S E C T I O N 4

== Chapter 6
Conclusion: Discourse and Ethnography ==

'To reintegrate himself (sic) with wordly actuality, the critic of texts ought to be investigating the system of discourse by which the 'world' is divided, administered, plundered, by which humanity is thrust into pigeon-holes, by which 'we' are 'human' and 'they' are not, and so forth' (Said, cited Bhabha, 1976:83).

The conclusions of this thesis remain stubbornly contingent on the production of an audience for whom to conclude and a specific reading of my work from which to conclude. This thesis has argued throughout that there are no general truths to be had, no absolute or originary truths, even those of 'experience'. The ethnographic authority, 'you are there, because I was there' is no guarantee of anything except that a convention, perhaps a genre, has been mobilised. Neither ethnographic authority nor the deconstructive textual analysis of statements uncovers 'what was really there'. Contingent or strategic conclusions are all that can be produced and these are precisely contingent, based on selective criteria. The value of any conclusions drawn is dependent not epistemologically, on their adequacy of fit to a 'real' world, but discursively on their adequacy according to discursive criteria. Epistemology is understood as a normative activity, evaluating discourses from the standpoint of their relation to truth rather than, as this thesis attempts, by 'merely' concentrating on the question of the conditions under which they are produced and the description of the dispersion of statements within a discursive field, that is, with what Foucault terms the 'material repeatability of statements' (1972: 103) and the archaeological task of specifying particular discursive formations (1972: 115). The main body of this thesis then, has been devoted to the analysis of what Bakhtin terms concrete dialogic heteroglossia (Lemke, 1985), that is, to the analysis of a specific field of competing discourses and statements.

A statement is to be understood not as simply a sentence, not a thing, but a function, what Foucault terms an 'enuciative modality' and such statements need always to be located in specific discursive formations.

'in examining the statement what we have discovered is a function that has a bearing on groups of signs, which is identified neither with grammatical 'acceptability' nor with logical correctness, and requires if it is to operate: a referential (which is not exactly a fact, a state of affairs, or even an object, but a principle of differentiation); a subject (not the speaking consciousness nor the author of a formulation but a position which may be filled in certain conditions by various individuals); an associated field (which is not the real context of formulation, the situation in which it was articulated but a domain of co-existence of other statements); a materiality which is not only the substance or support of the articulation, but a status, rules of transcription, possibilities of use and re-use' (Foucault, 1972: 115).

A discursive formation is a group of statements,

'linked together not as a fabric of sentences, not as a chain of propositions, nor yet as a unity of consciousness. it is linked at the level of statements, that is, as a practice' (Cousins and Hussain, 1984: 94).

A conceptualisation of statements as practice is crucial, as is the displacement of a traditional subject object dichotomy. The 'decentred subject' of post-structural analysis is no longer a discrete entity, a unitary consciousness attempting to gain knowledge of an independent world of 'objects'. Rather knowledge or power/knowledge, for the two are inextricably linked in Foucault's analysis, is a feature of the struggle within and across discursive formations. A discursive formation then is the totality of its statements and therefore any one statement implies a relation to all the others.

'The associated field is ... made up of all the formulations to which the statement refers (implicitly or not) either by repeating them, modifying them, or adapting them, or by opposing them, or by commenting on them; there can be no statement that in one way or another does not reactualise others' (Foucault, 1972: 98).

There are a number of crucial points to be emphasised then, in what has been concluded thus far. Firstly, that such an analysis displaces a rather traditional dichotomy of social science—that of macro and micro analysis. If statements are understood to be dialogic, always answering, commenting on or opposing other statements and always located into a wider discursive formation then they are at one and the same moment 'micro' and 'macro' phenomena. Further, such statements, thus understood need to be described in their specificity, as relating to particular concrete discursive formations. A discourse-ethnographic approach is necessary then in order to examine the particular dispersion of statements, there can be no analysis of discursive power in general. Ethnography in this analysis is regarded not as a map of an unproblematised, external real, but a cartography of statements and discourses within a particular field. Finally, discourses are understood to be in a constant state of competition, a state of heteroglossia.

'Discourse is not the uncontested property of power, it is the site of perpetual struggle, in which strategies of resistance as well as strategies of power are pursued' (Foucault, 1976: 132-33).

Power is understood importantly as immanent and omnipresent in the social.
It is this view of power which as Giddens as suggested has led to the 'sociological' direction of modern philosophy, to a resurgence of interest in the mundane or the everyday—an interest which as Chapter 1 of this thesis argues, ethnography as a general methodology is particularly suitable for. In such approaches,

'Our day to day activities are not merely inconsequential habits, of no interest to the student of more profound matters, but on the contrary are relevant to the explication of quite basic issues in philosophy and social science' (Giddens, 1987: 65).

Power, further, is not to be understood as something simply negative or prohibitive, it does not merely function to repress objects anterior to it (be they individuals, classes or whatever). Rather power is directly productive, shaping the relations constituting the social. Finally,

'Where there is power there is resistance. Relations of power, can only exist alongside a multiplicity of points of resistance; these play in the relation of power, the role of adversary, of target, of support, of fringe to be taken. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the network of power' (Foucault, 1976: 127).

Such an analysis,

'enables one to examine the mechanisms of discursive practices at the micro-level of the detailed calculations which are part of the processes of production of the discourse and practices in question. Such an analysis tends to support the kind of history of knowledge which shows that the process of producing knowledge is uneven, full of inconsistencies, failures, new beginnings, changes in direction and unpredictable outcomes. Nevertheless, it would be impossible to establish dependencies among discursive practices if regularities did not exist. The examination of conditions of possibility indicates what the limits are, what is sayable and what may happen. It therefore helps in the analysis of the more global level' (Henriques, 1984: 109).

Power then, is invested in discourse, equally discursive practices produce, sustain or enact power relations. Power, however, is not monolithic, it always operates in the context of resistance.
This thesis thus participates in a tendency which views 'reality' rather, the social, as constructed in and through language, discourses and semiotic systems, especially identified with the recent work of French post-structuralism, particularly the work of Foucault and Derrida. Critical ethnography, what I have also termed a discourse—ethnographic approach, analyses discursive relations. It is discursive relations, and not a 'real' anterior to discourse which provide the,

'objects about which it is possible to speak, write and reason' (Cousins and Hussain, 1984: 88).

Foucault uses the term discourse tactically, in order to avoid a distinction between ideas and a real external to ideas; to avoid treating knowledge in terms of 'ideas'. Several 'ingrained habits' (ibid.: 88) need to be given up in order for this to be possible.

'The first is the tendency to conceive knowledges as purely theoretical architectures. For this leads to a general philosophical distinction between a realm of ideas and a realm of action ... once the general distinction is abandoned it is possible to conceive of knowledge as a practice. The second consequence of treating knowledges as theoretical architectures is to epistemologise their analysis by comparing their objects to what is taken to be the order of the 'real" (Cousins and Hussain, 1984: 88).

For critical ethnography there are no general epistemological criteria of truth, truth is contingent and conditional. In this view.

'Adequacy no longer refers to the 'facts', or to the internal rules alone of a specific discipline or discourse. Instead, it is implicated in a set of arguments that involve what counts as material evidence, what principles of intelligibility are at work, what calculations of effect and consequences are made and what other discourse and practices are thought to participate in the construction of the statements of the discourse. Indeed, the question of adequacy is no longer formulated in terms of closeness to the truth but is part of a wider problem of what is to be done, that is to say part of a problem posed in terms of a regime of truth and the politics of truth' (Henriques, 1984: 114).

In addition, it needs to be noted that,

'the epistemologization of the issue of truth plays into the hands of the points of view that appeal to common sense as a criterion of rationality and reasonableness. This works in the following manner: contentious knowledge is left open but only as a problem for philosophical debate, leaving everything else to be referred to common sense, that is, what the dominant discourse in any specific field asserts to be true and to correspond to reality. The political implications of posing the question in an epistemological form should be clear ... namely it works for the strategies to enable the dominant claims about the real and existing power relations to appear rational and objective; it forces opposing views to establish their rationality and intelligibility according to norms that already favour that which they oppose' (Henriques, 1984: 111).

Gramsci's work on common sense (1971) and Deleuze's work on philosophy and the state (1977) demonstrate this latter point is crucial to the analysis of power and dominant discourses, for an understanding of the way in which dominant discourses exert influence over other minority or marginalised discourses.

There is a considerable amount of resistance to the unmasking of the constructed nature of reality as, for example, McHale remarks,

'There is in some quarters a considerable nostalgia for ... (social/human science) in which the emphasis falls upon the order of things, rather than the order of things—for in other words, a mimetic (fiction) purporting to give direct access to extralinguistic and extratextual reality, and or a (criticism) willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of this claim, instead of suspiciously deconstructing it' (McHale, 1987: 164—emphasis in original).

This 'notalgia' for an unproblematic mimetic gaze is a considerable obstacle to the task of ethnography, if the ethnographer has not got 'direct experience' to offer what can he/she offer? It is in relation to this question, that the concept of discourse is most pertinent. The task of a discourse—ethnographic approach is not the mimetic reproduction of an irreducible real, but the discussion of human social reality, that is, a reality experienced in and through discourse. Traditional ethnographic approaches, subscribing to both correspondence theories of language and empiricist philosophy aspire to evoke the direct experience of an irreducibly real, an irreducibly extra-textual world, but the approach taken in this thesis argues for the reconceptualisation of this task. The ethnographers' task is to represent discursive reality in all its polyphonic complexity—that is, not to discuss, for example, Northern Ireland, but the sign 'Northern Ireland' in a semiotic system which changes over time and as it passes from discourse to discourse. The work of ethnography is the examination of what Irigaray characterises as the,

'operation of the 'grammar' of each figure of discourse, its syntactic laws or requirements, its imaginary configurations, its metaphoric networks, and also of course, what it does not articulate at the level of utterance; its silences'. The task then is not to describe an extra-discursive world of 'objects by knowledge', nor to describe 'matter', but 'the scenography that makes representations feasible', 'the architectonics of its theatre', in order to 'shake discourse away from its mooring in the value of 'presence" (Irigaray, 1985: 75).

I indicated in Chapter 1 that the nostalgia or pull of an irreducible real is not only problematic for ethnography but is particularly pernicious for an analysis of Northern Ireland.

It was stated in the preface that this thesis attempted to 'write' where 'action' and 'experience' seem to be the things of greatest moment. The desire of analysts of the 'Northern Ireland Problem' for an account of an 'irreducible real' is often not merely a simple nostalgia but a feverish and deafening command. It is helpful if such 'commands' remind us to challenge what Henriques et al (1984) describe as 'discourse determinism', where discourse analysis is understood to be positing a simple inversion of correspondence theories of language—instead of reality determining language—the reverse is posited. It is equally useful if the perceived proximity of an irreducible real reminds the analyst to conceive of statements as practices, that is,to consider behavioural or action texts in addition to linguistic utterances. ¹ The desire for access to irreducibly extra-discursive phenomena in relation to analyses of Northern Ireland, however, is more usually a hindrance than a help to a discourse-ethnographic approach. The real, and an (unproblematic) access to it, are produced either as a general anti-intellectual stance—you have no right to theorise something so important—or as a naive empiricism—never mind the 'theorising' just collect the facts. Some commentators have, for example, labelled discourse theoretical approaches somewhat tendentiously as 'Derridadaism' (Crick (1985: 84)—Londonderrydadism in my case! I have argued throughout this thesis that to 'theorise' is not only desirable but necessary for anyone wishing to produce critical (interventionist) analyses, and also, of course, that empiricism is itself a 'theory', albeit a bad one.

Critical analysis must follow the recent trend of anti-humanism in structuralist and post-structuralist theory. This means analysing even those most unspeakable research moments, those in Northern Ireland, for example, connected with death. Terrorist or guerrilla action is often described as action which refuses speech. It is probably more accurate to say that which encourages, even demands 'speech', a proliferation of discourse. ² Similarly death could be seen as the end of speech but it is only final for those who actually die. 'Death shall have no dominion' only for the biological subject involved; one must say in this important sense death is non-discursive. This should not, in a headlong rush for the Derridadaist, deconstructionist language game-playing, be forgotten. Death for the biological subject is irreducibly real. The act of killing someone only becomes a possibility, however, within certain discourses in certain ways and the meaning of the event for those remaining only 'means' according to the judgements of a field of discursive regulation. Death in this sense is crucially discursive, that which produces a proliferation of speech. One has only to remember the comments made earlier in the thesis about the discursive functioning of 'women and children' in relation to military or paramilitary events to note this discursive aspect of death. One dead baby is more 'powerful' (discursively) than one dead soldier. The risk of the deaths of 'children' who were/might have been playing nearby 'invariably' increases the malevolence of a bombing or other military/paramilitary incident.

One commentator ³ remarked that

'Northern Ireland like Dracula's Transylvanian empire kingdom is much troubled by the undead'.

Figure 6.1 Derry Journal, Nov. 23, 1979
Figure 6.2 Community Mirror, December 1979

Figures 6.1 and 6.2 demonstrate two different Derry versions of the undead—for a third one might perhaps look to security force statistics on death and injury in Northern Ireland since 1968. The continual publication and comment on Northern Ireland's 'toll of terror' (Paisley, 1982) is indeed a manifestation of the continual return of the undead, so is the martyr tradition within Republicanism identified in chapter 4. Figure 6.1 shows part of the births, deaths, announcements page of the Derry Journal the local paper for the Bogside/Creggan area of Derry. Figure 6.2 is taken from a community newspaper called Community Mirror. The list of Derry Dead makes no distinction between IRA, British soldier, civilian. This is clearly a particular discursive strategy, attempting to place 'death' above 'politics'. The Derry Dead list then, by being "simply" a list of the dead, is far more than simply a list of the dead.
The thesis ends then, as it began, ⁴ with an apparent paradox, a paradox, however, which the reader is hopefully able to feel comfortable with, rather than threatened by.

Footnotes to Chapter 6

1 Lemke (1985) refers to both heteroglossia and heteropraxia in order to emphasise this point.
2 This is argued more extensively in Green and Mansfield (1986).
3 Hywel Griffiths was at the time Professor of Social Work at the New University of Ulster, Colraine. The remark was made in a private conversation.
4 See Preface.

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This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 31 July, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/alanmansfield/ch6.html (it was last updated on 27 March, 2021), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.