Parker, I. (1992) Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual
Psychology. London: Routledge.
Introduction
[pp. xi-xiii]
It should be obvious, except perhaps to a Guardian reader, that ... the escaped
Broadmoor killer, will be more dangerous to the public, rather than less, as
result of having studied sociology at the Open University.
(Worsthorne, 1983: 228)
You take your first step into discourse research as you take your first step away from
language. It is this paradox that makes the issues covered in this book curious, useful,
dangerous and liberating.
Language is so structured to mirror power relations that often we can see no
other ways of being, and it structures ideology so that it is difficult to speak both in
and against it. Outside psychology, studies of language from a wide range of
disciplines have shown how, for example, gender is constructed and women are
silenced (Spender, 1981), how colonialist visions of those outside the white West are
elaborated in language as ‘other’ (Said, 1978), and how notions of class, knowledge
and stupidity are connected in the ways we speak (Andersen, 1988). Radical
psychologists can draw on this work, and do not need to call themselves ‘discourse
analysts’ to do so. In fact, it is better to start with a wish to deconstruct power and
ideology and then look at how a study of discourse dynamics could help. You have to
be, in some senses, outside psychology to do that. Inside psychology, the emergence
of a discourse framework starts with the ‘turn to language’.
There are many strands to the turn to language in the discipline. One of the
influential forces here has been the group of writers who participated in, and
exacerbated, the ‘crisis’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The self-styled ‘new
paradigm’ psychologists - a group which includes Ken Gergen (1973, 1982), Rom
Harré (1979, 1983) and [xii] John Shotter (1975, 1984) - drew attention to the
importance of meaning and the accounts people gave of their actions. These writers
selectively imported ideas from microsociology - ethnomethodology, for example
(Garfinkel, 1967) - and analytic philosophy - such as speech act theory (Austin,
1962). The new paradigm critiques of traditional laboratory-experimental social
psychology are still relevant to contemporary debates about the role of (spoken or
written) accounts as well as appropriate methods to study language, and they provide
the context for the recent interest in discourse research.
Discourse analysis radicalizes the turn to language, but must also attempt to
survive in a still powerful traditional climate of positivism in the discipline, the belief
that an accumulation of little bits of ‘objective’ data about ‘real’ facts is the right way
for a science of mental life to go on. This tradition has been divided, in social
psychology, until the end of the 1980s, between those stubbornly clinging to
orthodox, usually laughably trivial laboratory-experimental studies of individual
behaviour and (more markedly in Europe than in America) those producing ostensibly
more radical intergroup field studies. Across this, orthogonally as it were, the waves
of research in attribution theory (with a massive influence), social cognition (with a
sizeable following), social representations (less so) and now discourse analysis
(increasingly) have swept across the discipline. It is discourse analysis that has caused
most damage to the pretended internal coherence of social psychology. Developments
in the study of language have also had some impact on other areas of psychology,
leading to challenges to traditional personality theory and developmental psychology,
and even to cognitive psychology (e.g., Harré et al., 1985; Costall and Still, 1987).
However, the crisis in psychology which has made discourse analysis possible
was a pale reflection of debates over structures of meaning outside, debates which
were to give issue to poststructuralism (Parker, 1989a). By post-structuralism I mean
the set of writings on language, discourse and texts produced by a number of French
cultural analysts, historians and philosophers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a group
which includes Roland Barthes (1973, 1977), Jacques Derrida (1976, 1983), Michel
Foucault (1977, 1980, 1981) and Jean-François Lyotard (1984). I will be drawing
selectively and cautiously on work from this tradition to connect an analysis of discourse with studies of power and ideology in the course of this book. [xiii]
My use and elaboration of ideas from discourse analysis is also highly
selective. There is a rich source of research (e.g., van Dijk, 1985), which has yet to be
tapped by psychology, which explores the links between fine-grained linguistic
analysis and ideology. I focus on the role of repertoires, discourses, in the
reproduction and transformation of meaning. Discourses both facilitate and limit,
enable and constrain what can be said (by whom, where, when). I will be addressing
debates in psychology over the role of discourse that have been brought to the fore by
Discourse and Social Psychology (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), Ideological Dilemmas
(Billig et al., 1988) and Subjectivity and Method in Psychology (Hollway, 1989).
I take up definitions of discourse and the issue of realism in Part I. In Part III
focus on cultural changes and the notion of reflexivity, with an assessment of the
advantages and disadvantages of this ‘solution’ to the powers of discourse in the turn
to ‘postmodern’ psychology. I turn to look at models of the individual entailed by
discourse approaches, and outline two alternatives (ecological and psycho-dynamic)
to the now dominant cognitivist framework in psychology in Part III. The book ends
with a fairly exhaustive research guide to the study of discourse in social and
individual psychology.
There are intimate links between knowledge and power, and, in this culture,
between discourses of knowledge and ideology. This book is not about ‘method’,
though it may help develop some expertise in the analysis of discourse and I suggest
some steps along the way. The book is about the dynamics that run through the
operation of different discourses, the cultural dynamics that affect the way we use
discourse and the subjective dynamics which tear at our sense of self as discourses use
us. [end of page xiii]