AS English Language: ENGB1 Part B – Language and Social Contexts Language and Power In your exam answers for the Language and Power (part of Section B of unit ENGB1), your focus should be to uncover the linguistic aspects of a text that act to create, or attempt to create, an “asymmetry” of power – a power imbalance – between the text’s creator and its user. •
This means uncovering the ways in which the text seeks to influence or persuade its reader or listener as well as how it reinforces ideological assumptions useful to its creator.
If you find yourself discussing linguistic aspects under the following headings, you will be on the right lines. Under such headings, you will also need to analyse the text at the level of whichever linguistic method or ‘frameworks’ you deem will be most revealing, e.g. graphology, lexis/semantics, grammar, pragmatics, discourse, etc. GENRE
Ask yourself how genre expectations might be at work to create a particular ‘mind set’ in the reader, one that causes the reader to respond to the text in a particular way. If a text’s genre can itself work to influence the reader (or listener, of course) to adopt such a ‘mind set’, then the writer’s ability to influence his or her audience has already begun.
CONTEXT
You will need to visualise, be sensitive to and consider the actual conditions of both the production and reception/interpretation of the text. This will require you to consider the text as an example of a real social discourse that occurred at some time, in some place and between certain individuals. • Think long and hard about that time, that place, that writer and that audience and consider what the text actually meant to them.
AUDIENCE
Work out the effects on the audience of stylistic aspects of the text (i.e. choices of layout, language and language features).
PURPOSE
Don’t begin an analysis unless you have grasped the ‘big picture’ of the text: what were its overall original purposes (there is rarely a single purpose – often entertain is mixed with persuade, for example, and with good reason!)?
MAXIMISING YOUR MARKS ‘ROUTINE’ vs. ‘SUBTLE’
In all of your analyses, you need to search for aspects of the text that will allow you to make a subtle point and commentary. Mundane, routine or self-evident aspects must be relegated to second place at all times and got out of the way as quickly as possible as they gain few marks. It is always subtlety and linguistic engagement that gains marks! •
Never forget to use the trusted POINT QUOTATION COMMENT method when creating a textual analysis.
UNCOVERING SUBTLE PERSUASIVE ASPECTS OF A TEXT ‘AUDIENCE POSITIONING’
This concept allows for an unusually subtle level of analysis. It concerns aspects of discourse and power. Audience positioning is linked with the idea of audience address (the way the text ‘addresses’ or ‘speaks to’ its audience). The idea of ‘positioning a reader’ takes this idea much further into quite sophisticated territory and is covered later. Audience address is a key aspect of a text to consider, however. It refers mainly to the choices of pronoun the text’s writer or speaker makes in order to try to create a particular relationship with the reader or listener: •
the use of the first person singular pronoun, ‘I’, can create a sense of empathy and intimacy and of straightforwardness or openness.
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the second person singular pronoun, ‘you’ (i.e. the direct address pronoun), acts to speak directly to the reader or listener to create a sense of familiarity or friendship
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the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ has two distinct senses and uses: as an inclusive pronoun it can suggest membership of a group shared with the writer or speaker; as an exclusive pronoun it separates the speaker or writer’s group from his
or her audience often in a power relationship •
Pronoun choices can be a part of the conventions of a particular genre or context and are also strongly discourse related.
In much contemporary discourse there is a move away from what are now considered traditional or ‘formal’ forms of address (e.g. the use of honorifics such as Lord Lady, Mr, Mrs). Today we prefer more informal, even casual, forms (Sam, Jenny, Hey!, you…, we…). This is in part the influence of American style; but you need to consider whether it is manipulative to address a stranger as a friend. What are the true motives – and are they authentic and sincere? Again, consider the power relationship being created. “Have a nice day, won’t you!”
LOUIS ALTHUSSER – ‘AUDIENCE POSITIONING’ When you think about ideas of influence and persuasion, it can be easy to forget what it means. If you think of your mind as being entirely your own to do with as you will, then if thoughts are occupying your mind that are not there because you freely chose to let them be there, you are under the influence of another’s thinking, i.e. you have been influenced ‘change your mind’. This means that there is an asymmetry of power and your relationship has become subordinate. The way we become persuaded into accepting certain important ways of thinking fascinates political philosophers called Marxists. Simply stated, they believe that the important beliefs we hold that act to form and structure our culture and society tend to favour one particular group within society: the group that holds wealth and power. Marxists call this group the bourgeoisie. Marxists also believe that these accepted and often unquestioned ways of thinking and living work to disfavour those who do not hold power. Marxists’ call this group, the proletariat. At the heart of such Marxist thinking is a desire to create a more equal society. One of the ways this can be brought about, Marxists believe, is if people could recognise the means by which we all come to accept and share certain important cultural ideas about life and society. They call these ideas dominant or prevailing ideologies. An important theorist in this area, and one who can help you in your analysis of power in texts, is the 20 th century philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser recognised that influential ideological power exists in even innocent-seeming texts – in fact, especially innocent seeming texts! – these, he felt, were entirely capable of ‘ideologically positioning’ us as readers or listeners. For Althusser, texts work to ‘position’ their reader into holding a particular mind-set by creating what he called, their ‘ideal reader’. Althusser suggested that texts operate on various levels, but a key level at which they work was subconsciously when they present to the reader a powerful sense of what it means to be normal. In so doing, he felt, texts could powerfully persuade us to accept a viewpoint that originates not with ourselves but with someone else. How does this work? Althusser knew that the dominant ideologies of all cultures or societies were those many and widely held ideas that members of each society and culture share and which they consider as ‘normal’ or ‘common sense’. It’s the kind of thoughts that lead us to recognise that while our society might not be perfect, it’s probably – in important ways – the ‘best of all possible worlds’. Crucially, Althusser also recognised that these ideological views were never more than a representation of reality/normality. Central to this is the recognition that our knowledge or awareness of reality must exist only at the level of idea: we think we know what reality is, but all we can ever conceive is an idea – a representation – of reality. For Althusser, reality must, therefore, always a ‘constructed’ thing; and, as a Marxist, he believed that the construction of reality that is accepted by the many as ‘for the best’ and as the ‘norm’ is one that supports the particular group in society that holds the most wealth and power. •
There can be no doubt that Althusser is right that our awareness of reality can only exist, for all of us, at the level of idea. The question for Althusser was: whose ideas are these and how important are they?
Steve Campsall: www.englishbiz.co.uk (rev. 06/01/2013): Althusser, Audience Positioning & the Ideal Reader
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Being a Marxist, Althusser felt that many of the ideas we consider make up a ‘normal’ way to think about society and the world were ideas generated or reinforced by members of the ruling and powerful classes – those who had the means to persuade us that certain ways of thinking were the natural ways to think – the only way to think.
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He felt this because he recognised that people with wealth and power had become wealthy and powerful within an existing ‘set-up’ of society – what he called society’s status quo. To work to change this status quo, would likely destabilise that which made them powerful and wealthy in the first place; any change would, therefore, put at risk their power and wealth. Althusser felt strongly, therefore, that those in power would, naturally, wish to retain their wealth and power and so work to maintain the status quo. •
Who do you think might be helping to construct, maintain and reinforce concepts such as what it means to be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in our society?
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And how is it that we come to accept their ideas as worthy of our trust? Althusser might well have pointed to the media, for a start.
Althusser believed that those in power in society use various means to reinforce ways of thinking that mean we willingly accept their view of society’s norms of behaviour and attitude. And for Marxists such as Althusser, this means ways that keep them in power. The means through which we become socialised into certain ways of thinking, Althusser argued, was through the actions of what he called society’s ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ – ISAs for short. For example, he felt that social institutions which most people considered ‘safe’ or ‘neutral’ – such as the family, school, religion, the media, the arts and culture, the law and government – acted to create, form, maintain and reinforce bourgeois ways of thinking – ways that maintained an unequal and divided society. Althusser saw these social institutions as helping to socialise individuals into certain fixed ways of thinking that support the status quo. Althusser is famous for declaring that ‘what is represented in an ideology is... not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relations of those individuals to the real relations in which they live’ (Althusser 1971). He developed this into an idea he famously called interpellation; this is what he said: ‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (and it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (and it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or ‘hailing’, and which can be imagined along the lines of when a policeman (or other) hails us: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).’ (Althusser 1971)
‘INTERPELLATION’ Althusser developed the concept of what he called ‘interpellation’ (he was French, after all!). With this idea, he sought to explain how a text, even an apparently everyday and innocent text such as a magazine article or ad, for example, can work to influence its target audience. According to Althusser, what he called the ‘subject’ (that is, the audience for the text) is created – or what he called constituted – ‘by the text’. The power of the text resides in its ability to position the subject (or, as Althusser put it, to create the audience as Steve Campsall: www.englishbiz.co.uk (rev. 06/01/2013): Althusser, Audience Positioning & the Ideal Reader
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subject to the text – like a subject is traditionally ‘subject’ to a king or queen) in such a way that the subject cannot easily adopt an alternative or contrary interpretive position without feeling ‘the odd one out’, i.e. as an outsider from the mainstream.
THE PERSUASIVE POWER OF TEXTS: ‘MESSAGE’ AND ‘CODE’. An important way through which texts ‘position’ their reader ideologically is through a distinction between what can be called the ‘message’ of the text and its ‘code’. The message is what a text offers at it ‘surface level’ (i.e. in an ad for jeans, ‘here is a new pair of jeans’); the code is what the text subconsciously offers at a ‘pragmatic’ or inferred level (e.g. buying jeans like these is what cool folk like you do…. You are cool – aren’t you??!!). Althusser recognised that whilst the target audience of any text might easily be able to resist what the text offers at the level of its message, resistance at the level of its code was all but impossible. This is because at the level of code, the text represents what its audience perceives to be what it means to be normal. •
Look closely at the pragmatic codes – rather than the text’s messages – of a number of texts and be sure you can separate ‘message’ from ‘code’.
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Work out how and why these ‘codes’ might be working because they act to represent or reinforce what it means to be ‘normal’ within society or within the target audience for the text.
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Why are the codes within these texts so difficult to resist?
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How do texts create such a powerful sense of ‘normality’ that, even if we did try to resist the codes, in resisting them, we feel somehow ‘reduced’ as a person, as an ‘outsider’, as different from the ‘normal’… as abnormal?
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A few codes are so important to the functioning of society that, if we did choose to oppose them, we would be incur trouble for ourselves. These are the codes that are supported by what is called instrumental (as opposed to influential) power. When a text is reinforced by instrumental power, the force of an institution or the state can be brought to bear upon us. This might be in various forms: detention at school, a curfew, the law and its courts, prison and even mental health ‘sectioning’.
DETECTING IDEOLOGIES OPERATING WITHIN TEXTS Whenever we perceive what seems ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’ in a ‘message’ that a text contains, we should be alert to the fact that what we are in fact recognising is unlikely to be in any way ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’; rather, we are recognising what is the ‘norm’, that is, what is ‘conventional’. These are always, to a Marxist, ideological ways of thinking that often act in subtle ways to reinforce our sense of ourselves as a ‘normal’ member of a hierarchical society. The text, in this case, is operating ‘invisibly’ to contribute to and reinforce our own construction as an ideologically conditioned individual.
THE ‘PLEASURES OF THE TEXT’ Few of us would wish to resist this ‘construction’ of ourselves as ‘normal’ (i.e. for ‘normal’ read ‘cool’, ‘laid back’, ‘having a life’, ‘a natural rebel’, ‘youthful’, ‘law abiding’, ‘not geeky’, etc., etc., etc… …). By allowing ourselves the independence of mind needed to reflect more closely and more critically on – or even opposing or rejecting – a seemingly trustworthy text at the level of its ideological code would begin to throw doubt onto our own sense of ourselves as belonging to a ‘normal’ group; we would be casting ourselves as an ‘outsider’, as an ‘odd one out’. The need to feel a part of a socially accepted group, to be perceived as ‘normal’, is such a powerful psychological drive that it is hard indeed to resist it. But who’s normality is it that we belong to – and who stands to gain from this? Perhaps far more often than we should, we submit ourselves freely and uncritically to the ideological processes which construct us as what we feel we ought to be, rather than what we might truly want to be: a free-thinking, freely-determining individual. Instead, we allow ourselves to become positioned, or more accurately, to become constructed, by ideological texts. We find ourselves being seduced by the pleasures of the text.
Steve Campsall: www.englishbiz.co.uk (rev. 06/01/2013): Althusser, Audience Positioning & the Ideal Reader
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