High Noon in Textland: A Critique of Clough

Abstract

The differences between Patricia Clough and I are very deep. Not that I reject the kind of analysis of discourse that Clough recommends. On the contrary. I've valued what I've learned from feminist and literary cultural theory and analysis. I have disagreements, of course. These have been sharpened by my encounter with Clough's critique of my work. A central and quite fundamental difference is that I propose a point d'appui for sociological inquiry in the actualities of people's lives. I'm talking about a place to begin, not a topic, nor a subject-matter, nor an object. From this beginning, we can, I hold, discover something at least of how this leviathan we live in is put together in the concerting and coordinating of people's ongoing activities, including those of discourse. Clough however can't imagine a subject outside discourse, in life, or conceive of a project of investigation and discovery of a world beyond and encompassing discourse. She is committed and can see no alternative to a standpoint within discourse having discourse as its object. I learned in the early years of the women's movement that there was indeed a site beyond and inclusive of the text-mediated, text-based discourses of professional sociology and academia. Or of the media, popular culture, or high culture. You might describe it as where we live. As particular individuals, embodied, in particular actual places with particular actual others, at the time it is right now. Basic stuff. Me sitting here writing, drinking a little wine, hearing the radio downstairs, and the obscure sound of water running which probably means that the toilet has jammed again. This privileged place of being, this little island for writing. I understand that sociology is discourse; I understand that our business as sociologists is to write society, the ongoing concerting and coordinating of people's activities, into the texts of that discourse. I understand therefore a place for the reader and knower outside the text has to be held in the text and have taken the concept of standpoint to operate as that discursive function. There is a big difference between a sociology writing a knowledge of people coordinated with the relations of ruling and their order, and a knowledge that recognizes that it too is itself in life, may be read, and used, and may extend people's ordinary good knowledge (embedded in their practices) mapping relations beyond the reach of the immediately known. The notion of a standpoint outside discourse holds a place in discourse for she who has not yet spoken, not yet declared herself, not yet disinterred her buried life.