Burman, E. and Parker, I. (2005) ‘Critical Discursive Practice in Psychological Culture’,
in W. Zongjie, F. Fan and Z. Weili (Eds) Cultural Diversity of Discourse: Facilitate CoExistence and Harmony (pp. 80-91). Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. [ISBN: 789490-120-2/H.37] [5,114 words]
Critical Discursive Practice in Psychological Culture
Erica Burman and Ian Parker
Discourse Unit, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
This paper is about the intersection between two boundaries - the boundary between
psychology and ‘psychological culture’ and the boundary between discourse analysis and
‘discursive culture’. The infusion of Western psychological ideas in a rapidly globalising
discourse poses a challenge for all those concerned with multiculturalism because
Western psychology carries with it essentialist and universalist specifications for how
people in different culture come to understand themselves. Particularly potent ideological
images of the self in psychological discourse concern gender, and Western ‘feminisation’
(which we distinguish from ‘feminism’, the political movement for the emancipation of
woman) serves to homogenise differences between cultures. In this paper we describe
aspects of psychological culture – from medical psychiatry and contemporary antipsychiatry, and then offer some brief examples of critical discursive practice that
challenge the boundary that divides our academic practices from the real world. Then
cultural representations are evaluated according to the relations indicated between the
politics of feminisation and politics more generally. The lesson is that it is not only the
content of the analysis that needs to change but the very form of the analysis so that our
work in discourse analysis becomes a way of doing cultural politics.
Academic boundaries and cultural practice
This first part of this paper is about the intersection between two boundaries, and about
the way each of the boundaries we are concerned with raises questions about the nature
of our different domains of academic work and their relation to practice. The second part
of the paper focuses on the role of gender in relation to these questions.
The first boundary is the boundary between psychology as a distinct discipline
that concerns itself with the nature of individual thinking and behaviour on the one hand,
and, on the other, ‘psychological culture’ as the field of application and elaboration of
psychology, a field within which psychologists have to compete against a variety of
popular commonsensical accounts of how people think and behave (Gordo-López, 2000).
This is the boundary between those who work as theorists and practitioners in the ‘psy
complex’, those who have expert understanding, and the people who puzzle about what
the psychologists know about them. This boundary is discursively organised, and it is
indeed discursively organised within material institutional practices.
What we psychologists think we know about the ‘nature’ of human psychology is
culturally specific, and certain kinds of academic and professional psychology hold sway
(e.g., Burman, 1994). This, both locally in each distinct sector of the capitalist economy
by virtue of the imperative to manage the work and leisure pursuits of normal folk as well
1
as the abnormal ones who will not play the game, and globally under contemporary
neoliberal forms of imperialism through the hegemony of specific definitions of what
counts as human labour power, what is countable as consumer preference, and what can
be accumulated by those who have sufficient capital. The first key point is that there is no
‘psychology’ as such, only historically-constituted psychologies that have already
mutated many times and will be transformed when we transform the discursive boundary
between the psychologists and the so-called ‘non-psychologists’.
The second boundary is the boundary between discourse analysis as a distinct
academic practice that concerns itself with forms of language and the way it is structured
in texts on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘discursive culture’ as the field of argument,
rhetorical contest and political debate within which the discourse analysts find
themselves jostling against a variety of popular commonsensical ideas about how people
talk and write and why it matters. This, then, is the boundary between the discourse
analysts in academic departments and people outside who are already carrying out forms
of discourse analysis as part of their critical and disruptive readings of texts. We will
describe later in a little more detail what these people are up to and what we might learn
from it. For the moment the key point we want to make is that this boundary is also
discursively organised, and this discursive organisation is, once again, woven into
material institutional practices.
This means that discourse analysts need to challenge how that boundary between
the inside and outside of their discipline distributes certain forms of expertise so that
certain kinds of practice inside the discipline is regulated and certain kinds of practice
outside the discipline is rendered invisible. There is no ‘discourse analysis’ as such, only
historically-constituted forms of close reading, reinterpretation and rewriting, forms that
either serve to embed our understanding of language in certain dominant cultural
practices or enable us to open the way to a transformation of language. This is where we
come to a point of intersection between the two boundaries.
When we refer to ‘language’ it should be clear by now that it is as discursive
practice, and so to speak of ‘critical discursive practice’ is to take a stance toward it
(Burman et al., 1996). Critical discursive practice is a domain of work that is important to
many ‘critical psychologists’ because it enables us to turn around and treat our own
discipline as a collection of texts susceptible to deconstruction (Parker, 2002). One
activity at the intersection between psychology and discourse analysis, or at the
intersection between the two boundaries that structure how each disciplinary practice
maintains itself, is where we critical psychologists try to make sure that critical
colleagues outside psychology do not look to us, to any of us, to supply the
‘psychological’ explanation, to fill in the gap that those from other disciplines think it is
necessary to fill (Parker, 2005).
But there is another activity which is just as important, which is where we attend
to the way that certain psychological assumptions, culturally and historically specific
assumptions, reappear in work on discourse. We need to attend to the way that discourse
work specifies forms of behaviour and forms of interiority, and the way it takes certain
‘psychological’ notions for granted. Of course, discourse theory has been able to distance
itself from the idea that language simply enables thoughts to be conveyed from one head
to another, coded and decoded by sender and receiver, and so susceptible to decoding by
an astute analyst (Easthope, 1990). There are still discourse analysts in psychology who
2
do think that when they study language they are also necessarily revealing underlying
thought processes in the author of a spoken or written text, and that is certainly a problem
we still need to tackle on our side of the intersection between our different areas of work.
However, what concern us here are the other less obvious temptations to psychologise
that seep into discourse work and that would then seep back into psychology that drew
upon that work. Notions of cognitive processing, schemata, interpellation,
phenomenological immediacy and embodied meaning are still too-easily to hand in
discourse and need to be treated with care, with suspicion (Parker, 1992).
It is not surprising that such temptations should be so available, so pressing; not
so much because the psychologists themselves have been such good salesmen but
because they too draw upon and feed back to us different forms of contemporary
psychological culture that make individual thought processes seem to be the point of
explanation for patterns of exploitation and resistance (Parker, 1989). Contemporary
psychological culture, which is globalising the domain of ‘psychology’ as a field of
explanation in part through the spread of the English language, is a potent structuring
force, a system of discursive practices interlaced with global and local political-economic
processes, and it needs to be tackled as a powerful phenomenon by critical discourse
analysts. Let us turn to some examples of psychological culture that discourse analysts
need to tackle.
Aspect of psychological culture
A London-based consultant psychiatrist and BBC radio presenter declared his ‘healthy
scepticism of the medical model as a framework for mental illness’ (Persaud, 2003, p.
605). Now you do not need to be a discourse analyst to see the rhetorical trick here; the
way that ‘scepticism’ of the medical model is as ‘a framework’, nothing more, for
something that is still taken for granted, the ‘mental illness’, and the way that illness as
the final word of the statement is stamped with meaning all the more efficiently by the
weight, mobilised retroactively, of the ‘healthy scepticism’ voiced at the outset.
This is an aspect of psychological culture that can fairly quickly and easily be
located, part of an apparatus of medicalisation of distress that has succeeded in recruiting
trainee psychiatrists from all over the world to imbibe and become addicted to ‘the white’
at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, often before they go back and implement
intervention programmes and carry out research that confirms that the same disease
categories can be found everywhere. Here is an example of essentialism and universalism
combined. Let us explain this cryptic reference to ‘the white’; it is the substance the
Dominion used to keep their Jem Hadaar shock troops in check in Star Trek Deep Space
Nine. (This US American science fiction television series is already shown in most
countries in the world, and the arrival of Star Trek arrives in every home in China will be
a sign, perhaps, that neoliberal globalisation will be complete.)
The point is twofold; that the dominant discursive constructions of normality and
abnormality, here ‘mental illness’, can be countered by mobilising a domain of discursive
practice way outside the realm of mainstream psychology rather than through disputing
the terms used; and that psychological culture is so pervasive that it structures even the
apparently most diverse constructions of psychology, here ‘addiction’, so that it is
tempting to avoid one psychological trap just to fall into another.
3
Let us turn to a second aspect of psychological culture. In 2004 a first national
conference was held by a new organisation called the ‘Paranoia Network’. The
conference was organised jointly between the Paranoia Network, Asylum: A Magazine for
Democratic Psychiatry and the Discourse Unit in Manchester. The Network brought
together people who had been diagnosed as ‘paranoid’ by mental health practitioners and
those who believe that you cannot be paranoid enough in present-day surveillance
society. The paradox they tackled is that while those in the psy-complex (the
psychologists, for example) observe and regulate thinking and behaviour – they are after
all part of the very enterprise that makes it so people do feel they are being watched – at
the same time the professionals feel fearful and suspicious about what people who are
‘abnormally’ paranoid might do next. For a moment at least our university was a space to
speak and produce new knowledge rather than simply listen and be subjected to the psycomplex. For this moment to work we wanted to make the day a ‘festival of
explanations’, and so we welcomed contributions from those struggling to do something
different inside psychology and psychiatry as well as those who have already broken
from the false knowledge that pretends to know-all about people.
This is the kind of event we have referred to in the past as ‘practical
deconstruction’ when we have hosted conferences with the Hearing Voices Network
(Parker et al., 1995). That network of activists brings together those who have a diagnosis
of schizophrenia because they hear voices, including those who may come to Britain
from cultures where it is quite normal to hear voices and then end up being compulsorily
detained by the institutionally racist psychiatric system because they make the mistake of
telling a psychiatrist about their experience. What such an event does is to resignify
experience through collective activity against psychology and psychiatry. It is critical
discursive practice in and against psychological culture. What such events also bring us
into contact with are people who are already doing ‘discourse analysis’ who are way out
on the other side of the boundary that divides our academic practices from the real world.
What we learn from these people is that it is not only the content of the analysis that
needs to change but the very form of the analysis.
Aspects of cultural resistance
Two graphic examples will illustrate some practical interventions in discourse by those
outside academic discourse analysis.
First, the ‘London Psychogeographical Association’ has members who have been
active in the main anti-capitalist protests over the past decade or so, but their own critical
discursive practice is an intervention that is designed to shake up the form and content of
debate. One of their initiatives is ‘three-sided football’, something that has profound
implications for the way we think about boundaries and the opposition between different
groupings, whether they are academic groupings or disciplinary groupings. One
participant proclaims that ‘In England, the resistance will be led by the London
Psychogeographical Association, who will use games of three-sided football to free
people from the shackles of dualistic thinking’ (London Psychogeographical Association,
1997, p. 88).
A second example, which owes something to situationist interventions into public
texts, is ‘Glop Art’. This refers to the activity of sticking bits of chewing gum on
4
advertising posters in the London Underground, an activity that has also provoked some
agonising among its participants about the extra work it might entail for the cleaners.
Nevertheless, the strategic addition of a bit of gum intervenes in the image and changes
it; so it is claimed, for example, that ‘Glop Art represents the cutting edge of critical
thinking among outsider artists whose opposition to all forms of capitalist culture
manifests itself as a self-conscious ethical positioning’ (Blissett, 1997, p. 199).
These practices refuse to participate in the usual ameliorative procedures of
academic life, even in those procedures that pretend to be the most critical and radical
(Burman and Parker, 1993). There is no ‘advice’ to those in power as to how messages
could be decoded or reformatted, and no dialogue about how signifiers could be
rearticulated. Operating at the intersection between a refusal of academic discourse
analysis and a refusal of academic psychology, they raise a question as to how we, on this
side of our boundary, will use our position in solidarity with them, will use our own
academic position to transform the cultural practices that we participate in.
The feminisation of discourse in psychological culture
Now we want to take up these issues further in relation to a specific arena of increasing
concern, the role of gender as a new technology of political subjectivity. By political we
mean politics in the biggest sense, of international war; or rather, how the micropolitics
of home and work are mobilised with new twists of meaning at the service of the
international business programme that world war and domination seem to have become.
Our contention is that representations of gender play a particular role in enabling this.
Gender is a key part of psychological culture and discursive practice; so key that it
threatens to remain one of the uninterrogated common threads that render them
continuous. Discourses of feminisation have of late crept into public policy worldwide
across a range of business and welfare sectors. But feminisation is not feminism, and
feminists - as well as other critics of institutional inequalities - need to ward off the
seductions of power and refuse the spurious call to identification, or interpellation: we
need to see this as the discursive trick of psychological culture that it is (Burman, 1990).
Even before Lynndie England and her fellow custodians horrified western eyes
with images of the sexual humiliation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the war in
Iraq had long been a forum for elaborating themes of nature and nation through the trope
of gender. The main public response, of how a woman could do such things, is misplaced
on a number of grounds – though the precise form of this misconception is indicative of
our argument here. For it is not surprising (though certainly not thereby condonable) that
an army prison officer guarding prisoners of war captured under conditions of major
psychological and political terrorisation (for such is what the ‘war against terror’ has
done) should have acted in this way. Indeed all kinds of cultural and institutional
conditions (including racism, the brutalisation of institutionalisation and the
institutionalisation of brutality, even boredom) made this likely – also probably including
covert incitement from senior military authorities (Achcar, 2002). The panic about a
woman as such doing such things is irrelevant – although clearly her gender was not
irrelevant to the humiliation she perpetrated. And beyond mere misplacement (of gender),
this is a displacement. That is, it works as a distraction from more meaningful inquiry
into the conditions for the brutality.
5
Now let us sidestep for a moment the question of who is doing the displacing, the
agency behind these potent cultural configurations. Clearly this is part of a longer
discussion that needs to be thrashed out: about avoiding conspiracy theory, but on the
other hand acknowledging that these are dominant cultural representations in wide
circulation. Let us just point out that from now on our text for consideration is largely
advertising material, and as such offers carefully crafted set of representations that
provides a key repository of culture. Clearly there are authors, commissioners,
distributors, advertising standards and watchdog bodies. We have elsewhere analysed
such ‘producer’ accounts and ‘reader’ receptions (Burman, 2004). To recall our key
point, such gendered representations form an arena where expert and commonsense
accounts converge.
One way to go with these arguments would be a far-reaching discussion of the
cultural and historical myopia with which the western world has viewed women’s
activities in war, including how women have always played an active role as combatants
(Enloe, 1988). Such motifs have clearly been functional for imperialism – as with the
longstanding image of men fighting for the protection of home and (mother) country, or –
as we saw in the invasion of Afghanistan – the framing of the colonial project there in
terms of claims to women’s emancipation (which rapidly evaporated, and all the signs are
that women will remain as oppressed as they were under the Taliban). The longstanding
links between discourses of gender and nation (Yuval-Davis, 1997) inevitably acquire
new nuances as neoliberal agendas advance. But methodologically, and politically, we
can only warrant our analysis from a specific context. So now we will offer some
illustrations of contemporary developments in the discursive appropriation of the politics
of gender.
Nagging Nora
Our first example is one of a series of texts displayed on the London underground (in two
advertising campaigns) in October 2002 and January 2003 in the build up to the invasion
of Iraq. The company BAE (British Aerospace Engineering) manufactures military
technology – submarines, planes, tanks, guns. So you can judge for yourselves what to
make of its little by-line ‘making for a safer world’ that accompanies its authorial stamp,
but clearly reversals (of attack into defence) are the order of the day. The organisation
itself (which is part state-owned) has been the subject of various scandals around
mismanagement of money and competence. The ‘female company’ at issue here is a
voice command system, part of the interactive software operating the Eurofighter planes
(a new cross-Europe fleet which have been regularly reported in the British press as
subject to enormous production problems). The advertisement depicts a shadowy
woman’s face wearing a headset, her bright red lipstick matching the red of the BAE
logo, alongside the following text:
WHO PROVIDES FEMALE COMPANY FOR FIGHTER PILOTS?
‘TARGET IN RANGE’, ‘INCOMING MISSILE’, ‘PULL UP, PULL UP’. NAG.
NAG. NAG. NAG. NAG. SPEAKERS HOUSED IN THE FIGHTER PILOT’S
HELMET GIVE ADVICE AND INFORMATION IN A CALMING,
AUTHORITATIVE FEMALE VOICE. THE PILOTS’ NICKNAME FOR IT IS
6
‘NAGGING NORA’. JUST ONE OF THE INNOVATIVE IDEAS FROM BAE
SYSTEMS THAT HELP TO MAKE THE WORLD A SAFER PLACE.
We will highlight what we see as its key issues briefly, as it forms a complement to the
main text we want to address here. Nevertheless there is a key discourse at play here that
can be discerned within all the scenarios we are discussing: war as (sex) work.
Firstly there is a domestication of war through its feminisation. Images of women,
especially women with lipstick, of femininity, connote the realm of the domestic, or at
least the personal. The use of the word ‘nag’ refers directly to stereotypical activity by
which women are depicted as subjecting their men to complaint (the ‘nagging’). ‘Nora’ is
a woman’s name (and apparently the machine is known as ‘Bitching Betty’ in the US
American Airforce). What the imagery in this advertisement does is to, second, displace a
neo-colonial battleground to the battle between the sexes (i.e. how wives/girlfriends
‘nag’), which also largely thereby trivialises its import. Third, and particularly important
here, there is a pseudo-feminist (or fake pro-feminist) discourse, with women acquiring a
position as equal partner, decision-maker or protagonist in this joint (commercial)
venture. (And note the old imperialist themes here – ‘our women are free’ vs. an implied
contrast whereby claims to emancipate women are mobilised to motivate for military
invasion.) Significantly, fourth, this occurs alongside the maintenance of obvious and
conventional discourses of sexualisation (the lipstick; soft focus face, and ‘female
company’) fostering allusions to escorts and prostitution. What this adds up to is, fifth, a
focus on gender roles and differences which, with its traditional connotations of the
private and personal, distracts from and so substitutes a military invasion for something
much more familiar (in both senses – cosier and more traditional). So the advertisement
simultaneously displaces and naturalises war under neoliberalism.
Join the professionals
There are further images of women in war-work that are not so easy to dismiss. Take this
next advertising leaflet for the British Army, also depicting a white woman with a
headset. But this time her face is in full view (without lipstick), with a stream of Arabic
coming from her headset. The headline reads: ‘Her language is lethal’.
Now you need to know that compulsory army service (for men) was abolished in
Britain shortly after World War Two. The slogan ‘join the professionals’ was a
longstanding feature of army recruitment campaigns, and the British army is indeed a
professional (rather than a conscript) force. This slogan portrays war as a profession that
you can train in, and for; importing both the discourse of meritocracy central to liberal
individualism and a more class-based vocationalism (and it is mainly the young workingclass unemployed who join up.)
Beyond this, this ad reiterates gender differences in two ways. Firstly, the second
person address (‘you’), offers a mobile referent of identification which, since in English
‘you’ is not gender-specified, could address a man or a woman. Alongside the image of
the woman, this works to challenge the normativity of the heroic masculine subject in a
context of public responsibility, even national security. It therefore partakes of a
discourse concerned with the social inclusion of women. Gender difference is here
7
rearticulated to redress women’s former social subordination in positions of public
authority.
But there is also a second normalisation of gender difference. The focus on
language skill is conventionally gendered – all psychology graduates who have been
subject to lectures on ‘sex differences’ will know that one of the few stable gender
differences to be reiterated (from such an epistemologically and methodologically flawed
paradigm) is the supposed linguistic superiority of girls and women (though whether this
superiority is simply a matter of social reinforcement – including gender training building on some slight developmental precocity is not possible to determine, see e.g.
Kitzinger, 1995). However tenuous, this focus on language skill works against the first
set of discursive moves favouring gender-neutrality to reinstate a discourse of gender
specificity. True, this is offset a little by also including elsewhere within the leaflet a
smaller image of a man with a headset (presumably to show that he can do it too). Unlike
Nagging Nora (who we must keep reminding ourselves is not a woman, but a piece of
technology), this is no sexualised woman agent from the genre of James Bond spy
thrillers. But it is no less naturalised in its representation of gender, albeit that this
naturalisation is masked by the promise of liberal equality: in the invitation to ‘be the
best’ accompanying the British army logo, liberal meritocracy meets gender difference.
So the longstanding promotional discourse of the British army (‘join the
professionals’) is now supplemented by a discourse of specialisation. (Note how the
website isn’t simply for the army, but offers a specific address: www.armylinguist.co.uk).
The specialisation demanded by advanced warfare and intelligence technologies can be
met through the world’s longest specialist technology of difference: gender. By
employing women’s traditional skills in language women can join the professional
business of war. ‘Her language is lethal’ as her weapon in war. But of course it is not she
who is ‘lethal’, nor ‘her language’, but rather the language she intercepts. Contrary to
old-style sexism, it is not the language that she speaks, but what she understands, that is
dangerous. Hence women’s traditional liminal positioning in relation to language – as not
entirely contained by it, but also moving across it - can be harnessed to engage with other
others in the form of the dangerousness of Arabic speakers; and women’s difference
becomes a vital resource for a newly androgynous military intelligence.
And just to reinforce the point about mobilising and transforming gender, here is
another example which appeared recently in our local free newspaper: ‘Want to be a
chef? Ask a soldier.’ Yes, this ‘chef’ is apparently a woman, since the question
accompanies the image of a white (possibly working class?) woman, but she’s also a
soldier. (And if cooking is traditionally feminised, being a ‘chef’ is a lucrative and high
status masculine preserve.) Here is a discourse of professionalisation that neither gender
strips nor gender types. The woman named as ‘Sgt Marie McChesney’ has ‘hobbies’
listed (‘fitness, swimming’) and her ‘tours’ in Bosnia and Croatia. Are these athletic
tours, or military assignments perhaps? But the army is now a ‘career’ profession offering
‘10,000 rewarding jobs, great pay and benefits, world travel and professional skills and
qualifications’. Even the ‘be the best’ by-line is literally aligned with the equal
opportunities slogan, emphasising the army as a good career choice if you are concerned
with employment conditions and relations.
8
Our specific engagement here with discourse and cultural transformation has been about
feminisation as a new form of psychologisation, that performs so well at distracting us
from the psychological and very material politics that we fail to connect it with the
structures and relationships that keep all of it going. Discourses of gender are of course a
common topic within national and international programmes of transformation – both
economic and cultural. Yet there have of late been major shifts in discourses of
femininity and feminisation – for example away from women as mothers and carers, to
women as economically active workers.
Gender, psychology, discourse and power
Talk of gender neutrality or even gender affirmation does not necessarily have anything
to do with actually embodied women. (Remember ‘Nagging Nora’ was a computer, not a
woman.) So we need to make sure that we don’t sign up to this feminisation (of business,
management, social skills, emotional literacy, multilingualism or even equal
opportunities in torpedo dropping or catering services in the army) as if it were a feminist
enterprise. Nor should we relate to it as if it were a product of feminism. It is not. It is
about money and development, and how gender plays a key role in dominant discourses
of economic and cultural transformation precisely because it is longstanding and mobile;
always culturally available and always subject to transformation and manipulation by
experts of the ‘psy’ and military-industrial complexes.
Notwithstanding the apparent shift indicated here away from the salience of
gendered categories within this material (towards various forms of liberal inclusion), such
gendered categories are actually also re-inscribed – in Nagging Nora using the most
traditional discourse of femininity and roles, and in ‘Her language us lethal’ mobilising
less sexualised but still traditionally gendered forms. Moreover this salience accorded
gender is misleading. For these texts and their messages are not so much about gender,
but about the appropriation of gender for the practice of power more generally. It is this
practice that we need to attend to. The boundaries between men and women thus need to
be transformed alongside the boundaries between academic psychology and psychology
and psychological culture and between discourse analysis and critical discursive work
carried out in the real world.
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