Fairclough -- Language and Power

Ideology and Discourse

Conventions in discourse embody ideological assumptions, taken as 'common sense,' sustaining power relations.
Overlap with discussions on language and power.
Focus on ideologies embedded in discourse features assumed as common sense.

Common Sense in Discourse

Harold Garfinkel: 'familiar common-sense world of everyday life' built on implicit assumptions and expectations.
These assumptions are rarely questioned and are part of discourse.
Ideology's effectiveness relies on merging with this common-sense background.

Questions Addressed

What is 'common sense' in discourse, its relation to coherence, discourse interpretation, and ideology?
How variable are ideologies within a society, and how are these variations manifested in discourse?
What is the relationship between ideological variation and social struggle, and how is the ideological common sense of discourse generated in the course of struggle?
How does ideological common sense affect linguistic expressions, speaking/writing practices, and social subjects/situations of discourse?
How can analysts bring this backgrounded common sense into the foreground?

Interpreting Texts

To make sense of a text, one must link its parts and relate it to prior experience.
Establish a 'fit' between text and world.
Coherence: Connections (i) between sequential parts of a text, and (ii) between parts of a text and 'the world'.
Interpreters make these connections using background 'assumptions and expectations'.
Sense or coherence arises from combining text content with the interpreter's common-sense assumptions.

Text and World Connection Example

Sentence from a 'true romance' magazine: 'For many centuries, the opal was reputed to be an unfortunate stone, bringing the wearer bad luck.'
Requires a world conception where objects can affect human lives/fortunes.
Such texts reveal implicit assumptions more easily.

Coherence of Whole Texts

Example from 'His kind of loving' in a 'true romance' magazine.
Two 'messages' about Carrie: feminism vs. patriarchal views.
Readers relate textual elements to implicit frames about women.
- (i) women are persons with rights to a career.
- (ii) women are subject to men’s judgments and prone to emotion.
Textual elements cue a frame, providing coherence during interpretation.
Expectations/assumptions ('members’ resources' - MR) give coherence to the text.

Visual Reinforcement

The 'traditional-subservient-woman' message is reinforced visually in an accompanying picture.
Carrie is petite and starry-eyed, while Geoff is tall, dark, handsome, protective, and towers over her.
Even typeface evokes the 'true romance' paradigm.

Interpretative Character of Text Production and Interpretation

Both text production and interpretation are interpretative.
Text producer constructs the text as an interpretation of the world.
Textual features cue the interpreter, who uses assumptions/expectations (frames).
Text interpretation is the interpretation of an interpretation.
Processes are creative and constructive.

Coherence Between Sequential Parts of a Text

Implicit assumptions link successive parts of texts by supplying 'missing links'.
Reader supplies these links automatically or through inferencing.
Example: Connection between sentences requires assuming that seeing a loved one after three months is exciting.
This linking assumption is automatic for most because it is part of our frames for loving relationships.

Inferencing

Texts can be ‘fitted’ to worlds either automatically or through inferential work.
No sharp dividing line between automatic gap-filling and inferencing.
Degree from links needing no working out to links needing a lot of inference.
Text 4.2 may require no inferential work from regular readers but might from others.

Common-Sense Assumptions

Assumptions to connect the heading (Problems) with the sentences are that you should talk to a 'good listener' with a 'sympathetic ear' about your problems rather than trying to deal with them alone.
You also need to assume that talking and listening can go on in writing (and print) to make the third of these sentences cohere with the first two!

Coherently Linking Letter and Reply

Letter as a request for 'help' and the reply require assuming that giving of advice in writing is giving help.
Use of 'though' is the cue for an assumption necessary to give coherence that a ‘quite pretty’ girl can expect to have been out with a boy by the age of 13.
Sentence 2 (and maybe also 3) is referred back to in sentence 4 as ‘this problem’, on the basis of the implicit assumption that her embarrassment is a 'problem'.
To make a coherent link between the third sentence of the reply and the sentences that precede it, we need the assumption that the solution to a 'problem' lies in a 'secret', a remedy known only to some (but passed on to ‘worried BJ fan’ by ‘Lesley’).

Powerful Way to Impose Assumptions

The reader brings contentious assumptions into the process of interpretation, not the text.
By placing the interpreter through textual cues that she has to entertain these assumptions if she is to make sense of the text.
Persuasive discourse and propaganda do this all the time, often in quite obvious ways.
Journalist begins an article with The Soviet threat to western Europe . . ., she presupposes there is a Soviet threat.
Readers do not always accept being placed where writers place them!

Common Sense and Ideology

Common sense of implicit assumptions is of an ideological order.
Operation of ideology in terms of ways of constructing texts which constantly and cumulatively 'impose assumptions' upon text interpreters and text producers, typically without either being aware of it.
‘Common sense’ is substantially, though not entirely, ideological.

Properties of Ideological Common Sense

Ideological common sense as common sense in the service of sustaining unequal relations of power.
In some cases, the relationship to asymmetrical power relations may be a direct one, like the commonsensical assumption that everybody has 'freedom of speech', which disguises and helps to maintain the actuality of barriers to speech of various sorts for most people.
In other cases, the relationship may be rather indirect - the ‘problem page’ texts in the last section, for instance.
Common sense assumptions may in varying degrees contribute to sustaining unequal power relations while also establishing and consolidating solidarity relations among members of a particular social grouping.

Commonsensical Framework

Ideological role of implicit assumptions is in providing a commonsensical framework and procedure for treating social problems in a purely individual way.
Helps deflect attention away from an idea which could lead to power relations being questioned and challenged - that there are social causes, and social remedies, for social problems.

Ideology's Effectiveness

Ideology is most effective when its workings are least visible.
Awareness that a particular aspect of common sense is sustaining power inequalities at one’s own expense ceases it from becoming common sense.
Invisibility is achieved when ideologies are brought to discourse not as explicit elements of the text, but as the background assumptions which on the one hand lead the text producer to ‘textualize’ the world in a particular way, and on the other hand lead the interpreter to interpret the text in a particular way.
Texts do not typically spout ideology: they position the interpreter through their cues that she brings ideologies to the interpretation of texts - and reproduces them in the process!

Automatic 'Gap-Filling' and 'Fitting'

Automatic ‘gap-filling’ supplies ‘missing links’ needed for sequential coherence without inferential ‘work’, and automatic ‘fitting’ of text to world, are of particular interest from an ideological perspective.
The more mechanical the functioning of an ideological assumption in the construction of coherent interpretations, the less likely it is to become a focus of conscious awareness, and hence the more secure its ideological status.

Imposing an Ideological Common Sense

There is a constant endeavour on the part of those who have power to try to impose an ideological common sense which holds for everyone.
There is always some degree of ideological diversity, and indeed conflict and struggle, so that ideological uniformity is never completely achieved.

Political Ideologies

Political texts are in contrast with our own ideologies.

Nazi Ideology Example

As a whole, and at all times, the efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of attention of a people, and always concentrating it on a single enemy.
It is assumed (and this is an ancient rhetorical device) that ‘a people’ is a sort of composite individual with the attributes of a single person (attention, will, strength, bitterness, having enemies), and the capacity to ‘act as one’, but these attributes can be sapped by disease (paralysis) as a result of weakness and instability.
Since the people cannot sustain unity and clarity of objectives for itself (the masses are wavering), it falls to a ‘leader’ to do so - to prevent division and concentrate attention.
It is assumed that the leadership of a people or nation is lodged in (the genius of) a single person, rather than collective.

Variability in Ideological Diversity

There is a great deal of variation in the extent of ideological diversity between societies, or between different periods in the history of a particular society.
Determines the level of diversity is the state of social relationships and social struggle, including class relationships and class struggle.

Diversity in Contemporary Capitalist Society

In a society where power relationships are clear cut and stable, one would not expect to find a great deal of ideological diversity.
Contemporary picture is characterized in some areas at least by a proliferation of ideologies which Therborn has compared to ‘the cacophony of sounds and signs of a big city’.
Within a society, there may well be variation between different institutions in respect of degrees of ideological diversity.

Limits on Ideological Common Sense

Ideological diversity sets limits on what I have been calling ideological common sense.
Greatest ideological diversity in a society, the less this will be so.

Sources of Diverse Ideologies

They come rather from differences in position, experience and interests between social groupings, which enter into relationship (and, as we shall see, ideological conflict) with each other in terms of power.
These groupings may be social classes, they may be women versus men, they may be groupings based on ethnicity and so on.
Often they are groupings of a more ‘local’ sort, associated with a particular institution.

Ideological Struggle

Among the various forms which social struggle may take, it is ideological struggle that is of particular concern in the present context because ideological struggle pre-eminently takes place in language.
Not only in language in the obvious sense that it takes place in discourse and is evidenced in language texts, but also over language.
It is over language in the sense that language itself is a stake in social struggle as well as a site of social struggle.
Seeing existing language practices and orders of discourse as reflecting the victories and defeats of past struggle, and as stakes which are struggled over, is, along with the complementary concept of ‘power behind discourse’, a major characteristic of critical language study (CLS) which differentiates it from descriptive ‘mainstream’ language study.

Scare Quotes

Relatively simple example from a left-wing weekly, illustrating the use of scare quotes to warn the reader that these expressions are problematic, belonging to someone else.

Discourse Types

A struggle between ideologically diverse discourse types exist which are conventions, norms, codes of practice underlying actual discourse.
They are ideologically particular and ideologically variable.

Struggle Between Discourse Types

The establishment or maintenance of one type as the dominant one in a given social domain, and therefore the establishment or maintenance of certain ideological assumptions as commonsensical, are at stake.
In politics, each opposing party or political force tries to win general acceptance for its own discourse type as the preferred and ultimately the ‘natural’ one for talking and writing about the state, government, forms of political action, and all aspects of politics - as well as for demarcating politics itself from other domains.

Social Institutions

The primary domains in which social struggle takes place are the social institutions, and the situation types which each institution recognizes.
Institutions tend to be rather complex structures, and a single institution is likely to involve various sorts of discourse in its various situation types.
Nevertheless, there are important similarities and overlaps between the discourse types associated with a particular ideological position, not only across situation types within an institution, but also across institutions.

Forms of Dominance Relationships

A dominated type may be in a relationship of opposition to a dominant one.
The linguist Michael Halliday calls one type of oppositional discourse the anti-language.
Anti-languages are set up and used as conscious alternatives to the dominant or established discourse types: language of the criminal underworld, or a social dialect which comes to be a consciously oppositional language.

Dominated Discourse

Another possibility is for a dominated discourse type to be contained by a dominant one: Thatcherite discourse has attempted to incorporate popular anti-bureaucratic and anti-State discourse by deflecting it towards a critique of the welfare state and of, in Thatcherite terms, ‘state socialism’.

Ultimate Objective for a Dominant Discourse

Recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness.
If a discourse type so dominates an institution that dominated types are more or less entirely suppressed or contained, then it will cease to be seen as arbitrary.

Naturalization of Discourse

Naturalization is the royal road to common sense.
Ideologies come to be ideological common sense to the extent that the discourse types which embody them become naturalized.
Depends on the power of the social groupings whose ideologies and whose discourse types are at issue.

Appearing Non-Ideological

Discourse types actually appear to lose their ideological character.
They tend to be perceived not as that of a particular grouping within the institution, but as simply that of the institution itself appearing to be neutral in struggles for power.
Learning how to operate discoursally in the classroom comes to be seen as merely a question of acquiring the necessary skills or techniques to operate in the institution.

Naturalization

Paradoxically, a fundamental ideological effect of ideology works through disguising its nature, pretending to be what it isn’t.
Acknowledging the phenomenon of naturalization is tantamount to insisting upon a distinction between the superficial common-sense appearances of discourse and its underlying essence.

Rationalizations

Explanations should be seen as rationalizations which cannot be taken at face value but are themselves in need of explanation.
Rationalizations are part and parcel of naturalization.

Meaning of Words

Most of the time, we treat the meaning of a word (and other linguistic expressions) as a simple matter of fact, and if there is any question about ‘the facts’ we see the dictionary as the place where we can check up on them.
Variability of meaning and the nature of meaning systems.

Undermining Variation

Because of the considerable status accorded by common sense to ‘the dictionary’, there is a tendency to generally underestimate the extent of variation in meaning systems within a society.
Meanings vary between social dialects but also vary ideologically in which discourse types differ in their meaning systems.
The word ideology itself is an example.

Families of Ideologies

Two families:
- (USA after WWII) ideology is interpreted as ‘any social policy which is in part or in whole derived from social theory in a conscious way’.
- (Marxist Tradition) ideologies are ‘ideas which arise from a given set of material interests’ in the course of the struggle for power.

Meaning of a Word

Words and other linguistic expressions enter into many sorts of relationship - relationships of similarity, contrast, overlap and inclusion.
The meaning of a single word depends very much on the relationship of that word to others.
Instead of the vocabulary of a language consisting of an unordered list of isolated words each with its own meaning, it consists of clusters of words associated with meaning systems.

Variability Example

In the postwar American sense of ideology mentioned above, ideology is closely related to totalitarianism, and totalitarian and ideological are sometimes used as near synonyms.
Totalitarianism is a superordinate term which subsumes fascism, communism, Marxism, and so forth; the meaning system is structured so as to make ideology ‘a weapon against Marxism’!
In the Marxist meaning system, by contrast, totalitarianism, does not figure at all, nor of course do we find communism/Marxism znA fascism as co-homonyms of totalitarianisfn.

Common Sense Application

'Common sense' as an ideological sleight of hand is when ideology one day apparently coming to have a fixed meaning which one could check up on in ‘the dictionary’, and which was not contested.
That fixed meaning would in this sense be an effect of power - in fact the sort of ideological effect I have called naturalization.

Fixed Meanings

The seemingly unfavourable case of the word nose in its most mundane anatomical sense is used where there is (as far as I am aware) no variation in or struggle around the meaning of nose.
Nevertheless, the meaning system which embodies the familiar classification of body parts does have some of the properties associated with naturalization.
The meaning system is sustained by power: by the power of the relevant ‘experts’, medical scientists, and by the power of those sections of the intelligentsia (teachers, dictionary-makers, etc.) who are guarantors of this as of other elements of the codified standard language.

Closure in Naturalization

It is assumed that the fixed dictionary meanings that present themselves as simple matters of fact to common sense are always the outcome of a process of naturalization, in so far as the arbitrariness of meaning systems is hidden, though only in certain cases {ideology but not nose, for instance) is naturalization the outcome of ideological struggle and hence of particular interest in CLS.

Creative Discourse

Texts are ideologically creative.

Newspaper Example

Since the invasion of the Falklands on April 2, there has been the sound of many voices. Yet at the heart of the matter, it was an evil thing, an injustice, an aggression. Nobody disputes that.
The second sentence, which I have italicized, is an attributive (SVC) sentence which establishes a ‘member of a class: class’ relationship between the invasion of the Falklands, and evil (thing), injustice and aggression.
In the last two sentences of the paragraph, this conflation seems to be ‘put to use’: the invasion is referred to as (that) evil, and this slides into general references to evil which are assumed to carry over to the invasion.

Interactional Routines

Common sense gives us not only meaning systems, but also what we might call the ‘interactional routines’ associated with particular discourse types - the conventional ways in which participants interact with each other.
It’s generally only when things go wrong that they draw themselves to our attention.

Police Interaction Example

What appears to me to be going wrong is that M seems to find problematic things which are generally regarded as commonsensically given when we ask for information at a police station; that those behind the reception desk are indeed police, that all such people are competent to ‘help’ members of ‘the public’, that a woman at reception will indeed be a policewoman (‘lady’).
Highlights the normal assumption of a general police competence to ‘help’ the public and responsibility for helping the public, which underlies the way in which Can I help you? standardly elicits a statement of ‘the problem’ without further preliminaries.

Alternate Practices

Another way in which the arbitrariness of naturalized dominant interactional routines becomes apparent is when they are confronted or contrasted with other non-dominant practices.

Doctor Consultation Example

Doctor (d) and his patient (p), a woman alcoholic where the patient is allowed to say what she has to say in her own time.
Doctor gives a great deal o f evidence of listening to and taking in what P says giving feedback.
Minimally directive and tries to interact with p by appealing to her understanding and giving her opportunities to respond to his ‘proposals’.
This text is from a programme about the work of a leading member of the British Holistic Medical Association.

Blurring Conversation

One way of seeing the holistic medicine text is as a mixture of interactional routines associated with different discourse types.
The way in which different discourse types are related to each other, and the extent to which they are kept apart or mixed together, is another aspect of struggle over language.

Social Identity

The ‘transparency of language’ is a general property which is illustrated for instance by what I said about meaning in the last section but one: the social processes constituting languages in general (and meanings in particular) are hidden beneath their appearance of being just naturally, commonsensically ‘there’.

Subject Positions

The socialization of people involves them coming to be placed in a range of subject positions, which they are exposed to partly through learning to operate within various discourse types.
Different discourses set up for patients is implicit in the comments I made about the text earlier.
The power to create the ‘patient’ in the image of the ideological ideal exists with the power that is at stake in the struggle between discourses in this respect.

Subject's Identity

What I have said about the subjects in discourse applies also to the situations of discourse.
The ‘ideal reader’ is looking for success, the capacity to dominate and influence others, an end to boredom and frustration.
Given assurances that something will happen if they want it to happen.

Positioning People

Social process of producing social subjects can be conceived of in terms of the positioning of people progressively over a period of years.
Social subject is thus constituted as a particular configuration of subject positions.
Discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined.

Awareness of Ideologies

People are not conscious of being socially positioned as subjects, and standardly see their own subjective identities as somehow standing outside and prior to society.
Constituting subjects is what ideology is all about - all ideology is in one way or another to do with positioning subjects.

Social Order

Naturalization of situation types helps to consolidate particular images of the social order.

Naturalization Weaponry

Naturalization is the most formidable weapon in the armoury of power, and therefore a significant focus of struggle.

Foregrounding Common Sense

CLS can highlight common sense when things go wrong in discourse to focus upon instances of communication breakdown and miscommunication.

Disturbing Common Sense

Deliberate disturbance is also done through experiment tasks.
The responses of subjects to experimenters’ attempts to estrange the common-sense world of discourse show just how solid and real that world is for people.

Summary

Discoursal common sense is ideological to the extent that it contributes to sustaining unequal power relations, directly or indirectly.
Ideology acquires the status of common-sense through ideological struggles in social institutions between discourse types.
A dominant discourse is subject to naturalization.
Ideology becomes common sense, it apparently ceases to be ideology; this is itself an ideological effect.

Naturalization of Linguistics

Linguistic expression and meaning systems result in a closure of meaning.
Naturalization in subjects and situations are self-evident and independent of discourse.

Cited Works

Garfinkel 1967
Brown and Yule 1983
Althusser 1971
McLellan 1986
Eagleton 1991
Zizek 1994
van Dijk 1998
Gramsci 1971
Therborn 1980
Hall 1982
Halliday 1978
Bourdieu 1977
Pecheux 1982
Thompson 1984
G. Williams 1999
Foucault 1982
Edelman 1974
Brown and Levinson 1978
Thomas 1995