Review: Language and Discourse: The Embrace of Uncertainty

Reviewed Work(s): Discourse and Social Change by Norman Fairclough; Writing, Schooling
and Deconstruction: From Voice to Text in the Classroom by Pam Gilbert; Making the
Social Text: Poetics and Politics in Social Science Discourse by Richard Harvey Brown
Review by: Maggie MacLure
Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1994), pp. 283-300
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1393232
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British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1994 283

REVIEW ESSAY

Language and Discourse: the embrace of uncertainty

MAGGIE MACLURE, University of East Anglia

Discourse and Social Change

Norman Fairclough, 1992
Cambridge, Polity Press

Writing, Schooling and Deconstruction: from voice to text in the classroom

Pam Gilbert, 1989
London, Routledge

Making the Social Text: poetics and politics in social science discourse
Richard Harvey Brown (Ed.), 1992
New York, de Gruyter

Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless
purity of our intentions evident enough?
Malcolm Arnold

1. We Need the Eggs

Reviewing recent trends in language and discourse is a tough assignment, not just
because of the size and diversity of the field, but also because of the fraught response that
mention of 'discourse' often prompts-especially if it's linked with that other bad word,
postmodernism. Some people find some of the key propositions of contemporary work
in discourse pretty hard to swallow: for instance, the idea that truth is the creature of
language, rather than the other way round; that there's no first, last or deepest thing Out
There that tethers language to reality; that our solid sense of self is a textual thing-the
product of genres, not genes; that there's as much rhetoric as reason in research.
Especially unpalatable to many people is the notion that power, oppression and struggle
are forged in discourse. For if there really were 'nothing outside the text', how would we,
how could we intervene politically?
But there's also a certain ambivalence. It's getting harder to ignore the claims by the
likes of Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Bakhtin or Geertz about the complicity of language

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284 Review Essay

in the workings of reality, society, power, knowledge, identity. Indeed, some of the terms
and tactics of discourse-based theories are proving very useful for a whole range of
critical and emancipatory enterprises. Deconstruction, for instance, is being done
strategically by feminist and post-colonial theorists to destabilise the old us/them
oppositions that have shored up the dominant discourses of western culture. Likewise,
Foucault's exposure of the regulatory force of such innocent linguistic acts as naming and
categorisation, and his identification of the 'technologies of power' exercised in discursive
practices such as examination and confession, have given a powerful edge to social and
educational critique. The trouble is, to embrace discourse theory is to court what many
people see as the abyss of epistemological doubt and political paralysis sketched above.
As a result, the 'linguistic turn' in the social sciences is kind of everywhere and nowhere:
fascinating yet frightening, essential but impossible. I'm reminded of the old joke about
the guy whose brother thinks he's a chicken. 'Why don't you take him to a shrink?'
somebody asks. 'I would', says the guy, 'but we need the eggs'.
This review essay is mainly about [1] why people might need the eggs of contempor-
ary discourse-based theory but often find it hard to swallow the chicken. My interest is
in work within education that can loosely be described as poststructuralist in orientation,
or which has been influenced by poststructuralist currents [2]. Definitions are tricky,
since poststructuralism could mischievously be defined in terms of a suspicion of
definitions. But I take it that a work is locatable with respect to poststructural notions if
it (a) takes some kind of sceptical position towards the relationship between language and
reality; and/or (b) understands discourse/language not just as a reflection of 'the social',
but as deeply implicated in the constitution of the social and cultural world; and/or (c)
considers 'meaning' to be ambiguous, contested, shifting, and never finally resolvable by
recourse to an 'external' world of objects and certainties.
As already noted, those sorts of propositions are both attractive and repulsive
to educational theorizing, which is still, in its many forms, more or less committed to
the modernist projects of emancipation, progress and resistance to oppression, and
which still sees the exercise of reason and the possibility of truth as the intellectual
cornerstones of those projects. Poststructural theories of discourse are deeply challeng-
ing to modernist projects, not least because they have an inbuilt potential to unravel
their own arguments. Taking texts apart might be a powerful weapon of critique when
directed 'outwards' towards the powerful public languages of policy, politics and the
media, by enabling us to reveal the rhetorical strategies and suppressions that deliver
the supposed truths and certainties in such discourses. But how to stop short of
applying this deconstructive logic 'inwards', to the truths, models and findings of our
own discourses of education? My argument below is that poststructuralist theories
always present both a threat and a promise for educational enquiry, and that this is
reflected in various strategies-textual ones of course-for handling that threat.
In referring to various books and articles below my interest, then, is not just in the
substantive areas they address in discursive terms-e.g. policy, professional discourse,
classroom practice-but in the different kinds of rhetorical deals that they strike with
the devil, in order not to be undone by the deconstructive logic. These strategies range
from (most obviously) silence about the traps for the unwary, through confession (admit
complicity in asides and footnotes but proceed as before) to a variety of strategies for
rescuing the core values of the paradigm. Lastly, there is the ludic strategy-the attempt,
not to sidestep the dangers of deconstruction, but to throw oneself wholeheartedly
into the paradoxical and reflexive game of meaning: to refuse to resolve

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 Review Essay 285

ambiguities, to disobey the rules of genres, to stop making sense. This is the kind of
radical poststructural 'turn' that really gets up people's noses.
I don't mean to disparage some or all of these textual strategies, nor to suggest that
there could be a 'purer' or less mediated kind of intercourse between education and the
discourses of uncertainty. Indeed, I think there are probably no final solutions to the
problems raised by the double-edged embrace of those discourses. But I think it's worth
trying to learn more about those encounters. Deconstruction tells us that if we look to
such skirmishes and truces on the borders of paradigms, we may learn a lot about what
those paradigms take, and make, themselves to be.
The books listed at the beginning are not given separate and individual reviews.
Instead, they are woven into the discussion as exemplars of particular issues. I single
them out for special mention mainly because they are interesting and challenging
examples of recent work, for those who want to read further. The three books are
referred to below by the initials in their titles: thus DSC, WSD and MST.

2. Taking Texts Apart: (1) interrogating policy texts and public discourse
One of the most obvious uses for discourse theory is the critique of policy texts and
public discourses. Like any other texts, policy documents, government pronouncements,
news coverage and the like can be subjected to 'close reading', to reveal the devices that
are used to claim authority and impartiality; to recruit the reader/listener to the
author/speaker's viewpoint and anathemise opponents; to consolidate knowledge claims
by marginalising, suppressing or smoothing over contradictions. Stronach (1992), for
instance, 'reads' the recent Howie Report on the future of Scottish upper secondary
education as an oscillation between appeals to two opposing economic/educational
'identities'-the romantic ideal of the rounded and accomplished Scottish student (male,
of course)-the 'lad o' pairts'-and a more modem European sensibility. Stronach
highlights the textual manoeuvres that give a gloss of coherence, consensus and
commonsense to a collection of mutually contradictory educational fantasies.
Ball's (1990) analysis of education policy in England and Wales characterises it in
terms of a struggle amongst competing discourses and their associated forms of knowl-
edge/power (after Foucault). Ball is especially interested in the discourses of the 'New
Right' and the way these have operated, via a 'discourse of derision', to pathologise
educational ideals such as progressivism and comprehensivisation (Ball, 1990, p. 18). Ball
and his co-workers have brought a discourse-based approach to several policy issues,
such as the reception of national curriculum documents within secondary school
departments (Ball & Bowe, 1992), and the operation of 'parental choice' (Bowe et al., nd).
The latter study is a critique, not only of the discourses of policy texts such as the Parent's
Charter and consumerist guides to 'good schools', but also of the accumulating body of
research. Their argument is that much of this research operates, collusively if unwittingly,
'inside the discourses of choice and consumption' that characterise the policy/con-
sumerist texts themselves, and therefore never succeeds in 'breaking out of the discourse'
to achieve analytic or critical autonomy (nd, p. 14).
Stronach & Morris (1994) find a similar kind of discursive complicity in evaluations of
vocationalist reforms. A new kind of 'conformative' evaluation has developed in the UK,
they argue, as a result of the volatile policy contexts of the 80s and 1990s. This 'policy
hysteria'--a postmodern condition of multiple and contradictory innovations, and wildly
oscillating policy stances--generates evaluations that are 'short-term, complicit, impres-

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286 Review Essay

sionistic and formative' (6). Complicity with the goals and values of the project is
achieved (and concealed) via a number of textual devices in evaluation reports-for
example, portraying negative findings as the harbingers of an imminent upturn; fore-
grounding the 'good news' and relegating the bad to subordinate clauses; using 'hooray
words' such as progression, ownership, whole school and entitlement to 'substitute for
critical analysis, and at the same time give advocacy a sense of direction' (pp. 12-13).
Stronach & Morris suggest there's something funny going on, then, around the language
of reform: they note elsewhere the development of a language of ' "enterprise",
"relevance", "student-centredness" that came to have as many definitions as it had
voices' (p. 3). MacLure & Stronach (1993a, p. 180-81) noted a similar kind of 'dispersion
of meaning' around words such as 'work' in (first generation) National Curriculum
documents. Fairclough is likewise interested in shifts of meaning within and across policy
texts. He too picks up on 'enterprise', as an instance of state-sponsored 'semantic
engineering', initiated by Lord Young, British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry
in the mid 1980s. Fairclough argues that Young invested the term 'enterprise' with a
particular set of meanings (linking it, for example, with notions of 'self-help' and
'self-reliance'), and traces an 'intertextual chain' leading from Young's speeches, through
official DTI brochures, and thence into a wide range of texts in health care, education
etc (DSC, pp. 131-33). This is one instance, according to Fairclough, of a widespread
process of 'colonization of orders of discourse'. A related textual phenomenon, according
to Fairclough, is that of 'overwording'-a dense profusion of words or phrases with
similar or related meanings. It is, it seems, a phenomenon to be viewed with suspicion-
'a sign of "intense preoccupation" pointing to "peculiarities in the ideology" of the group
in question' (DSC, 193; citing Fowler et al. 1979, p. 210). Fairclough's example is the
skills-based vocabulary of the 1988 Kingman Report on English in UK schools (DES,
1988), with wordings including competence, effectiveness, mastery, facility, expertise and
skill [3].
There seems to be a lot of mileage, then, in applying textual criticism to policy texts
and discourses. It looks promising as a vehicle for public accountability and critique, by
making the knowledge claims and authoritative postures of policy makers open to
'interrogation'. It also provides an analytic purchase on cycles and processes of reform.
There are a number of further questions that could be asked. Does text-based policy
analysis necessarily imply the radical (postmodern) version of the 'linguistic turn' that I
sketched at the outset? Or are people using discourse methods simply as one more tool
for doing whatever is their usual disciplinary business-policy sociology, ethnography,
critical theory or whatever? Is there any reason why they shouldn't do that? Is this kind
of work 'deconstruction'? Does it matter? Taking just the latter question for the moment:
the very idea of distinguishing 'proper' from improper kinds of deconstruction would be
to erect just the kind of 'violent hierarchy' (Derrida, 1981) that is the target of
deconstruction, in one of its versions at any rate. So nobody can afford to be doctrinaire.
But it is worth keeping an eye, I think, on the 'dispersion of meaning' around the term
deconstruction itself, precisely because of the vast number of 'intertextual chains' to
which it now belongs, from architecture to literary theory, from film reviews to political
commentary. It has even become a movement in fashion.[4] Within social science/edu-
cational discourse, there is a tendency, I think, for deconstruction to be used in a
vernacular sense roughly analogous to 'analysis' or 'critique', alongside more specialist
usages drawn from poststructuralist literary theory or French philosophy. Again, I don't
think this matters, except to the extent that it would be helpful to know whether its use
in particular cases is an index of a broadly poststructuralist or reflexive text-based

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 Review Essay 287

orientation, and hence some kind of a departure from the canonical forms of qualitative
or critical enquiry. It might just be a bolt-on term that does not really disturb the
linguistic economy of the paradigm-but gives it a little gloss of contemporaneity [5].

Standing on the Outside: the strategy of silence

There is the further question, already flagged above, of whether it's possible (epistemolog-
ically? politically? pragmatically?) to deconstruct only in an 'outwards' direction-to take
other texts apart as a critical/analytic method, without doing it to your own arguments
too. Ball is fairly sanguine about the possibility of 'standing' somewhere 'theoretically and
methodologically' outside the charmed circle of language in order to carry out a study
that he nevertheless considers to be 'deconstructive' and fundamentally about 'taking
things apart' (1990, pp. 1, 2). Others are less confident, and more critical of the possibility
of 'arresting' the deconstructive impulse before it starts to lap around the edges of one's
own discourse. Deniivo is scathing about arrested or 'quasi-deconstructive' readings in
anthropology which covertly stand outside the 'web of significations they themselves have
spun', and which thereby become mere explications de texte (MST, pp. 39-48). This
dilemma of deconstruction is a theme to be revisited below.
The deconstructive energies of the works discussed above are aimed 'outward',
then-towards the worlds of policy and media. No real crisis of representation here:
intertextuality [6] just offers an empirical handle on rather incorporeal notions such as
policy drift; or a device for decoding the linguistic fingerprints left along the intertextual
chain by the usual ideological suspects (the New Right; bureaucratisation; managerialism
...). Fairclough's metaphors of linguistic colonization, marketization, overwording and
semantic engineering seem to point to a nostalgic longing for a state of linguistic grace,
where language might be purified of ideology, plural meanings and ironic relations with
reality. Discourse is not 'irredeemably ideological', he reckons, and in any case some
kinds of discourse are more heavily ideologically 'invested' than others: '[i]t should not
be too difficult to show that advertising is in broad terms more heavily invested than the
physical sciences' (p. 91). This pronouncement might come as a surprise to sociologists
of scientific knowledge [7], who have demonstrated repeatedly how scientific discourses
are shot through with ideological and rhetorical 'investments'. In fact there is an
ambiguity throughout Fairclough's book, reflected in his (for me, unconvincing) attempt
to reconcile Foucault and Gramsci. He oscillates between, on the one hand, a constitu-
tive position that denies a pre-existing realm of meaning and an external reality, and on
the other, a hegemonic position that still spies some ground to occupy 'outside' language
from which to perceive reality and repel ideology.
It is relatively easy, perhaps, to sideline the reflexive problems of deconstruction, when
a strict boundary can be maintained between inside and outside. When the focus of
attention turns 'inwards', to the discourses of education, that boundary between inside
and outside, us and them, starts to get harder to police.

3. Taking Texts Apart: (2) internal affairs

Let's turn, then, to work that directs its attentions 'inward', interrogating the educational
discourses of theory, research, practice and professionalism. Gilbert's Writing, Schooling and
Deconstruction is an extended critique of the prevailing models of writing development in
Australia and the UK, and an exploration of an alternative approach based on

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288 Review Essay

deconstructionist principles. She starts with a review of the hugely influential literature
on writing development that still continues to hold sway in teacher education and writing
research, and shows how the core values of authorship, authenticity, spontaneity,
personal voice, creativity, expression and ownership have been relentlessly promoted.
What happens to theories of children's writing development, she asks, if you take
seriously the counter-propositions of poststructuralism? She appropriates the critique of
authorship and ownership developed by Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, and the idea of
writing as creating a new intertextual object out of fragments of other texts, rather than
an act of creativity springing full-blown from the writer's head. She uses Derrida's
inversion of the fundamentals of writing, that makes originality dependent on imitation
and iterability, to challenge the responses that teachers make to students' writing.
One of the incidental pleasures of the book is the collection of revelatory quotations
from key figures in the field of writing research. Graves' metaphors are particularly
hilarious. Here, for instance, is his 'folksy, capitalistic metaphor' of ownership in writing:

Most writers rent their pieces and the teachers own them. Renters speak
differently from owners: renters say, 'Let him fix it-I pay my rent'; owners
say, 'In the spring we're gonna re-seed the lawn, in the fall we're going to put
in a new partition here with an opening between the kitchen and the dining
room'. Now what happens is that the owners ... get very fussy about the
appearance of the place. So in reality the surface features are helped more by
ownership than by renting'. (quoted in WSD, p. 18) [8]

After systematically taking apart the key texts of the personal growth movement, and
disclosing their ideological pretexts, Gilbert goes on to develop her alternative, decon-
structionist approach, firstly in theory, and latterly via a discussion of examples of
students' writing and teachers' responses. The examples are less exciting than the
theoretical speculations; but Gilbert casts a genuinely new light, I think, on writing
pedagogy. Certainly, you would have to look hard to find this kind of approach
represented in pre- or inservice courses in the UK; and it goes without saying that it is
nowhere to be found in the official texts of the UK national curriculum in English, which
purvey a hectic mixture of other discourses-personal growth, grey-suited functionalism,
thinly disguised linguistic and class prejudice (MacLure, 1994).
McWilliam's (1992) focus is upon the discourses of teacher education in Australia. She
describes a discursive battle ground that is equally familiar in the UK-between the
progressive or avant-garde discourses of the teacher educators and the oppositional craft
discourses of student teachers. Trying to break out of the perpetual discord between the
two stances, and noting the failure of the rhetoric of 'critical reflexivity' and 'empower-
ment' to interrupt the pathologising of student dissent, McWilliam attempts a Derridean
deconstruction that inverts the usual hierarchy which privileges the avant-garde discourse
and marginalises the student/craft one, and reads the avant-garde discourse as just
another form of 'expert talk'. She proposes strategies for displacing the old oppositions.

Rescue by Inversion

Ultimately, though, McWilliam's deconstruction looks more like regular emancipatory

pedagogy. It just reverses the poles of the 'us/them' impasse, between students and
educators, making it a game that can now be won by/for the student underdogs (rather
than, say, a site of multiple and contested meanings).

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 Review Essay 289

Utopian Rescues

Interestingly, McWilliam brings on Habermas in the last act, to reconstruct the discourse
of teacher education as an ideal speech community 'in which individuals can all acquire
both universal and particular identities in order to develop their subjectivity and
uniqueness' (1992, p. 13). This tendency for poststructuralism to be recruited to emanci-
patory/critical projects, or rescued by them, is a characteristic 'turn' in recent educa-
tional theorizing. Indeed Habermas-and particularly his notion of the 'lifeworld' (e.g.
1987)-has figured more than once recently as the rescuer of discourse from the
uncertainties of poststructuralism [9]. Fairclough, for instance, uses the idea of the
lifeworld to privilege the everyday discourses of ordinary folks over the alien, regulatory
discourses of medicine and science (DSC, pp. 147-48). The lifeworld becomes the
repository of authentic, spontaneous experience.
Kemmis appeals to Habermas and his lifeworld too, to rescue evaluation theory from
the icy grasp of Foucault and postmodernism. Foucault is convincing, but he's cold: his
'cold, cynical, historical gaze' unmasks our freedom and remorselessly displays it as a
delusional flight out of one fly-bottle into another (1993, pp. 38-39). Habermas, on the
other hand, is warm: his opposition between the teeming vitality of the lifeworld and the
dead hand of the 'system' offers 'humane, convivial and rational resources with which to
confront the imperialism of institutional systematisation' (p. 51; Kemmis' italics). It's
worth noting that neither Fairclough nor Kemmis are disagreeing with Foucault: indeed
both give detailed and insightful expositions of Foucault's arguments. It is the implica-
tions of those arguments that they are unwilling to contemplate. Hence the setting up of
oppositions that allow them to draw back from that fatal embrace-to choose sponta-
neity rather than artifice, hope rather than despair, heat rather than cold. Happiness is
a warm philosopher. Other (to me, rather implausible) utopian rescues have been
attempted. Winter (1991) for instance, has recently suggested that action research is what
postmodernism has been waiting for, with 'reflective practice' and 'ownership' as the
devices that will rescue it for democracy. Critical pedagogy is another candidate for
rescue (e.g. Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991). Strange hybrid languages are one outcome of
these encounters: to say, for instance, that postmodernism 'celebrates difference' (Fitz-
clarence, 1990) is to bring a postmodern term under the emancipatory rubric of
celebration. It is a kind of oxymoron.
Sometimes the utopian counter-discourse is tacit rather than explicit. Maybin looks at
the informal talk of 10-12 year olds, and finds their conversations to be intertextually
constructed, in complex ways. They stretch (the conversations, that is) intermittently over
days and weeks, containing recurring themes that are taken up and extended collabora-
tively, gaining additional layers of meaning. These conversations are also intertextual in
an internal, Bakhtinian sense-'heavily populated with the voices of others-voices of
teachers, books, parents, friends, popsongs, jokes, playground rhymes, magazines' (1990,
p. 20). This desultory talk is not just a forum for working through important social
questions of friendship, fear, loyalty and identity; at the same time it is an extended
occasion for playing, collaboratively, with meanings. It is a 'rich resource for learning'.
Sarland's (1992) study of talk amongst a group of middle school boys strikes a similar
note: in re-enacting a folk tale, the boys wove together a carnivalesque patchwork
containing elements of slapstick humour, stand-up comedy complete with punchlines,
TV adverts, traditional folk narrative and personal experiences. One of the funny things
about work in this vein is that, far from attesting to the death of creativity and originality,
its overall tenor is one of appreciation of children's intertextual virtuosity. It seems,

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290 Review Essay

therefore, to smuggle back notions of creativity and authority via a covert opposition
between children's 'own' informal talk and an imposed and alien language of formal
schooling. This covert rescue is reminiscent of the overt rescue by recourse to the
lifeworld.
Studies that focus on teachers' involvement in classroom discourse tend to be less

celebratory. Here, the emphasis is often on the ways in which teachers (unwittingly
foreclose on the range of subjectivities and 'voices' available to their students. Walk-
erdine's (1989) analysis of the discourses of maths teaching reveals the ambivalen
positioning of girls within competing discourses, and shows how the pedagogic discour
reads/constructs girls' and boys' competence according to different criteria. Boys wh
scored highly in maths were likely to be judged by their teachers to have flair or spec
aptitude, while high scoring girls were more like to be thought 'just' to have worked har
or to be better at 'low level' skills. The double bind, of course, is that girls are tacitl
encouraged to develop just the sorts of skills-industriousness, neatness, methodic
procedures-that will subsequently be cited to downgrade their achievements (see also
Singh, 1993, on the discourses around technology and femininity in the classroom).
Davies' (1990) classroom study of the ways in which agency is assigned to (and withhe
from) children likewise reads classroom discourse as a site of struggle amongst competin
discourses-a struggle which, again, often results in different educational identities a
competences being available to girls and boys.
Walkerdine (1992) looks at the discourse of progressive pedagogy, with its lexicon o
'natural' development, nurture and reason. She characterises it as a Foucauldia
technology for producing self-regulating individuals. Progressivism offers a 'fantasy o
liberation' that renders powerlessness unspeakable, irrational and unnatural, and mak
women, as mothers and teachers, subservient to the needs of the 'natural child' that the
are in fact responsible for creating. 'The "Child" ', says Walkerdine, 'is created as a sign
to be read and calibrated within the pedagogic discourses regulating the classroom
(p. 22).
Walkerdine's article appears in an edited collection (Luke & Gore, 1992) of poststruc-
turalist feminist studies that are notable (in common with McWilliam above) for their
scepticism towards the magic words of critical pedagogy-empowerment, voice, dia-
logue, reflection. In a succession of articles these priestly words are interrogated and
found guilty of colluding with, rather than destabilising, the oppressive master narratives
of liberal humanism-of feeding their fantasies of progress and emancipation through the
exercise of reason, by singular and self-conscious individuals. The argument is, broadly,
that the discourse of critical pedagogy (e.g. Giroux, 1988) has failed to disrupt what Pfohl
(1992) would call the western whitemale categories that have been used to keep the
oppressed on the 'other' side of reason (that is, continually deemed, and doomed, to be
disorderly, driven by desire, inarticulate, unreflective, untamed).

Keeping the 'Other' in its Place

It is not hard to see the appeal of poststructuralism for feminist theorising (though it
certainly doesn't appeal to everybody--see Skeggs, 1991, for instance). It seems to
explode, or perhaps implode, the old categories that have kept 'woman' perpetually in
her place as the fixed and subordinate term in the old Adam-Eve dichotomy. It seems
to speak for indeterminacy, flux, desire and obliqueness, against order, hegemony,
abstraction and exclusion. So it chimes with the guerrilla tactics of resistance that have

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 Review Essay 291

been such a productive feature of women's struggles. However it's a double edged
weapon, as all concerned are well aware. As a set of struggles that have been founded
on claims for autonomous subjectivity, there are problems for feminism in embracing a
position defined by its radical rejection of the very notion of stable and singular identity.
In rejecting essentialism, feminist theorists continuously face the danger of rejecting their
own platform for action. And the problems are not just epistemological: there is a
political agenda too. Who, for instance, does it benefit to have women deconstructing
their own subjectivities? Lather quotes Fox-Genovese: 'Surely it is no coincidence that
the Western white male elite proclaimed the death of the subject at precisely the moment
at which it might have had to share that status with the women and peoples of other
races and classes who were beginning to challenge its supremacy?' (Lather, 1991, p. 28).
'Yeah, it's easy to give up identity when you got one', says bell hooks, thinking of black
experiences, although she comes down on the side of a postmodern analysis of race and
gender (quoted in Pfohl, 1992, p. 31).
Again, some kind of rhetorical deal has to be struck, that will allow the anti-hege-
monic, deconstructive energy of poststructuralism to be harnessed without undermining
the whole feminist enterprise. One tactic is to continuously assert the 'feminist first,
poststructuralist (or postmodernist) second' position. Thus Luke & Gore: 'Through the
naming of our feminisms as primary [...] we adamantly resist the hidden agenda of
erasure that drives much of current postmodernist theory and analysis' (1992, p. 5). This
gesture of privileging the 'old' discourse tries to establish in advance the terms on which
deals will be struck with the 'new' one(s).
Another version of the pre-emptive strategy is to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad'
versions of poststructuralism, or between good and bad bits, and offer to deal only in the
'good'. Thus Griffiths' (1992) terms on behalf of feminism specify-rather optimisti-
cally-those versions that will support, rather than undermine, modernist projects. Such
deals, that try to exclude versions or bits of poststructuralism, are a pervasive feature of
postmodernism's reception into, and by, other paradigms (see Lather, 1991). Aronowitz
& Giroux argue, equally optimistically, that critical pedagogy should select the best bits
from the 'flawed' discourses of both postmodernism and modernism, ensuring that each
'cancels out the worst dimensions of the other' (1991, p. 59).

Deconstruction: the double gesture

Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive, tactic recommended by poststructural

feminist theorists is to commit oneself to a double gesture: to work both inside and outside
of the hegemonic discourse. Davies for instance, in a study of the different readings that
can be made of 'feminist fairy tales', and the prospects for encouraging resistant reading
in school, concludes that '[r]esistance to male hegemony requires a simultaneous naming
of difference in order to draw attention to the way that difference is constituted, and the
deconstruction of that difference in order to move beyond it, not towards sameness, but
towards multiplicity' (1993, p. 158; see also Lather, 1991). To insist on occupying the
ground that one knows not to exist is an honourable act within the 'double movement'
of deconstruction, which according to Culler, works 'both inside and outside previous
categories and distinctions' (1983, p. 150). In deconstructing the 'violent hierarchy' that
subordinates literature to philosophy, or writing to speech, or language to thought,
Derrida did not claim to be able to step entirely outside those dualities--indeed the
deconstructive logic relies, he argued, on using (against itself, as it were) the very duality

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292 Review Essay

that is the target of the deconstruction. The double movement is also visible in Derrida's
account of meaning and context: 'no meaning can be determined out of context, but no
context permits saturation' (1979, p. 81) In other words, the meaning of a word or
utterance can't be specified in abstraction from its contexts of use; but those contexts are
inexhaustible and unforeseeable. Contrary to some interpretations, though, Derrida does
not conclude that this inescapable indeterminacy of meaning implies the end of theory:
again, the tactic is to work both 'inside and outside'. As Culler points out, G6del's proof
of incompleteness has not brought about the end of mathematics.
The double movement does mean, though, that deconstruction is vulnerable to a
range of charges running from nihilism, through covert elitism to hopeless relativism.
Locked into an 'ambidextrous relation', as Culler puts it, with its targets, it can always
be attacked 'both as an anarchism determined to disrupt any order whatever and, from
the opposite perspective, as an accessory to the hierarchies it denounces' (1983, p. 151).
Practitioners are especially likely to receive the counter gambit of the 'tu quoque', as
Ashmore (1989) calls it-the stock response to any anti-foundationalist stance, to the
effect that it undermines its own position [10]. The issues involved in the argument
around this-admittedly central issue-are too complex to go into in depth here. For the
moment I simply note that it's worth asking what an accuser might have at stake in
levelling the tu quoque charge: we might wonder, for instance, whether it is used as a kind
of rhetorical garlic-a device to ward off the fatal seductions of poststructuralism, and
thus avoid having to deal at all with its troublesome arguments.

4. The Lady Sawed in Half: research as rhetoric and reflexive critique

Much of the work discussed so far has avoided confronting head-on the question of the
complicity of its 'own' paradigm or field of enquiry in the textual construction of
knowledge/power, although that question is everywhere present as a kind of silent
challenge. A number of people, across a range of disciplines, have taken up that
challenge directly, examining their own field as a set of textual/rhetorical practices for
producing and legitimating knowledge, and policing disciplinary boundaries. From the
'sociology of scientific knowledge' (e.g. Woolgar, 1988), through 'critical anthropology'
(e.g. Clifford & Marcus, 1986) and 'social epistemology' (Fuller, 1992) to 'deconstructive
psychology' (Parker & Shotter, 1990), these approaches, whatever their (considerable)
differences, share a reflexive interest in the ways in which the knowledge base of their
particular field is constructed and maintained through textual/rhetorical practices. The
chapters in Making the Social Text represent a range of current work, from different social
science fields. Work in this vein has more or less abandoned foundationalist notions of
science and society. Thus Brown states in the Preface to MST that the contributors 'take
it for granted that social and cultural reality, and the social sciences themselves, are
linguistic constructions. Not only do we view society as a text, but we see scientific texts
themselves as rhetorical constructions' (MST, p. ix). There are a number of other
recurring issues in this kind of work:

(a) A sense of the (linguistic) complicity of the discipline in creating the objects it claims mere/y to study,
or in perpetuating the social conditions it claims to critique

Thus critical anthropologists have a keen sense of their implication in colonialism,

through their marginalisation of the alien 'Other' and their textual privileging of western

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 Review Essay 293

modes of rationality and subjectivity. Deconstructive psychologists know themselves, or

their predecessors, to have been the technologists of a Foucauldian regime, assisting in
the measurement, calibration, normalization and subjectification of the population in the
interests of governance.

(b) Interrogation of the authoritative discourses of the discipline

Linked to the sense of complicity, there is an intent to relinquish, or at least to make

permanently problematic, the specialist registers that have been used to ground claims to
disciplinary knowledge and expertise. One manifestation of this is a 'blurring of the
genres' across the humanities and social sciences (Geertz, 1988; see also Klein in MST).
Another is the deliberate attempt to step outside the usual academic genres, to play with
ways of writing otherwise.

(c) A view of research and knowledge production as, essentially, processes of reading and writing

A striking example is Geertz' (1988) virtuoso account of ethnography as a set of textual

procedures for producing and warranting anthropological knowledge. Geertz analyses
the texts of famous ethnographers, showing the different textual and rhetorical strategies
used by each. Atkinson's recent book (1990) takes a similar kind of stance towards
sociological ethnography. For instance, he compares an ethnographic study by Spradley
& Mann (1975) with a Hemingway short story, and shows how the former establishes its
ethnographic authority via the exactly the same kinds of rhetorical opening gambits as
the latter. Atkinson also shows how Willis' (1977) influential account of working class
boys' culture establishes the generality of its claims via a set of steps that lead the reader
firmly from specific instances to general principles.
In the educational field, Nespor & Barber (1991) have applied this sort of textual
analysis to an influential article by Shulman (1987). They take a critical look at 'the
teacher' as a rhetorical construction, pointing to the textual strategies used by Shulman
to 'naturalize' the theory and ideology embedded in his descriptions; to characterize
practice as the outcome of internal mental essences; to neutralize readers' scepticism or
dissent, and to dispatch competitors. Another example would be MacLure & Stronach
(1993b), which takes two different research portraits of the same teacher, and shows how
each account constructs a different identity via a range of narrative devices. In both of
these works, the authors acknowledge that there is no reason why their own arguments
should not be subjected to the same kind of textual interrogation. This is a strategy of
confession-it refers to the possibility of its own deconstruction, but holds back from
actually doing it. I should also point out, and here seems as good a place as any, that
confession is the strategy deployed in this review.
Treating research as text can be controversial, raising---as it does in a very direct
way-questions of relativism and the absence of foundations. Geertz notes that many
ethnographers judge it to be simply 'an unanthropological sort of thing to do'. Specific
accusations noted by Geertz include: dilettantism (ethnographers should be in the field,
not the library); self-indulgence (they should be studying the Tikopia, not anthropology's
own 'rhetorical machinery') and literary pretentiousness (anthropologists should write
good plain language and not fool around with tropes) (1988, pp. 2-3). 'But perhaps the
most intense objection of all', writes Geertz, is that
concentrating our gaze on the ways in which knowledge claims are advanced
undermines our capacity to take any of those claims seriously. Somehow,
attention to such matters as imagery, metaphor, phraseology, or voice is

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294 Review Essay

supposed to lead to a sort of corrosive relativism in which everything is more

or less a clever expression of opinion. Ethnography becomes, it is said, a mere
game of words, as poems and novels are supposed to be. Exposing how the
thing is done is to suggest that, like the lady sawed in half, it isn't done at all.
(1988, p. 3)
Geertz is quite bracing, however, about the possibility, indeed the moral imperative, of
deconstructing ethnography's 'easy realism' and fully acknowledging the rhetorical
nature of its pretensions to knowledge-without seeing any need to lapse into the 'moral
hypochondria' that he discerns in other, younger anthropologists who take the whole
thing too seriously. I am not sure whether Geertz is practising the double gesture of
deconstruction here, or just refusing to look down lest, like Wile. E. Coyote as he runs
off the edge of the cartoon cliff, he notices he is falling. Maybe there is little difference
between these two acts.

Many practitioners of rhetorical analysis continue to write more or less within the
generic conventions of their own discipline. Geertz, for instance, does not depart far from
a recognizably scholarly discourse, of an urbane and ironic cast; nor does Atkinson.
There have been attempts, however, to step outside the usual genres of research writing,
at least some of the time. Mulkay (1985), for instance, tries to demystify the authoritative
language of the sciences, including his own, by casting part of his discussion in the form
of a play. Instances within education are more modest. Griffiths (1992) intersperses
passages of 'normal' qualitative research discourse with pastiche letters to the reader. A
conference paper that I co-wrote with Ian Stronach had a last section ('Inconclusions')
that incorporated our 'own' voices in transcript form squabbling about how the text had
come to be written and what we had covertly suppressed to serve our own ideological
interests. Embarrassed by our own attempt at postmodern 'playfulness', we dropped that
section when the paper appeared as a chapter in a book [11]. Footnote 1 in this review
is a faintly self-referential touch in a text that is, as I have already confessed, otherwise
largely dedicated to the strategy of confession.
Such examples of self-referential play begin to flirt with a scepticism about the
grounding of their own arguments. However their capacity seriously to disrupt the
production of sense is limited, since they are only half-hearted, at best, in their playing
of the game. All too often they result in no more than a kind of intermittent leaden
playfulness that allows the 'serious' discourse in the remainder of the text to go on doing
the authoritative work.[12] The authors don't really abandon their textual authority,
although they may feel better about being seen to have put it temporarily up for grabs.
Nespor & Barber argue that such renunciation is, in any case, impossible:
Although such strategies are a powerful means of making problematic the
traditional rhetorical techniques of research writing, it would be an illusion to
assume that they can increase the reflexivity of a text or make it somehow less
rhetorical. Self-referential discussions of the rhetorical structure of one's text
are themselves analyzable as rhetorical devices, as are additional commentaries
on those commentaries, and so on, in an infinite regress. There is no
non-rhetorical vantage point from which to survey a text-our own or anyone
else's. (1991, p. 430)
But, granted that there is no way to know, finally, one's own rhetorical strategies and
devices for producing meaning, it is still possible to keep these things in a state of
permanent irresolution--to give oneself up completely (or as completely as possible) to
the 'play' of meaning and the deconstructive refusal to 'arrest' that play. This is the last
resort--the ludic strategy.

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 Review Essay 295

5. The Last Resort: the ludic strategy

At first sight it is hard to see why anyone would want to play this game of not making
sense-at least according to the conventions and logics of the culture. Why should we
want to deny ourselves, as Lyotard (1984) recommends, the 'solace of good forms'? As
a strategy it certainly has many more critics than practitioners. Nevertheless, it's a serious
game, played out of the conviction of the epistemological and political necessity of
practising what you preach: that it's no good just to critique the ignorant dualities of
'rational' argumentation, the bluff appeal of 'plain language', the deceptive innocence of
realist narrative, while continuing to use these devices to frame the critique. Because in
doing so, you are doomed to reconstruct that metaphysical world of binary oppositions
that's built on the fantasy of 'presence'-of all the good things that are in some sense
'here' because of all the opposite, bad things that are not: reason not emotion; thought
not language; reality not rhetoric; lifeworld not system and so on. The aim of
deconstruction is to displace those complacent oppositions; but by refusing to step outside
the usual ways of writing/talking it's impossible to escape the 'epistemology of fission'
(Deniivo, after Baudrillard, MST, p. 46) that always makes it possible for them to
re-enter the discourse.

This is not 'just' an epistemological issue: the argument, as we have seen, is that the
crude oppositions of reason and binary logic have been used to keep the oppressed and
the marginal on the 'other' side of reason and virtue-while, of course, relying for their
very existence and legitimation on those excluded others. Minh-Ha, writing of post-col-
onial experiences, especially of women, considers 'clarity' to be a 'means of subjection'-
deeply complicit in the deeds of imperialism as part of the linguistic subordination of
peoples through imposed languages and 'correct writing' (1989, p. 17). To fail to disrupt
the 'epistemology of fission' is to fail, continuingly, to disrupt those logics of exclusion/
oppression.
Derrida's relentless punning, his typographical experiments, and indeed the very
'difficulty' of his writing, can be read as a willed renunciation of the usual oppositions
that privilege literal over figurative language, philosophy over literature; and a refusal to
arrest the play of the signifier in order to claim some spurious ground of presence. Renee
Deniivo's article in MST is also an example of ludic writing. Its title alone should give
a flavour of 'her' style: 'No Anthro-Apologies, or Der(r)idding a Discipline'. You may
also have guessed that Dentivo is a pseudonym. Lyotard has recommended the practise
of 'svelte discourse' (see Sim, 1988)-a kind of textual dance that refuses to stand still
long enough to establish a determinate position where it can be held accountable for its
arguments. A clear (and notorious) version of the ludic manifesto is that of Deleuze &
Guattari:

Form rhizomes and not roots, never plant! Don't sow, forage! Be neither a One
nor a Many, but multiplicities! Form a line, never a point! Speed transforms
the point into a line. Be fast, even while standing still! Line of chance, line of
hips, line of flight. Don't arouse the General in yourself! Make maps, not
photographs or drawings. Be the Pink Panther, and let your loves be like the
wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. (1981, p. 49)

But it has to be admitted that, however convincing the internal arguments, the ludic
strategy causes enormous problems in terms of its relationships with its (usually much less

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296 Review Essay

playfully inclined) readers. Sim (1988) describes the puzzlement (recalling Geertz'
account of anthropological hostility) that Lyotard's paper on svelte discourse caused
when it was submitted to the editorial board of Radical Philosophy-was it an unphilosoph-
ical sort of thing to do? Or was it an un-English sort of thing (philosophically speaking)
to do? Was it radical? Was it rubbish? (It was not accepted by the journal). Lyotard might
reply that that sort of wrong-footing of expectations was precisely the point. But to the
extent that it succeeds, it becomes incapable of being communicated to anybody.
A lot of people think that is too high a price to pay-not only on epistemological
grounds, but also on political, and ultimately moral ones. One of the most notable
features of modernism's hostility to the linguistic excesses of postmodernism is the
intensely moral flavour of its accusations. Connor, in one of the more temperate critiques
around, argues that although the ludic strategy 'may begin with the attempt to politicize
the realm of the aesthetic, it can invert easily into the distracting and self-promoting
aestheticization of politics' (1989, p. 218). For many opponents, it is mere textual fiddling
while oppression goes unchecked. One of the most common accusations from the left,
therefore, is that it is reactionary (cf. Sholte's, 1987, description of Tyler's text-based
anthropology as 'bourgeois chique'). A large and diverse collection of moral, political and
ethical slurs have now collected around the name of postmodernism, some of which have
already been noted: nihilist, relativist, dehumanising, self-indulgent, dilettante, covertly
hegemonic, sexist, elitist [13]. One of the early targets of this febrile opposition, the
literary theorist Hassan, was prompted to include a tongue-in-cheek health warning in
the preface to one of his more arcane writing experiments: 'There is no reason for alarm:
I have no influence on the profession to corrupt the young' (1982, p. 45) [14].
The same hostilities that have been engaged in the other social sciences can be seen,
currently, in education. In fact, it is not necessary to be terribly ludic at all, in order to
start to incur the now familiar accusations of self-indulgence and worse [15]. Lather's
(1991) rather solemn book is dismissed by Maynard as 'vanity ethnography', 'proselytis-
ing postmodernism' and 'doctrinaire' on account of its 'narrowly conceived discursive
concerns' (1993, pp. 329, 331). McWilliam complains of 'postmodernist tension' (yes,
PMT) brought on by the excesses of the 'galloping theory', unreadability, elitism,
apoliticism, cynicism and narcissism that she finds in educational attempts at postmod-
ernism. This, she thinks, is the fault of 'those French structuralists and their clones for
whom 'cute and clever' is preferable to 'cogent and coherent' (1993, p. 211). And
McWilliam is, she says, a convert. Skeggs (1991) considers postmodernist discourse to be
just one more boys' toy-another hegemonic discourse that excludes pretty well every-
body outside its self-referential circle. So condensed and allusive has the circle of hostile
commentary become that we find casual little vilifications, almost in asides, that would
look very strange if we did not know that they 'stand for' a veritable corpus of objection:
for instance, in the middle of an otherwise very appreciative review of Ball's oeuvre, White
& Crump remark that he 'has fallen a little too much under the spell of Monseigneur
Foucault for our liking' (1993, p. 418).

5. Conclusion: running, jumping and standing still

None of these criticisms is necessarily unfounded, and if nothing else they have made
educational debate that much livelier. Certainly there is no excuse for treating them as
knee-jerk reactions: the issues they raise simply cannot be sidestepped. But neither should
they be allowed to work simply as devices wielded by a mature, and perhaps no longer
terribly effective set of paradigms, in order to keep themselves in the dark about the poor

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 Review Essay 297

prospects of their grand schemes and their big stories. Soper sketches this caricature of
the dispute between the left/political metaphysicians of modernism and the ludic jesters
of postmodernism:
on the one side [stand] the dogged metaphysicians, a fierce and burly crew,
stalwartly defending various bedrocks and foundations by means of an assort-
ment of trusty but clankingly mechanical concepts such as 'class', 'materialism',
'humanism', 'literary merit', 'transcendence' and so forth. Obsolete as these
weapons are, they have the distinct advantage that in all the dust thrown up
by their being flailed around, their wielders do not realize how seldom they
connect with their opponents. On the other side stands the opposition, the
feline ironists and revellers in relativism, dancing lightheartedly upon the
waters of difirance, deflecting all foundationalist blows with an adroitly directed
ludic laser beam. Masters of situationist strategy, they sidestep the heavy
military engagement by refusing to do anything but play. (1991, p. 122)
Soper, after carrying out an elegant analysis of the mutually incompatible nature of the
two positions, feels impelled to jump, in the end, back into the metaphysicians'
camp-unable to accept poststructuralism's denial of its covert value positions. She feels,
as do I, that value always reinserts itself behind the back of the antifoundationalist
rhetoric (see also Connor, 1992). Thus the 'rescue' strategies that I outlined above seem
inevitable. I'm not sure, however, that the only option is to jump one way or the other.
As long as the debate between postmodernism and modernism endless recycles itself as
one more binary battle, it seems doomed to be no more than a set of postures that allows
the left/emancipatory metaphysicians always to retreat to the moral high ground, and
the ludic(rous) jesters to keep on making faces at them-a frozen tableau held in place
by the 'epistemology of fission', and therefore, in Deniivo's/Baudrillard's words, an
'event without consequence' (MST, p. 47). The trouble is, the other possibilities seem no
less fraught. The embrace of discourse is always going to be both seduction and
stranglehold. How to choose, in the end, or even in the meantime, between running,
jumping and standing still?

Acknowledgement
Thanks to Ian Stronach for his timely comments.

Correspondence. Maggie MacLure, Centre for Applied Research in Education, School of

Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

NOTES

[1] Note the rhetorical strategy here: it is not finally up to 'me' (as 'author'? as 'person'?) to
text is 'about'. 'You' may read it quite otherwise.
[2] There are other, 'safer' sorts of contemporary discourse approaches that are not discu
which are also exerting an influence on educational theory and practice-notably Vygot
example papers in Rogoff & Wertsch (1984).
[3] Fairclough also mentions a more general semantic/ideological movement between texts
'semantic restructuring'. There are a number of references in other works to semantic logi
between texts. Derrida, for instance, describes a process of 'semantic impoverishment' in li
The term is not used deprecatingly however; indeed it indicates a kind of textual richness t
relentless repetition of key words or phrases, to the point where they lose their specific mea

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 298 Review Essay

and become a kind of structural, organising element of the text as a whole (Derrida, quoted in Culler,
1983, p. 210). There is also Derrida's notion of 'paleonymics'-the (deliberate) retention of old words
after they have had new meanings 'grafted' onto them, especially as the outcome of deconstruction.
[4] This involves crumpled, undyed or monochrome fabrics with the seams on the outside, recycled bits (ie
'quotations') of the designer's own past collections, or postmodern patchworks assembled from dissonant
fragments of other garments (e.g. Brampton, 1993).
[5] I can't see anything, for instance, in the logic of Hammersley's extended 'deconstruction' of qualitative
vs quantitative method that makes it anything other than a standard critique from within the mainstream
rhetoric of qualitative enquiry-although, to be fair, neither does he. As he points out in a footnote with
a strangely triumphant tone: 'My use of the term 'deconstructing' in the title of this chapter is no more
than a rhetorical flourish; my philosophical assumptions are very different from those of deconstruction-
ists. However, given their views about meaning, they can have no justifiable complaint against my theft
of this term!' (1992, p. 172). I'm left wondering why he wanted to make that flourish.
[6] There are other versions of intertextuality that imply a much more radical critique of foundational
theories of discourse. For Barthes, Derrida or Kristeva, in different ways, intertextuality is not just one
among many features of discourse organisation, but a condition of the possibility of meaning and the
production of texts in general. In Hartman's (1992) account, text, reader, author and context are all
mutually 'co-constituted' in intertextuality.
[7] Such as Woolgar (1988), Latour (1987), or Collins (1985).
[8] Another of Graves' metaphors, scarcely less bizarre, relates to writing as an expression of 'inner' things:
'Writing, real writing, is exposure of our innermost thoughts and feelings. When we ask children to write
sincerely, we ask them to undress'. Teachers have got to get naked too, though. If they don't, they have
'the same effect as the fully dressed visitor to a nudist camp who blunders around gaping at others'
nakedness' (both quotes from WSD, p. 24).
[9] This is hardly surprising as a rescue strategy, since Habermas' dispute with Lyotard across the battle lines
of modernity/postmodernity (1981) is one of the key texts in the modernist armoury of defences against
the postmodern turn.
[10] A recent example of the tu quoque (others are not hard to find) is Hammersley's (1992, p. 49) critique of
the 'self-refuting' character of 'relativism'.
[11] The conference paper was MacLure & Stronach (1991), and the altered chapter was MacLure &
Stronach (1993a).
[12] As Lee (1990) reminds us, there's nothing inescapably radical, epistemologically, about playing self-refer-
entially with the rules of realism. It is done all the time in adverts without, one presumes, undermining
the structures of comprehensibility and persuasion.
[13] Perhaps this is an instance of Fairclough's notion of 'overwording'-see above.
[14] Foucault, on the other hand, positively welcomed the chance to corrupt the young: 'I'm very proud that
some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking
of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong' (1988, p. 13). I don't imagine that
this statement will do much to endear him to his critics.

[15] Anecdotally: a woman colleague and friend recently charged me with the 'rape' of a well-known 19th
century woman, when I suggested that a postmodern alternative to a biography that tried to capture her
'essence' might be to look at the texts that had grown up around this figure, and what this might tell us
about notions such as the 'exemplary woman'. A discourse-based approach to subjectivity and identity
is easily read as a dehumanising turn.

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