Main reading: Carr (2010), intro. and chap. 6
Other reading: Carr (2010), conclusion; Bauman (1983)
An important theme in this class is that people create their sense of self in discourse, particularly the pragmatics of discourse in interactions. This too is a site of politics, power, and struggle.
If we are all doing being, can you ever tell if someone is being honest? Is there even such a thing as doing being honest?
Bakhtin writes:
[T]here are no “neutral” words and forms—words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. (Bakhtin 1981, 293)
We come into being by speaking, but there are no words that belong to no one when we do. There is no such thing as “your own words”! Somebody better tell the Office of Academic Integrity!
If every word is borrowed, then every word is quoted. A speaker must then either position themselves as that word's author or its animator.
Out of its century of contact with Christianity, Auhelawa has developed a specialized Christian register. Two words in this register are important:
walo teina ana mwalae
This is the end of this talk.
na nige mata yaguguya na ambenalei
And I'm not going to preach and you listen to it.
[…]
hava yaluyaluwa ana ve’ita aliguwai na hava yaluyaluwa ana mohe aliguwai yamohegomiu na alimiyai
What the Spirit has showed to me, and what the Spirit has given me, I give to you all and it is with you.
[…]
yaluyaluwa ana ve’ita ainaiena ya’aiyauya alimiyai ahubena teina vehabana
I have shared the teaching of the Spirit with you for today. (Loise, Sowala United Church, April 23, 2006)
An example of script-flipping by Nikki from an earlier part of Carr's book (2010, 35–36):
FB clients, therapists, and case managers are discussing the need for more “structure,” that is, stricter rules for assessing compliance (and progress) by clients.
1 Nikki: Well, I think what you people are failing to realize: we’re recovering women. 2 Our lives have been centered around getting and using drugs and, basically, 3 this recovery thing is that we are learning to live our lives over again. 4 Group: Yes/Hm-hmm/hmm-hmm (simultaneous) 5 Nikki: That means we are learning to make friends without using drugs; 6 we are learning to get up in the morning, wash our face and brush our teeth 7 without. 8 Group: Yes/hm-hmm/That’s right. 9 Nikki: Some of us had to get a 40 ounce before we got out of bed; 10 some of us had to smoke a joint; whatever it was before we could even go to 11 the bathroom and wash our faces and get our acts together, you know. 12 So, I mean, so basically what recovery is supposed to be teachin’, teaching us 13 how to live our lives without using drugs 14 Leif: That’s right! 15 Angie: You got it! 16 Nikki: And give us some kind of support.
Notice the work that “some of us” does in lines 9–10.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 259–422. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press.
Bauman, Richard. 1983. Let your words be few: symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeenth-century Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://archive.org/details/letyourwordsbefe00baum.
Carr, E. Summerson. 2010. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, UNITED STATES: Princeton University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=617260.
/
#