Discursive Objects Research Articles

Gender disruptions in the digital industries?

The digital industries in the United Kingdom are said to have specific ‘image problems’. Public sector policy-makers and commentators have argued that few women choose to enter this sector because there is a misfit between its dominant image as ‘geeky’, technical and masculine, and women workers' self-perceptions. Drawing on Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, this article juxtaposes these public policy claims with recruitment literature which seeks to disrupt or shift away from traditional stereotypes of the digital industries worker. This article considers the unintended consequences of these discursive objects and argues that they contribute to the re-inscription of gender norms rather than their disruption. The analysis identifies repetitions of particular discursive practices which fix gender offering only narrowly legible worker subject roles with which women workers are expected to find their fit. This article argues that attention to discursive performativity in official public texts and visual and textual organisational artefacts offers a means for enhanced understanding of the transformations and continuities of inequalities within contemporary work domains.

‘No absolute privacy’: Henry James and the Ethics of Reading Authors’ Letters

Authors’ private letters play a significant role in Henry James’s fiction, literary criticism and in his literary and authorial legacy. They are privileged discursive objects activating fundamental issues of privacy and publicity, canonicity and the material condition of literature. The letter is a contested discursive object in James’s work, since it is at one and the same time a potent figure for authenticity and interiority, and consequently poses a threat to the author’s desire to control his own literary corpus and his privacy. In this article, James’s personal and private investment in designing his literary testament (his private letters and his definitive collected edition) is discussed in the context of his ethical and aesthetic concerns with reading the publications of authors’ private correspondences.

A alavanca que move o mundo: o discurso da mídia de negócios sobre o capitalismo empreendedor

Utilizando-se da perspectiva da teoria social do discurso de Norman Fairclough (2001), tem-se por objetivo identificar e discutir possíveis implicações nas relações de trabalho contemporâneas da criação e disseminação do conceito de "empreendedorismo" pelas revistas de negócios. A suposição que norteia este estudo é a de que o discurso utilizado vincula - de forma acrítica e sem questionamentos - o tema "empreendedorismo" a crescimento, desenvolvimento e enriquecimento das organizações e dos indivíduos que nelas trabalham, elegendo e naturalizando o capitalismo de mercado como único modelo possível de desenvolvimento socioeconômico. Para alcançar o objetivo proposto, este estudo baseia-se no método da análise crítica do discurso (ACD) e concentra seu foco no material publicado nas revistas de negócios brasileiras Você S/A Exame, Carta Capital e HSM Management, no período de março de 2004 a abril de 2009, totalizando 112 reportagens e 400 páginas. Os resultados da pesquisa permitiram a identificação e a seleção de três objetos discursivos (capitalismo empreendedor, ascensão econômica no livre mercado e herói global) vinculados ao tema "empreendedorismo". Em conjunto, os três objetos discursivos identificados permitem que se explorem algumas possíveis implicações nas relações de trabalho contemporâneas em relação: (1) ao discurso da mídia, que estabelece uma convergência entre os interesses das organizações e os interesses dos indivíduos; (2) às novas configurações da esfera do trabalho em um modelo de capitalismo empreendedor; (3) à busca do sucesso profissional como organizador do comportamento humano no mundo do trabalho.

The Power of Tulips: Constructing Nature and Heritage in a Contested Landscape

In this paper we analyse the successful local/regional opposition to a proposed new town north of the Dutch city Leiden in terms of pathways, sites and techniques of object formation. In the struggle over spatial plans and policies, new objects are constructed and played out. In some cases, the new objects became institutionalized and codified future development in the region. We focus on the strategic role of the construction of heritage and nature in the planning process, concepts utilized by opponents of the urban plans. Revisiting Foucault's concepts of power/knowledge and discourse, we present a detailed analysis of the process of emergence, solidifying and institutional embedding of new forms of heritage and nature as new discursive objects. We argue that such a retour à Foucault is important, allowing for an elucidation of object formation, still understudied in planning and governance studies.

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

Fantasy in the discourse of ‘Social Theory of International Politics’

No doubt Wendt’s ‘Social Theory of International Politics’ (STIP) is a discourse. As such, the theory is built on certain discursive conditions of possibility. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of discourse, I analyse these conditions of possibility in arguing that a desire of discursive closure is created in STIP through a fantasy. The latter sustains itself not only by pre-empting its own failure but also by maintaining the desire for discursive closure. I argue that STIP cannot escape deploying such a fantasy. More broadly, what social constructivism based on critical realism does, especially in its thin version, is construct a dichotomy between intransitive and transitive objects in its theoretic discourses. It then endeavours, via constructing fantasies, to use transitive discursive objects to sustain the desire for the constructed dichotomies, which hankers for discursive closure. This means that Wendt is more constructivist than he knows, despite his move of ‘not going all the way down’. In short, I argue that ‘ideas not all the way down’ is a discourse all the way down because of what Wendt and thin constructivists struggle to make of it.

THE EVIDENCE OF SIGHT

ABSTRACTIn The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault focuses on excavating discursive formations, but he acknowledges that a pre‐discursive reality, “the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse,” also exists. This divide between the pre‐discursive and the discursive is straddled, I argue, by photographs as historians use them. The reason for photography's dual capacity lies with the complex nature of sight, which is both precognitive (primarily so, as neuroscience demonstrates), and also culturally encoded. Historians most commonly rely on mute sensuality; they place photographs in books with little comment, implying that some form of unmediated recognition is possible. Used in this way, photographs cannot serve as the basis for new analyses but may underscore the affective stance of historians toward their topics. Less commonly, historians interrogate photographs much like texts, locating them within the discourses through which they emerged. This strategy treats the experience of sight, in Joan Scott's words, as “an interpretation that needs to be interpreted.” Photographs seen as discursive objects may provide understanding of past political and social relations, but we lose any assurance that we can recognize and intuitively understand their subjects. In short, we risk blindness. I explore these two fundamentally different strategies for approaching photographs, using the concepts of recognition and excavation to examine an image made in 1946 by Japanese photographer Hayashi Tadahiko. Photographs, I argue, expose our dual relationship with the past, both visceral and cultural.

Environmental discourse of architecture

This study attempts to examine the environmental discourse of architecture. The attempt to constitute a linguistic framework for the environmental discourse requires a critical understanding of the interrelationship among the following concerns: a) discourse as a ‘system of statements’ that prescribes the ‘theoretical formation’ of an object, b) architecture as a field in which several discourses (professional, technological, social, representational, theoretical, etc.) operate around their specific objects, c) environmental discourse as a discursive ‘formation’ which involves verbal or non‐verbal ‘statements’ referring to the problematic of environment. The analysis of the linguistic figures such as clichés, interpretations and definitions, reveals the discursive power of language as a condition in which environmental discourse forms its discursive objects and produces discursive effects in architecture.

“Do you hear with your ears or with your eyes?”: the education of the deaf pupils at Casa Pia de Lisboa (c.1820–1950)

This paper focuses on the education of the deaf pupils at Casa Pia de Lisboa, a Portuguese boarding‐school, covering the period from 1820 to 1950. The intention is to show that a historical sedimentation of a scientific discourse about deafness is an effect of a new rationality of government begun by modernity and perfectly fitting a bio‐political strategy. The development of medical and psychological sciences and their inscription in the educational landscape allows the appearance of new techniques and instruments in the observation and comprehension of the school population, as well as a rush of experts on social prophylactic. The field of practice offers a single heterogenous surface on which discursive objects are involved in the production of effects of power and types of subjectivities: this article is crossed by the double image normal–abnormal deployed by school practices. The conceptualisation of deafness as an abnormality justified the multiplication of corrective processes directed to an erasing of deafness. The deaf were fabricated as the Other of the educative arena and the hospitality given to them was no more than conditional. The oral lingo was conceived not only as the normal but also as the official language that the deaf had to assimilate.

Reading Dialogic Correspondence: Synge's The Aran Islands

Reading Dialogic Correspondence:Synge’s The Aran Islands Veerendra Lele After one hundred years, how might we read John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands anthropologically and ethnographically? The book bears a long history of interpretations by Synge's contemporaries, by literary artists and scholars, and by anthropologists.1 All of these interpreters critique, correctly, the romantic interests in "primitives" particular to both the Revivalist political aesthetic and to early colonial anthropology—and to its product, fieldwork ethnography. More recently, scholars have salvaged Synge from the Orientalist-cum-nationalist box and argued that he develops an early form of realism from a "displaced nostalgia."2 Scholars also note that while conforming to the still-emergent ethnographic conventions of his time, Synge simultaneously challenges these conventions through his autobiographic presence.3 Considered as an ethnographic work, this should not surprise us, if by ethnography we mean "the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing."4 Anthropologists now recognize the dangers of primitivism, and they have internalized the critique of power differentials, including colonial and postcolonial analyses, that condition so many modern epistemologies. And anthropologists have internalized something else: an understanding that ethnography itself is a cultural practice, and a dialogic one at that.5 The Aran Islands and the Aran Islands are both historically specific discursive objects—"places" are always arbitrated concepts—overlapping perhaps, but not isomorphic. The Aran Islands is certainly fictive, but like all fiction it is constrained by what is possible. Reading it now ethnographically, one can sense a creative agency expressed through particular cultural practices, with linguistic practices being primary. There is little interest in The Aran Islands in archaeological [End Page 124] anthropology as Synge is interested in other types of artifacts, among them languages, bodies, and folklore. His physical anthropology, his "ethnometry," resides in his musings on the supposed correspondence between physical features and personality, an awkward, and to our ears unseemly, traverse of the Cartesian divide. Reading Synge's text as straight ethnography is problematic, as others have noted.6 But Synge's autobiographic and dialogic presence is itself part of the potential ethnography that is The Aran Islands. As a writer—as the "graph" of the term "ethnographer"—he shifts from the agent-patient approach of the natural sciences, and instead develops a novel ethnographic disposition, a dialogic disposition. Though there is in The Aran Islands the residue of "objective scientific" ambition, there is also the subjective, and ultimately, the more human: for what are we, but subject—or subjected, as Nietzsche would have it—positions? Of talking with Máirtín, old and blind, Synge's first teacher and guide in Inis Mór, Synge writes, Then we talked about Inishmaan. "You'll have an old man to talk with you over there," he said, "and tell you stories of the fairies, but he's walking about with two sticks under him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on four legs when it is young, and on two legs after that, and on three legs when it does be old?" I gave him the answer. "Ah, master," he said, "you're a cute one, and the blessing of God be on you. Well, I'm on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is back on four; I don't know if I'm better than the way he is; he's got his sight and I'm only an old dark man.'"7 Mikhail Bakhtin analytically describes two forms of Socratic dialogue as "anacrisis" and "syncrisis." Anacrisis requires, or demands, a response, "the provocation of the word by the word."8 The semantic content of such exchanges includes the formal reproduction of subject positions and differentials. In contrast, syncrisis is the bringing together of perspectives, in Bakhtin's assessment, concordant with his concept of heteroglossia. From my own fieldwork in contemporary spoken Irish in Aran, ag labhairt ("to speak") seems more anacritic and ag caint ("to talk") more syncritic. The mixture of syncrisis stands in contrast [End Page 125] to what Bakhtin argues is the monologic impetus of the classical dialectic...

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (review)

Reviewed by: Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Deanna M. Toten Beard Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. By Jonathan L. Chambers . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006; pp. xv + 268. $55.00 cloth. The epilogue to Jonathan Chambers's rigorous new study of progressive American playwright John Howard Lawson includes the author's uncomfortable memory of an academic conference some years ago when a colleague asked him to defend his scholarly investment in the career of a failed playwright. Messiah of the New Technique, an insightful investigation of Lawson and leftist theatre culture in the United States, definitively confirms the value of Chambers's efforts. The author's "unyielding belief that the study of art and the study of society are inextricably intertwined" (9) has resulted in an illuminating materialist study of both Lawson and revolutionary politics in the United States before World War II. Chambers treats as discursive objects Lawson's plays, manifestoes, letters, and memoirs, along with reviews of his plays and period assessments of avant-garde theatre during the 1920s and 1930s. All of these sources richly record (even as they helped create) the liberal social energy in the country during the interwar years. The strength of Chambers's scholarship is his careful examination of John Howard Lawson as "both product and producer of a larger ideological conflict in the social and cultural spheres in this historical moment" (116), which persuasively shows how "common categorical labels for Lawson such as 'failed,' 'propagandistic,' and even 'left-wing' not only reduce and isolate his remarkable and varied career but also undergird and advance totalizing narratives regarding the theatre and, moreover, the political and cultural left in the United States during the twenties and thirties" (205). Up until now, there has been little work done on the political and experimental theatre career of Lawson, author of Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Loud Speaker (1927), and Marching Song (1937). The recent appearance of Gerald Horne's The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (2006) might hint at a new [End Page 147] wave of interest in Lawson's drama, although that study—like Gary L. Carr's The Left Side of Paradise (1984)—deals exclusively with Lawson's infamous career in Hollywood. Indeed, as Chambers's conference colleague pointed out, most of Lawson's plays were commercial and critical failures, yet Chambers is less interested in the relative success of Lawson's stagework than in the usefulness of that career to a richer understanding of the period theatrically, culturally, and politically. The book offers excellent descriptions of Lawson's infrequently read plays, providing not only important basic details of plot, character, and dramatic form, but also tracking changes in drafts of the plays and including valuable information about specific production choices made in the original productions. Employing materialist historiography and dialectical methodologies, Lawson's plays are read not simply for their formal qualities, but as evidence of both the playwright's changing ideas about political theatre and larger shifts within leftist ideology and subculture. In reaction to the stale habit of framing early twentieth-century American theatre history as a dichotomy between commercial theatre—its allies and exigencies—and noncommercial theatre (read "experimental," "little," and "art"), recent scholarship has sought to complicate our understanding of the discourse in those years. Chambers's study contributes to this reexamination by arguing that there were in fact not simply two modes in US theatre between the wars. Lawson's politically saturated theatre, for example, did not entirely appeal to the goals and values of either Broadway or most art theatres: "Lawson was, in short, neither fish nor fowl, neither 'artist-rebel' nor 'revolutionary'" (118), Chambers notes. The absence of a single, monolithic noncommercial and experimental theatre in the period mirrors the complexity of revolutionary politics during the same interwar years when, as Chambers's study thoroughly describes, "the so-called left in the United States was in truth comprised of many communities" (155). Starting with Lawson's upbringing within a Christian Scientist home and continuing through his formative friendship with...

Enrolling the Social Sciences in Nanotechnoscience

This article presents a reflection on the challenges and opportunities associated with the now ubiquitous requests inviting social scientists to participate in ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Implications) type frameworks, attached to large science projects such as nanotechnoscience. It elaborates on some ideas presented in a panel discussion titled "On the Social and Ethical Impacts of Nanotechnology" in Winnipeg at the Canadian Sociological and Anthropological Association (CSAA) annual meeting in the spring of 2004. This was the first panel session devoted to nanotechnology in the CSAA. I begin by briefly developing some key ideas from the field of social studies of science in order to draw attention to the fact that scientific activity has always required the mobilisation of a variety of social, political, cultural and economic resources. Nanotechnoscience is no different. What is distinctive, however, is the perceived need to enrol the social sciences in ELSI-type programs as a way securing legitimacy and to contribute to the overall success of these initiatives. I suggest that it is important to attend to the types of discursive spaces and objects of knowledge that are opened up to the social sciences in these ELSI frameworks. In light of work in science studies, the notion that the social implications of the technology can be grasped by simply projecting current trends into the future has to be problematised and treated with great care. I conclude by suggesting that sociology and anthropology's most important contribution might lie not in contributing to the illusion of predictability and control, which nanotechnoscience is currently attempting to foster as a way of securing social, political, ethical and economic legitimacy for its endeavour, but in short-circuiting these processes.

Writing the Child in Media Theory

Contemporary mass media are perceived by programme-makers, politicians, and the public to have a particularly crucial role in childhood culture, development, and behaviour. For each of these groups, and for children themselves, film, television, and video are often regarded as overlapping media. Each medium overlaps in both children's and parents' discourse about media effects and children's responses to media. While there are significant methodological issues that can be raised about the specificity of different media, this essay follows the contours of existing debate by focusing mainly on television, including film and video which is watched on television. The concern for how adults should respond to children's interactions with media is both quotidian and real, and can be addressed in two interrelated ways. Children's interaction with media is on one hand a question of discourse, which focuses on how the terms of the issue are posed and how it is addressed. Secondly, the relations between children and media are a matter of action, including the procedures for parents' control and prohibition of media use, legal regulation and censorship, and policy debate. But action takes place on the basis of discursive assumptions about both children and media, where the legitimacy of law, policy, and parental control rests on stated or unstated theories of childhood and media culture. Both discourse and action are conducted by adults, so that any discussion of children's interaction with media must first recognize a certain virtuality of the object it addresses. While the figure of the child is massively present in discourses around the mass media, the child as a subject who might participate in these discourses remains largely silent. Therefore, the primary task in discussing children and media is to determine the ways in which the figure of the child, and the functions, effects, and cultural meaning of the media, are posed as discursive objects. This focus on the forms taken by discourse needs to extend from relatively unelaborated theories of childhood and media, such as those evident in the discourses of concerned adults or the press, to discourses that claim expertise, such as those produced by broadcasters and media theorists.

Speaking from the margins: A discourse analysis of ten women's accounts of spirituality

Psychology's concern with the human subject has traditionally marginalised women's accounts of their own experience. This paper reports a study of the discursive resources identified in 10 women's accounts of their spirituality and the relationships between these resources and those identified in selected psychological, feminist, and poststructuralist texts. From a poststructuralist perspective, we analyse and discuss the ways in which the women's accounts, and the more academic accounts, reproduce discourses and discursive objects, and simultaneously produce speaking positions for women. We discuss some of the problematics of engaging with the research process and of working through and with theories that historically constitute women as lacking, invisible, and silent.

Discursive ethnomethodology: Analysing power and resistance in talk

In order to better understand relationships between forms of institutional discourse and social interaction we outline an approach to the study of power in talk which we call discursive ethnomethodology. Following commas on approaches to the study of language and power, we illustrate our framework through analysis of an interview between a police officer and suspect where the latter exhibits a ‘right to silence’. Essentially, our approach distinguishes between two aspects of talk as event the immediate participation context, end the discursive or ‘folk-model’ resources employed by participants in context. Corresponding to these aspects are implicit/explicit expressions of power and resistance and externally available discursive objects. Through example extracts we illustrate how this framework can be employed in forensic psychology, bringing together both discursive psychology and critical discourse analysis alongside the ethnomethodological orientation of conversation analysis.

On the Way to Knowledge: Making a Discourse at Quality

This paper shows how `archaeology of knowledge' (Foucault) works at a site, called quality. By tracing the formation of knowledge on quality, a discursive space is opened. A spider web and snowballs help to illustrate where and how connections and concepts take shape, mutate and transform from modern quality control to quality management. Unconvinced by a seemingly objective or external source to discourse for unity in TQC and Deming's methodology, the paper argues for a discursive unity instead. A demonstration on how `quality' and `standards' may have become discursive objects highlights complex effects of a `quality' discourse. When the shaping capacity of discourse is taken seriously, its effect on knowledge (transformation may have to be reconsidered. To this end, the paper seeks to give voice to what established procedures for `positive knowledge' have been unable to deliver.

The procedural and rhetorical modes of the organizing dimension of communication: Discursive analysis of a parliamentary commission

How can we explain a phenomenon as general and as central as social organization through discourse analysis? This is the question raised by the Transformational Analysis of Discourse (TAD) which proposes treating the illocutionary dimension of all speech acts as the establishment of a relationship between an agent and a recipient through the transfer or mediation of objects. The discursive analysis described in this paper is intended to show the utility of this analysis of speech acts as a key to understanding the organizing dimension of communication. The corpus is a transcription of the deliberations of a Quebec parliamentary commission set up to decide the future of Sidbec, a public metallurgical corporation created in 1964 by the Quebec government in response to the presence of American‐owned mining operations in Quebec since the mid 1940s. In applying this method of analysis, we attempt to substantiate three hypotheses: (1) all enunciation can be interpreted as an activity of mediation (that is, an action involving the transfer of an object) between an agent and a recipient, (2) the organizing dimension of communication is found in the discursive objects circulating illocutionarily between agents and recipients, (3) perlocutionary transformations occur in two modes, namely, the “procedural” mode and the “rhetorical” mode. Through these transformations, we aim to demonstrate that the social universe is structured and organized through “interobjectivity” (Latour), essentially through the circulation of enablements—what Greimas calls a “being able to do,” such as a permission—and constraints—what Greimas calls a “having to do,” such as advice or request. Thus, organizations exist only through such illocutionary circulation and perlocutionary fixation of objects which not only create (discursive) links between actors, but also transform their (social) identity. Even though these links are symbolic, they constitute both what ties us together and differentiates us from each other in organizations. TAD also attempts to illustrate how Rhetoric can be translated as “the art of linking.” By demonstrating how the “rhetorical” mode of the perlocutionary transformation occurs, we try to show how arguments can be analyzed according to strategies of association (or identification) and dissociation (or division) carried out in discourse. Using illustrations of these two complementary strategies, we show how people can be linked together through the perlocutionary acceptance of objects that circulate illocutionarily.

Argument as a natural category: The routine grounds for arguing in conversation

A theoretical analysis of the natural category “argument”; can be built inductively from examination of discursive objects recognizable as members of the category. The natural category of argument appears to be defined functionally by its disagreement‐relevance and structurally by its expansion of basic sequences of speech acts. Expansion of speech act sequences into prototypical arguments—those in which reasons are exchanged—is governed by felicity conditions associated with the particular speech acts involved, so that making an argument is always done with reference to socially shared structures amounting to the proof requirements of individual speech acts.