People do have knowledge of the meaning of their action

Interactioninst theory od discursive positioning

Social structure is coceived as flied patterns of positioning and therefore immanent rather than real

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~ALock/position/position.htm (Harre & Davies) accessed 17/11/99

“invoke concepts such as 'speech act', 'indexicality' and 'context', that is the concepts central to ethogenic or new paradigm psychology (Harre, 1979; Harre and Secord, 1973; Davies, 1982). Feminist poststructuralist theory has interesting parallels with this position. The recognition of the force of 'discursive practices', the ways in which people are 'positioned' through those practices and the way in which the individual's 'subjectivity' is generated through the learning and use of certain discursive practices are commensurate with the 'new psycho-socio-linguistics' (Davies, 1989; Henriques et al., 1984; Potter and Wetherall, l988; Weedon, 1987).

'positioning' is largely a conversational phenomenon

a conversation unfolds through the joint action of all the participants as they make (or attempt to make) their own and each other's actions socially determinate. A speech-action can become a determinate speech-act to the extent that it is taken up as such by all the participants. So what it is that has been said evolves and changes as the conversation develops. This way of thinking about speech acts allows for there to be multiple speech acts accomplished in any one saying and for any speech act hearing to remain essentially defeasible (cf. Muhlhausler and Harr‚, 1990; Pearce, 1989). As we develop our account of positioning we will argue for a productive interrelationship between 'position', and 'illocutionary force'. The social meaning of what has been said will be shown to depend upon the positioning of interlocutors which is itself a product of the social force a conversation action is taken 'to have'. We shall use the term 'discursive practice' for all the ways in which people actively produce social and psychological realities.

In this context a discourse is to be understood as an institutionalised use of language and language-like sign systems. Institutionalisation can occur at the disciplinary, the political, the cultural and the small group level. There can also be discourses that develop around a specific topic, such as gender or class. Discourses can compete with each other or they can create distinct and incompatible versions of reality. To know anything is to know in terms of one or more discourses. As Frazer ( Iggo) says of adolescent girls she interviewed: 'actors' understanding and experience of their social identity, the social world and their place in it, is discursively constructed. By this I mean that the girls' experience of gender, race, class, their personal-social identity, can only be expressed and understood through the categories available to them in discourse.'

In this sense 'discourse' plays a similar role in our social theory to that played by 'conceptual scheme' in contemporary philosophy of science. It is that in terms of which phenomena are made determinate. An important distinction, though, between the two terms, as we understand them, is that conceptual schemes are static repertories located primarily in the mind of each individual thinker or researcher almost as a personal possession, whereas discourse is a multi-faceted public process through which meanings are progressively and dynamically achieved.

A particular strength of the poststructuralist research paradigm, to which we referred above, is that it recognises both the constitutive force of discourse, and in particular of discursive practices and at the same time recognises that people are capable of exercising choice in relation to those practices. We shall argue that the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions. A subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights for those that use that repertoire. Once having taken up a particular position as one's own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned. At least a possibility of notional choice is inevitably involved because there are many and contradictory discursive practices that each person could engage in. Among the products of discursive practices are the very persons who engage in them.

When one speaker is said to position themselves and another in their talk, the following dimensions should be taken into account:

1. The words the speaker chooses inevitably contain images and metaphors which both assume and invoke the ways of being that the participants take themselves to be involved in.

2. Participants may not be aware of their assumptions nor the power of the images to invoke particular ways of being and may simply regard their words as 'the way one talks' on this sort of occasion. But the definition of the interaction being 'of this sort' and therefore one in which one speaks in this way, is to have made it into this sort of occasion.

3. The way in which 'this sort of occasion' is viewed by the participants may vary from one to another. Political and moral commitments, the sort of person one takes oneself to be, one's attitude to the other speakers, the availability of alternative discourses to the one invoked by the initial speaker (and particularly of discourses which offer a critique of the one invoked by the initial speaker) are all implicated in how the utterance of the initial speaker will be heard. This is also the case for any subsequent utterances, though the assumption is usually made by participants in a conversation that utterances by speakers subsequent to the initial speaker will be from within the same discourse.

4. The positions created for oneself and the other are not part of a linear non-contradictory autobiography (as autobiographies usually are in their written form), but rather, the cumulative fragments of a lived autobiography.

5. The positions may be seen by one or other of the participants in terms of known 'roles' (actual or metaphorical), or in terms of known characters in shared story lines, or they may be much more ephemeral and involve shifts in power, access, or blocking of access, to certain features of claimed or desired identity, and so on.