So far my best sense of PoP is that it tries to describe activity
patterns in such a way that their explicit and implicit meanings
for participants are part of the actions, and thus so that what
something means to us plays a role alongside its other effects,
links it to other actions along with links of other (material,
structural) kinds.
If we ask how we can most usefully describe our sense of the
_consistency_ (from action to action, event to event) of some
participants practices in an activity, and their _specificity_
(why we sense one such pattern is different from another, say of
other participants in the same kind of activity, or one very like
it), then we certainly need some such global unit of focus as
Eugene seems to be trying to construct. In my own terminology and
theories, this unit would correspond to an individuated actional
formation ('individuated' not necessarily with respect to one
actor, but as a more specific variant of the general cultural
formation, which itself includes consistently observable
strategies, as well as meaning and material process).
For me a very interesting question would be just how specified or
individuated a level of focus for PoP or something like it we are
interested in. I would suspect that we would find, in some
community, a number of variant PoPs that turn up again and again
among different groups of participants (that's what makes
something a cultural or social _formation_, or 'institution').
But we could also describe things more specifically, so that we
approached the uniqueness of the PoP of a particular community at
a particular time. Obviously it is most useful to understand the
uniqueness against the background of the commonalities. What do
we specifically learn and gain, however, at each of these levels
of description? and what are they most useful for?
Eugene and others have also been puzzling the relations of
discourse analysis to these larger units of focus. Here we have
partly a problem of terminology. There is very narrow formal
discourse analysis which is concerned only with delineating
patterns like the IRF. Most of these however see the need to use
semantic criteria, which in turn require some model of how
utterances or speech acts function in the context of some larger
activity. Some people even use 'Discourse' to include non-verbal
communication and action which is part of the social-functional
pattern of interaction or activity. I did so in the early 80s,
though I find this terminology confuses people. Discourse is a
mode of action, and as such it certainly includes more than the
deployment of linguistic resources (however those are delimited).
At the other end of the spectrum one has the sort of Discourse
Analysis which Foucault constructs, and which is much more macro-
sociological in character (in fact, quite specifically
historical). While Foucault thought of it mainly in relation the
the analysis of textual documentary sources, it really represents
something more like the ways of making meaning that characterize
a particular community at a particular time in relation to some
set of activities. Foucault's notion also includes more of the
analyst's perspective and is not limited to a member's
perspective. Hybrids of his view and more linguistic versions of
DA, like the critical discourse analysis of Fairclough, or the
approaches of Gee, Kress & Hodge, or me, also include macrosocial
issues (power, ideology, domination, gender/class relations,
etc.) as part of the essential context of discourse analysis and
as partly constituted by discourse. Bourdieu has a notion of
discourse habitus which is in theory very material and bodily (as
well as socio-cultural), and Bahktin's notion of voice has some
material (e.g. acoustic, articulatory) aspects but is mainly a
(micro and macro) social-positional view.
Discourse is not necessarily or fundamentally 'communicative' as
we have discussed here lately. It is not even necessarily social-
interactional, though it is always in some sense 'addressed' and
at least potentially socially functional. Discourse can be used
to include the material dimensions of activity, but this is not
usual. In my own work I have tried to restore more of the balance
in this respect (e.g. in _Textual Politics_ chap 6, or in my
Odense conference paper on 'Matter and Meaning'. C.S. Peirce
certainly considered semiosis to be a material as well as
meaning-system process, and discourse is usually taken to be a
species of semiosis by most theorists.
All that said, I find it is usually useful to remind people that
the semantic resources of language, from words to rhetorical
formations and genre structures, are among the principal tools by
which meaning and, through meaning, material effects and social
relations are produced. They are only part of the picture, but a
very important part. And in my experience many studies do not
sufficiently pay attention to how they are used and with what
effects. I also do not believe we will ever be able to account
for what people do with language in some more fundamental terms
(cognition, intention, philosophy) -- at least not in words! But
we can describe what they're doing in ways that enable us to
relate what is said here and now with what is said and done there
and then, and that's a big step. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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