Intertextual Analysis: A Bakhtinian framework for discourse analysis

Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism is relevant to this study as a theoretical background to the analysis and discussion of teachers’ discourse and their views about their pupils’ outside school literacy practices and the aspects which inform their classroom practices. Bakhtin’s (1981) views on the construction of individuals’ consciousness and on the transformation of consciousness into language (word, utterance, text) help to shed light onto the issue of how these agents’ discourses come to be.

I discuss below aspects of this theory, mostly Bakhtin’s notions of multiple voices and the role of time and space (context) in the formation and transformation of language. This has, however, no ambition to be an exhaustive discussion of Bakhtin’s theory of metalanguage (Holquist, 1981). This discussion is then followed by a presentation of Fairclough’s (1992 and 2003) framework for the analysis of ‘multiple voices’ in text, presented under the term of intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986) which is heavily informed by a Bakhtinian perspective to the study of language. This theoretical framework will be used in the analysis and discussion of teachers’ interviews in Chapter Six.

105 Space, time and simultaneity in dialogue

From a Bakhtinian perspective, the self can no longer be seen as the representation of a unified individual consciousness (when seen in opposition to Descartes’ views) in the same sense as the utterance or text cannot be seen as the representation of a single voice. Holquist explains that for Bakhtin “self” is dialogic, a relation’ [sic] (1990 p. 19). It is the relation between self and the other within the intrinsic aspects of time and space that constitutes the core of Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism.

With dialogue taking a central role in these relations, space and time are used to theorize on: 1. How the place from where I stand informs my conceptualizations of the other, 2. How issues of otherness and outsidedness help me to create who I am – my own self through relations of contrasts and similarities.

The relevance Bakhtin places on the elements of time/space in dialogical relations between self and other is paralleled to the relevance these elements have to Einstein’s theory of relativity in the sense that in both theories an event – motion, in the case of relativity, and the act of being, the construction of self and otherness, for Bakhtin – can only take place through the relation of two bodies with each other in specific time and space (Holquist, 1990):

Dialogism argues that all meaning is relative in the sense that it comes about only as a result of the relation between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space […]. (Holquist, 1990 p. 20)

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Holquist (1990 p. 20) explains, however, that bodies can ‘be thought of as ranging from the immediacy of our physical bodies, to political bodies and to bodies of ideas in general (ideologies).’

In Bakhtin’s (1986) conceptualizations of language, relations of space and time as represented within the realms of social worlds and historicity come to play a role in changes in language, which Bakhtin explains through his notions of the formation and transformation in speech genres and his theory of answerability where the utterance is seen as a response to individuals’ positioning in the world.

Bakhtin (1986 p. 60) explains the utterance as constitutive by thematic content, style and compositional structure. These aspects of the utterance are each and equally determined by the specific contexts of communication, or a ‘particular sphere of communication’:

Each separate utterance is individual, […], but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. (Bakhtin, 1986 p. 60 sic.).

It is to these ‘relatively stable types of utterances’ that Bakhtin refers as speech genres. Speech genres are, in this way, emphasised by Bakhtin as determined by different human activities and the effect these activities have on the different elements of the utterance. Bakhtin posits yet that the inexhaustibly innumerous possibilities for human activities are reflected in the great heterogeneity of speech genres.

Holquist (1990 p. 70) also posits that given its collective nature, as opposed to styles which can be of an individual nature, the rise or fall of a specific genre is a reflection of ‘social and historical forces at work over long spans of time’.

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The role of space and time, and their dialogical relations with the self, in language is further, and perhaps more emphatically, theorised by Bakhtin in his notions of answerability. Answerability refers to a view of the utterance as an answer to aspects of its environment as represented in the system of its language, the place from where one stands (contextual factors and individuals’ own communicational needs) and previous utterances. On the latter, Holquist (1990) comments that:

[an utterance] is always an answer to another utterance that precedes it, and is therefore always conditioned by, and in turn qualifies, the prior utterance to a greater or lesser degree. (Holquist, 1990 p. 60)

He goes on to add that:

Before it means any specific thing, an utterance expresses the general condition of each speaker’s addressivity, the situation of not only being preceded by a language system that is “always already there,” but preceded as well by all of existence, making it necessary for me to answer for the particular place I occupy. (Holquist, 1990 p. 60)

In this way, from a Bakhtinian perspective, an utterance is never originary in itself as it is always preceded by other utterances it comes to respond to. In dialogue, a speaker also addresses to the values that are subsumed in their relations with the listener and the cultural and social spaces from where he/she speaks. To the relations of speakers and listeners in dialogue and their response to the context (social contexts, ideologies) these interactions are embedded in, Bakhtin (1986) respectively refers to as addressee and superaddressee as discussed below.

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From a Bakhtinian perspective, the development of the text and its understanding cannot be reduced to the simplistic binary of author/reader, speaker/listener as the very consciousness of each subject is itself the product of other dialogical relations, the playing field of a number of other voices. Bakhtin (1986) ponders:

The word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the “soul” of the speaker and does not belong only to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet but a trio). It is performed outside the author, and it cannot be introjected into the author. (Bakhtin, 1986 pp.121/122)

Here, on posing a ‘new statement on the problem of authorship (the creating individual)’ an argument against the author’s voice as a unity, Bakhtin (1986) introduces his notion of dialogue as a triad rather than a duo. This third party is explained here in terms of others’ voices or past spoken words which enter the author’s text. As Morris (1994 p. 4) explains it is relevant to stress that word is not in Bakhtin’s notions dealt with in isolation, ‘as words in the dictionary which have only meaning potential but as the actualized meaning of those words used in a specific utterance’ (Morris, 1994 p.4). For Bakhtin the word can only have their meaning realised and understood within its historical contexts (the time and space from where it is uttered).

Elaborating on the notion of answerability and on dialogue as triad, Bakhtin introduces his notion of superaddressee as the third party in any dialogue. He explains that for any

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dialogue there is an addressee to whom the utterance is intended, but there is also a third party:

[…] in addition to this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time (the loophole addressee). (Bakhtin, 1986 p.126)

On the nature of this third party, he posits:

In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally true responsive understanding assumes various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth). (Bakhtin, 1986 p.126)

These relations of answerability reinforce the notion that Bakhtin strove for in most of his work, the argument that the self (the author or the speaker) is not a unified consciousness in the struggle for meaning, as Holquist (1981) explains:

A dialogic world is one in which I can never have my own way completely, and therefore I find myself plunged into constant interaction with others – and with myself. In sum, dialogism is based on the primacy of the social, and the assumption that all meaning is achieved by struggle. (Holquist, 1990 p. 39)

In the notion (or metaphor) of the superaddressee, this struggle is extended beyond the author and his/her listener/reader to these agents’ responses to the ideologies and beliefs that are present in our social worlds in specific time and space.

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In the study herein, these views set the grounds for an analysis of the voices that constitute teachers’ discourses (the words uttered by others’ past and present voices). In this way, it is presupposed that their views towards curriculum and classroom practices are not only an outcome and representation of their own individual will but rather of a whole set of values, ideologies and givens that have been present in their social historical contexts.

I discuss below how from a Bakhtinian perspective these voices are assimilated.

4.6.1 On transmission and appropriation: authoritative discourse and internally persuasive voice

Note: all the citations in this section have been taken from Bakhtin’s (1981) ‘The Dialogic Imagination’.

On discussing the issue of everyday speech, Bakhtin posits that on average at least half of what a person living in society utters are someone else’s words. This issue, Bakhtin argues in two stances, firstly, he posits that the words of others encountered for instance via the person we are talking to, in books, newspapers, documents, official decrees and which are also found in our own previous speeches are consciously ‘not communicated in direct form as our own, but with reference to some indefinite and general source: “I heard”, “It’s generally held that…” […] and so forth’ (Bakhtin, 1981 p. 338). Secondly, Bakhtin argues that a more significant aspect in this discussion is, however, the assimilation process of another’s voice into one’s ideological consciousness:

The tendency to assimilate others’ discourse takes on an even deeper and more basic significance in an individual’s ideological becoming, in the most fundamental sense. Another’s

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discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models and so forth – but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behaviour […] (Bakhtin, 1981 p. 342)

Here, Bakhtin indicates his pursuit for a theory of language development, of cultural and ideological appropriation through language. Drawing on a discussion of his notions of authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse, Bakhtin underlines the principles of transmission of others’ voices and notions of ideological assimilation. In Bakhtin’s (1981 p. 342) terms, authoritative discourse is discourse whose authority has already been acknowledged [sic.] in the past. ‘It is prior discourse’. It is ‘located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher.’ Bakhtin (1981 p. 342)

As the ideological givens present in our social worlds, the authoritative word can be of a religious, political and moral nature, it can still be ‘of acknowledged scientific truth or of a currently fashionable book’ (Bakhtin, 1981 p. 343). It may also

embody various contents: authority as such, or the authoritativeness of tradition, of generally acknowledged truths, of the official line and other similar authorities. Bakhtin (1981 p.344)

Authoritative discourse does not merge with the other masses of discourses which surround it. It requests to be clearly and specifically demarcated (by quotation marks or even a different script). Bakhtin (1981, p. 343) explains that ‘its semantic structure is static and dead, for it is fully complete’ making it more difficult the incorporation of semantic changes into it.

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On the level of assimilation, given its nature as an ideological unity, it demands to be either accepted or rejected by us in its entirety, that is, there are no parts of its discourse that can be appropriated while others are rejected. Bakhtin’s explains that:

[…] it demands our unconditional allegiance […] It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands and falls together with that authority. One cannot divide it up – agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. (Bakhtin, 1981 p.343)

In other words, authoritative voice is transmitted in its whole as an incontestable truth – which aims at becoming ideological belief that demands to be appropriated in its entirety. In contrast, internally persuasive discourse bears the dialogical characteristics discussed earlier in this chapter in the sense that it presupposes discourse that merges with other discourses (ours and those of others’), reaccentuating some of its parts, rejecting others and giving rise to yet new utterances or new discourses. It does so in an open response to its context and its listeners.

Internally persuasive discourse – as opposed to one that is externally authoritative – is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with “one’s own word”. In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. (Bakhtin, 1981 p. 345)

The dialogical nature of internally persuasive discourse is reflected into the ways of its transmission and ‘the methods for framing it in contexts’, which provides for maximum

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of interaction between one’s words and the words of others and freedom of creativity over the latter.

On assimilation, Bakhtin posits that

[…] it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values. (Bakhtin, 1981 p.346)

In his discussion of transmission and assimilation of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, Bakhtin alludes to issues of power relations that may shape ways of transmission as well as play a crucial role in the assimilation of different voices:

[Internally] persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code. The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness. (Bakhtin, 1981 p. 342)

How certain discourses come to be assimilated as authoritative voices is re-visited below on the light of Gramsci’s (1991) theory of hegemony.

4.6.2 Voices in intertextual analysis

Bakhtin’s work has in the last decades influenced the work of a number of theorists in different areas of scholarship (see Maybin 2000; Blackledge and Creese, 2010). His notions of multiple voicedness have specially informed a number of recent studies in language studies and discourse analysis (see for instance the work of Pietikainen &

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Dufva, 2006). Nonetheless, theorists looking into drawing on Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism in the study of discourse practices are confronted with the complexity and fragmentation of his work and the absence of a practical framework. As a result, discourse analysis in this thesis draws on Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism in combination with Fairclough’s (1992 and 2003) framework for intertextuality analysis, which takes into consideration the central elements in Bakhtin’s notions of multi voicedness as discussed above.

Text and units of discourse analysis

Fairclough’s (1992, 1995 and 2003) framework for discourse analysis incorporates the complementary analysis of linguistic analysis, intertextual and interdiscursive analysis. His notions of discourse analysis have been heavily informed by Halliday’s (1978) work with systemic linguistics. Starting from this perspective, Fairclough (1995 p.6) suggests an approach to the analysis of text that attends to the multifunctionality of language in text, in which texts are analysed in relation to participants’ ‘representation of experience and the world’ (ideational); their role relationships in discourse (interpersonal); and the textual features of the text – its ‘form, structure and organization’ (Fairclough, 1995 p. 6). At the level of intertextual analysis, Fairclough draws upon concepts of intertextuality which stems from work of the Bakhtin’s circle (Volosinov, 1973) and on his notions of interdiscursivity and orders of discourse to explain issues of text production, distribution and consumption against aspects of historicity and social changes. Departing from the distinction of manifest and constitutive intertextuality suggested by French discourse analysts, Fairclough (1992 pp. 103/104) uses the term intertextuality (instead of manifest

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intertextuality) to refer to the analysis of ‘intertextual relations of texts to specific other texts’ and interdiscursivity (instead of constitutive intertextuality) to refer to the analysis of ‘intertextual relations of texts to conventions’ (Fairclough, 1992 pp. 103/104). For the purpose of discourse analysis in Chapter Six, I focus more closely on those elements of analysis related to intertextuality and also refer to a distinction between the latter and assumptions.

Intertextual analysis

Intertextuality, as coined by Kristeva in her studies of Bakhtin’s scholarship, refers to the presence of others’ texts in one’s discursive practices. Bakhtin’s notions of social change as a determinant of changes in language are strongly reproduced in Kristeva’s (1986) notions of intertextuality and, in turn, in Fairclough’s framework for intertextual analysis. Kristeva posits that intertextuality implies ‘[1] the insertion of history (society) into a text and [2] of this text into history’ (Kristeva, 1986 p. 39 cited in Fairclough, 1992 p. 102). Fairclough (1992 p. 102) explains that while in the first instance ‘the text absorbs and is built out of texts from the past […]’, in the second, ‘the text responds to, reaccentuates, and reworks past texts, and in so doing helps to make history and contributes to shape subsequent texts’.

As anticipated by Bakhtin (1986) in his notions of answerability and the distinctions between authoritative and internally persuasive voices, the extent to which others’ voices and other genres will be reproduced, reaccentuated, negated/rejected or appropriated in one’s discourse has its basis in issues of power and ideological relations in past and present times in society (that is, our responses to Bakhtin’s superaddressee). Fairclough

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(1992) adds to these notions by suggesting an approach for discourse analysis that takes into consideration attempts of hegemonic ambitions in contemporary societies. He argues that Gramsci’s notions of hegemony combined with intertextual analyses can ‘chart the possibilities and limitations for intertextual processes within particular hegemonies and states of hegemonic struggle’ (Fairclough, 1992 p. 103). He goes on to note that hegemonic struggle is not only crucial in contributing to explain why certain types of texts are reproduced in discourse, but also why others are absent. How others’ voices are represented and contextualized in one’s discourse will be reflected in and, in turn, reflect these struggles. I discuss below forms of representation and contextualization with a focus on their relations with issues of power struggle. These notions are relevant herein for the understanding of whether and how the new discourses of pluralism enter teachers’ discourses in the conceptualization of literacy and the making of classroom practices. Representation

The voices of others can be represented in one’s discourse in an array of different forms of reporting. Others’ voices may be manifestly attributed, vaguely attributed (not attributed to a particular individual) or not attributed at all.

Choices in reporting may indicate the extent to which one is seeking to reproduce others’ voices in their integrity or whether the reproduced text is a vague re-wording of the