C-CS

Discursive Positioning

ABSTRACT

We make mental models of our world. We organize them synchronically and diachronically in our episodic memory. We also categorize experiences by situations (scripts). Situations are at root inter-personal. Persons in situations occupy positions. We occupy "subject positions." These positions convey social values and thereby affect us positively or negatively. The sum of all the situated positions in our memories constitute our worldviews.

Our discourse reflects the ways in which we conceptualize and image our experiences.

We make mental models of our world

The view that we make mental models of our world is practically axiomatic in cognitive psychology. The work of Philip Johnson-Laird is very widely accepted as the standard view. For Johnson-Laird a mental model is the result of perception and comprehension and contrasts with pro positional representations. "Mental Models," The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, 525-527. Ruth M. J. Byrne in her Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology entry, "mental models," notes that "Discourse rarely provides us with a fully explicit description of a situation; instead we appear to make 'bridging' inferences whose conclusions have their source in a model of the situation" (224). She also has a clear account of Johnson-Laird's conception of a mental model matching pro positional representations

We organize them synchronically and diachronically in our autobiographical memory

It is also widely acknowledged that we store our experiences in our "autobiographical memories." Since we recall them either with respect to time or space, it can be said that they are organized chronologically and situationally. Chronological organization has a diachronic (from present to past) and a synchronic (same time) axis.

Episodic memory does exactly what the other forms of memory do not and can not do—it enables the individual to mentally "travel back into her personal past. . . .Episodic memory has evolved from other forms of memory, and obeys the basic time relations of its constituent mileposts: The individual does something at Time 1 and remembers it at Time 2. But episodic memory differs from all others in that at Time 2, its time's arrow is not an arrow, it loops back to Time 1. Tulving, E. (1998). Neurocognitive Processes of Human Memory. (265)

I argue (from a practical perspective) that our memories are organized (at least in part) in terms of relations between the past and present, that is, with respect to a diachronic/synchronic axis. In recalling our past histories, we follow a diachronic chain of events that is networked to a present point in time. For example, the thought of my wife can easily evoke the time when we first met. In other words, my understanding of my wife is networked in my personal history in a synchronic/diachronic matrix from which I can retrieve various memories. The past, in this sense, has a paradigmatic relation to syntagmatic-synchronic moments in time—my past experiences involving my wife frame my present understanding of her .

We also categorize experiences by situations (scripts)

The notion that we build virtual worlds in our minds by assembling remembered experiences and re-assembling them to map onto present experiences has a lengthy history.

At one juncture in this history (1977), Roger Schank and Robert Abelson published Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, a work on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Psychology. Schank refined his conception of a script as a “knowledge structure”in Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning In Computers And People (1982). As is clear from his subtitle, he was working in the “minds are like computers” tradition. In subsequent publications (Tell Me a Story (1990) and Dynamic Memory Revisited 1999, he took a more psychological view and linked the concept of a script to that of a story

According to Schank and Abelson (Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding) we can invoke a large number of scripts, that is, “generalized knowledge structures pertaining to routine, frequently encountered situations or events” that allow us to anticipate the course of action and eventual outcomes. (See Ashcraft, Fundamentals of Cognition, 206).

Patricia Harkin gives a succinct account of it in her, "Understanding Virtual Experiences by Configuring Them":

In Shank’s account, persons have general memories of events that become cognitive schema enabling them to navigate particular circumstances. If, for example, I know that the Chicago Transit Authority requires exact change and the fare is $2, I know that I can’t hand the driver a five dollar bill and expect him to give me $3 and a ride to work. Drivers are not allowed to give passengers change. Past experiences help us to navigate unfamiliar ones. If I enter a restaurant where I have never been before, the chances are good that I’I'll pick up clues from the décor, the entrance, the ambient lighting, the presence of absence of music (or MUZAK), the way people are dressed, the distance between tables, and so forth, about what kind of restaurant this is, how much it’s likely to cost me, and whether the menu will have a leather cover with gold tassels or be covered in plastic with ketchup stains. (Harkin, "Understanding Virtual Experiences By Configuring Them", [?])

From an artificial intelligence perspective, Routines can also be understood as Schank’s "scripts" or MOPs . Routines can be understood from a transactional analysis perspective, as "scripts people live" (Steiner, Scripts People Live). They can also be understood in DeCerteau’s sense from the perspective of cultural anthropological as "everyday practices" (de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life ). Further scripts can be understood as "scripts" in the sense of "film scripts" or "VR scripts." In Communication Studies, scripts are features of "interpersonal communication."

From a C-CS perspective,, a script contains inter-linked routines. These cultural practices are embedded in the way that a specific group generally constructs its cognitive map of the world. Cultural practices are everyday routines: these are series of events that form sequences of daily activities such as "going to the Cotton Club." Some scripts mentioned in the literature are configurations. As configurations, they have their impact as narrative transforms, in the sense of Propp’s morphology—narrative structures that exist as strings of "functions." (See Ascraft’s adaption of scripts from Schank & Abelson 206). The form in which they are given parallels Propp’s example of how we understand narrative functions. In this capacity they are "abstract structures" that carry "archetypes" of experience.

Scripts are situated in scenarios. A scenario is a set of scripts not quite forming a story but delineating a situation out of which a story emerges. Scenarios are exigencies dramatized. Scripts > scenarios > stories. Each is a larger narrative unit encompassing the former. These “theorems” allow for the following hypotheses: In the Virtual Harlem project, scripts can link students to the Harlem Renaissance by allowing them to identify with everyday routines in the 1930s. That these scripts are memorable can embed the idea of the Harlem Renaissance in a lived present history as a configuration of a cultural past. They operate as "myths" to live by (McAdams Stories We Live By ) or "equipment for living" (Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form, 253-262).

Situations are at root inter-personal

The proposition that "situations are interpersonal" requires some explanation. To say that some situations are inter-personal is a truism but to say that all situations are interpersonal goes against common sense.

The first objection is likely to be that individuals are frequently in situations by themselves. This is clearly the case. However, in most situations, individuals talk to themselves. In fact it is almost impossible not to carry on a conversation with yourself while awake. Generally we refer to self-talk as intra-personal communication. However, in self-talk "someone" speaks and "someone" listens. The speaker and the listener in this interior dialogue are not identical.. The difference between the two is a difference of perspective on the situation which is captured in the image of an angel sitting on a person's right shoulder whispering into his ear and the devil on his left shoulder whispering into his ear.. In this context, we can say that one persona of an individual is speaking to another persona of the same individual. In this sense, inter-persona communication is "inter-personal."

The other likely objection is that mass communication is not inter-personal because many persons addresses many persons in different places and often at different times. However, despite the number of persons and the temporal and spatial distances between them, it is still the case that persons communicate with persons. Hence mass communication is at root interpersonal.

Another possible objection is that "machines communicate with each other." However, this is a personification of inanimate objects.and the term "communicate" is used here only by analogy.

Acknowledging the usefulness of the distinctions mentioned above, I want to emphasize the fact that situations are invariably governed by the communications that accompany them, that is, by discourses associated with them.. The significance of this observation is that situations invariably contain at least two perspectives on them. If situations entail different perspectives, then they are shaped by the positions and their relations, at least, discursively

Persons in situations occupy positions

In social psychology, scripts are defined as “ways of behaving socially that we learn implicitly from our culture.” This suggests that “scripting” or “configuring” is usually mediated by mythoi or analogs available in the culture. (Aronson, et al., Social Psychology, 477). The authors of Social Psychology suggest that adolescents, date rape studies show, learn sexual scripts that dispose them to believe that women resist sexual advances and therefore that males need to be persistent. The sexual "role" or persona of the male in the situation of dating is to play the part of the aggressor, take the initiative, and so on.

“Roles” are “shared expectations in a group about how particular people are supposed to behave” (Aronson, et. al., 1999, 340). Roles, thus defined, have to be considered a subset of scripts.

Consider the following story told by a nun about the effects of an "anger clinic" that she attended:

Nun: Before that [the clinic] I was a people pleaser. I
grew up being a people pleaser. I'm fourth in the family
and that made a lot of difference. The only way I could
get along is really by pleasing my parents all the time.
I learned I don't have to please anybody else, I can
please my self. And once I became really convinced I can
please my self, I don't have to do what you're telling
me, then I became free and I was able to tell them
"hey, I don't want to do that!"
Donahue: Thanks a lot sister .. .
Audience: (Applause)

In lines 23-2 6, the nun is narrating a phase of life in which she positions herself solely within a relationship in which her primary task was to work for others, as both a "people pleaser" and "fourth in the family." So positioned, relational duties to others overshadowed senses of her self. In lines 27-29, she repositions her story through the term self as a way of expressing her newly acquired agentive standing. Now, she is one who is not solely in a constraining relation (as a "people pleaser"), but a "self" who is "free" from such constraint. Further, she is able to assert that this is so (line 31). Stories such as this one again show a vacillating form of talk. about social identities. Yet here, the movement is not explicitly from positions of gender difference to commonality, as above(although there are similarities), but from an explicit, constraining relatedness to an extricable, uniquely independent site of reflectiveness and expressiveness. The nun's story tells us why she went to an anger clinic: to learn to extricate her being from obligatory constraints and thus to discover her self. Extract 3: (Carbaugh, 1988b, p. 69-70)

The difference perspectives of personae or persons in a situation are "positions" they assume in connection with their social roles.

We occupy "subject positions.

In the social institution of the university, professors occupy "subject-positions." They are ranked--Assistant, Associate and Full. These titles entitle them to a "position" in the institution of criticism with a status relative to other positions. Through the ways professors talk and think about themselves and are talked and thought about, they are subjected to positions relative to others (e.g., students) in the hierarchical structure of power relations that makes up the university. Subjects are identified by the positions they occupy.

In Althusser's famous view, we acquire our subject positions by being called to them. He wrote: "I shall then suggest that ideology . . . 'recruits subjects . . . or 'transforms' . . . individuals into subjects . . . by interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!'" (71, 174). A person so interpellated or hailed recognizes "that the hail was 'really' addressed to him, and that it was really him who was hailed (and not someone else)" (174).

A person, by being called a "researcher" or a "professor" is called, or hailed, by the institution in which the terms "researcher" and "professor" function. That person recognizes that he is, indeed, a professional researcher. He thus believes in the reality of his calling and all that it entails within the institution of the university. In Althusser's view, "The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing" because ideology, in Althusser's view, produces subjects (175). Subjects are positioned by the discursive formations to which they are subjugated.1 Persons are subject to discourses that position them in particular mappings of a world. Universities map the world by departmentalizing it. Each department studies some aspect of our world; each has as its subject matter a particular field.

Althusser describes subjects as interpolated into (automatically drawn into) institutional state apparatuses such as schools, religions, armies, or governments by being assigned a position there in relation to other persons who belong to the institution. Althusser" Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

A subject position is the way in which persons are positioned by others discursively. The position one assumes within a group or an institution by virtue of the practices one performs. By virtue of behaving like a student (studying) one is given or one assumes a position in relation to others in the same school (e.g., groundskeepers, secretaries) that governs how you and they behave.

These positions convey social values and thereby affect us positively or negatively.

In Positioning Theory, Rom Harre & Lagenhove write:

A position in a conversation, then, is a metaphorical concept through reference to which a person's 'moral' and personal attributes as a speaker are compendiously collected. One can position oneself or be positioned as e.g., powerful or powerless, confident or apologetic, dominant or submissive, definitive or tentative, authorized or unauthorized, and so on. A 'position' can be specified by reference to how a speaker's contributions are bearable with respect to these and other polarities of character, and sometimes even of role. Positioned as dependent, one's cry of pain is hearable as a plea for help. But positioned as dominant, a similar cry can be heard as a protest or even as a reprimand. It can easily be seen that the social force of an action and the position of the actor and interactors mutually determine one another.

Conversations have storylines and the positions people take in a conversation will be linked to these storylines. Someone can be seen as acting like a teacher in the way his/her talk takes on a familiar form: the storyline of instruction, of the goings-on in the classroom. Living out in one's speech and actions one of the pedagogical storylines involves adopting such and such a position, for example having certain obligations to the students, and at the same time it makes one's sayings and doings relatively determinate as social acts of instruction, correction, reprimand, congratulation and so on.

They indicate that positions in conversations are "metaphorical." However, the metaphors emerge from the way situations are construed in our imaginations. thus, from our point of view, the more accurate characterization is that discursive positions are virtual, not actual.

The sum of all the situated positions in our memories constitute our worldviews

In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz remarks:

In recent anthropological discussion, the moral (and aesthetic) aspects of a given culture, the evaluative elements, have commonly been summed up in the term "ethos," while the cognitive, existential aspects have been designated by the term "world view." A people's ethos is the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects. Their world view is their picture of the way things in sheer actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society. It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order. Religious belief and ritual confront and mutually confirm one another; the ethos is made intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life implied by the actual state of affairs which the world view describes, and the world view is made emotionally acceptable by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic expression. (126-127)

The composite of remembered situations understood in temporal and spatial relationship to each other and understood as the way things are and have been constitutes a "world view"—a memory system arranged chronologically and geographically along synchronic and diachronic axes. “… the German word Weltangschauung … was the standard term used to convey the notion of a set of beliefs that underlie and shape all human action” (Marshall, Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science, 8). In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, David Hermon elaborates on Bruner's view that stories "can be cobbled together to form a "culture," "history," or "tradition" (164).

As Cobern points out, “A worldview refers to the culturally dependent, implicit, fundamental organization of the mind. This implicit organization is composed of presuppositions that predispose one to feel, think, and act in predictable patters. (Everyday Thoughts about Nature: A Worldview Investigation of Important Concepts Students Use to Make Sense of Nature with Specific Attention of Science, 2)

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Notes:

. [ The terms "diachronic/synchronic. (Gk 'through/across time' and 'together time') were coined c.1913 by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). A diachronic approach to the study of a language (or languages) involves an examination of its origins, development, history and change. In contrast, the synchronic approach entails the study of a linguistic system in a particular state, without reference to time. The importance of a synchronic approach to an understanding of language lies in the fact that for Saussure each sign has no properties other than the specific relational ones which define it within its own synchronic system." Cuddon, J. A. (1991). The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.

Although the term "synchrony" and "diachrony" entered conventional linguistic terminology only with Ferdinand de Saussure, they can be defined independently of the Saussurian theses. A linguistic phenomenon is said to be synchronic when all the elements and factors that it brings into play belong to one and same moment of one and the same language (that is, to a single language state). It is diachronic when it brings into play elements and factors belonging to different states of development of a single language." Ducrot, O., & Todorov, T. (1983). Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. [emphasis mine. I use this distinction analogously with respect to personal histories and worldviews.]

Following Ducrot and Todorov, I do not include "the Saussurian theses" in my working definition of the diachronic/synchronic axis. Saussure's emphasis on studying language as a synchronic system without linking it to its diachronic past, thus simplifying the nodes in the system turns a dynamic process into a static grid.] ...

[This relationship has to be understood in terms of a distinction such as plot/story. A story (as a chronological narrative) can be told in segments that occur at different points in time. A reader typically understands the plot by locating each event in a story (chronological) sequence. ] ...