Lecture
Discourse is speech, the process of linguistic activity
«We define discourse as a complexly structured communicative-sign system possessing six main dimensions: the intentional dimension (power intentions, strategies, designs), the actual dimension (the embodiment of power intentions in real activity of a sign-symbolic character), the virtual dimension (the recognition and understanding of meanings, values, identities), the contextual dimension (the expansion of the field of meaning based on sociocultural, historical, and other contexts), the psychological dimension (the emotional, energetic charge contained in discourse that gives it suggestive power), and the «sedimentary» dimension (the imprinting of all the above-mentioned dimensions in social consciousness and experience, in the environment constructed and materialized by society, whose forms are a reflection of culture)». Olga Rusakova
The theory of discourse emerged in the late 1970s
The main goal of discourse theory is to offer a new analytical perspective for studying the ways in which social, political, and cultural identity is constructed.
The most influential is the poststructuralist version of discourse theory
Torfing identifies three generations of discourse theories, or three traditions of discourse analysis.
First-generation theories of discourse interpret discourse in a narrowly linguistic sense, focusing attention on the semantic features of spoken or written text.
The second generation of discourse theories — «critical discourse analysis» (CDA) — turns to the study of social practices. Discursive practices include all types of linguistically mediated practices, as well as the images and gestures that are produced and interpreted by social actors. Discourses are treated as Jacques Derrida put it: «Everything is discourse»
The third generation of discourse theories has a distinctly poststructuralist character. Discourse is treated as a synonym for the practice of social construction.
Following Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, discourse is regarded as a set of social practices within which meanings and senses are constructed and reproduced.
Discourse is an attribute of the social
Basic characteristics of the poststructuralist theory of discourse
it is asserted that there is no primary, self-determined entity that defines and orders all relations of identity (God, Reason, Humanity, Nature)
recognition of the play-like character of the determination of social meanings and identities.
Truth (truth) is not a property of the external world, but a property of language. The concept of truth is always local and pliable, since it depends on a particular discursive regime that establishes what is true and what is false. In other words, truth is a product of discursive construction.
Grasping the meaning of concepts also requires examining the contexts and modes of interpretation.
identity is formed in the course of positioning in relation to other signified phenomena.
Basic postulates
1) our knowledge and ideas about the world are not a direct reflection of the external world, but a result of the classification of reality by means of categories; our knowledge is a product of discourse;
2) ways of understanding and representing the world are determined by historical and cultural context; «discourse is a form of social behavior that serves to represent the social world (including knowledge, people, and social relations)»;
3) knowledge arises in the process of social interaction, in which people construct truths and prove to one another what is correct and what is mistaken;
4) in accordance with a particular worldview, certain kinds of behavior are fixed as natural, others as unacceptable; «a different social understanding of the world leads to different social behavior, and therefore the social structure of knowledge and truth has social consequences»
The discourse theories of Laclau and Mouffe
discourses are ways of communicating about and understanding the social world, competing with one another to assign particular meanings to the social world.
discourse, as interpreted by Laclau and Mouffe, is a product born in the course of and as a result of the articulation of representations of social reality.
a particular identity is acquired by the subject through the discursive structuring of the social world and the performance of procedures of positioning within discourse.
The subject acquires its identity in discursive practices
Identity is always formed according to the principle of relativity. A subject is something because in discourses it is contrasted with something.
discourse is an unfinished, structure open to change, a multivariate spectrum of articulations, a conglomerate in which, besides the fixed meaning, there are always other potential variants of meaning that can transform the structure of the discourse.
Viewing discursive practices as articulations through which the cognitive construction of the entire social reality is produced does not at all mean denying the existence of the social world as an objective reality.
Example: a stone exists independently of social classification systems, but whether it is regarded as a projectile or as a work of art depends on the discursive context in which it is situated
Discursive psychology
subjective psychological realities are created through discourse. Discourse is regarded as the "builder" of lived psychological reality.
The causes of the formation of particular attitudes (dispositions, intentions) should be sought not in individual cognitive structures, but in the ways of social interaction, i.e., in the context of a more general system of meanings. Attitudes are products of social interaction.
Discourse, defined as the use of language in everyday texts and communication, is a dynamic form of social practice that constructs the social world, personalities and identities.
Personality is formed through the internalization of social dialogues.
Language shapes not only consciousness but also the unconscious (the "unspoken")
J. Potter and M. Wetherell, instead of the concept of "discourse", introduced the concept of «interpretive repertoire», to emphasize that discourses are flexible resources of social interaction. Each repertoire provides resources that people can use to construct versions of reality.
"By interpretive repertoire we mean readily recognizable groups of terms, descriptions and figures of speech, often clustered around metaphors or vivid images"
The poststructuralist approach of Foucault and his followers defines identity as a product of subjective positions within discourses... The synthetic approach views identities as a product of particular discourses, and as a resource of social action in interaction
Positioning
In the synthetic approach, the process by which identity emerges is revealed through the category of "positioning". Positioning is the process on the basis of which people form an opinion about themselves in the course of interaction and negotiation with other people.
People participating in interaction with one another are regarded in three ways:
1) as products of particular discourses;
2) as creators of discourses;
3) as agents of sociocultural reproduction and change.
The creation of identities is limited by the range of discursive resources available to individuals. It is linked to their social position, status and culture. It is often easier for people to accept identities already prescribed by someone else.
what is passed off as self-evident is, in fact, nothing other than the dominant discourse.
One need only shift the perspective or restructure the order of the discourse for what was considered self-evident to turn out to be problematic.
For example, feminist studies carry out a deconstruction of the discourse in which the domination of men over women and the domination of "civilized" peoples over "primitive" ones are taken as self-evident.
dominant discourses are myth-generating constructions, i.e., sources of social mythology
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis deals with living speech as an act, as an act of personal activity
in psychotherapy, to speak is not so much to exchange information as to influence the interlocutor, to take command of the communicative situation, and to change the listener's system of representations and behavior.
Discourse analysis relies on a number of principles
the most important is the principle of subjectness - this principle restores the rights of the subject, the author and the master of linguistic reality
The second principle - dialogicity - can be described, following the ideas of M. Bakhtin, as taking into account the presence of the Other. Following this principle, the therapist must accurately attribute the utterance to a particular subject, who in many cases does not necessarily coincide with the conscious self (ego) of the speaker.
the principle of ideologicality - the concept of ideology is used here as a set of certain hidden ideas, whose not always and not fully conscious influence determines the meaning of the utterances that make up the discourse.
Ideas that function as secondary signifiers of discourse are situated in the space of the connotative semantics of utterances and determine the hidden meaning of speech, which is capable of replacing and displacing the explicit meaning at any moment.
The principle of intentionality presupposes an understanding of the client's conscious intentions and an accounting for their unconscious intentions as a polymorphic subject of utterances. Even small fragments of discourse usually contain a multitude of different, often oppositely directed and even mutually exclusive intentions and aspirations.
the principle of contextuality - for both the therapist and the client, the actual discourse is always correlated with the linguistic context, i.e., with what has «already been said» and «already been heard».
Narrative psychology
Narrative psychology is based on the assumption that all the information we receive about the world, and all the information we communicate to the world about ourselves, is shaped in the form of narratives - that is, certain sequential stories possessing semantic integrity and a certain narrative coherence
Narrative psychology is close to social constructionism and, in essence, can be regarded as one of its subdirections.
Language and speech, which play the most important role in narrative psychology, are also the principal means of the social construction of reality: by describing the world through speech, we create a unified field of meaning that allows different individuals in society to perceive the world in a similar way.
we agree not only on what to call things, but also on how to describe the processes occurring in nature and society (for example, in the language of scientific theories), and on the basis of these descriptions structures are created, relying on which we come to know the world.
The child acquires these structures together with mastering language
the discursive model makes it possible not only to take into account descriptions and characteristics of phenomena relevant to society, reproduced in communicative acts, but also to analyze the features of people's interactions and relationships from the standpoint of their belonging to a particular sociocultural group
The degree of mental maladjustment in patients with neurotic disorders is closely related to the variant of the discursive personality type.
The formation of mental maladjustment in patients with neurotic disorders is influenced by disharmonious combinations of individual-psychological and socio-psychological factors of influence, which are reflected
in the specifics of the personality's system of relations,
the state of its social support network,
the features of its family structure,
the dominant style of compensatory-adaptive behavior,
as well as the features of self-regulation of voluntary activity
There exists a potential multiplicity of possible paths of development, a multitude of trajectories, where the currently existing being is only one of the realized embodiments of what is potentially possible
George Kelly's theory of personal constructs is often referred to in the West as constructivist psychology proper, according to which the cognizing subject, like a scientist, puts forward and tests alternative hypotheses about the world, and the subject's behavior is regarded not as a reaction to external stimuli, but rather as a question posed to the world.
The more developed a system is, the more degrees of freedom it has, and with regard to human personality, equifinalist models and predictions built on the principle of determinism are incorrect.
We can only speak of scenario variants of the development of events, where a person realizes one possibility from a «fan» of potential possibilities at each moment in time.
Therefore, the description of a person within understanding psychology is carried out through the person's picture of the world, the system of values or motives on which the individual subject relies in planning their «required future» or in making decisions.
The writer André Maurois notes that human life resembles fragments of unfinished novels, plots without continuation, more than it resembles an extended tale with a prologue, climax, and denouement
humankind and the individual change and evolve in real time at a speed comparable to the process of cognition of the cognizing subject, which creates a situation more akin to a dialogue between the knower and the known, in the course of which mutual influence and change occur between the known and the knower.
Even history, which studies what has already been realized, «being that has come to be», is continuously reinterpreted and rewritten anew, since, in the context of today's new situation, the weight and significance of various past events changes, and the figure and ground of the kaleidoscope of facts shift
Optimists' dreams come true. Pessimists' — nightmares. (Bernard Shaw)
The existence of «self-fulfilling prophecies», functioning on the principle of «circular causality», indicates that cognition itself changes and structures human being.
As G. Kelly believed, «human behavior is channeled along the same courses through which the anticipation of events occurs»
This proposition is close to S.L. Rubinstein's principle of the «unity of consciousness and being» and proceeds from the premise that not only does being determine consciousness, but consciousness also organizes and structures being.
The influence of theoretical constructs built by scientists on life, on the social being of society, manifests itself no less clearly.
The twentieth century, its culture, mentality, art, and even politics, turned out to be densely saturated with the ideas of Freud's psychoanalysis, which are essentially psychotherapeutic myths.
Psychoanalysis gives the patient a certain language, a set of concepts and images that make it possible to express unconscious traumatic experiences, make them accessible to consciousness, and, having comprehended them, work through them.
By becoming aware of their problems within the framework of psychoanalysis, the patient, the client, or simply an ordinary person familiar with psychoanalysis, largely sees their own problems through the prism of Freud's personal experience, of Freud's personality.
With regard to art, this is expressed in the fact that it is not so much art that reflects life, but rather reality that slavishly imitates art.
History is above all the realization of ideas voiced by politicians and carried out by the masses, who contribute their own elements of creativity, but «in the beginning was the word», bearing a certain idea.
An idea, in the language of psychosemantics, is a system of constructs or generalizations.
The conceptual apparatus created by psychology not only describes but also introduces into the description new connections and distinctions, as well as certain values, ultimately forming new constructs of consciousness (expanding it), and through this awareness, constructs reality itself as well
Creative-constructivist function
Theoretical constructions proposed by a thinker or scholar, once appropriated by culture and social consciousness, become the rails along which history moves
these paths are laid by the constructs of consciousness
The function of the humanities lies not only in describing the «being that has already come to be», but also in generating constructs of an expanding consciousness that sets in motion the «being that is coming to be»
Interpretation requires the presence of another feeling, suffering subject, embedded in human culture, who, by means of their own psyche, their own subjectivity, models the psyche and personality of the other
Psychosemantic methods make it possible to represent the subject as a bearer of a system of meanings, which, in operational terms, corresponds to an entire cloud of reference positions, and the subject appears as a kind of semantic microcosm, an individual system of world perception, and a unique frame of reference.
Within the psychological model, discourse is understood as a way of the linguistic constitution of the subject, the sole representative of their inner experience.
Psychotherapeutic interaction represents a discursive practice — a specific form of language use for the production of speech, through which the concept (model) of the surrounding reality is changed, and the subject's system of personal meanings is transformed.
The essence of psychotherapeutic discourse consists in the interlocutors' articulation of the picture of the world, and then in changing the listener's (client's) ideas about the world and themselves, thanks to which, having gained new knowledge, they can develop productive opinions and attitudes and form the most effective and satisfying attitudes toward people, things, and events.
+The word promotes mutual understanding, not because it contains a single meaning shared by the interlocutors, but because it provides a spectrum of diverse meanings that set the field of communication.
Comments