on 11/27/01 6:42 PM, Mike Cole at mcole@weber.ucsd.edu wrote:
>
> Hmmmmm. I can't read French well enough to get access to Benveniste,
> relatively
> little of whose work seems to be in English-- there is more in Russian!
>
> There is a fiske and shweder book on metatheory in social sciences with
> the term subjectivities in the title that might prove helpful in seeing how
> this terain is laid out, but as Judy suggested, a lot of the books I come
> up with that have subjectivities in the title are based on narratives and
> self-representations.
>
> I'll need to keep poking at this question for a while, but I am mindful
> of the Gergenesque/Middletonesque reminder from discursive psychology that
> people's accounts are situated and always must be considered in terms of
> their instrumentality vis a vis the ongoing interactions they help to
> constitute-- which renders the relations between representation and the
> author's "real" subjectivities problematic.
>
> Susan-- Does Benveniste help us with this issue?
> mike
I don't think Benveniste worked on the issues you are talking about, yet his
theory can work with you, I think. Subjectivity as an affect of deixis in
language is constructed within the matrices of sentences, discourses, and
and narratives. Subject positions in language differ and contradict each
other and sometimes open up generic choices to the subjects so constructed.
For example, I am the hero of the story, the subject of this discourse and
this sentence and I will take a wife, or, I am the object of this story,
this discourse is intended to exclude me and I will be passive.
But this whole train of thought does not permit a distinction between real
subjectivities and unreal ones; rather, some subjectivities are more
fractured or more fragile or more whole, and the narratives and discourses
and sentences that compose them can have different intentions, eg to
deceive, to persuade, to establish power over another. And narratives with
the intention to deceive are told to ourselves, by ourselves, as well as to
others ... sometimes.
But I am extrapolating wildly from Benveniste, and from my own work on
gender and narrative. It is fun, though.
I am interested in looking at the book you mention. Oh yes, and Benveniste
in English is Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek.
Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971.
Susan
>
> PS-- Here is one ref I have started to follow up on>
>
> From subjects to subjectivities : a handbook of interpretive and
> participatory methods / edited by Deborah L. Tolman and Mary Brydon-Miller.
>
> New York : New York University Press, c2001.
>
-- Susan Knutson, Professor Département des études anglaises Université Sainte-Anne Church Point, NS B0W 1M0 (902) 769-2114 ext 151
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