Embodying discourse analysis: Lessons learned about epistemic and ontological psychologies

Introduction

The complex and dynamic character of human and social science precludes simplistic explanations of the sort that we see in a particular kind of naïve mechanistic cognitivism, which bypasses the irreducibly social, and consequently context-dependent, quality of psychology (Bruner, 1990). It is important, therefore, for a continuing dialogue on how to apprehend human psychology in light of the move away from naïve cognitivism. It is for this reason that the respondents to Cresswell’s article (this issue) deserve commendation (Buttny, this issue; Demuth, this issue; Larraín and Haye, this issue; Matusov and Von Duyke, this issue). They represent an admirable effort to grapple with a comparatively new turn toward a psychology that takes sociality seriously.

Cresswell’s article attempted to direct attention towards discursive psychological praxis to take it in potentially new directions: the inclusion of broader social discourse and the inclusion of experience. The purpose of this rejoinder is to continue to work out inquiry that both sheds naïve cognitivism – including concomitant naïve realism – and gives a non-reductionist approach to psychology as the study of socio-linguistic phenomena. We propose consideration of ontology as another expression of the phenomena Cresswell attempted to address – a notion we will propose is already presumed in discursive psychology. We will first discuss ontology and why there would still be the necessity to address it. We then propose a clarified conception of experience. We conclude with future research directions that take into account the respondents’ well-placed critiques.

Ontology

Discursive psychologists’ resistance to ontology began with a reaction against a naïve ontology sometimes seen in cognitive science (Edwards, 1997; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Discursive psychology sought to liberate psychologists from a hegemonic/ethnocentric enlightenment model of the mind rooted in Cartesian thinking. The taken-for-granted ontology of naïve cognitivism was then laid bare for critique. We owe a very significant debt of gratitude to the early discursive and social constructionist work that established this critique, because it opened the door to alternative methods of thinking (e.g. Billig, 1996; Edwards, 1997; Gergen, 1985; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). However, the underlying concern presented in Cresswell’s discussion of broader social discourse and experience is that this move against ontology may have restricted our empirical praxis and capacity to develop a robust alternative to naïve cognitivism.

Consider Edward’s (1997) telling distinction between epistemic and ontological constructionism (for discussion, see Corcoran, 2009, 2010; Potter, 2010). The favored approach in discursive psychology is the epistemic version of discursive psychology, which highlights how discourse is not about the existence of things but about people reaching understanding jointly constructed (e.g. Potter, 2010: 663). Discourse is about the situated construction of our knowledge-about-psychology in the moment. It is for this reason that experience and broader social discourse are treated by Potter (this issue) as practical issues that enter analysis via their construction and orientation. On the contrary, the ontological version of discursive psychology is one that defends how the existence of things is socially constructed. This version is downplayed because discursive psychologists refuse to make any ontological commitments to what exists. Cresswell’s article was an attempt to rekindle a discussion of ontology as it ostensibly manifests in life and not in terms of what actually exists. It was an attempt to do so in a way different from the naïve cognitivism many of us embroiled in this research area have long since abandoned.

Still neglected in discursive psychology are the forms of life that amount to non-reductive ontologies. There is room to expand if we believe theorists such as Wetherell who point out that ‘discourse analysis is a theory of discourse – it is not a theory of psychology, society, or life in general – and to pretend that it is so, and to extend it to questions of investment or character, is to mistake its object of study’ (2007: 670). The object of study in discursive psychology is how psychological phenomena come to be understood, while ontological issues (such as the kind of person one is) are not addressed in order to avoid self-contained individualist claims. As Potter writes, the goal of discursive psychology is to get away from cognitivism on the one hand, and provide a systematic empirical praxis on the other: ‘The prioritizing of the (broadly) epistemic over the (loosely) ontological is not derived from abstract philosophical proclivities. The key reason for this kind of focus is that it supports coherent analytic practice’ (2010: 662). Discursive psychology is not intended to provide a theory of psychology insofar as it is intended to provide an analytic practice of how discourse enables the construction of our understandings-in-practice of psychological phenomena. Cresswell’s article was intended to expand analytic interests and move toward understanding the psychology of phenomena which have an ontological compulsion to humans, such as investments.

A further reason for advocating this direction is inspired by Matusov and Von Duyke’s (this issue) critique that Cresswell’s article suffers from a lack of focus on issues of immigration. They are correct because, while Cresswell’s article is intended to press towards a different approach to such topics, it also deals with systematic issues beyond them. Namely, ontology cannot be accounted for but is required for a more robust discursive psychology. For example, Potter proposed that:

the general point here is that the detailed organization of the interaction is explicable using the standard resources of conversation analysis, and we can see the psychological matters as things that are attended to, managed, and formulated using these resources. (Potter, this issue: 583)

Potter is correct, but what is left without interpretation is what compels the attention, management, and formulation of such stake and interest. From where do these come? They are taken for granted as ontologically present and necessary for the interpretation of the excerpt provided by Cresswell. Without the givenness of stakes and interests, there would be no discursive interpretation that any of the respondents provided. The re-analyses by Potter and Demuth are predicated upon them being a compelling force in the extract.

While the escape from naïve cognitivism is good, something yet remains left out. Although it may not be relevant to discursive psychology strictly defined, understanding human psychology requires a turn towards it. In the words of Corcoran:

… richer understanding of our forms of life, ways of being, cultural order, and so on, struggle for recognition under the psychological programme promoted by [the epistemic approach to discursive psychology] … To confirm, as many [discursive psychologists] do …, that there is more to being human than discourse alone, only then to disallow an ontological commitment in the psychological study of human being, is circumscribed to say the least. (2009: 381)

Cresswell’s article attempted to spell out such ontologies with a discussion of broader social discourse and experience. Moreover, if Buttny is right, and experience is also something about which we talk, then what Cresswell proposes can be extended to account for the relationship between epistemic and ontological discursive analysis. It has already been noted that the epistemic and ontological features of social life are not poles and they are not mutually exclusive (Corcoran, 2010). We can come to construct knowledge about our experiential stake just as we are compelled to have a stake in certain discussions and not others, as per the larger embodied social discourse of which we are a part. This sort of move allows for the institutional features of talk elaborated by Potter (this issue).

Embodiment

In response to Cresswell’s proposal, Buttny (this issue) suggested that the significant problem with Cresswell’s understanding of experience was that it depended upon a sentiment about amazing moments of surprise: the sublime, revolt, and so on. This conception of experience side-steps the mundane sort of life that most people live and, as Potter (this issue) notes, emerges as sentimentalism or nostalgia.

The kind of experience that would be more fruitful for Cresswell to address is one that draws on embodiment in relation to language: experience as dynamic and rhythmic co-regulated bodily dispositions. For example, as is well established in the literature on child development, mothers speak to an infant while it is latched to the nipple but not sucking and are silent when an infant takes its turn by sucking (Jaffe et al., 2001). Countless behaviors like this form the kind of embodied dispositional expectations that are part of language. The talk of love between a mother and child is a coupled rhythmic give and take involving human bodies and so the talk is inseparable from the bodies. This direction was highlighted by Demuth (this issue) and can serve as a model for our proposal. As she intimates, socializing an infant into already communally present discourse involves cultivating a dynamic and rhythmic co-regulated constitution of them. Experience is the lived body conceived as a socio-linguistic body, cultivated in dynamic and rhythmic co-regulated constitution. For example, in the excerpt addressed by Cresswell, experience is not only something about which we talk and derive mere epistemic knowledge. Such a notion of embodiment better suits experience insofar as it captures the mundane features of life, such as Jim’s use of continuers in the interview extract: rhythmic co-regulation. This approach align with the vision of recasting psychological phenomena as social, while explaining commitment and the stakes that are already presumed in discursive psychology.

The ontology we are proposing involves an embodied experience of the world lived as if it is an ontological truism, this being shaped in language. That is, such ontologies pertain to understanding from the perspective of people as they live their lives, realities that cannot seemingly be lived otherwise. Consequently,

I experience the object of my fear as fearful, the object of my love as loveable, the object of my suffering as oppressive … but I do not experience my own fearing, loving, suffering. My lived experience is … the whole of myself in relation to some object. (Bakhtin, 1990: 112–113; original emphasis)

It is also important to note that the dynamic co-regulated constitution of experience has little in common with naïve cognitivism because it retains a constitutive role for sociality that precludes the hallmarks of abstract and subjective representation/computation (Boden, 2006). Accordingly, there is no privilege of the private over the social because the interactional features of life are crucial. It is on this basis that we can apprehend Cresswell’s claim that he is not putting forward anything like a dualistic linear process model where primordial experience leads to talk (p. 567), or a theory of something primordial or extra discursive (p. 554).

Conclusions: Future directions

We are still left with the question of what to do. The authors who responded to Cresswell provide direction that we have distilled into three general guidelines for further work.

First, Larraín and Haye (p. 601) make an excellent point that the kind of research Cresswell proposes suffers from naiveté insofar as he treats the participants in the extract as reaching consensus of some sort. Part of the task in interpreting text to apprehend the kind of non-reductive ontologies that we must recognize is that we are not dealing with unified and reified things. Rather, such ontologies are contested and brought into a state of tension. The value of their critique is that they highlight how discursive processes are a ‘more highly pervasive and polymorphic phenomenon’ (p. 598). Because of this, an adequate analysis must take into consideration compulsion, including conflict of interest, thus showing the necessity for a broader outlook on ontology that includes contestation. Moreover, we propose that Matusov and Von Duyke’s (this issue) discussion of the ‘depth concern’ also meshes well here. They touch upon notions similar to ontology through their discussion of speech genres and social affordances. They further express the need to pinpoint breaches between interlocutors through ‘inappropriateness’ and the ensuing attempts to fix and return the dialogue back to a smooth discursive flow. As such, these critics highlight the importance of tension, and this tension highlights the dynamic quality of ontologies.

A second general principle pertains to Matusov and Von Duyke’s discussion of technism. If we are reading them correctly, we see how they are concerned that Cresswell could be proposing something like a formula for research praxis where standard procedures produce standard results (Polkinghorne, 1983: 3). On the one hand, it is precisely this sort of technism that has made discursive psychology a strong alternative to naïve cognitivism. The strong point of discursive psychology is the development of methods that enable checks on analysts, and so it has a ‘water-tight’ methodology where criteria such as credibility and transferability can be applied (see Merrick, 1999). In so doing, it can be reliably used – as was done in Potter’s commentary on Cresswell – to reveal institutional hegemonies in their everyday context. On the other hand, experience is bypassed because everything that is not clearly epistemic is bypassed. Future research should endeavor to develop techniques that are not necessarily formulaic, but are still examinable for the purposes of determining good versus bad work. A potential direction may be to follow work by Shotter (2011) as he explores abduction and the role of embodiment. He makes room for techniques as activities create breaches that enable researchers to develop sympathetic understanding of others. Following such attempts may enable an approach that can be critiqued while not falling into technism (see also Cresswell and Hawn, 2012).

Third, it is important that the previous two principles be conducted in a context that is intricately tied to theory. One of the most valuable lessons previously garnered from the emergence of social constructionism and discursive psychology was that data do not speak for themselves (Billig, 1996). The concern was that data had been treated as unproblematic by psychologists and so inadvertently instituted hegemonic practices (e.g. Sampson, 1993). New theorizing about the nature of psychology led to new empirical praxis. A potential danger is that we may fall into the fallacy of thinking that we can just turn to the data and the truth will be revealed. In extended modes of discursive analysis like Cresswell proposed, discovery involves theorizing due to the recognition that theory shapes data as much as data shapes theory.

We suggest that the lines of dialogue need to move beyond a dualistic discussion of cognitivism versus discursive psychology/constructionism, because a more fruitful discussion would be about developing a broader theory of psychology and empirical praxis that accounts for more human phenomena. Let’s attempt a discussion on how to develop an increasingly sophisticated approach that can account for experience as conceived of above.