NOTES ON

HOLLWAY, Wendy, “Gender Difference and the production of Subjectivity” (1984)

1) My approach to subjectivity is through the meanings and incorporated values which attach to a person’s practices and provide the powers through which he or she can position him- or herself in relation to others. (1/27)

2) …I focus on individual women’s and men’s subjectivity, that is the product of their history of positioning in discourse, and the way this constructs their investments in taking up gender-differentiated positioning in heterosexual relations (thereby reproducing the discourses). (1/27)

3) Foucault’s use of the term discourse is historical and this is crucial to the analytic power of the concept. For my purposes the emphasis must be shifted in order to understand how at a specific moment several coexisting and potentially contradictory discourses concerning sexuality make available different positions and different powers for men and women. (3/27)

4) I delineated three discourses: the male sexual drive discourse; the have/hold discourse; and the permissive discourse. … For my purpose however, what is more important is the use I make of these three in my analysis of the effects of gender difference in positioning subjects. (3/27)

5) The position for a woman in this set of meanings <<given by the permissive discourse>> is as the object that precipitates men’s natural sexual urges. (5/27)

6) Discourses make available positions for subjects to take up. These positions are in relation to other people. Like the subject and object of a sentence (and indeed expressed through such a grammar), women and men are placed in relation to each other through the meanings which a particular discourse makes available: ‘the female who yields and submits’ to the man (Storr, quoted on p, 231) (7/27)

7) Because discourses do not exist independently of their reproduction through the practices and meanings of particular women and men, we must account for changes in the dominance of certain discourses, and the development of new ones (for example those being articulated by feminists) by taking account of men’s and women’s subjectivity. Why do men choose’ to position themselves as subjects of the discourse of male sexual drive? Why do women continue to position themselves as it objects? What meanings might this have for women? How do contradictions between the have/hold and male sexual drive discourses produce the practices of particular heterosexual relationship? Do the practices signify differently for women and men, because they are being read through different discourses? (7/27)

8) Discourse determinism comes up against the old problem of agency typical of all sorts of social determinism. … The advantage of the idea that current at any one time are competing, potentially contradictory discourses (concerning for example sexuality) rather than a single patriarchal ideology, is that we can then pose the question, how is it that people take up positions in one discourse rather than another? (8/27)

DAVIES, Bronwyn & HARRE, Rom, “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves” (1989) --- reproduced in a slightly changed version in Harre & van Langenhove (1999)

9) … positioning can be used to facilitate the thinking of linguistically oriented social analysts in ways that the use of the concept of ‘role’ prevented. In particular the new concept helps focus attention on dynamic aspects of encounters in contrast to the way in which the use of ‘role’ serves toi highlight static, formal and ritualistic aspects. … The recognition and the way in which the individual’s ‘subjectivity’ is generated through the learning and use of certain discursive practices are commensurate with the ‘new psycho-socio-linguistics’ (Davies, 1989; Henriques et al., 1984; Potter & Wetherall, 1988; Weedon, 1987). (1/15)

10) A particular strength of the poststructuralist research paradigm … is that it recognises both the constitutive force of discourse, and in particular of discursive practices and at the same time recognises that people are capable of exercising choice in relation to those practices. We shall argue that the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions. A subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location for persons within the structure of rights for those that use that repertoire. Once having taken up a particular position as one's own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point of that position and in terms of the particular images, metaphors, story lines and concepts which are made relevant within the particular discursive practice in which they are positioned. (3/15)

11) An individual emerges through the processes of social interaction, not as a relatively fixed end product but as one who is constituted and reconstituted through the various discursive practices in which they participate. Accordingly, who one is always an open question with a shifting answer depending upon the positions made available within one's own and others' discursive practices and within those practices, the stories through which we make sense of our own and others' lives. Stories are located within a number of different discourses, and thus vary dramatically in terms of the language used, the concepts, issues and moral judgements made relevant and the subject positions made available within them. In this way poststructuralism shades into narratology. (3/15)

12) Positioning, as we will use it is the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines. There can be interactive positioning in which what one person says positions another. And there can be reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself. However it would be a mistake to assume that, in either case, positioning is necessarily intentional. One lives one's life in terms of one's ongoingly produced self, whoever might be responsible for its production. (4/15)

13) Positions are identified in part by extracting the autobiographical aspects of a conversation in which it becomes possible to find out how each conversant conceives of themselves and of the other participants by seeing what position they take up and in what story, and how they are then positioned. (4/15)

14) In telling a fragment of his or her autobiography a speaker assigns parts and characters in the episodes described, both to themselves and to other people, including those taking part in the conversation. In this respect the structure of an anecdote serving as a fragment of an autobiography is no different from a fairy tale or other work of narrative fiction. By giving people parts in a story, whether it be explicit or implicit, a speaker makes available a subject position which the other speaker in the normal course of events would take up. A person can be said thus to 'have been positioned' by another speaker. (4 & 5/15)

15) One speaker can position others by adopting a story line which incorporates a particular interpretation of cultural stereotypes to which they are 'invited' to conform, indeed are required to conform if they are to continue to converse with the first speaker in such a way as to contribute to that person's story line. (6/15)

16) The possibility of choice in a situation in which there are contradictory requirements provides people with the possibility of acting agentically. (12/15)

17) In moving from the use of role to position as the central organising concept for analysing how it is that people do being a person, we have moved to another conception of the relation between people and their conversations. … With positioning, the focus is on the way in which the discursive practices constitute the speakers and hearers in certain ways and yet at the same time is a resource through which speakers and hearers can negotiate new positions. A subject position is a possibility in known forms of talk; position is what is created in and through talk as the speakers and hearers take themselves up as persons. This way of thinking explains discontinuities in the production of self with reference to the fact of multiple and contradictory discursive practices and the interpretations of those practices that can be brought into being by speakers and hearers as they engage in conversations. (14/15)

19) <referring to Hollway – above # 6>: Our usage of these concepts is in line with how Hollway used them. (16)

20) within the persons/conversations grid, positioning can be understood as a discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s actions intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts and within which the members of the conversation have specific location. (16)

21) 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… 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. (17)

22) The structure of conversations is thus tri-polar: it consists of positions, storylines and relatively determinate speech-acts. (18)

BUTLER, Judith (1990). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. In S-E. Case (Ed.), Performing feminisms: Feminist critical theory and theatre (pp. 270-282). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

23) “the exchange of speech or writing <as> the occasion for a disruption of the social ontology of positionality” (440)

“to mark oneself is to take account, to give account, and hence, implicitly, to answer to a charge and seek exoneration. The moral horizon of guilt and innocence frames such an imperative from the start.” (p. 442)

25) ---a MEDIATED presentation and, thus, ‘sense’ of self - - as “legitimating moves” <interactively achieved or accomplished> - where a ‘subject-status’ is not necessarily presupposed as a ‘ground’:

26) ---taking the marking of a subject-position as the GROUND versus ‘a point of departure’ (centrally concerned with self-reflection, self-criticism, agency – and ultimately orientated toward self-revision):

“Pluralization disrupts the social ontology of the subject itself when that relationality is understood not merely as what persists among subjects, but as the internal impossibility of the subject as a discrete and unitary kind of being. Identity as effect, as site, as dynamic, as simultaneously formed and formative is not equivalent to the notion of identity as subject and ground. Reading identities as they are situated and formed in relation to one another means moving beyond the heuristic requirement of identity itself” (p. 446).

BAMBERG, Michael “A Fresh Look at the Relationship between Pragmatic and Semantic Knowledge” (1980)

27) It seems adequate to describe the awareness that is expressed in … conventionalized forms of interaction as the experience or knowledge that the infant’s activities are constrained by the situational setting on the one hand, but at the same time that one’s own activity can make a contribution to ‘create’ or change the setting in which the interaction takes place. In this sense then, it can be argued that the child has a concept of the differences in the direction of fit between his/her own activities and the world. The notation of ‘direction of fit’ is borrowed from Searle (1975), who used it in order to clarify the difference between the illocutionary point “to get words … to match the world” and its directional counterpoint “to get the world to match the words” (Searle, 1975, p. 346).

However, as I have tried to argue, this conception of the differentiation in the direction of fit can be applied to a developmentally earlier experience than that of the directionality of linguistic utterances, namely that of the directionality of the child’s intentional activity. The point Searle makes regarding the directionality of speech can be viewed as being rooted developmentally in the awareness of the directionality of intentionality (see also Bamberg, 1978, and Searle, 1979, 1980). (33-34)

BAMBERG, Michael “Perspective and Agency in the Construal of Narrative Events” (1996)

28) The constellation of agency relationships seems to be central to the construction of a perspective so that events can appear as linguistic products. In other words, selections of what Berman and Slobin (1994) have termed event view and degree of agency do not come into event construals as independent decisions. They are highly relevant decisions to clarify (index) the purpose for which events are construed. Whether events are construed to attribute blame, to save face, or to elicit empathy, the selection of (a) topic, (b) loci of control and effect, (c) event view, and (degree of agency, are functions of these discursive purposes. And the discursive purpose functions as the coordinating force that holds the selection of linguistic devices together. (36-37)

BAMBERG, Michael “Critical Personalism, Language and Development” (2000)

29) For Stern, the person is the central unit from where the exchange between ‘Person’ (person) and ‘Sache’ (world) is organized in terms of ‘Selbsterhaltung’ (self-maintenance) and ‘Selbstentfaltung’ (self-unfolding) (Stern, 1906). The two ‘directions of fit’ between person and world are dialectically organized from the person as a central unit. On the one hand, ‘Entfaltung’ (unfolding) is directed toward the outside, opening up and imposing organization onto it (an unfolding of self into world as an externalization); on the other hand, ‘Erhaltung’ (maintenance) is achieved as a maintenance process, a taking in, in the form of a binding, that is directed toward the self (as an internalization process). (750-751) …

30) I will take up on the way Stern framed the “Individualitätsproblem’, that is, the way to investigate individualities (plural) by way of analyzing people’s accounts (‘Kundgebungen’) in the form of personal acts of positioning (‘personale Akte von Stellungnahmen’). In exploring the concept of positioning for the construction of individualities and subjectivities, I will initially follow Stern’s claim regarding the centrality of the person in the construction of individualities. Subsequently, I will attempt to curtail and modify this centrality so that language can begin to infiltrate and qualify the person simultaneously as a socio-cultural and historical construct. (752) …

31) In order to productively build on the indexicality of language acts, and developing on Hollway (1984) and Davies and Harré (1990), who focus much more on the fact that language in and of itself positions the speaker, I have developed a sequence of analytic steps that reveal the positions that emerge in talk activities, with special emphasis on narrating. (755)

32) First, I am redefining the boundaries between language and communication. Rather than exploring both in terms of systems that are explorable in themselves, where one figures as the potential resource for the other, I have suggested fusing them in terms of language/communicative practices. This fusion bypasses the trichotomy among the Person, a language and a world (that is external to language), where words or sentences refer to objects or events in the world, and where language is a tool to (socially) connect people. Rather, I am suggesting viewing language as a mode- possibly the central mode –of engagement with, but always in, the world. World- and person-making take place in language practices. To put it more radically, without language, there is no world (aboutness) and there is no person (author/constructor). (763)

Central to the interpretive framework for the analysis of narrative interaction is the idea of positioning. According to Hollway, positions are given by preexisting social forms of communication (discourses), and also, in another way, are taken. She writes: “Discourses make available positions for subjects to take up. These positions are in relation to other people” (Hollway, 1984 , p. 233). Similarly, Harré and van Langenhove (1999 , p. 17) argue: “With positioning, the focus is on the way in which the discursive practices constitute the speakers and the hearers in certain ways and yet at the same time, they are a resource through which speakers and hearers can negotiate new positions.” In line with this type of positioning concept, narratives in interactions can be analyzed as being constrained by, and to a large degree determined by, such preexisting social forms of communication, whether they are termed master narratives (Andrews, 2002; Mishler, 1995; Talbot, Bibace, Bokhour & Bamberg, 1996), master plots (Abbott, 2002), culturally available narratives (Antaki, 1994), dominant discourses (Gee, 1992; Gergen, 1995) or simply cultural texts (Denzin, 1992; Freeman, 2002). It is in this sense that subjects, speakers, or “the person” are “always already” positioned, regardless of what is said and to whom it is directed.

In stark contrast, a constructivist and social constructionist perspective construes the individual person as actively and agentively positioning him- or herself. Here, the person is not viewed as being “subjected” to preexisting discourses or narratives, but rather as subjectively constructing these discourses and, in doing this, constructing him- or herself as agent and subject, i.e., as somebody who is accountable for his or her actions and words. Butler’s (1990) performative view of realizing and performing identities in an almost play-like fashion picks up on the construction process as agentively performed, but attempts to connect and ground it to the social site of construction. Edley and Wetherell’s theory of “interpretive repertoires” (Edley, 2001 ; Edley & Wetherell, 1997 ; Wetherell & Edley, 1998 , 1999 ) can be seen as another line of reconciling the contradiction between the two views of a subject: being positioned and agentively positioning him- or herself.

It appears that the contradictions between the two views of the person as interacting with the world (one as agent, the other as undergoer) are two rather distinct views of two separate centers of construction and motivating forces and two very different directions of fit (“person to world” and “world to person”), both of which have their affordances and explanatory power as distinct metaphors that are irreconcilable. To view these two metaphors as part of the same “dialectic process” may be equally misleading. They are orientational metaphors that guide our everyday talk and conceptions about the relationship between person and world and that organize our investigations of human action and development in quite different ways.

In order to show how narratives can be analyzed as a particular type of talk-in-interaction, and in order to analyze identities, let me briefly lay out an approach to narratives-in-interaction as a special kind of discourse mode, with a close eye on the processes in which personal and cultural meaning are brought into existence. In previous work (Bamberg, 1997a , 2000b ; Korobov, 2001 ; Talbot, Bibace, Bokhour, & Bamberg, 1996 ) we have begun to differentiate between three different levels of ordering activities.

First, in talk about others and about self, characters are linguistically created on the plane of what the talk is about. We usually describe them in terms of nouns and pronouns, and stick attributes and predicates to them so that they gain physical, emotional, and motivational contours before we attribute actions to them. Then, again by use of linguistic means, we create positions in which they appear as characters in relationships with regard to other characters. Last but not least, we linguistically “line up” these characters and their positions as orderly in time and space, and we define their relationships as developing, remaining stable, or deteriorating across time and space. At this level, characters are arranged from a particular orientation point in terms of descriptive details and in terms of their roles as prot- or antagonists, perpetrators, by-standers, or victims. For example, as analysts we target the linguistic means that assist in the construction of agents as being “in control,” so that the action appears to be willfully inflicted on the other character. Or we scrutinize the formal devices that result in a central character who is helplessly at the mercy of outside, quasi-natural forces, or who is rewarded by luck, fate, God, or personal qualities (such as bravery, nobility, or simply ‘character’). In sum, at this level of analysis, we scrutinize the linguistic means that establish the characters in the story—how they are drawn into existence and how they are placed in relationship with one another—so that we can answer the question “What is the story “about?” (positioning level 1). Principles of this type of analysis reveal in Herman’s (2002) terms, the “systemically patterned preferences for assigning roles to narrative participants” (p. 169), and according to Toolan (2001), “uncover links between grammar and plot-structure” (p. 36). (For more detail, see Bamberg, 1986, 1996, and Berman and Slobin, 1994.)

Second, since we are dealing with talk-in-interaction, speakers are continuously rearranging their “positions.” To achieve this, they first of all need to draw up an orientation from which the characters are depicted in the story. The speakers want to be understood as neutral, involved, or as taking sides with one or more of the characters, in order to make an accusation, give an apology, or simply to let the co-conversationalist know their “position.” In doing so, speakers arrange themselves as experts, advisors, and authorities, or as advice seekers, helpless, and innocent. Speakers also display themselves as polite, pushy, strong, or weak. Again, we assume that this type of information is signaled with linguistic and supra-linguistic means, some type of body language, so that interactants understand the business at hand. It is at this level, again for analytic purposes, that we ask why a story is told at a particular point in the interaction or, more specifically, why the narrator claims the floor at this particular point in the conversation to tell the story? What is he or she trying to accomplish with the story (positioning level 2)?

The analysis of speaker-audience positioning follows the sequential arrangement of turns between speakers, assuming that each uptake is sequentially coordinated, because it is assumed to be “consequential” for the flow of the conversation. The principles and techniques for this type of analysis are laid out in classic conversation analytic work (Sacks,1995; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 1982, 1997) and are applied for identity analysis (cf. McIlvenny, 2002a), an arena that was originally considered “non-CA purposes” (ten Have, 1999). However, since the analysis here does not attempt to contribute directly to principles of how talk is done as social interaction, but rather how talk is employed to “do identity,” I will explore how the participants actively and agentively position themselves as adolescents and as males, i.e., how they are “doing adolescence” and how they are “doing masculinity” (cf. McIlvenny’s discussion of West & Zimmerman <1987>, 2002b, pp. 130–142).

Although positioning level 1 and positioning level 2 are analytically quite separate (level 1 targets the story textually, level 2, interactively), the boundaries between these two are somewhat fluid, because often the same linguistic devices serve as indexes for both types of positioning. Analyzing positioning at level 3 becomes even more difficult, because it is here that we as analysts are more likely to use categories that are more interpretive and culturally loaded, particularly since we tried to bracket these categories in the two previous levels of analysis. Working up the characters and events in the story with relevance for the here and now of the communicative situation, however, pulls for a position for which the speaker can be held accountable—regardless of whether the speaker has been the theme or whether anonymous others have been thematized. The speaker transcends the level of characters in the story and the interactional level of “‘how I want to be understood by you, the audience” and attempts to answer the question “Who am I?” In doing so, the speaker/narrator positions him- or herself vis-à-vis cultural discourses and normative (social) positions, either by embracing them or displaying neutrality, or by distancing, critiquing, subverting, and resisting them. We assume that it is here, where a discursive space is drawn up in the form of a position, locating the speaker in a more general sense. Whatever has been accomplished locally between the interactants by sharing the story, it can be told about the speaker elsewhere, held against the speaker, or contribute to his/her positive standing within the community of their practices (see Whitebrook’s, 2001 , differentiation between self and identity). By sharing his or her story originally, the speaker has signaled how he or she wants to be understood. Therefore, the original story gains an independent status above and beyond the situation for which it was originally relevent. This is the risk of engaging in story-telling. But such positioning is essential for claiming an identity that the others will work with and build on, because it is oriented toward culturally shared forms of continuity, including the potential for coherence (positioning level 3).

In sum, then, the analysis of the first two positioning levels is intended to progressively lead to a differentiation of how speakers draw on normative discourses and position themselves in relation to these discourses in their claims of “who they are” in their identity work. It is along these lines that speakers develop “subject positions” that can ultimately lead to a sense of continuity and a sense of self. Two noteworthy caveats are in order at this point. First, any attempted answer to the “who am I?” question is not necessarily one that holds across contexts, but rather is a project of limited range or, as Holstein and Gubrium (2000 ) call it, “a practical project of everyday life” (p. 70).[i] My second caveat draws on the fact that the self as positioned vis-à-vis normative discourses is an outcome of relational work in terms of what is projected into the text as well as what is produced in the coauthoring relationship between the participants. The moral position that is indexed as the space inhabited by the speaker is jointly generated by the participants of conversations. It is along these lines that the cultural and normative order at level 3 can also be characterized as a form of positioning in relation to the self or, more strongly, that a notion of self comes into existence at this level of positioning.

The arrangement of these three positioning levels is not coincidental. For analytic purposes, it may be appropriate to start from what seems to be “most explicit” at the level of textual arrangement, working up from there to the level where speakers interactionally arrange themselves. The next step is to analyze the level where the speakers create a sense of themselves—rather than assuming that they carry their “essential self” into talk-in-interactions just to explicate the self. Thus, in procedural terms, I will start with a narrative, textual analysis in which I will search for those parts of the conversation that relate to what happened in the story and to the characters in it. This will be followed by an analysis of how these narrative parts were established interactively.

[i] And Holstein and Gubrium continue: “It is a self not necessarily referenced in quotation marks, because our experience of it is not cosmically evanescent; it’s as real as its ordinary production and by-products. Its authenticities are situated and plural—locally articulated, locally recognized, and locally accountable. Self no longer references an experientially constant entity, a central presence or presences, but, rather, stands as a practical discursive accomplishment” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000 , p. 70).