Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

DISCOURSE

emotionality concerns the public construction and exchange of cultural behaviours and concepts: the playing out of an emotional discourse and a discourse on emotion. It is this discourse, moreover, which is the proper object of anthropological enquiry, for its very playing out constitutes Fathalla and his audience as social actors, tells them what (and when and how) they can ‘think and feel’.

An anti-Foucauldian anthropology of discourse

Notwithstanding the modishness of Foucauldian approaches to discourse in anthropology, in particular for an uncovering of relations of power and their links to what is known and said, for some, Foucauldian imagings remain unhappy and unconvincing (cf. Sahlins 1996). This is not simply a signalling of the ‘antihumanism’ of the imaging, but an asserting that any such impersonal accounting for social life is unconvincing primarily because of its inaccuracy and unsubtlety: its distance from the details of the ongoing work of social interaction, work by individuals in conjunction, creating themselves and their social relationships.To miss reporting this individual work and to substitute the dead hand of determinism—to replace, as does the Foucauldian, individual mentalities by conventional and collective ‘governmentalities’—appears a travesty of both a political and an empirical kind. If there is to be found a discourse in shared cultural concepts in a social milieu, then there must also be an account of individual usage and interpretation. For, it is the agency of each individual which is ever responsible for animating discourse with significance (and so maintaining its role as the major synthesizing process of social life), without which discourse would simply remain inert cultural matter. To claim for discourse its own animating force is a hypostatization, with possibly dangerous (totalitarian) political consequences.

Two bases of the anti-Foucauldian argument, then, are that discourse is not the same as consciousness: that the form and the content of discursive expression must needs always be analytically distinguished, and that communication between people is, thus, never simply a matter of an exchange of conventional verbal or behavioural forms. Secondly, socialization within a set of discursive forms of expression and exchange is never ‘completed’ (Berger 1969:31), in the sense of those discourses being learned alike by different people, or those people becoming alike through an unconscious identification with the discourses.

As formulated by George Steiner (1975:170–3), discourse can be seen always to exhibit a dual phenomenology: a common surface of

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DISCOURSE

speech-forms and notations, of grammar and phonology, beneath which is to be found a concurrent flow of articulate consciousness.The conventional surface of collective public exchange thereby rests upon a base of possibly private meanings and associations, meanings which derive from the ‘irreducible singularity’ of personal consciousness and sub-consciousness, from the singular specificity of an individual’s somatic and psychological identity (cf. Rapport 1993a:161–77). As Steiner concludes (1975:46): ‘[t]he language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is an inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible, personal meanings’. While there may be discursive rules and routines (concerned, say, with the proprieties of the expression of emotion in public exchange), affected by, even effecting, differentials of power, it is surely impoverishing of description and analysis to suggest, then, that when people speak (when Fathalla persuasively recites his poetry) the playing out of a language-game is the only thing occurring. Public and socialstructurally situated discourses certainly afford links between the individual and the collective and effect avenues of social exchange, but it is surely unperceptive to claim that their enactment is all or most that their individual participants are or can be engaged with.

More broadly, engagement in a discourse need in no way translate as that discourse achieving agency, determining or causing meaning, eliminating the interpretive work of the individual speakers and hearers. Conventional discourses provide means of expression but they do not determine what is meant by them (cf. Knapp and Michaels 1982, 1988). Rather, it is the individual who animates discourses by the imparting to them of personal meaning; individuals personalize discourses within the context of their own discrete perspectives on life, using them to make and express a personal construction of the world, a possibly original language-world, a sense particular to them at a particular time.

Discursive exchange, moreover, is never unmediated by a creative individual improvisation of its conventions. Individuals at once partake of discourses’ rules and routines, take part in the continuing constitution of socio-cultural milieux which such exchange gives onto, and make these instruments of their own understanding and use. Indeed, it is individuals’ personalization of discursive structures that causes them to remain alive: here are structures granted contemporary relevance, validity and significance, by being imparted with personal meaning and intent. For this reason, too, there can be worlds of difference between shared grammatic-cum-paradigmatic competency on the one hand and shared cognition or mutual comprehension on the other. For individuals in interaction can be seen to be both

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assisting in a continuing collective performance and, at the same time, creating, extending and fulfilling ongoing agendas, identities and world-views of their own. The sense made of the discourse by its speakers and its hearers need not coincide, therefore, because each is responsible for instigating their own process of originating meaning, imparting a possibly uncommon order to the discourse’s common forms; the individual makes personal sense in interaction, alongside others doing similarly. Hence, even if the various senses made of the discourse are complementary—even possibly consensual—this is something achieved through individual interactants’ work (and by chance) rather than something carried in on the back of the discourse per se. To adapt Hymes (1973a:25–6), the ‘communicative event’ of the discourse becomes a question of its manifold construals.

One can say, in sum, that without a fund of discourses the individual would not have the means of making sense, but without this work of interpretation, this individual use, discourse would not achieve animation in public life. Indeed, for Searle (1977:202–8), the two necessarily presuppose each other; there is an infinitude of content possible within a finitude of linguistic expression because there is conventionally iterated verbal and syntactical form on the one hand and conscious, intentional individual activity on the other. Certainly, such duality should neither be sundered nor compounded in anthropological accounting.

In an eminently sensible counsel, Victor Turner eschewed all mystifications which would obscure the fact that human beings possess the consciousness and sophistication to transcend their own institutions (cited in Ashley 1990:xix). In an anthropological appreciation of discourse, it would appear a mystification not to see the individual speakers and hearers behind the conventional roles allotted them—the so-called ‘subject-positions’ or ‘discursive sites’. For here are persons who cannot help themselves from periodically standing back from the social routines in which they are engaged and reflecting on them ironically: making sense of them in ways which may subvert the totalizing effects of those routines and in ways which reveal those persons to be able to adopt cognitive positions beyond the domain and determinism of those routines.

Whatever the order and sense propounded by the logic of the routines as such, the persons taking part in those routines, animating them by their mental and bodily, verbal and behavioural, presence in those routines, are able to (are destined to) write their own sense.They compose their own personal narratives which include them saying: ‘Here I am partaking of a particular discourse, playing a languagegame’. Sometimes the game is played better than at other times,

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ECRITURE FEMININE

sometimes the playing is more trying than at other times, but there is surely no moment at which individuals do not experience the mixed emotions of both recognizing what the language-game expects of them and knowing precisely where they stood—emotionally, cognitively—in relation to it. It may not always be an easy matter determining how to reconcile these positions—what to say, how to act, how to seem—and it is always a far harder thing to know where one’s interlocutors stand vis-à-vis the discourse, but it is never difficult for the individual to see heror himself both present and absent: a conscious player in the game (however reluctant and formally disempowered) but never unconsciously played by it.

See also: Code, Common Sense, Ethnomethodology, Irony

ECRITURE FEMININE

Ecriture feminine, or ‘women’s writing’, is a term coined by Luce Irigaray (1985) to convey a notion of female symbolic expression which can overcome a hegemony in current linguistic structures which is not just masculine but positively phallocentric and patriarchal, and which renders specifically female expression silent. As employed by Irigaray, and by the likes of Hélène Cixous (1990) and Julia Kristeva (1984), the concept amounts to a heady concoction of linguistics and psychoanalysis.There is no overall agreement between the above on the extent of biological determinism or essentialism in female experience, but all draw upon its bodily nature: ‘[B]eyond the classic opposites of love and hate…lies this perpetually half-open threshold, consisting of lips that are strangers to dichotomy’ (Irigaray 1993).

Ecriture feminine draws on the works of Saussure, Freud, Lacan and Derrida, but owes its ethos, perhaps, to the writings of Nietzsche, and his attempts self-consciously to develop a philosophy based on irony, critique and revaluation. ‘Suppose Truth is a Woman’, Nietzsche advises, as part-strategy towards an ongoing ‘revaluation of all values’; écriture feminine takes this to heart (cf. Irigaray 1991).

Language and identity

Social inequalities between the sexes derive from deep ideological structures, it is argued, in particular the play of language upon the unconscious. These make ‘the subject’, the ego, whether in language

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or in the developments of science, religion or law, inevitably masculine; the truly feminine is erased in a network of lies. Women cannot know or love themselves, therefore, because language is foreign to them, rather than home to them, and merely mirrors their lack; women are in a state of ‘dereliction’, and hence commonly suffer psychosis (Irigaray 1993).

What is called for is to establish a presence in language which goes against and disrupts conventional norms and does not begin from the repressed, lacking and markedly ‘other’ nature which characterizes the feminine in contemporary structures and symbolizations.The feminine is more than simply a container of the masculine codes of everyday life, and yet the truly feminine represents something unnameable and inexpressible, at present.Women must speak like men and be attached to men in order to achieve a social status, to engage in social relations, and to acquire cultural capital.According to masculine parameters of identity, subjectivity, truth, meaning and value, women can only know themselves as inferior (castrated) versions of men.

The challenge is not to eschew language for, as poesis, this symbolization is a source of liberation, social, individual, spiritual and imaginative. However, to go beyond ‘the Name and the Law of the Father’, it is necessary to rewrite the woman beginning from that feminine fullness within the woman; not to mimic the male or seek to play a part in his social contracts (not to aim for a male-imitation identity, status or publicity) but to draw on feminine experiences which lie beyond and before conventional languages. Such a ‘feminine idiolect’ might emphasize, and give form to, multiplicity, fluidity, rhythm, difference and becoming, in place of the masculine verities of singularity, linearity and fixed (binary) oppositions. It is a matter of experimenting with poetic styles and achieving new discursive forms (cf. Irigaray 1991). For instance, maybe the rhythmical babblings of the child, before it learns linguistic structures could be adapted so as to write over and against language with voice, body and song. At present, these rhythms merely remain in language as echoes: as gaps, pauses and silences within the linear sequence.

A feminine God is yet to come—indeed, she would always be the God of becoming as such—but a specifically feminine language (also law and philosophy) can still be imagined. Above all, the writing of the feminine could entail an exploding of the definite singularities, distinctions and oppositions of Western thought: body/mind, subject/ object, affect/intellect, substance/form, nature/culture, alter/ego. For every one of these binarisms reduces to feminine versus masculine: Western civilization is built on patriarchalism. Instead, two (or more)

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