#lemke

Lemke Berlin

Coffea

Neben Gramscis Überlegungen zur Herrschaftssicherung in liberalen Gesellschaften können auch Foucaults Überlegungen zum Neoliberalismus uns dabei helfen zu verstehen, wie kapitalistische Gesellschaften Menschen hervorbringen, die sich vor allem als ökonomische Wesen begreifen. Michel Foucault, den vielleicht einige von euch bereits durch seine historischen Untersuchung der Machtformen oder durch das Schlagwort “Diskurs” kennen, hatte sich in seiner Vorlesung Ende der 70er Jahre damit beschäftigt wie Menschen geführt werden. Zuerst gehen wir allerdings auf den Liberalismus selbst ein. Der Liberalismus ist eine Weltanschauung, die Freiheit und freie Entfaltung der einzelnen Menschen in den Mittelpunkt rückt. Den zentralen Bezugspunkt bildet hier also nicht die Gesellschaft, sondern die einzelnen Menschen. Der Gesellschaft selbst wird besonders im Frühliberalismus auch nicht zugesprochen, dass sie als eigenes Subjekt mit Dynamiken und Wahrscheinlichkeiten von Ereignissen funktioniert wie man es heute beispielsweise aus soziologischer Sicht sagen würde. Vielmehr wird sie als ein Objekt angesehen, das durch die Vielzahl und Vielfältigkeit von ökonomischen Einzelinteressen der Menschen und deren politischen Einstellungen produziert wird. Eine Gesellschaft ist hier zunächst nicht mehr als die Summe der Individuen.

Mies Van Der Rohe – Lemke House

What is discourse analysis? And what does it have to do with multimedia? In my view, discourse analysis is a set of techniques for making connections between texts and their meanings. Originally formulated for the analysis of purely linguistic texts, discourse analysis methods have come to form the basis for analyzing “texts” that consist not just of words, but also of visual forms such as images and diagrams (static or animated), full-­‐ motion video, sound-­‐effects and music, and various interactive features.

There are a number of different intellectual traditions that contribute to discourse and multimedia analysis. I came to this field before it really had a name, because I wanted to understand how physicists came to think and talk and write the way we did, and it seemed to me that we learned these things mostly through verbal and non-­‐verbal communication with people who were already doing it. In the 1970s I was a student and junior researcher in theoretical physics, and it was pretty obvious that I was learning to frame and solve problems, to mobilize theory, and even to tell jokes like a physicist from sitting in classes, reading books, talking with other students and with physics faculty members, and watching the occasional video or display on a computer screen.

Would it be possible, I wondered, to videotape other students doing what I was doing and from the videos to figure out how the ideas and practices of physicists were being “transmitted” or learned? How would you analyze a videotape to achieve this?

As a theoretical physicist, I dealt mostly with text, mathematics, diagrams, and talk about them. I was less concerned about operating experimental apparatus. It seemed to me that most of what I was learning, I had to be learning from talk and writing (whether in books, articles, or just on the chalkboard), so I asked around among my friends whether linguistics or anthropology had anything useful to offer on this subject. By good luck I was pointed in the direction of the work of Michael Halliday, a British linguist who was interested in how we make meaning with words (Halliday, 1978). This was not the dominant focus in linguistics at the time, where most linguists were following Noam Chomsky’s lead and ignoring meaning in favor of purely formal analysis of grammatical structures.

I had also been reading the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist of the 1920s, who presented a theory of learning and intellectual development based on the hypothesis that people internalized the cultural meanings around them, largely through the medium of language (Vygotsky, 1963, 1978). And I had an interest in cultural anthropology, where there was a prevailing notion that people acquired the habits and values of their communities by active social participation. It was fashionable at that time to see all forms of cultural meaning as similar to language in that they formed semiotic systems (Levi-­‐ Strauss, 1963). What would we discover, I wondered, if we applied Halliday’s analysis of the relationship between wording and meaning to what students and teachers said in a physics class?

Extending this idea to the learning of science in general, I persuaded some people at the National Science Foundation in the US to fund a project to videotape science classes in secondary schools and a university, transcribe the talk in its contexts of classroom activity, and apply Halliday’s methods of analysis. The funding also allowed me to go to visit Halliday, who had recently moved to the University of Sydney in Australia, and also to go to England, where other people were engaged with similar efforts to do linguistically-­‐based discourse analysis (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).

It was an exciting time, because what we call discourse analysis today was just being created then (in the late 1970s and early 1980s). There was also at that time what later became known as the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences, led by people like the anthropologist Claude Levi-­‐Strauss and the historian and social theorist, Michel Foucault. Levi-­‐Strauss followed an essentially semiotic approach to the analysis of the texts of myths from indigenous peoples, mainly in South America, but had much wider influence with his philosophy of “structuralism” (Levi-­‐Strauss, 1963, 1969). Foucault had a somewhat less semiotic and more cultural-­‐historical approach to the analysis of archives of texts from earlier historical periods, supporting his inquiries into intellectual and institutional history (Foucault, 1969). Textual data was becoming the focus of important work in the human sciences.

Discourse analysis was shaped by the kinds of questions people were asking, and the kinds of uses to which it was being put. It was being developed as a tool for specific purposes, and its different variants reflect the variety of questions being posed. Levi-­‐Strauss wanted to know if the many different versions of the same myth across different indigenous groups could be seen as systematic variants of one another, rather as Chomsky was showing that different grammatical constructions could be transformed into one another by a set of simple rules (Chomsky, 1965). Foucault wanted to know what kinds of discourses were possible about a given topic in a given historical period, how they changed across the centuries, and how this was related to changing social institutions. Halliday wanted to know what kinds of meanings it was possible to make in the English language, and how different grammatical resources were deployed in different contexts to make those meanings.

Today it is easy to see how these different enterprises could support one another, but at the time it was just a leap of imagination. There were also other pieces to the puzzle. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and his linguist collaborator Valentin Voloshinov had developed in the 1920s and 1930s a theory of the inherent dialogism of texts, the sense in which anything said or written tended to situate its meanings in an implicit dialogue with other texts (Bakhtin, 1973; Voloshinov, 1929). This led to a general principle of intertextuality which connected the work of Levi-­‐Strauss and Foucault to the social semiotics of Halliday. Pierre Bourdieu was combining traditional quantitative sociology with an interest in the development of a social or cultural habitus, a mostly unconscious disposition to do and say things in particular ways that were like those of others in the same social position (Bourdieu, 1972). Basil Bernstein was connecting a kind of linguistic habitus to social class differences in learning in schools and primary socialization in families, and turning to Halliday’s linguistic methods to find supporting evidence (Bernstein, 1971).

In 1981, I found myself with a hundred pages of transcript of dialogue in science classrooms, a number of sociocultural frameworks for making sense of the general phenomena, and a set of specific linguistic tools for analyzing various aspects of the meanings being made. I had the overhead lights and the floor tiles, but the task of furnishing the room remained. What lies between the general theories of social learning (Vygotsky, Bernstein) and sociocultural structure (Levi-­‐Strauss, Foucault, Bourdieu) on the one hand, and the line by line, clause by clause analysis of the meaning of what was being said and done in these classrooms? Everything. Discourse analysis, and its multimedia successors, is about filling in the gap between macro-­‐social theory and micro-­‐social data. It is about construing patterns of various kinds at some intermediate levels between what Halliday called the “system” – what is possible – and the “instance” – what actually happened this time – in order to say something about what is typical. And not just what is typical in general, but what is typical for whom, when, and why (Lemke, 1995).

Most of Halliday’s work was a description of the grammar of English as a set of possibilities, linking each option that the grammatical resources of the language make available (such as singular or plural, past or future, transitive or intransitive, interrogative or imperative) to the kinds of meanings we make with it. But he did this within a larger theoretical framework that he and the group in Sydney called “social semiotics” (Halliday, 1978; Hodge & Kress, 1988). In brief it was a model of the relationship of language to society, and it held that meaning was made by language in use in a context of situation and a context of culture. Every different social setting evoked a different meaning potential, a different set of probabilities that particular meanings would be made, using particular resources from the grammar of the language.

This entailed a theory of which features of the setting were related to which kinds of meaning that could be made with the language. And it went both ways; that is, using language in part made or changed the nature of the setting, just as a given setting evoked the use of certain sorts of language. In this way it was possible to understand such notions as register (the kind of language typical for a particular kind of setting or activity) and genre (the forms of sequential discourse that people in a community use for particular purposes).

I had a setting, the classroom, and within it a variety of activities, from going over homework to explaining new concepts to having a dialogue about the best answer to a question. There were spoken genres, such as extended sequential dialogue in which teachers posed questions and evaluated student answers to them, and written genres, such as textbook chapters and student lab reports. But there was also a great deal more. There were patterns of semantic relationships among technical terms that were worded differently but remained essentially the same across textbooks, classroom dialogues, and tests or curriculum documents. There were typical rhetorical patterns of reasoning and logical justification that appeared again and again. There were regularities across different sessions and different classes in how lessons started and ended. The room began to fill with furniture (Lemke, 1990).

I had begun from an interest in seeing how the conceptual content of physics was embodied in the dialogue between teacher and student. Over the course of a few years of analysis of the data, I came to see that this was just one part of a much more complex social process, linked to such matters as power, control, authority, and respect in the social relationships of the classroom, and to wider beliefs and values about the nature and role of science in society. People were expressing feelings and evaluations that were inseparable from the process of learning. Students were learning not just facts and theories from science, but ways of behaving in classrooms, and beliefs and values about science, society, and themselves. The meanings being made in the classroom could often not be understood apart from other meanings and texts not present in the classroom. The learning process, and its stumbles, were also part of longer-­‐term developmental processes of students’ (and teachers’) identities, careers, and lives outside school.

The discourse of the science classroom was a window on much more than science education; it was a window on a society and a culture, just as social semiotics was claiming had to be the case for any use of language.

The importance of discourse analysis was not just as a tool to see what was happening in some event. It was a tool that could enable us to look far beyond the immediate events, whatever they were. Indeed you had to look beyond in order to understand what was in front of you.

Lemke Berlin

Cupam