Discursive Influence Research Articles

From Quotation, through Collage, to Parody: Postmodernism's Relationship with Its Past

FROM QUOTATION, THROUGH COLLAGE, TO PARODY: POSTMODERNISM’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS PAST SAM L. RICHARDS INTRODUCTION: ON QUOTATION Tout texte se construit comme mosaïque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’un autre texte. (Every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, every text is an absorption and a transformation of another text.)1 —Julia Kristeva UOTATION MARKS, ABOVE ALL, INDICATE that the “author” consciously disowns their contents. They direct the “reader” to send approbation to whom it is due, and deflect disagreement towards an alternate and more distant Other. Quotation facilitates an abdication of authorial responsibility by temporarily transferring the energies of the interpreter to another source. Quotation is not the author’s own. This act of disownership can potentially be imbued with an attitude of Q “ 78 Perspectives of New Music suspicion or deference, skepticism or agreement, reservation or endorsement. It is the dichotomous nature of these concomitant pairs of uniquely opposing authorial positions—each conveyed via identical punctuation—that makes them capable of generating a double-coded discourse. Scare quotes are a visually identical incarnation of their authoritative counterpart, the citation, and although it is tempting to conceptually bifurcate the two—like a punctuational homonym, whose meaning is entirely different yet whose appearance is the same—such division is counterproductive if the exact relationship between them is not carefully articulated. Disownership is the similarity between scare quotes and the citation, and authorial tone is the difference. Usually. Quotation marks implicitly flag their contents as having an origin. Concepts that lack historicity imply a false sense of objectivity, and if an idea ostensibly always has been, there is a seductive and all-toohuman temptation to make the logically fallacious leap to the conclusion that the idea always will be. What has an origin is also often a construction, and, as such, it is therefore susceptible to deconstruction. Explicitly framing an idea as a quotation, therefore, historicizes and highlights the borders of a perhaps previously inscrutable object. It transforms ballooned and once seemingly objective observations into subjective perspectives; in an almost astonishing transmutation, ideas “captured,” unveiled, and exhibited within inverted commas have their discursive shield of impenetrable iconicity removed. Quotation marks denude their objects. And yet, while an idea contained within quotation marks can be made suspect, it can also be tenaciously authoritative. Quotation can be used to reinforce, reify, support, concretize, justify, bolster, or strengthen existing positions. It can exert its force like a campaign, sweeping away dissent, anomaly, noise, and aberration with an effective , yet, at times, sinister elegance. Scholasticism’s foundational modus operandi relies on the dogmatic decrees of “authorship.” Analogous to law, precedent of quotation reigns supreme, exerting an enormous paradigmatic inward pressure to conform and work within established conceptual bounds.2 From this vantage, quotation is the formalized propagation of deference. It is the ritual enactment of ideological servitude. It is a conceptual surrender made public, a concession by the author that another has, at another time, in another place, composed something that the author considers to be superior to their own. One quotes when “original” ideas have become exhausted, and when one senses a scarcity of aesthetic options.3 By quoting another, the authors themselves undergo a momentous sea change of function, not only ceding auctorial vision to another party, but also assuming the new From Quotation, Through Collage, To Parody 79 mantle of reproducer, redistributor, and redisseminator, resulting in a kind of “death” of authorship.4 In a conspicuous, yet profound, manner, quotation weaves the historical into the now. It is quintessentially an expression of what has come before: what has been written, what has been said, what has been articulated, what has been claimed, what has been argued, what has been implied, and what has been alluded to. There is no future within those framing marks, only past, yet by reinstating what has been into what is, the author reenacts, reapplies, reperforms, and repurposes the old, exacting a more pervasive chronological and discursive influence from the “text” than what could be wrought from within the quotation ’s original “context.” Indeed, at the very least, quotation marks indicate a contextual change.5 From multiple contexts multiple meanings ensue...

From Quotation, through Collage, to Parody: Postmodernism's Relationship with Its Past

FROM QUOTATION, THROUGH COLLAGE, TO PARODY: POSTMODERNISM’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS PAST SAM L. RICHARDS INTRODUCTION: ON QUOTATION Tout texte se construit comme mosaïque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’un autre texte. (Every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, every text is an absorption and a transformation of another text.)1 —Julia Kristeva UOTATION MARKS, ABOVE ALL, INDICATE that the “author” consciously disowns their contents. They direct the “reader” to send approbation to whom it is due, and deflect disagreement towards an alternate and more distant Other. Quotation facilitates an abdication of authorial responsibility by temporarily transferring the energies of the interpreter to another source. Quotation is not the author’s own. This act of disownership can potentially be imbued with an attitude of Q “ 78 Perspectives of New Music suspicion or deference, skepticism or agreement, reservation or endorsement. It is the dichotomous nature of these concomitant pairs of uniquely opposing authorial positions—each conveyed via identical punctuation—that makes them capable of generating a double-coded discourse. Scare quotes are a visually identical incarnation of their authoritative counterpart, the citation, and although it is tempting to conceptually bifurcate the two—like a punctuational homonym, whose meaning is entirely different yet whose appearance is the same—such division is counterproductive if the exact relationship between them is not carefully articulated. Disownership is the similarity between scare quotes and the citation, and authorial tone is the difference. Usually. Quotation marks implicitly flag their contents as having an origin. Concepts that lack historicity imply a false sense of objectivity, and if an idea ostensibly always has been, there is a seductive and all-toohuman temptation to make the logically fallacious leap to the conclusion that the idea always will be. What has an origin is also often a construction, and, as such, it is therefore susceptible to deconstruction. Explicitly framing an idea as a quotation, therefore, historicizes and highlights the borders of a perhaps previously inscrutable object. It transforms ballooned and once seemingly objective observations into subjective perspectives; in an almost astonishing transmutation, ideas “captured,” unveiled, and exhibited within inverted commas have their discursive shield of impenetrable iconicity removed. Quotation marks denude their objects. And yet, while an idea contained within quotation marks can be made suspect, it can also be tenaciously authoritative. Quotation can be used to reinforce, reify, support, concretize, justify, bolster, or strengthen existing positions. It can exert its force like a campaign, sweeping away dissent, anomaly, noise, and aberration with an effective , yet, at times, sinister elegance. Scholasticism’s foundational modus operandi relies on the dogmatic decrees of “authorship.” Analogous to law, precedent of quotation reigns supreme, exerting an enormous paradigmatic inward pressure to conform and work within established conceptual bounds.2 From this vantage, quotation is the formalized propagation of deference. It is the ritual enactment of ideological servitude. It is a conceptual surrender made public, a concession by the author that another has, at another time, in another place, composed something that the author considers to be superior to their own. One quotes when “original” ideas have become exhausted, and when one senses a scarcity of aesthetic options.3 By quoting another, the authors themselves undergo a momentous sea change of function, not only ceding auctorial vision to another party, but also assuming the new From Quotation, Through Collage, To Parody 79 mantle of reproducer, redistributor, and redisseminator, resulting in a kind of “death” of authorship.4 In a conspicuous, yet profound, manner, quotation weaves the historical into the now. It is quintessentially an expression of what has come before: what has been written, what has been said, what has been articulated, what has been claimed, what has been argued, what has been implied, and what has been alluded to. There is no future within those framing marks, only past, yet by reinstating what has been into what is, the author reenacts, reapplies, reperforms, and repurposes the old, exacting a more pervasive chronological and discursive influence from the “text” than what could be wrought from within the quotation ’s original “context.” Indeed, at the very least, quotation marks indicate a contextual change.5 From multiple contexts multiple meanings ensue...

Leadership cultures and discursive hybridisation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of leadership culture and analyse how leadership cultures are produced in higher education reforms, in a hybridised discursive context of traditional academic values and emerging managerialism and leaderism. Design/methodology/approach – Building on a perspective on leadership as a cultural phenomenon emerging in processes in which societal, sectorial and professional discursive resources are invoked, this study adds to earlier studies on how notions of leadership are involved in the transformation of higher education organisations. To this end, the method combines a traditional qualitative study of change initiatives over a long period of time with participative observation. Focusing on two vignettes, the analysis centres on how several discursive resources are drawn upon in daily interaction. Findings – The emergence of hybrid leadership cultures in which several discursive resources are drawn upon in daily interaction is illustrated. This paper emphasises how hybrid cultures develop through confirmation, re-formulation and rejection of discursive influences. Research limitations/implications – An extended empirical material would enable further understanding of what cultural constructions of leadership that become confirmed, re-formulated or rejected. International comparisons would also enrich the analysis. Practical implications – This paper may influence leadership, leadership development and change initiatives in higher education organisation. Social implications – Higher education organisations are crucial for societal development and this paper contributes to better understanding how they are changing. Originality/value – The perspective proposed builds on recent developments in leadership studies and expands the means for focusing on social processes rather than individuals.

‘Epistemic chaos’: the recontextualisation of undergraduate curriculum design and pedagogic practice in a new university business school

This paper is based on a qualitative case study of undergraduate curriculum design and pedagogic practice in the new University Business School (UBS). Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 24 academics from across a range of business sub-disciplines together with an extensive documentary review of materials relating to two undergraduate degree programmes. The case study found that the UBS curriculum had become recontextualised as a ‘business project’ in which programmes were constructed as ‘products’ for the higher education market. The associated pedagogy was largely confined to behaviourist problem–solution routines based on narrow projections of the ‘real world’ of business. This paper contends that UBS undergraduate programmes were designed in a generic mode in response to the material and discursive influences of marketisation. As a consequence, ‘epistemic chaos’ had arisen in which knowledge and pedagogy had become fragmented and amorphous.

States Make Movements? The Material and Discursive Influence of State-Sponsored Community Organizing in Puerto Rico

The authors examine the interaction between an emergent community movement in Puerto Rico and a poverty program implemented by the Puerto Rico government to deal with poverty in a self-claimed radical way. The authors explain the development of this movement, showing how state sponsorship shaped the material and discursive opportunities and constraints faced by movement leaders and participants. The authors then examine three discursive themes that emerged from fieldwork and interviews with community movement leaders and state actors that suggest the potential as well as the constraints implied by the close state—social movement relationship. These are (1) the partial recasting of dependency arguments in a critique of conventional clientelistic politics and government policy toward the poor, (2) the dismantling of traditional single-issue (i.e., Island political status) party politics in favor of an economic interest-based politics, and (3) an embrace of the rhetorical and coercive power of law. The authors conclude by discussing implications of these findings for the study of social movements, civic participation, and public policy.

Finding space for non-dominant languages in education: language policy and medium of instruction in Timor-Leste 2000–2012

Timor-Leste offers a rich case study of the array of discursive influences on medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy in multilingual, post-colonial developing contexts. MOI policy in this young nation is a site of tension between struggles to define national identity in the shadow of colonial language ideologies and the globalised discourses of powerful international development aid partners. Guided by the notion of opening up ideological and implementational space for non-dominant languages in education, this article reviews the evolution of MOI policy in East Timorese primary education over the decade since independence. Paying particular attention to recent proposals for mother tongue-based multilingual education, the review highlights the ideological nature of the relationship between language planning and the MOI. The East Timorese case shows how MOI policy emerges from historical and socio-political experiences and is shaped by complex interactions between external and internal forces.

"I’m a Modern Bride": On the Relationship between Marital Hegemony, Bridal Fictions, and Postfeminism

"I’m a Modern Bride": On the Relationship between Marital Hegemony, Bridal Fictions, and Postfeminism

Discussion of Patient-Centered Care in Health Care Organizations

The tradition of inherent knowledge and power of health care providers stands in stark contrast to the principles of self-determination and patient participation in patient-centered care. At the organizational level, patient-centered care is a merging of patient education, self-care, and evidence-based models of practice and consists of 4 broad domains of intervention including communication, partnerships, health promotion, and physical care. As a result of the unexamined discourse of knowledge and power in health care, the possibilities of patient-centered care have not been fully achieved. In this article, we used a critical social theory lens to examine the discursive influence of power upon the integration of patient-centered care into health care organizations. We begin with an overview of patient-centered care, followed by a discussion of the various ways that it has been introduced into health care organizations. We proceed by deconstructing the inherent power and knowledge of health care providers and shed light on how these long-standing traditions have impeded the integration of patient-centered care. We conclude with a discussion of viable solutions that can be used to implement patient-centered care into health care organizations. This article presents a perspective through which the integration of patient-centered care into health organizations can be examined.

Feminism

Feminism

Environmental risk, sustainability discourses, and public relations

As modern societies become increasingly aware of the social and environmental costs of industrialization we are seeing significant shifts in the ways in which businesses, governments and societies think about a viable future. Traditional discourses of economic growth are meeting ascendant discourses of sustainability. This article explores the resulting struggle through analysis of discursive influences in the development of environmental policy in New Zealand at potential critical turning points over a 10-year period. The role of public relations professionals in such discursive struggles, and the implications for organizations and public relations in the long term are discussed.

The Connectivity of the Creative Industries in North East England — The Problems of Physical and Relational Distance

The creative industries are seen as a key part of economic development policy for national and regional policymakers. This research adopts a relational approach to examine the spatialities and networks of connections that workers in the North East of England's creative industries forge and maintain over space. Based on a questionnaire survey and interviews, our findings reveal a set of industries that are isolated from the major hubs of creativity outside the region and display a regionally bounded set of working and engagement practices. Numerous reasons underpinning this isolation are outlined, which are generated, in part, by both physical and relational distance to other agents in similar sectors. We also examine a group of highly mobile creative workers whose working practices and previous experience outside the North East allows them to overcome barriers faced by their counterparts. The paper concludes by calling for further comparative research to better understand the connectivity of regional creative industries that also avoids privileging London as the only source of discursive and financial influence. A series of recommendations for policy makers tasked with fostering the creative industries is outlined.

Teachers Responding to Narrative Inquiry: An Approach to Narrative Inquiry Criticism

ABSTRACT Using a reader-response approach, the author examines practitioners’ interpretations of three narrative inquiry texts to highlight how their responses suggest ways to enhance and more particularly nuance narrative inquiry representations of teaching practice. She asserts that the transactive character of the reader-response relationship across texts and readers makes it possible to examine the contextual and discursive influences shaping both the production of narrative inquiry texts and the readers’ responses to them. Findings suggest that practitioners do not always receive and interpret narrative texts as they are intended, and that those divergent interpretations offer ways to further develop the field of narrative inquiry scholarship.

Plateau Indian Ways with Words

The indigenous rhetoric of the Plateau Indians continues to exert a discursive influence on student writing in reservation schools today. Plateau students score low on state-mandated tests and on college writing assignments, in large part because the pervasive personalization of Plateau rhetoric runs counter to the depersonalization of academic argument. Yet, we can teach writing in ways that honor all students’ “and not just Plateau students’ rhetorical sovereignty” even as we prepare them for academic writing.

Extending Habermas and Ratzinger's Dialectics of Secularization: Eastern Discursive Influences on Faith and Reason in a Postsecular Age

In the unlikely confluence of two colossal intellectual heritages, neo-Kantian Jürgen Habermas and Catholic prelate Joseph Ratzinger agree that we have entered a post-secular age. For both, the inauguration of such an age entails skepticism towards absolutist science and a growing recognition of the contributions of spiritual worldviews to social solidarity. Following their call for a multifaceted purification in the West whereby secular and religious commitments are subjected to mutual critique, I explore potential Eastern contributions to this process by providing a micro-analysis of the interaction of discursive subjects in three traditions: for Confucianism, the rectification of names; Taoism, truth disclosure; and Buddhism, right speech.

Choosing Words with Care? Shifting meanings of women's empowerment in international development

‘Women's empowerment’, as used by international development organisations, is a fuzzy concept. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of empowerment associated with efficiency and growth are crowding out more socially transformative meanings associated with rights and collective action. In their efforts to make headway in what has become an unfavourable policy environment, officials in development agencies with a commitment to a broader social change agenda juggle these different meanings, strategically exploiting the concept's polysemic nature to keep that agenda alive. We argue for a politics of solidarity between such officials and feminist activists. We encourage the latter to challenge the prevailing instrumentalist discourse of empowerment with a clear, well articulated call for social transformation, while alerting them to how those with the same agenda within international development agencies may well be choosing their words with care, even if what they say appears fuzzy.

Offshore Threats: Liquefied Natural Gas, Terrorism, and Environmental Debate in Connecticut

Broadwater Energy is one of a number of recent proposals to construct a liquefied natural gas facility along the East Coast of the United States. The proposal calls for the construction of an import and regasification terminal in Long Island Sound, roughly halfway between the states of New York and Connecticut. First made public in 2004 by its sponsors, TransCanada and Shell, the Broadwater proposal has inspired opposition from a range of interest groups. An examination of the Broadwater debate with a focus on arguments made by Connecticut residents in the months leading up to the release in late 2006 of the proposal's Draft Environmental Impact Statement reveals explicit and implicit points of overlap between concerns about the facility's environmental impacts and concerns about its status as a potential terrorist target. Discussions about terrorism deployed in the Broadwater debate have initiated and informed a politics of scale through which themes common to environmental debates have been transformed. This transformation, in turn, highlights the discursive and material influence of terrorism in contemporary U.S. society. Concerns about terrorist attacks have been deployed by activists to enhance the strength of an otherwise environmental debate and, in the process, those concerns have developed the potential to shape land use policy in Long Island Sound.

"The Only Thing Left for the Whites Is a Couple of Coaching Jobs": Revisiting the Discursive Influence of Pre- and Post-Brown Media on Desegregation and Resegregation in Collegiate Sports

Former CBS sports analyst, "Jimmy the Greek" Snyder said "The only thing left for the Whites is a couple of coaching jobs" (Shapiro, 1988, pp. A1, A10). The Supreme Court's landmark <i>Brown I</i> and <i>II</i> decisions brought a sharp increase in the visibility of some of the most exceptional black college athletes the country. Subsequently, many segregated, white institutions began to recruit these black "superspades" (Harris, 1993, p. 52; and Davis, 1995, p. 627) per team and mass media sources began to compare/contrast blacks and whites via sporting events. This manuscript revisits historical and contemporary messages of the mass media regarding blacks vs. whites in college athletics and considers how mass mediated sports involve (1) discursive innovation (Hughes, 2005), (2) a revolutionary message, (3) simplistic appeals to emotions, (4) rhetorical figures generating an aura of "presence," (5) invocations to a collective identity that is conducive to a situation-distressed collective group seeking a solution to social problems as a means of escape, and (6) dramatization of polarized aggression between forces of good and bad that is indicative of impending doom or hopelessness restricting individual perspectives in favor of collective group identity (Lewis, 1988). The manuscript discusses how this particular construction of messages may have contributed to the desegregation and resegregation (Orfield, 2001) of the two most visible, NCAA Division I sports: men's college basketball and football. Moreover, the article provides evidence of the necessity for an ongoing academic investigation of sports and athletes in education.

“Street Girl”

This article is located in the body of feminist work on “girl culture” that has as its focus the shifts in constructions of femininity. A number of feminists have contextualised these shifts within the broader discursive influences of neo-liberalism, post-feminism, and “girl power,” each of which produce the millennium “girl” subject in particular ways. The independent, “sassy,” and “sexually free” girl may be seen as constructed at the intersection of these discourses. Nonetheless traditional discourses of femininity endure and “post-feminist” girl must negotiate the contradictory tangle of conventional femininity and feminism. Drawing on these ideas, this article examines representations of teenage femininity and sexuality in the New Zealand soap, Shortland Street. Focusing on the main teenage character, Claire, the article analyses ways in which she is produced within conventional and “new” discourses of femininity. These analyses suggest Claire is re/produced as a “postmodern” girl for whom sexual “freedom” assumes a compulsory quality that positions her as sexually desiring and agentic but also as a promiscuous “skank.” The article concludes by considering the “impossibility” of femininity for young women in modern times.

Rethinking Knowledge and Power: The Local and the Global

Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. Edited by Sheila Jasanoff, Marybeth Long Martello. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 376 pp., $67.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-10103-3), $27.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-60059-5). As the watchword for the new millennium, globalization is both valorized and vilified (Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Friedman 2000). In either case, it is rarely denaturalized and recognized for the plethora of socially constructed processes that it is. The contributors to Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance seek to address this omission—and much more—in the context of environmental governance. Rather than dichotomizing the local and the global, this book demonstrates that both are essentially contested, dialectically constituting each other, and deployable in multiple arenas as rhetorical strategies. Most important, the authors of the thirteen case studies contained in the volume generate surprising insights from their unifying premise: that the generation, communication, and diffusion of knowledge is an eminently political project. Thus, Earthly Politics stands as an important antidote to two trends in international studies: the polarization that has occurred around the phenomenon of globalization, and the epistemological bias that privileges the supposedly objective neutrality of science over other ways of knowing. The book accomplishes this by importing significant insights and methodologies from other fields. International relations has been referred to as “the borrowing discipline.” Historically, international relations borrowed much from economics; more recently, the constructivist turn has been inspired by imports from sociology and philosophy of science. Earthly Politics advances the constructivist research agenda by drawing from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. How we understand environmental problems, the editors and contributors believe, shapes how we manage these problems. Yet, our understandings can never be divorced from discursive and cultural influences, an insight that is key to both the constructivist turn and postmodern influences in international relations theory (Katzenstein 1996; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996). The interdisciplinary orientation of Earthly Politics comes not only from an epistemological commitment of editors …

Using narrative and discourse analysis in researching co‐principalships

After completing a longitudinal study of co‐principal shared leadership initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the author discusses some of the issues raised by her research design and methods. First, she explains the storying techniques she used to construct case narratives of each initiative. While these accounts drew largely on the participants’ own words, she shows how her own narrative analysis shaped them. She then explains a ‘pragmatic’ discourse analysis that combines elements of Foucauldian and feminist critical and poststucturalist theory (Fraser, 1997). In using this for a secondary analysis of the case narratives, the aim was to illuminate some of the discursive influences that were shaping, and being shaped by, the individual co‐principals and their evolving shared leadership practices. The author encountered a range of dilemmas, however, as she tried to cross boundaries between these ‘realist’ and poststructuralist research approaches. She reflects here on the implications of what Lather (1997) has called ‘the ruins of a feminist ethnography’ and associated issues that have been raised around authorial distance and representation and participant voice and confidentiality.