. If it is doings, e.g. social and cultural practices, that are fundamental, then as activities these practices consist of processes and participants defined in relation to the processes. Among the types of participant constructed in our culture are ones we call human individuals, but what a human is (an organism, a social individual, an actor or agent) is not necessarily the same from one type of activity to another. We learn how to conflate them, to make them all seem the same, and indeed how to think of ourselves as being constructions of this kind (cf. Lemke 1988b, in press). Human individuals cannot be taken for granted as the starting point of either social or cognitive theories.

The linguistic turn, which has many and at times incompatible variants, is most fruitfully understood as involving a recognition of the problematic nature of language or any signifying practice (ritual, music, or dance, for example).

Language in this sense is not a purely transparent medium that may simply be looked through (or bracketed) in the interest of (re)presenting the object or findings of research. It poses problems for the historian (or other analyst) and signals the manner in which the observer is constitutively implicated in the object of research. With reference to psychoanalysis, Freud framed this problem in terms of transference, and transference involves both the tendency of the analyst-analysand relation to repeat typically inappropriate parent-child relations and the more general tendency of an analytic discourse to repeat the problems at issue in its object of analysis.3 The goal for Freud was to pass from a perhaps inevitable and necessary tendency to 'act out' (or compulsively relive) these problems - a tendency particularly insistent with respect to traumatic events - to the attempt to recall them in memory and critically work through them.

Moreover, language or signification cannot be situated in a merely instrumental and subordinate position, nor can it be confined to the status of simply one more object of investigation. Indeed, with the turn to language (or, more generally, signifying practices), an entire research paradigm may in certain ways be placed in question.

The essential step away from modernism was the new focus on meaning. How does a text mean? How does a graph or diagram tell us something? How do marks on paper (or lighted pixels on a screen) convey to us a complex conceptual meaning? A landscape is a text for a geologist. An apparatus and its readouts is a text in the same sense for a physicist. The principles, and the problems of meaning, are the same. If the meaning of any text depends on how we interpret it in relation to other texts, how can either data or explanation be fixed and stable in its own meaning, much less the basis for objective knowledge of an objective world? Why should we believe that scientific texts are not subject to the same principles of interpretation as literary texts? Why should we believe that primary data can be read from the book of nature without the same problems, or arbitrary conventions, of interpretation that beset the reading of any other sort of "book"? Why should we believe that the practical effects of technologies are legitimate warrant for the objective truth of theories, when the only links between them are yet more texts, more discourses?

Deconstruction

The term "deconstruction" comes from Martin Heidegger, who calls for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotates both English words) of the history of ontology. The point, for Heidegger, was to describe Being prior to its being covered over by Plato and subsequent philosophy. Thus, Heidegger himself engaged in "deconstruction" through a critique of post-Socratic thought (which had forgotten the question of Being) and the study of the pre-Socratics (where Being was still an open question).

In later usage, a "deconstruction" is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors. They argue that aspects in the text itself would undermine its own authority or assumptions and that internal contradictions would erase boundaries or categories which the work relied on or asserted.

Often opposed to deconstruction are social constructionists, labelled as such within the analytic tradition, but not usually in the case of the continental tradition. The term was first used in sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality.

In the continental tradition, most works argue that power dissimulates and that society constructs reality, while its individuals remain powerless or almost powerless. Often, both continental and analytic sources argue for a renewed subjectivity, borrowing heavily from Immanuel Kant, while they largely reject his a priori/a posteriori distinction. They both minimize discussions of practical ethics, instead borrowing heavily from post-Holocaust accounts of the need for an ethics of responsibility, which is very rarely practically defined.

Deconstruction is a complex, heterogeneous movement that has been more prominent in literary criticism and certain branches of Continental philosophy than in history.

But historians have shown interest in it if only to learn enough to criticize it and its 'lures,' often, if not typically, understanding it in reductive or truncated terms.

Given the complexity of deconstruction and the variety of ways in which it is construed or employed, it is difficult not to be reductive in making generalisations about it or its more prominent practitioners, and I cannot claim to have escaped this difficulty in my own discussion.

In deconstructive reading, there is a pronounced suspicion of synoptic or contextual reductionism, and virtually everything is to be found in nuance and the close reader's response to it. This approach to reading often brings extremely dismissive reactions to synoptic, content-oriented, and constative (or representational) reading practices - reactions especially evident in radical forms of deconstruction.

Paul de Man and those modelling themselves on him tend to be radically deconstructive. The writings of Derrida are more divided and at times involve countervailing forces, although they have a strong pull in a radically deconstructive direction that has perhaps been exacerbated with de Man's death and Derrida's inclination at times to identify with his theoretical views and reading practices.

By radical deconstruction we mean the tendency to take the important resistances to meaning and the internal contestations or tensions in texts and to become fixated on them by reading all texts in terms of an almost compulsively repeated process of locating an aporia, mise en abime, uncanny nodal point, or process of internal undoing.

The resistance to meaning thus threatens to become an externally predictable but internally compelling evacuation of meaning, and all roads in reading seem to lead to the aporia. Meaning (or the signified) tends to be eliminated, or at least bracketed, and attention is riveted on the enigmatic play of the signifier, which becomes arbitrary, mechanical, inhuman, 'free' play. Moreover, the valuable emphasis on the conditions of possibility of a phenomenon or an historical process may be absolutized such that they displace rather than inform history and lead to an abstract, meta-metaphysical mode of analysis in which specificity is lost or obscured.

There is a marked contrast or unstable binary opposition between hermeneutics and poetics. Hermeneutics is interpretation that seeks the meaning of texts, while poetics focuses on the play of the material signifier that is both the condition of meaning and the force that prevents meaning from being satisfying or even at times from constituting itself in any readable manner.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1134