d:/socio4-1/responses.

3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:46 ± disk/mp

Journal of Sociolinguistics 4/1, 2000: 21±29

RESPONSES
to Carter and Sealey

Realism and sociolinguistics

Jonathan Potter
Loughborough University, United Kingdom

The attempt to develop a realist sociolinguistics is an interesting one. However,

it risks major theoretical and analytic confusions. In particular, it raises
re¯exive concerns about the production of its particular social ontology; it
raises questions about how participants' constructions will be dealt with when
they are di€erent from those of the researcher; and it can lead to a confused
and impoverished view of language. These problems are bound up together, so
that is how I will deal with them. Constructionists place much stress on the
importance of rhetoric, and it is in that spirit that this reply is organized
argumentatively but, I hope, with a sense of the value of this paper in
stimulating argument.
Carter and Sealey's argument draws on tropes and rhetorical manoeuvres
characteristic of social science constructions of realism (Edwards, Ashmore and
Potter 1995; Potter 1992, 1998). Probably the most disarming of these is the
production of a set of objects and processes that will make up the ontology of
this particular realism, and then treating this as natural and separate from the
authors. As is typical of those advocating a realist position, Carter and Sealey
choose entities which are deeply solidi®ed in the discourses of social science
(such as social structure) or commonplaces of (Western) everyday discourse
(such as people).1 They also build their world of realist sociolinguistics using the
®gurative discourse of natural and geological science (temporal modality, strata),
of cognitive psychology (goals, consciousness), and of a range of seemingly ad
hoc entities that we might read about in (Western) newspapers (tightly
organized inspection arrangements, curriculum planners). Some of these are
argued for; some are taken to be so obviously there that they do not need
textual support.
The constructionist position that Carter and Sealey mischaracterise in their
article2 is not a programme for denying the existence of this range of objects.
That would make it a dark mirror image of realism. Instead, its analytic focus is

# Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA.
d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:46 ± disk/mp

22 RESPONSES

on the way such objects are constructed in texts and talk (not merely in face-to-
face interaction; not merely afresh on each occasion) and what activities those
constructions contribute to.
Take the example of the school inspection (Carter and Sealey: 5). It is
authored to make a realist point. However, I would guess that if we studied
precisely such a situation we would ®nd that di€erent participants construct
phenomena in a range of ways, on di€erent occasions, to do a range of di€erent
activities. What to one participant, on one occasion of talk, will be an inspection
arrangement will, to another participant on another occasion (or even the same
participant in the same conversation), be Thatcher's programme for controlling
teachers or those bloody people arriving or a chance to put pressure on the dead wood.
People perform a wide range of activities through descriptions; such variability
is well documented in discourse research. The problem with Carter and Sealey's
realist sociolinguistics is that they will (presumably, we do not get detail) be
®ltering these participants' accounts through the matrix of the researchers' own
reality claims. Whatever a participant claims, whatever is written in a report or
newspaper or memo, some things are made undeniable. Analytic decomposition
can go so far, but no further. For Carter and Sealey it really is an inspection
arrangement whether participants use this construction to de¯ect more critical
stories or to defend an ocial line.3
There is a deep and consequential point here. Following thinking in the
sociology of scienti®c knowledge, I have argued that a coherent analysis of
participants' discourse (their talk and texts as parts of practices) requires a stance
of methodological relativism (see Potter 1996). Anything else will risk the
analyst inadvertently taking sides with some participants rather than others.4
The argument complements that developed by Scheglo€ (e.g. 1997) about the
way context can be most coherently studied. Given that the relevant contextual
particulars for some text or interaction can be variably and ¯exibly formulated,
who is to judge what is actually relevant? Scheglo€'s recommendation is to look
to participants' own orientations and formulations, and their procedural
consequentiality in interaction.
Take Carter and Sealey's example of the informal talk of children (p. 17). We
are told that they `involuntaristically' occupy the role of child, which gives them
less power than adults, and that their limited construction cannot evade the
e€ects of curriculum planners and asymmetrically distributed cultural capital.
But this begs a range of questions. Is the category child (which Carter and Sealey
casually add to their quickly growing pile of social reality bricks) so unprob-
lematic? Are this set of individuals5 treating one another as children? Is this a
category that they carry around and which governs all their actions until they
reach (what?) their thirteenth birthday?6 Are there consequential orientations
in their talk to standard language? Or is its role entirely authored by Carter and
Sealey; and why do these sociolinguists construct this entity rather than some
other one; what is it doing in their text? Is it inconceivable to Carter and Sealey
that, in their terms, these individuals resist adult power, deploy cultural capital,
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:46 ± disk/mp

RESPONSES 23

undermine language policy? Put another way, Carter and Sealey are construct-
ing a complex set of more or less abstract and technical entities in their text
which may be far from the concerns and orientations of their participants, who
are constructed as largely powerless. Then, oddly, this is used not to show the
power and reach of construction but its limitation. Only by ignoring the
re¯exive business of their own text can this argument do anything but self-
destruct.
The danger from the proposed enterprise of realist sociolinguistics is that it
forces the analyst away from taking participants' activities and orientations
seriously. The constructive and active business of talk and texts is constrained
by the requirement that they ®t into the analyst's prior ontology. Carter and
Sealey have provided an engaging realist promissory note, yet its creditworthi-
ness is far from established. I would urge scepticism until it is cashed
analytically; the critical points hinted at here suggest that the cheque will
bounce.

NOTES
1. Carter and Sealey are happy with people as a fundamental unit. Surely, it is
insucient merely to state this. They need to show the inadequacy of a range of
post-structuralist, and in particular, Foucauldian criticisms of the primacy of persons
for social analysis.
2. Carter and Sealey's version of constructionism seems to be derived from the cautious,
social problems focused constructionism of writers such as Sarbin and Kitsuse (1994).
This is quite di€erent from the perspective described and developed in Potter (1996).
3. Carter and Sealey spend some time developing a restricted view of which entities
can correctly be described as having agency. However, this will undoubtedly ride
roughshod over a range of participants' attributions of agency to collectivities,
structural arrangements, inanimate objects and sub-parts of persons. Are people
merely wrong when they use agency in this way, or would we as analysts be better
o€ considering the organization and construction of agency attribution (see Edwards
1997)?
4. This is not a complaint against research which is guided by, or inspired by, political
ideals. As Edwards, Ashmore and Potter (1995) emphasise, taking strong positions
makes just as much sense for relativists as realists, perhaps more. The problem is
starting with an ontology which already prejudges the outcome of analysis.
5. For systematic constructionism there is no neutral language outside of these
discourse processes (Ashmore 1989). Words like individual are conveniences and
provide a display of neutrality; but they bring their own baggage in with them.
6. For two recent papers taking this constructionist, attributional view to categories of
child and children, see: Aronsson and Cedeborg (1996) and Bonaiuto and Fasulo
(1997).

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:46 ± disk/mp

24 RESPONSES

REFERENCES
Aronsson, Karin and Anne-Claire Cederborg. 1996. Coming of age in family therapy
talk: Perspective setting in multiparty problem formulations. Discourse Processes 21:
191±212.
Ashmore, Malcolm. 1989. The Re¯exive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scienti®c Knowledge.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bonaiuto, Marino and Alessandra Fasulo. 1997. Rhetorical intentionality attribution: Its
ontogenesis in ordinary conversation. British Journal of Social Psychology 36: 511±
537.
Edwards, Derek. 1997. Discourse and Cognition. London: Sage.
Edwards, Derek, Malcolm Ashmore and Jonathan Potter. 1995. Death and furniture: The
rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism. History of
the Human Sciences 8: 25±49.
Potter, Jonathan. 1992. Constructing realism: Seven moves (plus or minus a couple).
Theory and Psychology 2: 167±173.
Potter, Jonathan. 1996. Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction.
London: Sage.
Potter, Jonathan. 1998. Fragments in the realization of relativism. In Ian Parker (ed.)
Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism. London: Sage. 27±45.
Sarbin, Theordore R. and John L. Kitsuse (eds). 1994. Constructing the Social. London:
Sage.
Scheglo€, Emmanuel A. 1997. Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society 8: 165±
187.

Address correspondence to:

Jonathan Potter
Discourse and Rhetoric Group
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leicestershire, LE11 3TU
United Kingdom
j.a.potter@lboro.ac.uk

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:46 ± disk/mp

Response to Carter and Sealey

Norman Fairclough
Lancaster University, United Kingdom

I broadly agree with Carter and Sealey about the importance of distinguishing
(as well as connecting) the perspectives of structure and agency, and also that
`critical realism' o€ers a version of realist social theory which sociolinguists
might productively work with. In my comments I shall be drawing upon a
forthcoming book in which Lilie Chouliaraki and I have made some use of
Bhaskar's work (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). We do not work with the
Layder theory of `social domains' which Carter and Sealey focus upon in their
paper, but I have no diculty in bifurcating the perspectives of structure and
agency in this way, and for the purposes of this paper I shall assume the four
domains (situated activity, social settings, psychobiography, contextual re-
sources) which Carter and Sealey refer to.
I want to focus on an important omission from Carter and Sealey's paper: if
we are to move from recognizing categories such as these four domains as
potentially useful, to putting them to work in sociolinguistic theorizing, we need
accounts of their interconnection. We therefore need mediating categories for
such accounts ± that is, categories which help us to move between them. I shall
take up in particular Bhaskar's suggestion that `the mediating system we need is
that of positions (places, functions, rules, duties, rights) occupied (®lled,
assumed, enacted etc.) by individuals, and of the practices (activities etc.) in
which, in virtue of their occupancy of these positions (and vice-versa) they
engage' (Bhaskar 1986). What Bhaskar is suggesting is that the linked
categories of `position' and `practice' allow us to move coherently between
structure and action (or between Layder's more di€erentiated social domains).
As Layder points out (1997), the category of `practice' can be used in ways
which claim to address the relationship between structure and agency but are
in e€ect reductive of the distinction (or the distinction between his four social
domains). But I see this as an argument for theorising the category of `practice'
with care, not for abandoning it. Practices make the link between structure and
agency ± between contextual resources, social settings, psychobiography, and
situated activity. And theorizing the positions/practices system also allows us to
begin to specify how semiosis (including language) ®gures in the linkage of
these domains. I shall try to show this in a schematic way in this note.
I assume that in engaging in situated activity, people articulate together
diverse elements of the social: physical activities; broadly sociological elements

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:46 ± disk/mp

26 RESPONSES

such as social procedures and forms of organisation; broadly psychological

elements including beliefs, knowledges, feelings and values; and semiosis
(including language). Articulating them together means bringing them into a
more or less stabilized (though never more than relatively stabilized) combina-
tion (see Laclau and Mou€e 1985). These articulations are partly pre-given, the
more-or-less stable and durable cumulative e€ects of past activity. I call these
`social practices'. Situated activity varies in its conformity with given social
practices, but one should always avoid reducing analysis of the articulatory
work that is done in situated activity to analysis of the social practices which
shape that work, for the former never fully determine the latter (see below).
The diverse elements of a social practice (and of a situated activity) are
dialectically related as `moments' of that practice (on the `dialectics of dis-
course', see Harvey 1996). Seeing their relationship as dialectical allows us to
avoid two dangers: a reductionism which treats some elements as merely
epiphenomena of others ± for instance a discourse-reductionism which treats
social life as nothing but discourse (semiosis), or a sociological reductionism
(such as Bourdieu tends towards, see Hasan forthcoming, Chouliaraki and
Fairclough forthcoming) which treats semiosis as an epiphenomenon of the
sociological; and a confusion of the di€erence between elements of the social
with discreteness. Elements of the social (e.g. the semiotic and sociological
elements) are not discrete, not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, each
element `internalises' the others, in Harvey's terms. For instance, the socio-
logical element of a practice does not at any level of abstraction completely
exclude the semiotic (or vice-versa), and so any coherent account of it will be
partly a semiotic account. That is why we can coherently say that semiosis
simultaneously `is' power, ideology, knowledge, desire, and physical activity.
But the di€erent elements nevertheless constitute di€erent social logics ± for
instance (in Hasan's terms) the `semiologic' is di€erent from the `sociologic'.
Social life is produced in situated activity, and social practices are more-or-
less durable ways of producing social life (Althusser and Balibar 1970). The
di€erent moments of social practices constitute in Bhaskar's terms di€erent
`mechanisms' ± they di€er in their generative or productive power. Analysis of a
social practice is analysis of how the productive powers of di€erent moments are
articulated into a way of producing social life. Semiosis is from this perspective
one mode of producing social life, with its own particular materials and means
of production which can be variously deployed to produce various social e€ects
(Althusser and Balibar 1970). Speci®cally semiotic analysis must go in tandem
with analysis of how the semiotic moment ®gures within and contributes to the
particular way of producing social life which we are analyzing. We cannot
assume that semiosis has a constant social weight and force ± it can be a more
or less salient moment of a practice. Modernisation is a `turn to semiosis' which
has made semiosis a more salient moment within a range of social practices ± a
development which Smith for instance has characterised in rather di€erent
terms as `textually mediated' social life (Smith 1990).
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:47 ± disk/mp

RESPONSES 27

Social practices constitute networks which may be more or less elaborate, and
it is through analysing these networks that we can specify how situated activity
is linked to social settings. Social settings can be regarded as shifting networks of
practices (or shifting `conjunctures'). Another feature of modernisation which
impinges on Smith's theorisation of textual mediation is `vertical' integration
(Koivisto and PietilaÈ 1996±7), the integration of situated activity into social
systems, or in a di€erent theoretical vocabulary of `lifeworld' with `systems'.
Practices are networked together in ways which link everyday life with social
systems, though to varying degrees.
Networked practices are characterized by speci®c relations of recontextualisa-
tion (Bernstein 1990), speci®c principles according to which one practice
internalises others. Referring speci®cally to semiosis, the semiotic moment of
any practice is constituted through a recontextualisation of the semiotic
moments of other networked practices. However, recontextualisation should
be viewed as a dialectical relationship of appropriation/colonisation ± one
practice may be colonised by another, but the latter always enters the former
as precisely a recontextualisation, i.e. as incorporated into the context of the
former and therefore open to being appropriated within its dynamics. For
instance, ordinary conversation is shot through with discourses emanating
from social systems, which on the one hand colonise it but on the other hand
may be appropriated and `turned' for various local purposes. Having said this,
the way the dialectic works out depends upon structural relations of hierachy
and dependency between networked practices within the conjuncture.
The discourse moment of a practice and its relation to other moments needs
to be speci®ed for each of the positions constituted within the practice, and the
recontextualisation of other practices is relative to and variable according to
position. But there is a complex relation between positions and people which
can be speci®ed by bringing the other two social domains (contextual resources,
psychobiography) into the account. I began by describing situated activity as
articulatory work shaped by social practices but not reducible to social
practices. Both the social (class, gender, ethnic/cultural) memberships of
people and their individual life trajectories a€ect their relationship to social
practices in situated activity ± the `performances' of people in particular
positions vary according to where they stand in the social distribution of
material, social and cultural resources (`contextual resources') and according
to the individual attitudes, dispositions and facilities they have developed during
a lifetime (`psychobiography', see Archer 1995). For the semiotic moment in
particular, variations in performance will involve di€erences in knowledge of
and access to languages and dialectical and diatypical varieties of languages,
di€erent degrees of facility in operationalizing and combining these resources,
and di€erent communicative and rhetorical styles. To some extent these
variables come to be built into social practices, their contradictions and
tensions, and their social relations of power and struggle. But what actually
happens in situated activity has to be seen as contingent upon articulations of
# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:47 ± disk/mp

28 RESPONSES

social settings (as networks of practices), contextual resources, and psychobio-

graphies, whose potential complexity depends upon the social structure and
determines how open or closed the social is within particular areas of situated
activity.
Semiosis ®gures in two interconnected ways as a moment of a social practice:
as a mode of producing social life, and in the representation of the world,
including the re¯exive self-representations which are an inherent part of a
social practice. Representations are always positioned, i.e. from particular
positions within particular social practices, and there are no representations
which transcend social positionality. Yet representations are also always
practical, i.e. they are produced in the course of situated activity which is
activity within and upon the world. Anti-realists such as Potter (see his
Response above) tend to one-sidedly stress the former while missing the latter
(Collier 1998). Representations are constantly being evaluated against each
other in terms of epistemic gain (Taylor 1989) ± the extent to which they
provide conceptual handles on the world which are of practical value in acting
within and upon the world. This is in a Marxist vocabulary the `test of practice'.
It implies an engagement with and experience of reality which cannot be
reduced to the discourses which are nevertheless a necessary condition for it,
and it implies that reality exists outside of the discourses in terms of which it has
hitherto been represented (so that achieving better representations is always an
issue ± see Harre 1998).
Let me conclude this necessarily brief sketch with two even briefer observa-
tions. First, although I very much welcome the journal opening this debate on
sociolinguistic theory, I also think it is important to recognise what has already
been achieved theoretically. I am thinking in particular of Bernstein's rich
theoretical work (recently, 1990, 1996), which has been unjustly sidelined. It is
true that he is a sociologist and does not push the theory into a theorisation of
language as such, but he takes us to the threshold of language, and provides
conceptual categories which can be used to think language with (see Chouliar-
aki and Fairclough 1999; Hasan 1996). Secondly and connectedly, if we are to
work theoretically across disciplines and theories, we need a theoretically
coherent view of what it means to put the logic of one theory to work within
another. See Fairclough (forthcoming) for some discussion of working in a
`transdisciplinary' way.

REFERENCES
Archer, Margaret. 1995. Realist Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Althusser, Louis and Etienne Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books.
Bernstein, Basil. 1990. The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge.
Bernstein, Basil. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. New York: Taylor and
Francis.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1986. Scienti®c Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso.

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000

d:/socio4-1/responses.3d ± 5/1/0 ± 16:47 ± disk/mp

RESPONSES 29

Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking
Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Forthcoming. On Hasan's `The Disempower-
ment game: A critique of Bourdieu's view of language'. Linguistics and Education.
Collier, Andrew. 1998. Language practice and realism. In I. Parker (ed.) Social
Constructionism, Discourse and Realism. London: Sage. 47±58.
Fairclough, Norman. Forthcoming. Discourse, social theory and social research: The
discourse of welfare reform. To appear in Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1. London: Heine-
mann.
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Di€erence. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hasan, Ruquaiya. 1996. Ways of Saying, Ways of Meaning. London: Cassell.
Hasan, Ruquiaya. Forthcoming. The disempowerment game: A critique of Bourdieu's
view of language. To appear in Linguistics and Education.
HarreÂ, Rom. 1998. Foreword. In I. Parker (ed.) Social Constructionism, Discourse and
Realism. London: Sage.
Koivisto, Juha and Verti PietilaÈ. 1996±7. Ideological powers and resistance: The
contribution of W. F. Haug and Projekt Ideologie-Theorie. Rethinking Marxism 9:
67±87
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mou€e. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London:
Verso.
Layder, Derek. 1997. Modern Social Theory. London: UCL Press.
Smith, Dorothy. 1990. Texts, Facts and Femininity. London: Routledge.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Address correspondence to:

Norman Fairclough
Department of Linguistics
Lancaster University
Lancaster, LA1 4YT
United Kingdom
n.fairclough@lancaster.ac.uk

# Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000