Re: [xmca] Friesen Article: question on kinds of talk analysis

["Au, Wayne" <wau@Exchange.FULLERTON.EDU>]

Steve,
I would highly recommend getting into James Paul Gee's work. He's all about video games and learning right now, but his earlier stuff about Discourse and discourse analysis is brilliant. My favorite book of his is "Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses" (but there is a newer 2007 edition of the original 1996 one) and he also has a really good Discourse analysis book: "An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method" (2005). Jim is a really good academic writer - one of my favorites, and he really gets language.

I've taken two courses with him, and from what I've gleaned, I would say that conversation analysis generally falls under the larger umbrella of discourse analysis. In conversation analysis people look at how actors in a given conversation position themselves (vis-à-vis language) relative to the other actors in the conversation and relative to their intended goals. In this way conversation analysis has the potential to speak to issues of culture and power very concretely at the level of individual and/or group interaction. Discourse, in Gee's terms at least, is a broader concept than "conversation" in that Discourse (with a capitol "D" specifically) speaks to how one communicates their identity through language as well as through other means (posture, clothing, style, etc.). So Discourse analysis also has the potential to look at language and power, but it does so within a broader framework and tries to take in larger issues of identity.

But this is all coming out of "New Literacy Studies" (which, frankly, isn't that "new" anymore), and I'm sure there are many more traditional and/or historical takes on discourse analysis and conversation analysis that would disagree with what I've offered here.

For what its worth...

Wayne


On 5/19/09 4:59 AM, "Steve Gabosch" <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:

This passage got my attention in Norm Friesen's article on discursive
psychology:

"the computer can be understood to have the same status as other
psychological phenomena in discursive analysis ..."  (page 133)

Speaking of discursive analysis, I need some education about the
differences and similarities between conversation analysis, discourse
analysis, discursive analysis, and perhaps other kinds of talk
analysis that are out there.  Any suggestions?

- Steve





On May 11, 2009, at 11:03 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:

> Mike, I think you have very well, but this is a tough problem. There
> are some people on this list who are marvellously transdisciplinary
> (no names lest I omit someone) but it is hard to see how to get
> something really going in this direction, beyond heroic islands and
> a few brilliant scholars.
>
> Something which has increasingly been grabbing my attention is the
> idea of an *emancipatory science*, the possibility of getting a
> discussion going amongst people in absolutely any discipline about
> how to break from the dominant positivist approaches around this
> principle. There has been a longstanding desire to do this, but
> efforts have been limited I think to certain currents of social
> theory, or more or less commitment to ethical code.
>
> 1. The 80 years discussion in the CHAT tradition around "unit of
> analysis," seems to be recognised in no other current of science. I
> think this idea needs to be better understood and used in criticism.
>
> 2. The interest in Idiographic as opposted to Nomothetic science
> which you, Mike, have introduced as something which Luria was
> committed to.
>
> 3. Related to (2) the kind of knowledge accumulated by self-help
> groups as opposed to "specialists" and "generalists."
>
> 4. "Emancipatory science" as a banner to organise a "crusade"
> against Behaviorism, Structuralism, and other currents of science
> which deny agency.
>
> 5. Habermas's idea of "emancipatory interest"?
>
> Perhaps a kind of social movement within science could open the way
> for transdisciplinary approaches? What do you think?
>
> Andy
>
> Mike Cole wrote:
>> Darn.
>> My experience with "interdisciplinary" has been so different than
>> yours,
>> David, it might even be enough of the opposite to motivate my
>> search for
>> some other formulation, like transdisciplinary without evoking
>> fears of a
>> coercive Foulcaudian master discipline. Seems like any route we
>> search end
>> leads to oxen and their
>> droppings. :-(
>> I started out an experimental psychologist for whom rats and
>> sophomores were
>> simply different kinds of the same sorts of "subjects" who one
>> studied for
>> convenience sake, depending upon particulars of how to get at the
>> common
>> underlying "psychological processes."  Istumled into and out of
>> Moscow
>> barely understanding what I was doing. Was sent to Liberia with
>> about the
>> same depth of understanding. Spent decades trying to sort it out
>> and piece
>> it together and ended up helping start a "communication
>> department" (no s at
>> the end).
>> Communication HAD to claim to be discipline to become a department
>> with a
>> grad program or had to disappear and that would have stranded me
>> back in a
>> psychology who thought that culture was only the "glove that goes
>> on the
>> hand." (Lovely metaphor from Gessell). But i could no longer
>> swallow that
>> and had come to believe that cultural mediation is central to human
>> behavior.  I was FORCED to create a DISCIPLINARY
>> department of Communication or flee into somewhere else and it
>> would be no
>> better.  And Communication, I fully believed was not a discipline
>> and was
>> not about to become one I could sign on to. It had to be created.
>> So what happens? We get hailed as this neat interdisciplinary
>> department.
>> And what does that mean? Incommensurate data, no way to say that
>> someone
>> said something actually wrong, not just some other
>> discipline's way of looking at things. What things? Ohn, most any
>> would do,
>> so long as it could be related,
>> post hoc mostly, to communication.
>> When people do anthro and psych as interdisciplinry we get a new
>> way to do
>> positivist cause effect science for subjects and objects who have the
>> misfortune of contributing to their own histories, thus screwing the
>> interdisciplinary logic of their combination.
>> Or we get a department of communication which aclaims its
>> interdisciplinarity. Cites Bakhtin, Foucault,
>> Bourdieu, inter alia, and the oxen of anyone with a yearning to
>> gore or be
>> gored.
>> Tis a puzzle.
>> My students are struggling with these issues in one class, and
>> trying to
>> come to grips with their lives as
>> middle class college students who spend two afternoons a week with
>> kids who
>> havnt enough to eat, parents only partly there or in prison or on
>> welfare to
>> work, or......  All those paradoxes to and moral conundrums to
>> work out.
>> And hoping that its true there is nothing so practical as a good
>> theory, so
>> they actually start searching for and evaluating candidates for such
>> theory(s).
>> And all we have jointly is this thin and tangled medium.
>> So it goes.
>> mike
>> Ps-- If you could help me out with the technology quesion I would
>> appreciate
>> it.
>> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 4:05 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>> >wrote:
>>>  Since CHAT is an open house, I'm going to offer an extended
>>> cautionary
>>> tale for discursive psychology from my own bailliwick, applied
>>> linguistics.
>>> H.G. Widdowson, who practically founded our field, pointed out
>>> that there is
>>> a basic contradiction in the claim that applied linguistics (or
>>> cognitive
>>> science or chat) is "interdisciplinary".
>>>
>>> The contradiction is this: on the one hand, we claim to be a
>>> discipilne in
>>> our own right, with our own mediating relations between theory on
>>> the one
>>> hand and praxis on the other. On the other hand, we claim to exist
>>> "interdisciplinarily", in the interstices between disciplines, by
>>> virtue of
>>> THEIR mediating relations between theory on the one hand and a
>>> praxis which
>>> is actually alien to our own.
>>>
>>> I think matters are not helped when we replace the word
>>> "interdisciplinary"
>>> with "transdisciplinary". That involves a claim to some kind of
>>> metadiscipline; terribly good for our sense of self-importance, but
>>> disastrous for our relationship with our own praxis. In applied
>>> linguistics,
>>> this inflation of the discipline from a technological bull frog to
>>> an
>>> interdisciplinary ox meant that we ended up replacing applied
>>> linguistics
>>> (that is, the solution of real problems in the real world where
>>> language, if
>>> not linguistics, is a real and central concern) with something
>>> that looked a
>>> little more like linguistics applied (that is, now that we've got
>>> this keen
>>> body of theory let's figure out what it's good for).
>>>
>>> At conferences it became very easy to tell the dwindling groups
>>> bullfrogs
>>> from the exploding groups of oxen. Bullfrogs were always reading,
>>> and oxen
>>> were always writing. Bullfrogs tended to hang out with teachers
>>> and even
>>> students, while oxen travelled in herds, mooing to each other in
>>> various
>>> incomprehensible postmodern dialects.
>>>
>>> Concretely, it was even easier. The bullfrogs were STILL
>>> interested in
>>> language teaching, even though a lot of our student base was taken
>>> over by
>>> something called TESOL and enrollments were plunging. The oxen
>>> became
>>> interested in a kind of literary critical discourse applied to the
>>> ordinary
>>> language of (notably prestigious) fields like medicine and law and
>>> advertising. After all, if texts are texts and discourses are
>>> discourses
>>> (and maybe texts are discourses too) then there is no reason we
>>> can't apply
>>> the lit crit techniques of Kristeva and Barthes and why not
>>> Bakhtin to the
>>> discourses overheard in surgeries, courtrooms, and the texts in
>>> glossy
>>> magazines.
>>>
>>> It was sexy, but ultimately sterile as far as practical
>>> discoveries of new
>>> modes of problem solving went; a lot of the systemic functional
>>> analyses
>>> (and also the discursive psychological analyses) pretty much
>>> discovered what
>>> we already knew was there (e.g. that South African newspapers under
>>> apartheid tended to cover events in the townships from the white
>>> point of
>>> view rather than the black one) and it even ignored stuff that we
>>> didn't
>>> know was there (e.g. that the same newspapers had some clear
>>> indications
>>> that white jounalists were getting fed up with the crap they were
>>> writing).
>>>
>>> There were also groups of oxen which went into computers and corpus
>>> linguistics. But here the "linguistics applied" problem was even
>>> worse,
>>> because computer corpora were full of native speakers and finished
>>> linguistic products, and this tended to neglect exactly the kinds of
>>> problems we should have been attending (the kinds of problems that
>>> Alex
>>> Kozulin's article in the latest MCA tackles). Having cut their
>>> ties with
>>> praxis by becoming "interdisciplinary" the oxen invariably tended
>>> towards
>>> what was easy to study, uninteresting, and irrelevant.
>>>
>>> That's why I worry a little about little words like "resource" as
>>> opposed
>>> to "tool". I know that "tool" has a distinctly early twentieth
>>> century
>>> sound; it belongs to a better time, when the future seemed somehow
>>> malleable, if only we had the right implements. I know that
>>> "resource"
>>> sounds a lot more twenty-first century; it sounds more suited to a
>>> time when
>>> things are scarce and precious and need to be valued without being
>>> used, and
>>> it seems more important to remind ourselves of the "embodiment" of
>>> communication than its instrumentality, its sign and tool using
>>> quality.
>>> These are evil times, and it is hard to trust in the artifacts of
>>> sociocultural progress; at times like these, as Volosinov says,
>>> academics
>>> shake their heads and repeat that man is only an animal.
>>>
>>> But the students I will teach in about half an hour will graduate
>>> next
>>> year, and then they will teach eight and nine year old children.
>>> Some of
>>> them, perhaps most of them, will live to see the twenty-second
>>> century. So I
>>> still think, rather stubbornly and sometimes even stupidly, that
>>> we had it
>>> right the first time; in the long run, the future must be
>>> malleable if only
>>> we have the right tools and if only we stick to the right
>>> problems! After
>>> all, that's how we got this far.
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Seoul National University of Education
>>>
>>>
>>> --- On *Sun, 5/10/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Friesen Article
>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>> Cc: "David Middleton" <D.J.Middleton@lboro.ac.uk>
>>> Date: Sunday, May 10, 2009, 6:27 PM
>>>
>>> David--
>>>
>>> Thanks for getting us directly connected with this article.
>>> I have a question, the answer to which is presupposed in your term,
>>> technology. One of the aspects of the study of communication as I
>>> experience
>>> from a department so named is that technology is a term that
>>> applies almost
>>> exclusively to electronically powered digital devices.... by my
>>> *colleagues*,
>>> who also treat "media" as a singular noun and a "cause" in the
>>> positive
>>> sense of "the media are responsible for the degeneration of our
>>> moral
>>> order."
>>>
>>> Put aside my parochial question about media and focus on
>>> technology. What
>>> is
>>> a technology? I trace my own, vague understandings to the idea
>>> of technea in ancient Greece where teoria referred to the audience
>>> at a
>>> dramatic performance. I am guessing you have thought about this a
>>> lot.
>>> Can you help me out here? I think it is relevant to the article
>>> because of
>>> the everyday interpretation of "educational technology" .
>>>
>>> I hope that someone knows how to reach Norm Friesen so that he can
>>> join the
>>> discussion. I think that discursive psychology is an important
>>> intellectual
>>> enterprise and would like to understand its relationship to the
>>> issues we
>>> are used to discussing.
>>> mike
>>>
>>> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 4:37 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>>> <http://us.mc01g.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>>> >
>>>> wrote:
>>>> Yes, xmca is a bit of a three ring circus: when there isn't a
>>>> tiger loose
>>>> on the other thread, then he's either backstage--or prowling the
>>> audience.
>>>> I've got some non-rhetorical and non-display questions about the
>>>> Friesen
>>>> article:
>>>>
>>>> a) My first question has to do with "interdisciplinarity", a recent
>>> thread
>>>> that snapped befoer it could get as far as "Discursive Psychology
>>>> and
>>>> Educational Technology". In applied linguistics we used to think
>>>> we were
>>>> inter-trans-disciplinary: we thought we were language teaching
>>>> plus any
>>>> discipline you need to make language teaching more fun, effective,
>>>> affordable, useful. Then we discovered that we were really just a
>>>> TECHNOLOGY. It's not the same thing. For one thing, being a
>>>> technology is
>>>> more fun, effective, affordable, and useful. For another, it's
>>>> not nearly
>>> as
>>>> prestigious, which means good riddance to an enormous amount of
>>>> careerist
>>>> baggage. Isn't "cognitive science" (and even CHAT) just in the
>>>> process of
>>>> discovering the same thing?
>>>>
>>>> b) My second question concerns p. 133, where Friesen has this to
>>>> say:
>>>> "Discursive psychology does not understand (?) discourse or
>>>> conversation
>>> in
>>>> terms of communication in its conventional technologized (??)
>>>> meaning as
>>> the
>>>> transmission of information; instead, it understands discourse
>>>> above all
>>>> (as?) a kind of activity--a type of action or work through which
>>>> the
>>> social
>>>> field of interaction itself is constituted". I can think of a lot
>>>> of ways
>>> in
>>>> which you could transmit information without "action" or "work"
>>>> or even a
>>>> social field of interaction (involuntary signals). I can't think
>>>> of a
>>> single
>>>> way in which you could constitute a social field of interaction
>>>> without
>>>> transmitting information. So am I to conclude that discursive
>>>> psychology
>>> is
>>>> a narrower notion than the convental technologized one?
>>>>
>>>> c) My third question has to do with a sentence later in teh same
>>> paragraph
>>>> that goes like this: (...Mind, computer, and other terms and
>>>> categories
>>>> woudl emerge from this type of analysis not so much as causes or
>>>> tools to
>>>> produce certain results but as rhetorical and interactional
>>>> resources
>>>> for discursive, social action." To me this suggests that they are
>>>> not
>>> tools
>>>> but only potential tools. Given that I am a proud technologist
>>>> with no
>>>> pretensions to interdisciplinarity, why is that a step forward?
>>>> It looks
>>>> like a giant leap backwards from where I am standing.
>>>>
>>>> d) Finally, I wonder about the whole exercise of analyzing a
>>>> tidbit of
>>>> interaction between a human and a chatbot for evidence that the
>>>> human is
>>>> responding to the chatbot as we humans are supposed to, that is,
>>>> as a
>>> more
>>>> or less successful performance of a perverse kind of role play. The
>>>> particular role play that chatbots are supposed to enact is NOT,
>>>> however,
>>>> a machine pretending to be human, but rather a human pretending
>>>> to treat
>>> a
>>>> machine as a human. Isn't the missing precondition for real (as
>>>> opposed
>>> to
>>>> potential) social action the ASSUMPTION that the other person has a
>>> genuine
>>>> intention to interact?
>>>>
>>>> David Kellogg
>>>> Seoul National University of Education
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
> From Erythrós Press and Media <http://www.erythrospress.com/><http://www.erythrospress.com/>.
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CSU Fullerton
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