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 PSYC3004  Mind, Meaning & Discourse

Lecture 7 & 8: Discourse, power and reality /
Joking and the ownership of language
© Dave Hiles, October 2003

           "One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter." 
                                                                                                           Francoise Sagan

(7) Discourse, Power & Reality (Burr, Chaps 4, 5)

Burr points out that language and discourse are at the heart of the construction process:
       ". . . language and our use of it, far from from simply describing the world, both constructs the world as we perceive it and has real consequences" (p. 47)

O What is discourse? (Burr - chap 4)
  Q Burr points out the tension between discursive psychology which seems to emphasize the freedom of the speaker to draw upon language as a cultural resource, and critical psychology ("macro" constructionism) which emphasizes how language sets limits upon, not only what we can think and say, but also what we can do or what can be done to us (p. 63)
  Q discourse refers to a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of events (p. 64)
  Q surrounding any one object, event, person, etc. there may be a variety of different discourses, each with a different story to tell - a different way of representing it to the world, e.g. foxhunting (p. 64-5)
  Q everything around us can be considered as ‘textual’, and ‘life as text’ could be said to be the underlying metaphor of the discourse approach (p. 66-7)
  Q Michel Foucault was centrally concerned with the idea that there is an intimate relationship between discourse, power and knowledge (p. 67)
  Q the power to act in particular ways, to claim resources, to control or be controlled depends upon the knowledges currently prevailing in a society - we can exercise power by drawing upon discourses which allow our actions to be represented in an acceptable light  (p.68)

O Disciplinary power (Burr - chap 4)
  Q Foucault rejects the view of power as an essentially repressive force, seeing it instead as at its most effective when it is productive, when it produces knowledge (p. 69) 
  Q such discourses are very powerful, in that they manage the control of society and its members efficiently and without force, through what he calls 'disciplinary power' (p. 69) -  e.g. "The History of Sexuality" 
  Q disciplinary power, as social control, is not recognised as such, it is 'invisible' - power is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms e.g. the discourse of romantic love (p. 73) 
  Q discourses are embedded in power relations, and therefore have political effects - e.g. feminism
  Q discourses are intimately connected to institutional and social practices (p. 75)
  Q Foucault stresses that as discourses emerge so power will emerge, rather than the other way around - however, in turn, discourses can be become appropriated by certain groups to serve their own interest
  Q discourses exist in competition, they are always implicitly being contested by other discourses, e.g. personal identity becomes a site of conflict.

O Discourse, ideology and reality (Burr - chap 5)
One consequence of the social constructionist position is that:
    "Truth becomes revealed not as some irrefutable state of affairs ultimately discoverable through the application of scientific method, but is a fluid and unstable description of the world created through discourse" (Burr, p.80)

This raises the issue of ideology, that Burr explores as:-
  Q false consciousness
  Q knowledge in the service of power - i.e. mobilised in the social world to serve the interests of powerful groups
  Q lived experience (Althusser)
  Q dilemmatic (Billig)

O Discourse, truth and reality 
Burr discusses this within the debate between relativism and realism. She also confusingly describes these as 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' respectively!! However, I think it is better to ignore this philosophical debate and it is better discussed by returning to the topic of ideology. e.g.: 

Q Raymond Williams (1977) sees three main uses of the term ideology:
  Q a system of beliefs for a particular class or group
  Q a system of illusory beliefs
  Q the process of the production of meanings & ideas

Q Noam Chomsky (1989) offers the notions of ‘necessary illusions’, and ‘the manufacture of consent’

Q Ian Parker (1992) offers the concept of ‘object status’, and the idea of ‘objects invented through discourse’


Ideology (Turner, 1998; p. 154)

"The term ideology is itself continually being redefined, contested, and explored within all areas of cultural theory. There is no incontestable definition of ideology. Put at its simplest, we can say that implicit in every culture is a ‘theory of reality’ which motivates its ordering of that reality into good and bad, right and wrong, them and us, and so on. For this ‘theory of reality’ actually to work as a structuring principle it needs to be unspoken, invisible, a property of the natural world rather than human interests."

 

(8) Joking and the Ownership of Language

O Comedy, the Absurd - Its psychological function
   Q Jokes:-  their logical structure
                 their unconscious motivation
                 their discursive context
                 nb. Jokes are remarkably culturally specific, situationally specific.

  Q Joking, transgression and the ownership of language

O Logical structure

Q Palmer, J. (1987) The Logic of the Absurd. BFI.

The gag (joke) is analysable into two moments, for which the terms peripeteia and syllogism are appropriate:

! PERIPETEIA - in classical aesthetics the peripeteia is the moment when the fortunes of the principle character are reversed
     i.e. a moment of shock or surprise that the narrative constructs

! SYLLOGISM - the underlying intensely logical nature of the gag/joke
    i.e. in a gag/joke presented as a pair of contradictory syllogisms, one plausible, one implausible

There are two major sources of expectation in a gag or joke:

!discourses of the social formation
    i.e. a contradiction of knowledge/values/expectations of the outside world

!narrative expectations
   i.e. a series of expectations concerning the future course of events that are produced by the narrative up to that point

O Unconscious motivation

Q Freud, S. (1905) Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious. (S.E. Vol.8)
 A study of The Interpretation of Dreams (1990) suggests that dream analyses are surprisingly full of jokes. In his Autobiography (1925), Freud remarks:- "I began to investigate jokes and found that their essence lay in the technical methods employed in them, and that these were the same as the means used in the 'dream work' - that is to say, condensation, displacement, the representation of a thing by its opposite or by something very small, and so on".

Freud divided jokes into two categories:-
     (1) word play, puns, jests, innocent jokes - using economy of psychical effort
      (2) tendentious jokes (i.e. involving a more definite purpose - obscene, hostile) - a release of suppressed material and the energy used to suppress it.

O Discursive context

Q Purdie, S. (1993) Comedy: The mastery of discourse. Harvester.

Q Three Features of Joking:-
              (1) transgression
              (2) markedness
              (3) affective response of "funniness".

Q Jokes: their discursive context
    " jokes/humour are very common in human discourse
    " jokes are remarkably culturally specific, situationally specific
    " jokes have recognisable surface structures (often narrative), children often learn these before understanding the jokes themselves
    " jokes can diffuse social tension, establish rapport
    " shared jokes communicate understanding
    " jokes release unconscious tension, enact repressed wishes
    " jokes challenge the oppression of meanings/language - the ownership of language is returned to the individual speaker.

O Postmodern contexts.
Joking is paradoxically affirmative of Lacan's Symbolic Law.
     "Whatever 'sense' or 'truth' a joke may conceal, however, whatever targets and taboos it allows us to attack, however many layers of effects it entails, all joking discourse can be seen to include an 'ab-use' of language through whose exchanged marking we claim mastery of Symbolic competence". (Purdie, 1993, p. 55).

 

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