DeKeyser et. al, AI Authoritarianism

DeKeyser, Thomas; Casey R. Lynch; and Sophia Maalsen (2025) “AI Authoritarianism: Towards an Analytical Framework.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70048

This article traces some of the “authoritarian tendencies” embedded in AI technology and culture, and proposes some lines of possible research focus. In particular, they discuss AI “as a techno-­material, an ideological, and an everyday ensemble” (2).

Their discussion of the first, “techno-material” aspect makes two key points. The first is inhumanisation, whereby the labor, decision-making, etc. of (specific) humans is replaced by inhuman machinery. The authors emphasize that this is selective inhumanisation, in that AI takes power away from some humans, but increases the power of others. Second, AI authoritarianism works by the integration of difference, rather than simply by suppression or expulsion like other forms of authoritarianism. [In this way it is not dissimilar from market capitalism’s incorporation of difference through commodification]. “Integration” here means that, in addition to suppression, difference is made use of by the regime as a means to make itself more powerful.

To give an example, in an authoritarian context without AI capabilities, a statement critical of a government may be rapidly removed (e.g., from an online or offline public space) and even lead to the dissident’s imprisonment, while an AI authoritarian actor may translate this same statement into data to be incorporated into data sets to train AI models on, providing the authoritarian, for instance, with stronger tools for the pattern recognition of dissent or for developing more clever communication strategies culturally attuned to dissent. This is not the termination of the authoritarian intolerance toward difference, but its technological refinement—the dream of a world devoid of any meaningful opposition. (3)

As the authors note, “what is at stake is the possibility of contestation within a given socio-­political order: how to resist that which renders productive your resistance?”

The second, ideological aspect follows the longstanding discussion of the so-called “California Ideology” and the links between the “cult of intelligence” and racism and eugenics, also discussed in several other sources (e.g., Bender and Hanna), and so far as I can tell completely ignored by mainstream media accounts of AI today. The long history of Silicon Valley’s military links, and the military contacts of the various leading companies, are mentioned here and well-documented in general. It would have been interesting here to see a more global discussion of ideological shaping of AI discourse in other cultural settings where AI is being produced.

Third, the authors look at the effect of AI scaling on its everyday deployment. They focus on the example of the urban “street-level bureaucrat,” whose agency and situational knowledge is supplanted by a distant, inscrutable, and practically incontestable AI model. “Beyond reducing transparency and enabling deskilling, AI diminishes the amount and intensity of stakeholder involvement in local governance” (5).

Most notably, if conventional authoritarianism relies on the active, and purposeful, centralisation of power and disabling of accountability, then AI authoritarianism integrates these features into its very functioning, making it part of its very basic design. To position AI at the heart of urban local governance is, almost by default, to embrace centralised authority and unaccountability.

In conclusion, they suggest three further things for geographers to consider when studying this subject going forward. First, they are not arguing that all uses or framing of AI interventions are going to be authoritarian. Nevertheless, they want to highlight these authoritarian tendencies within AI, which could be present even in “seemingly benign” AI systems. Second, researchers should take note of the diversity of ways AI and authoritarianism influence and shape each other; this will require “in-­depth, contextual examinations” (6). Third, they challenge scholars to “imagine and critically assess the possibilities for non-­ authoritarian or even anti-­ authoritarian AI.” This, of course, would necessitate challenging or moving away from the inherently authoritarian techno-material, coding, and scaling aspects of AI which they identified above, not to mention the problematic ideological framing of “intelligence.” [And there is an argument to be made, that what the AI industry is misidentifying as “intelligence” inhering in the machine, would be better understood as patterns of language/articulation/discourse existing in culture, and thus part of the commons]. The authors conclude:

Considering all of this, we might question whether a non-­authoritarian AI would indeed still be AI at all, or perhaps something else entirely.

 

Writing and Identity, Chapter 9

Summary of Chapter 9: The discoursal construction of academic community membership

In this chapter Ivanič turns to the ways writers’ identities are shaped by “the subject positions—the abstract ‘possibilities for selfhood’—which are socially available in the discourse types on which writers draw as they write” (255). She analyzes her co-researchers’ essays for their use of particular “discoursal characteristics” which are “a function of the interests, values, and practices of the academic community” with which the writers are identifying when they deploy these characteristics (257). Specifically, she extracts 50-word passages from the center points of each essay, which she investigates for the use of five linguistic features: clause structure; verbs (process types); nouns, nominalization, and nominal groups; tense, mood, and modality; and lexis (259). These are based on Halliday’s Functional Grammar, with some adaptations by Ivanič. Ivanič draw on her own “intuition” as a member of the academic community to interpret the significance of these features in relation to that community (273).

Clause structure is interrogated in terms of lexical density: “the average number of lexical words per clause” (260). A “lexical” word is one bearing meaning, as opposed to a “grammatical or functional” word. (In the preceding sentence, for example, the lexical words are lexical, word, bearing, meaning, opposed, grammatical, functional, and word.) Ivanič counts noun phrases, such as “health service,” as single lexical words; she then divides the number of lexical words by the number of clauses to get lexical density.

Per Ivanič, “it is possible to see that all eight writers have, by the time of writing in their second year at university, taken on a voice which positions them within the academic community—a voice which is shaped by academic community practices, and implicates its users in these practices” (262). Lexical density thus reveals not only the interests and style of academic discourse, but also the practice of its composition, which “involves sitting alone for extended periods and formulating ides into words, without the sort of prompting and feedback from interlocutors which they would get into conversation.” From Halliday, she quotes the metaphorical contrast between academic writing as a “diamond formed under pressure,” in contrast to everyday speech, which is a “rapidly running river.” They key insight is that these differences in density are due to the process, and practice, of composition.

The verbs used in the essays show an emphasis on abstract “relational processes” and metaphor, describing ideas, as opposed to the “material process” verbs which would describe human actions. Nouns in the essays are predominantly inanimate and abstract as well, including large amounts of nominalizations, which she describes as “‘nouny’ ways of expressing an idea where a ‘verby’ way would be possible” (266). The effect of this noun use “gives the writing … its character of being about abstract, generalized content, one or more steps removed from actual events in people’s lives.” “Nominalizations, general nouns and carrier nouns are all devices which allow the writer to cram ideas together, to pack them into each other” in accordance with the previously-mentioned practice of lexical density (267).

Long nominal groups, embedded clauses, and a high proportion of lexical words characterize language in which ideas are compacted, often as a result of slow premeditated composition practices. These characteristics position the writers among those familiar with written text, and used to compacting ideas, rather than stringing them out more loosely.” (268)

The texts are all written in the present tense: “present tenses function to express timeless truths, and position the writers as interested in such truths” (269). They are all in the declarative mood, which “positions the writers as presenters of information, attempting to influence their interlocutors’ knowledge and beliefs, rather than seeking for information or attempting to influence their interlocutors’ actions.” Similarly, use of academic lexis positions writers as members of a community which uses and understands such words, though Ivanič reiterates the point from the previous chapter, that some of her co-researchers expressed ambivalence about the word choice they feel compelled to adopt.

Having covered these five linguistic features, Ivanič discusses further “lexico-syntactic characteristics” which position the texts as academic discourse. The use of quotation marks to draw attention to particular words, for example, shows that this is “type of writing where self-consciousness about language is valued” (272). Citations insert the texts into the web of interlocking and inter-referencing scholarship, and first-person is generally avoided to foster a sense of “objectivity.” She goes on to discuss “discourse organization as an aspect of the institutional voice” (274) and the interrelationships and differences between specific academic discourses, which will be explored more in the following chapter.

Writing and Identity, Chapter 8

Summary of Chapter 8: The sense of self and the role of the reader in the discoursal construction of writer identity

In this very interesting chapter Ivanič focuses on how writers create a “discoursal self” in their writing, particularly in relation to their expected readership (in the case of Ivanič’s co-researchers, these are their tutors and graders). Writers adopt discourses, voice, phrasing, vocabulary, and discursive strategies partially out of a desire to identify or “own” these, and partially out of a belief that they are expected to. Drawing on conversations with writers over their writings and the comments left by mentors and graders, Ivanič develops a rich discussion of the variety of decisions writers make to adopt, accommodate, or resist scholarly discourse and construct a textual discoursal identity which reflects their “real” self, a self they aspire to become, or a persona they feel they are required to perform.

The chapter gives great nuance as to how writers not only construct a discoursal identity they can “own,” but also accommodate or resist discourses which they feel are forced upon them. One method of muted or partial resistance is “disowning,” or distancing the words from their own voice, for instance by using quotation marks. More pointedly, they can also reject stances or discoursal strategies they feel are expected of them, but which they dislike or disagree with. Writers had a sense of the “dominant ideologies” of their particular academic communities, with which they either sought to align or, more commonly, maintain some distance from. At the same time, they often assumed their readers would hold with the values and expectations of the dominant ideology, which shaped their strategies of appropriation, accommodation, or resistance. “In either case they have to decide how far they will be true to themselves in appropriating these values and meeting these expectations, how far they are prepared to accommodate them for ulterior motives, and how far they are determined to resist them” (245).

Ivanič notes the “fluidity of self” as writers take new words and discourse strategies into their writing repertoire: “people’s identities are in a constant state of flux as a result of participation in new discourses. It is not just a question of a few new words here and there, but a whole new way of being...” (242). She pays particular attention to the power relations between academic writers and the readers who will be grading and evaluating them:

Dominant practices, conventions, ideologies don’t position writers directly. The power relationship between reader and writer … mediates the influence of the wider social context on the individual writer.

She reiterates the connection made in an earlier chapter with Goffman’s concept of “protective practices” in interaction, whereby participants in a conversation (or in this case, writers) help their interlocutors (in this case, readers) maintain their performance of identity, tying this to Bakhtin’s concept of addressivity.

Writing and Identity, Chapter 4

Summary of Chapter 4: Issues of identity in academic writing

In this chapter Ivanič reviews the literature on student writers in an academic setting. She traces the development in this field from an original perspective focused on product, meaning, how to get students to produce particular written products; to an exploration of process, the process of learning and writing; to the contemporary interest in writing as social. Much of the discussion involves navigating the relationship between “social construction” and “social interaction,” i.e., the extent to which identity, meaning, values, etc. can be treated as entities, or as created by entities (e.g., culture, “society,”) preceding and above the level of individuals; or as the product of individual agents in interaction.

Along these lines, she reviews competing understandings of the concept of discourse community: as abstract (that is, along the lines of “culture,” or “interpretive community”) or as concrete (aka, as a speech community in the sociolinguistic usage). She notes that academic discourse communities share not only written but also spoken discourses, and adds that “it is necessary to recognize the interests, values, and practices which hold people together and see how discourse emerges from those, rather than starting by looking at discourse” (80). She argues against what she terms an “initiation” approach which sees academic discourse communities as possessing set characteristics and practices which students need to be “initiated” into to master; rather, we need to understand these discourse communities as situated in time and place, and as changing through time, in part through the re-interpretation and modification of practices by new entrants:

Academic discourse communities are constituted by a range of values, assumptions, and practices. Individuals have to negotiate an identity within the range of possibilities for self-hood which are supported or at least tolerated by a community and inscribed in that community’s communicative practices. Discourse community members, of varying affiliations in relation to the values, assumptions, and practices, are also locked in complex interpersonal relationships, characterized by differences in status and power …. (82)

From a discussion of “boundary” writers (those whose different writing style or values causes them troubles in trying to conform to a written discourse community), she applauds researchers and teachers who recognize that “disadvantage is constructed by the system, not a characteristic of people” (83). She quotes Patricia Bizzell to the effect that “We should accustom ourselves to dealing with contradictions, instead of seeking a theory that appears to abrogate them,” and concludes that “Discourse communities are the ‘social’ element in the expression, ‘the social construction of identity.’”

Ivanič reviews studies discussing how writer-learners should learn to imitate, not the “product or the process of writing,” but the writer (85), in a form of “identity modelling” (though she is critical of this term). However, learners should not, or do not, just mimic, but construct a “compromise” between existing conventions and their own idiosyncracies:

A writer’s identity is not individual and new, but constituted by the discourses s/he adopts. On the other hand, a writer’s identity is determined not completely by other discourses, but rather by the unique way she draws on and combines them. (86)

[A productive way to think the intersection between the “Unique”/haecceity, and discourse as structuring.] She references some interesting-sounding studies on plagiarism, notably by Ron Scollon, then discusses Roger D. Cherry’s distinction between two aspects of identity in writing: ethos (aka character, from Aristotle’s rhetorical triad of ethos/pathos/logos), and persona (aka social role). Among critical approaches to academic discourse, she notes the use by Geoffrey Chase of terminology adapted from Henry Giroux’s critical pedagogy, referring to three stances taken by learners: accommodation (learning to accept conventions), and opposition (involving a more broad critique of the dominant ideology) (92). Ivanič notes that she has used this approach in the past, but now considers it to assume “too monolothic a view of academic discourse.”

She discusses some reasons why her particular interest in the writer’s construction of identity has not been a focus of scholarship up to her time of writing (1998): one being an emphasis on the reader, which took the writer for granted. At the same time, the development of the social view of writing in opposition to the earlier process view (each diagrammed on pages 95 and 96) led to some blinders. The process theorists somewhat uncritically celebrated the idea of “voice,” as in, each writer needs to find their own “voice.” This was then criticized by the social theorists as too romantic and simplistic, fetishizing individual creativity at the expense of understanding the social and discursive context of creation. Ivanič agrees with this critique, but suggest that in “denying the existence of a writer’s ‘voice,’ I think that these theorists lost sight of other aspects of the writer which are extremely important to a social view of writing” (97). Ironically, the use of the term “voice” is back in fashion among critical social theorists of writing, from its use in translations of Bakhtin, but with a changed meaning:

‘Voice’ in this new way of thinking is multiply ambiguous, meaning a socially shaped discourse which a speaker can draw upon, and/or an actual voice in the speaker’s individual history, and/or the current speaker’s unique combination of these resources...

She concludes by folding insights from the current chapter back into her earlier elaboration of Goffman’s theory of self-presentation, adapted for writing (as opposed to face-to-face interaction, as in the original). Much of Goffman’s face-to-face terminology, such as the use of “clothing” and “furniture,” in interaction, remains useful as metaphor, because in writing, “The encounter between performer and audience may be removed in time and space, but it is still an encounter” (100). She notes some standard criticisms of Goffman, such as that he acts as if individuals are consciously strategizing at all times, and that they inhabit a community of shared values and understandings, “which might be relatively true in a small, close community like the Shetland Isles” (102). She includes an interesting discussion of Goffman’s “protective practices” whereby performers and audience cooperate in perception management (the former by trying to save face in interaction, the second by using tact, etc., to help the performer maintain face). Readers, in contrast, are not as likely to feel the situational compulsion to help the performer maintain face; even worse, graders of academic papers often think of themselves as on a mission to point out the writer’s inadequacies. [In this light, cf. Sedgwick on “reparative reading.”]

She concludes with a discussion of the three aspects of “identity” as the term is often used: 1) the product of processes shaping the individual; 2) the way they position and portray or enact themselves; and 3) the way they are understood by readers/interlocutors. Rather than teasing out one of these as the true “identity,” Ivanič prefers to consider how they are interrelated, and situationally more or less relevant, though her book will (as stated in earlier chapters) focus on the construction and interplay of the “autobiographical self” and the “discoursal self.”

Writing And Identity, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Chapter 2: Discourse and Identity

In this brief chapter, Ivanič discusses how her terminology and analysis derives from, and aligns with, several key influences, viz., Halliday, Fairclough, Bakhtin, and Vygotsky (by way of Wertsch). She starts off the chapter by delineating her usage of the terms “discourse,” “language,” and “text.” She uses the first two largely interchangeably to refer to “language-in-its-social-context,” the first because it emphasizes this social context, and the second because it emphasizes the linguistic-per-se, which might otherwise get forgotten in sociological discussion of context; at the same time she emphasizes that she does not want the two terms to be seen as somehow opposed or demarcating specific fields which could be somehow disentangled and studied separately (37). By “text” she will refer to “the physical manifestations of discourse... the marks on the page,” to foreground “the role of form in discoursal/linguistic processes and practices as a whole” (38).

She derives three lessons from the work of MAK Halliday:

1) “language is only one of many sign systems which convey meaning” (39) and needs to be analyzed within this broader context.

2) “language is integrally bound up with meaning, and all linguistic choices can be linked to the meaning they convey”.

3) As indicated by the term “social-semiotic,” meaning is dependent on two kinds of context, which Halliday calls the context of situation and the context of culture. [This sounds reminiscent of Goffman’s “loose coupling” of the interaction and social orders.]

Halliday further proposes three “macro-functions” of meaning (40):

1) conveying ideational meaning (ideas, content, etc.);

2) conveying interpersonal meaning (status, relationships, etc); and

3) the textual function, whereby the physical text makes “the meanings hang together.”

Ivanič will add to Halliday’s account with a more sustained focus on the role of identity; she lists three “dimensions” of social identity which relate directly to H’s three macro-functions:

1) “a person’s set of values and beliefs about reality,” conveyed through ideational meaning;

2) “a person’s sense of their relative status in relation to others,” linked to interpersonal meaning; and

3) “a person’s orientation to language use,” which affects how they construct texts.

Turning to Fairclough, she reproduces (41) a diagram from Language and Power showing the linked “layers” of text, interaction (with process of production and process of interpretation), and context (with social conditions of production, and of interpretation). She uses Fairclough’s work to extend and deepen the focus on social interaction and context, out of Halliday’s framework; then, in turn, adds in Bakhtin’s richer metaphor and discussions of the “taste” of words, ventriloquation, double-voicing, etc., to extend Fairclough. Finally she brings in Vygotsky, mediated through James Wertsch’s Voices of the Mind, which pulls together Vygotsky and Bakhtin.

She discusses the roles of “genre” and “discourse,” emphasizing Fairclough’s distinction between two kinds of intertextuality: manifest intertextuality and interdiscursivity (47-8). Manifest intertextuality is the explicit quotation, and referencing of another text; Ivanič prefers to call it actual intertextuality, because it is not necessarily all that “manifest.” Interdiscursivity, in contrast, refers to abstract text types, conventions; it is the relating of this text to others through the level of genres, etc. [The distinction between these two kinds of intertextuality brings to mind my most recent round of paper grading, much of which involved pointing out to students who had used generative AI that their citations, quotes, statistics, etc. were hallucinations – because chatgpt (or whichever they are using) is totally stuck at the “abstract” level of interdiscursivity, which it imitates; it is quite able to generate a sentence which might plausibly appear in a given text, but has much more difficulty providing an actual sentence which appeared in that text. Thus, it can reproduce interdiscursivity, but not actual intertextuality, most likely because it cannot tell the difference between them.] She notes that Bakhtin often “blurs” the distinction between interdiscursivity and actual intertextuality, “sometimes usefully, sometimes annoyingly” (51).

Via Wertsch, Ivanič notes that one of Vygotsky’s key contributions is the argument that “higher mental functioning in the individual derives from social life.” Though drawing on Vygotsky, Ivanič is not so interested in the “unilinear development” which his work focuses on, but instead on a non-hierarchical multiplicity of potential paths of development undertaken by individuals as they explore ways of developing their own identities through writing. Instead of assuming that students need to develop their thinking and writing in some particular direction, she is more interested in how they play out their identities in relation with the more or less privileged or privileging discourses, genres, styles, etc., available to them (and she discusses how these terms, derived from Wertsch, provide a more active and agentive account of the relative status of different discourses and genres, than the more static term dominant). She is interested in how writers develop a “toolkit,” per Wertsch (54), or “building materials” (apparently from Fairclough) (47), to construct their own identity and its performance through writing. [The objection springs to mind, raised by, for example, Merleau-Ponty, against such a portrayal of a subject confronting the world somehow abstractly and then pulling out all this kit of mental resources, tools, etc., not unlike the linguists of Laputa carrying around their bags; though I suppose M-P was objecting to the empiricists, etc., who try to understand perception and sensation this way; the metaphor is arguably more reasonable when discussing writing, which can even involve drawing upon literal examples of such resources, I mean I have right here a thesaurus and a bookshelf of books to pull out and reference... so I guess I, ahem, withdraw the objection...]

She concludes with a nice positioning worthy of Sextus Empiricus, to the effect that when she writes of language-users “selecting,” or “choosing” from “options,” she does not mean this as the necessarily conscious agency of some perfectly free will. To the contrary, such “choice” is constrained, situated, and often unconscious. Thus, she asks readers to accept wording like “choice” in this context as “a simplying metaphor for what are in fact fleeting, subtle, complex, subconscious processes which are socially constrained and not under the full control of the individual” (54). [Quite fair, and is not the very “self” or “subject” not also just such a “simplifying metaphor,” an edifice built, to paraphrase Nkee, on running water]. She ends with noting how, in the midst of this situated constraint, etc. writers develop something which “is often simplistically called the writer’s ‘own voice’” (55). Ivanič will instead call this the writer’s owned voice, “the writer’s choices, from among many competing socially available discourses, of ones s/he is willing to be identified with.”

Writing and Identity, Chapter 1

Roz Ivanič (1998) Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

Summary of Chapter 1: Introduction

Ivanič introduces herself and her reasons for writing this book, which will be about the “social struggles in which the self is implicated through the act of writing” (2); as she nicely summarizes her thesis:

Writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped possibilities for self-hood, playing their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs, and interests which they embody. (32)

She will explore this topic through case studies involving “mature students” entering higher education over the age of 25; she argues that the particular challenges faced by such students in constructing an academic identity provide “crucial moments in discourse” (5) which reveal the workings of identity construction through [articulation], more generally. Much of this introduction is a brief review of the various terminologies that have been used to discuss identity, self, “persona,” etc. in various disciplines; the key points of which will be returned to in more depth in future chapters. Taking a departure from Goffman’s Forms of Talk she delineates four subjects she will be focusing on: 1) the autobiographical self; 2) the discoursal self; 3) self as author; and 4) possibilities for self-hood.

The first, autobiographical self, is “the identity which people bring with them to any act of writing, shaped as it is by their prior social and discoursal history” (24); this involves also interpretation or the representation of their past, to themselves. This is Goffman’s “writer-as-performer.” The autobiographical self is not necessarily conscious, nor often clearly available from the text itself. (I am reminded of an introduction to Plutarch’s Lives which I was recently reading, in which the author scours Plutarch’s writings for any biographical information, and has to admit that the few elements that could be scraped together might well be fictive.) Her research questions in regard to the autobiographical self are (25):

a. What aspects of people’s lives might have led them to write in the way that they do?

b. How has their access to discourses and associated positionings been socially enabled or constrained?

c. More generally, how does autobiographical identity shape writing?

The second, discoursal self is “the impression – often multiple, sometimes contradictory – which they consciously or unconsciously conveys of themself in a particular written text,” that is, “constructed through the discourse characteristics of a text. This is Goffman’s “writer-as-character.” Her research questions on this self are (25-6):

a. What are the discourse characteristics of particular pieces of writing?

b. What are the social and ideological consequences of these characteristics for the writers’ identities?

c. What characteristics of the social interaction surrounding these texts led the writers to position themselves in these ways?

d. More generally, what processes are involved in the construction of a discoursal self, and what influences shape discoursal identities?

The third, self as author, regards the writer’s development of an authorial voice, not to mention of “authoritativeness,” particularly in the case of academic writing. In the case of Ivanič’s mature students [or for my purposes, non-academic autoethnographers], she notes that “the writer’s life-history may or may not have generated ideas to express, and may or may not have engendered in the writer enough of a sense of self-worth to write with authority, to establish an authorial presence” (26). [Thus there is an intersectionality to the development of authorial voice, of the confidence to feel that you are the one to write about this in this way]. Her research questions here (27):

a. How do people establish authority for the context of their writing?

b. To what extent do they present themselves or others as authoritative?

To these three aspects of writer identity is appended the fourth subject, which is “possibilities for self-hood in the socio-cultural and institutional context,” in other words, what sorts of identities, positions, etc. are culturally available for writers to adopt or adapt. She discusses the term “subject position,” but prefers the term “positionings” to emphasize that this is a process; though at the same time she does not want to present “a rather cosy, over-optimistic picture of unlimited alternatives” (28), and so will use both “position” and “positioning,” depending on which aspect of [the conduct of conduct] she wishes to emphasize. She lists the following research questions on this subject (29):

a. What possibilities for self-hood, in terms of relations of power, interests, values, and beliefs are inscribed in the practices, genres, and discourses which are supported by particular socio-cultural and institutional contexts?

b. What are the patterns of privileging among available possibilities for self-hood?

c. In what ways are possibilities for self-hood and patterns of privileging among them changing over time?

Besides Goffman, she references Foucault’s technologies of the self; a glance at the bibliography suggests key interlocutors will be Fairclough, Bakhtin, and Halliday, among others.

Discourse in the Novel, Part 4

 Part 4: The Speaking Person in the Novel

B starts off by restating the inherently heteroglossic character of the novel, as a form of writing that, even when it does not actually contain heteroglossia, nevertheless acknowledges its “heteroglot environment, such that even “unitary and direct” language used by an author recognizes itself as contestable, necessary of being “championed” and “defended” in a polemical environment (332). Nevertheless one of the most important ways that the novel recognizes and engages with the “heteroglossia that surrounds it,” is the introduction of characters who give voice to different languages (in B’s definition of the term):

From this follows the decisive and distinctive importance of the novel as a genre: the human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking human being; the novel requires speaking persons bringing with them their own unique ideological discourse, their own language. (332)

B then clarifies this importance with the explication of three “aspects:”

1) Heteroglossic discourse in the novel is not merely “transmitted or reproduced,” as it might be, for instance, in drama; it is instead “artistically represented... by means of (authorial) discourse” (332: emphasis in original). The significance of this is that it brings in all the complexity of reported speech, and exists in a more complicated, entangled and interacting relationship, (aka orchestration) with the author’s language, than presumably would be the case in [the ideal types of] contrasting genres such as drama or epic. Cf. also the argument made by the editors in the introduction that polyphony exists only in the interaction of centripetal and centrifugal forces, not simply in one or the other.

2) What is important about speaking characters is not their actual characters or fates, but the social languages they represent, the dialogicality they introduce into the novel.

3) Speaking characters in novels are always ideologues, and their words “ideologemes” (333); this is the same point made before, above and in the Dostoevsky book, about their independence from and equality with the narrator, and ability to in principle be authors or narrator/personalities of their own.

The activity of a character in a novel is always ideologically demarcated: he lives and acts in an ideological world of his own (and not in the unitary world of the epic), he has his own perception of the world that is incarnated in his action and in his discourse. (335)

What’s important, again, is not that these are individual characters but that they are socially representative; also, that their speech is represented by the author, because this act of representation itself qualifies and undermines the independence and authority of the author’s speech (which uncontested authority it would otherwise have in the ideal types of epic or poetry). This is actually a very interesting perspective on the problem of representation, in general, as something that is inherently double-voiced, and which problematizes, rather than privileges, the voice or author doing the representing; furthermore, from B’s point of view, this is also important because it shows the actually fluid and always contested nature of language (and of languages, in all the senses B uses this word). Thus, “the central problem for a stylistics of the novel may be formulated as the problem of artistically representing language, the problem of representing the image of a language” (336: emphasis in original). Even stylization and parody are “double-voiced and double-languaged phenomena” (337).

One of B’s major goals in this section is to discuss how this artistic representation of heteroglossic speech in the novel is both related to, and distinct from, the general [citationality] of language in “extra-artistic” everyday communication. The relationship to the speech of another is central to any act of enunciation/[articulation]:

The transmission and assessment of the speech of others, the discourse of another, is one of the most widespread and fundamental topics of human speech. In all areas of life and ideological activity, our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words, which are transmitted with highly varied degrees of accuracy and impartiality. The more intensive, differentiated, and highly developed the social life of a speaking collective, the greater is the importance attaching, among other possible subjects of talk, to another’s word, another’s utterance, since another’s word will be the subject of passionate communication, an object of interpretation, discussion, evaluation, rebuttal, support, further development, and so on. (337)

[In the above he is basically describing the “heteroglot context” previously referred to, in which any act of articulation/enunciation takes place; also, the increased complexity or “developed” nature of a society presumably underlies the relevance of the novel in modernity, as opposed to earlier, simpler forms of society for which epic was more appropriate.] [It seems to me this historical theory of his would not stand scrutiny, however, since epic and poetry probably never really had this separate and unquestionable rigidity that he assumes in the ideal type; cf. call and response, and the whole Albert Lord argument about the situated re-working of living, oral epics in context, in each retelling.]

He writes at length about the importance of metadiscourse in everyday life and speech, and the importance of making sense and interpreting what others are saying, and saying about us, and our words, as “living hermeneutics” (338); “...in the everyday speech of any person living in society, no less than half (on the average) of all the words uttered by him will be someone else’s words...” (339). He makes an interesting point about quotation marks:

... not all transmitted words belonging to someone else lend themselves, when fixed in writing, to enclosure in quotation marks. Their degree of otherness and purity in another’s word that in written speech would require quotation marks (as per the intention of the speaker himself, how he himself determines this degree of otherness) is required much less frequently in everyday speech. (339)

The point here is the distinction between the stylistic and artistic means by which speech is artistically represented in the novel, and the way the speech of others is reported/cited/echoed in everyday speech, quotation marks being one of the “special formal devices” used in written speech, to demarcate between the author or narrator’s speech, and that of others. In everyday speech, such clear boundaries are used less often, and the speech of others flows through our mouths, and becomes our own. B expresses this in a somewhat weird way as the “engaged transmission of practical information,” which he contrasts with “artistic representation.”

For this reason everyday speech is not concerned with forms of representation, but with means of transmission. (339: emphasis in original)

On the one hand, this recreates the poetics/rhetoric distinction which imho B was rightly castigating in an earlier part of the essay. B has a valid point to make, but it may not be best served by a reductive opposition between “representation” and “transmission.” The important point is that the stakes, and the means, of orchestration, indirect speech, and so on, in everyday conversation, and in the novel, are distinct, though related. In any event B does go on to complicate the distinction by recognizing that there are “certain aspects of representability” (340) involved in this “transmission,” but insists that “[t]his representation is always subordinated to the tasks of practical, engaged transmission and is wholly determined by these tasks” (341).

Expanding on the way others’ speech is transmitted in everyday speech, B distinguishes between the two school-taught modes of “reciting by heart” and “retelling in one’s own words” (341); in the first the voices of the speaker and that of the recited text are kept clear and distinct, but in the latter they are mixed, it is double-voiced. This is a crucial part of the assumed superiority of the latter in the modern disciplinary subject, and one of those aspects of pedagogy most imperilled, or seemingly so, by the rise of AI chatbots that can spew out plausible student essays. In any event B develops this distinction into a further one, between authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse (342). Here, the distinction relates to the role of these received or repeated texts in the development of the speaking subject’s ideology (or “idea system”). The recited text forms an exterior, authoritative discourse outside of the speaker, to be followed or obeyed; the retold, double-voiced text becomes internally persuasive, part of the speaker’s own belief system and sense of self.

The “authoritative word” stands outside the subject and demands recognition or submission; there is a distance established between it and the subject. The subject does not necessarily respond with submission (but can be either “sympathetic or hostile,” or take more complicated positions (343); the point is that this distance is established. B states that “the degree to which a word may be conjoined with authority” is what creates this distance; he notes the complexity of this, with the authoritative word on the one hand surrounding itself with a swirl of interpreting, evaluative discourses which nevertheless are like a cushion or protective layer; the authoritative word or discourse itself remains intact, unalterable; “... it demands, so to speak, not only quotation marks but... a special script, for instance.” [Specialized religious languages like Latin, Church Slavonic, etc. come to mind, but one could think also of the logical notation of certain branches of philosophy.] B emphasizes that that [entextualized, reified] word of authority allows no play:

no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it.

[Here, in addition to the beautifully ultra-Volosinovian phrase “verbal consciousness,” is a direct link to Rappaport’s theory of the importance of the digital/binary in ritual.]

[Somewhere around here I had a brilliant paragraph which got deleted somehow, on the relevance of Bakhtin’s points about authoritative language to modern scientific and critical approaches. Above, I put Bakhtin’s terms authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse originally in italics (a special script), and other phrases in quotation marks; this marks their use or invocation as authoritative discourse, drawn from Bakhtin-as-authority, and placed in his voice, not my own. However, through further discussion, I start adopting the terms on my own, without demarcation, showing the shift from authoritative into internally persuasive discourse. However, there was a further, brilliant point to be made about play and scientific/critical discourse’s relation to authority, which I can’t quite remember.]

B continues emphasizing the difference between AD and IPD: AD cannot be represented, it can only be transmitted (because representation requires that play which AD disallows). Authoritative discourse in the novel appears as a thing, a “dead quotation” (344).

At this point B starts throwing out references to a key concept, zone of contact or contact zone; with no attempt to provide a definition. And here I have lost another brilliant paragraph in which I went online, found numerous sources using the term “zone of contact” very confidently and usually with no clear definition, but with a wide range of largely inconsistent meanings. Without recreating all that iirc the common usages were that the “zone of contact” is 1) the zone in which two speakers/characters interact in speech; 2) the zone of contact between two languages (in the sense of such speakers’ languages, or social languages in society); 3) the contact between an authoritative discourse and a speaker interacting with or challenging it; and 4) contact and mutual exchange/influence between two cultures or languages (in the usual sense of the word). My sense is that definitions 1 and 2 are the closest to what B seems to intend. His point is that authoritative discourse tries to keep itself distant from this zone of contact to protect itself, as it does not want to be played with or refracted; yet speakers respond to this with struggle:

... there is a struggle constantly being waged to overcome the official line with its tendency to distance itself from the zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority. In this process discourse gets drawn into the contact zone, which results in semantic and emotionally expressive (intonational) changes: there is a weakening and degradation of the capacity to generate metaphors, and discourse becomes more reified, more concrete, more filled with everyday elements and so forth. (345)

B now switches to the obviously preferred term, internally persuasive discourse. Against the discussion of authoritative discourse with imagery of “thingness” and death, IPD is all about openness, creativity, and life. There is still a struggle involved, but this is not a struggle against death but within life, over what path the subject is to take in forming themself, in the midst of so many creative and competing discursive possibilities:

Internally persuasive discourse—as opposed to one that is externally authoritative—is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word.’ In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions, and values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open, in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean. (345-6)

The term “zone of contact” reappears:

The internally persuasive word is either a contemporary word born in a zone of contact with unresolved contemporaneity, or else it is a word that has been reclaimed for contemporaneity... (346)

So here, the contact is with “unresolved contemporaneity,” the discursive present; the word that has been reclaimed from the past gains multiple contemporaneities and contexts, retaining those from the past and gaining new ones from the present. Along with such words in IPD is a conception of the listener: “Every discourse presupposes a special conception of the listener, of his apperceptive background and the degree of his responsiveness; it presupposes a specific distance.”

B of course wants to get back around to the role of speaking characters in the novel, as a form of heteroglossic representation, and the next step he makes is to formulate a theory of what could be called [proto-representation] in everyday thought and speech [he eventually names it “organic hybridization”]. There are all these ways in which we take on others’ speech [and styles, ways of thinking and acting, etc.] in our search to develop our own self out of these influences; we crassly mimic some, transmit others, come to reject others, etc. “A few changes in orientation and the internally persuasive word easily becomes an object of representation.” By taking these words/discourse which had come to be IP for us, and placing it in the mouths of imaginary speakers, or “images” (B suggests a preacher, a wise man, a leader, for ethical, philosophical, and sociopolitical discourse); while experimenting with this discourse, “we attempt to guess, to imagine how” such a person would talk, act, and so on; and this is the [proto-representation] of characters in our own minds and speaking.

This process—experimenting by turning persuasive discourse into speaking persons—becomes especially important in those cases where a struggle against such images has already began, where someone is striving to liberate himself from the influence of such an image and its discourse by means of objectification, or is striving to expose the limitations of both image and discourse. The importance of struggling with another‘s discourse, its influence in the history of an individual‘s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One‘s own discourse and one‘s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other‘s discourse. (348)

B uses the concept of “experiment” throughout this discussion: “experimentally objectifying another's discourse” allows “liberation from this discourse by turning it into an object.” I also think we can see here Bakhtin’s more complex and nuanced concept dialogism or dialogicality, substituting for the three-part dialectic movement of more standardly Marxist approaches.

B returns to his favorite subject of all time, which is the importance of Dostoevsky. There are two ways in which D’s works show “the acute and intense interaction of another’s word” (349). First, in each of his characters’ languages there is “a profound and unresolved conflict with another’s word” on the levels of lived experience, of ethical life, and of ideology. Second, the novels in their entirety are never-resolved conversations between the author and the characters, in which the characters are not subordinated to the author, and the characters always remain “incomplete and unresolved,” in other words, alive and agentive.

He spends a few pages discussing “extra-artistic ideological communication,” the very Foucauldian subjects of [veridiction and interpellation] in confession, and legal, religious, and scientific discourses; he gives some recommendations for improved methods and approaches in philology and the study of rhetorical genres.

Returning to the novel, he states that there are two ways in which this dialogized discourse is present in the novel. First, it is present in the speech of characters, and in the inserted genres; second, it is “subordinated to the task of artistically representing the speaker and his discourse as the image of a language” (355). It is this second aspect which turns out to be essential to the difference between artistic and “extra-artistic” dialogism (and to the distinction mentioned above, between “representation” and “transmission”: extra-artistic dialogism is merely concerned with transmitting the content, or information of specific statements (“isolated utterances”); only artistic dialogism endeavors “to recognize and intensify images lying behind the isolated utterances of social language, a language that realizes itself in them, but is not exhausted by them...” (356). The novel, thus, moves beyond double-voicedness to double-languagedness, the interaction and confrontation of two social languages.

A social language, then, is a concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of a language that is unitary only in the abstract.

A social language is a “potential dialect:”

Language, in its historical life, in its heteroglot development, is full of such potential dialects: they intersect one another in a multitude of ways; some fail to develop, some die off, but others blossom into authentic languages.

Key to the distinction between, and the importance of, these social languages is not simply their differention around identities, but around ideological beliefs:

The image of such a language in the novel is the image assumed by a set of social beliefs, the image of a social ideologeme that has fused with its own discourse, with its own language.

B now delineates three categories under which “devices in the novel for creating the image of a language” may be subsumed (358): hybridizations, the dialogized interrelation of languages, and pure dialogue. Hybridization is “the mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance.” This is done intentionally in the novel, but unintentional or unconscious hybridization plays an important role in the evolution and historical change of languages, as indicated above in the discussion of the formation and dissolution of dialects, and the historicity of language change. He provides the compelling image of the utterance as the “crucible” in which these hybridizations (and thus, social languages and dialects themselves, over time) are forged. Novelistic hybridization differs from hybridization-in-the-wild [which he also calls “historical, organic hybrids”] not only on account of being intentional, but by involving two individualized (as opposed to “impersonal”) language consciousnesses, that is, the image of the language is individualized or [embodied] in the voice of the author and of the character. The importance of these individuals in intentional hybridization is because these are, not merely the mixing of two languages or styles, but “the collision between differing points of views on the world that are embedded in these forms” (360). Compared to organic hybrids, that are “mute and opaque,” intentional hybrids make use of “conscious contrasts and oppositions.” Nevertheless, organic hybrids have played important historical roles, as they are “pregnant with potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words.” Intentional hybrids go beyond organic hybrids by being internally dialogic, that is, the two points of view are “set against each other dialogically.”

He goes on to talk about the relationship between the representing and the represented languages; the language embodied in, reified in the novel itself (as the style of the author), versus that embodied or represented in the speech of the characters, etc. through hybridization. He draws a contrast between hybridization “in the strict sense” and “internally dialogized interilluminations of language systems taken as a whole” (the second of his three categories, above) (362). His first example of this is stylization, which has been covered at length in his Dostoevsky book; the second is variation, which

freely incorporates material from alien languages into contemporary topics, joins the stylized world with the world of contemporary consciousness, projects the stylized language into new scenarios, testing it on situations that would have been impossible for it on its own. (363)

The writing style of Philip Reeve in Mortal Engines comes to mind: a somewhat goofy mock-Dickensian style, set in a steampunk future, with numerous quirky and witty references to contemporary pop culture, the effect being to create a completely new and unique style, mood, and voice. (A truly epic book series, unfortunately travestied by a disgracefully bad film adaptation.)

The third style is parodic stylization, in which “the intentions of the representing discourse are at odds with the intentions of the represented discourse” (364). He notes that stylization and parody form two extremes, between which there are many “varied forms for languages to mutually illuminate each other.” He ends with some observations on dialogue and plot, and summarizes his views on the importance of the artistry involved in hybridization in the novel (when it is done right), which distinguishes it from organic hybridization, as well as from the incompetent mixings of hack writers.