Hello, and welcome to episode 55 of Structured Visions. Structured Visions is a space where I explore new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and I'm very grateful for you listening today. You are very welcome here.
Today's episode is called Critical Condition, and I thought I would share with you some of the ways in which my analysis of conversational texts or conversations, the way my grammatical analysis fits in with some established ways of understanding language and discourse analysis and that type of thing. And it comes out of a conversation that I had with my husband over lunch yesterday, where I sometimes wonder about what a normal conversation with one's husband would be. Is it like, you know, are these carrots great enough for, you know, what was your day? How was your day been?
But instead of asking, you know how you approach your language analysis, you use systemic functional grammar, right? And I'm like, yeah, how is your use of SFG different from how it's usually used in critical discourse analysis? And he says, and then he adds, can you just explain it like in one sentence or less? You know, he didn't want the girl who will podcast on it.
Well, that was a great question. And I did answer him in one sentence or less, and I wasn't totally happy with my response. So now I am going to record a podcast about it, and he doesn't have to listen to it. But you can listen to it if you want to.
And so if you've been listening to structured visions for a while, or even if you haven't, I like to geek out on grammar. And so what I do is I often take conversational texts, but sometimes just any kind of text, so any use of language. And I do this grammatical analysis of it, and I'm always making the claim that it's revealing something. And I was informed about this way of analyzing text by studying a form of linguistics called critical discourse analysis or CDA.
And a lot of my work, most of my work, I claim is a way of doing CDA or a way of doing critical discourse analysis. But my way of doing it is very different from traditional ways of doing critical discourse analysis. So if any of you are familiar with CDA, you know, and you're curious about how I'm doing is different from that than this would be useful. But even if you haven't done anything that's a CDA-oriented or language analysis, it might be interesting to learn a little bit about it.
So I thought I would share it with you today. And I thought I would just start by a kind of bog-standard explanation and example of what, quote-unquote, typical critical discourse analysis does. And I think the best way to do that is to simply jump into the deep end and just do some critical discourse analysis. And you can just follow along as I do it.
And you'll get a feel for what the project is, and then hopefully I'll be able to make it explicit, some of the actual explicit projects or aims of critical discourse analysis. So in order to do that, I just tried to find more or less at random a newspaper article. It was actually an online article, news text, because often CDA analyzes news texts. And I thought, well, I'll try to find a relatively uncontroversial one so that we can kind of see how it works.
So nothing about political debates or nothing that's going to be massively incendiary. And so instead I just chose a text that's called, Women Train to Become Perspective Firefighters. And this is from Fox News, and it's a regional section of Fox News looking at New York City. So I'll put the link to that news text in the show notes at structurefisions.wordpress.com.
And so the news text simply reads, and the text accompanies a video. So it was a video shot, and then the text is a kind of summarized version of what happened in that video shot. And we'll today just be analyzing the text, the actual printed text as opposed to the video. But if you look at the video, then there's some interesting comparisons that you can make.
So the text says, Women Train to Become Perspective Firefighters. That's the headline. And then I'll just read you this over the short piece. It says New York, Fox 5 News.
While the FDNY, so the Fire Department of New York, has around 10,500 male firefighters. It only has 52 female firefighters, and most of them have been through a class at New York Sports Clubs. Perspective firefighters are training hard as the department grows its female presence. Taught by an NYSC trainer, along with members of the NYPD and FDNY, the bravest and finest workout is preparing women to be first responders.
Okay. And then, yeah, that's just the first paragraph. And then there's three more short paragraphs, which I will read all of those out. And we'll maybe just look at that first paragraph and the headline.
So the idea here is if you're doing a critical discourse analysis of this text, one of your starting points is to say, okay, the language here is used to represent something. So it's not just that this kind of story exists in the world. You know, any journalist knows you have to make a story out of a bunch of potentially incoherent or incoherent elements. So you construct a story.
And the way that you construct the story is through the use of language. And so what then happens is language is kind of seen it to convey a particular event or a particular experience or something about the world. So here we have this language that I guess gives us a little bit of a window into a reality, if you like, or something that is constructed as reality. And when we see that it's actually language, but that's the only thing in this text that's giving us access to this type of reality, we recognize that choices are made.
So when you use language, there are potentially infinite ways of conveying experience. And so you're choosing one every time you use language to convey experience, you're choosing a particular way of conveying it. So one of the things that you can explore with critical discourse analysis is what choices have been made in this text and what other choices weren't made. So we can start with the headline, women train to become prospective firefighters.
Okay, so what choices were made there and what other choices could have been made? And so we could look at that and especially when we compare it to the first sentence of the actual main body of the story and the first sentence to remind you is while the FDNY has around 10,500 male firefighters, it has only 52 female firefighters and most of them have been through a class at New York sports clubs. Okay, so there's lots of different elements to the story. There's the New York Fire Department.
There's this discrepancy between the number of males and number of females. And it's a big discrepancy, right? So 10,500 males to 52 females, that's humongous, right? Now if I were going to do the story, and this is one of the things about critical discourse analysis is you always admit that you're bringing your own perspective to the text.
So my perspective, and you admit it and you just come straight out and you say this is what my perspective is. So here I am admitting what my perspective is. That's a huge, huge gap. The story, the important story for me is why is there such a big gap between the number of, you know, why is there such a huge gender divide in this particular area of work?
So to me, that links up into bigger pictures about how gender divides come into being. And that's an enormous gender divide, 52 female firefighters to 10,500. And I think, well, I would want to ask the question of how is the Fire Department of New York actually addressing that gap? You know, what is it doing?
How is it coming about? And how is it addressing it? And what research have been putting into that to close the gap, right? So that would be my perspective on it.
Now, that clearly isn't this text perspective on it. And one way you can know is by looking at the headline, women train to become prospective firefighters. That's where the story is. And it's interesting because the headline doesn't say anything about the gap, right?
The headline puts the emphasis on the women. So we can say, all right, let's look at this linguistically. Okay, women train to become prospective firefighters. That's a, you know, a clause.
And we can say, okay, there's a, the verb in that clause is train. And according to systemic function, wherever we look at the verb train, and we see it as a type of process. So rather than women are prospective firefighters, which is one type of process, or women want to be prospective firefighters, which is a different type of process, we say women train. So women are prospective firefighters.
It's a relational clause. Women want to be prospective firefighters. The want is what's called a mental process. Women train to become prospective firefighters is called a material process, material action process.
So in brief, that means that there is an agent to that process. There's somebody doing something in the world. That's the way this event is represented. So we've got this material process, which is train, and we've got agents who are doing that, and they are in the subject position, in the agent position, women.
So it's women who are training. Okay. So the emphasis on the headline is the women. And the emphasis is on the work they're doing in the world.
So the actions that they're taking, the material action, action in the world that they're taking in order to achieve something. Okay. And you think, okay, well, that's actually quite good. You know, it's going to be feminist.
It's like, let's find out about what women are doing and what actions they're taking. And I'm saying, ah, yeah. But in this case, by putting the emphasis on the women, we're seeing this potential problem or actually just a manifest problem of the gender gap as being something that women have to address by training rather than something more structural that the institution might look to address or ask questions about or explore. And then the other thing that I would, and also in that headline, that structural problem of the gap is missing.
Here's another thing I would say about that headline and the choices that were made. Women train to become, and then there's a noun phrase, prospective firefighters. So everything is a choice when you're making language. Why if you were writing that headline, would you choose to use the adjective perspective?
Why wouldn't you just say women train to become firefighters or even women train as firefighters? What is that word perspective doing? And from my perspective, not my perspective, but from my perspective. When I look at that, I think, well, that headline is distancing women from the actual job of being a firefighter by putting all of these kind of cushioning words in, that's keeping them away from it.
So women train as firefighters is pretty much everything that we need to know. So they're training, which means we know that they're not already firefighters, right? Because you have to train to be one. You could say women train to be firefighters and women train to become firefighters.
The word become is a relational process, and that's semantically entails that they are not yet firefighters. So when you use the word become, if I say I'm becoming a great public speaker, it means I'm not already yet a great public speaker, right? She's becoming quite the linguist. It means she's not already quite the linguist.
So that idea that they're not already firefighters is already encoded semantically in the word become and also more or less encoded in that word, train. So that idea that they're not yet firefighters is already encoded in two words there. And then we have this word perspective, which says redundantly exactly the same thing. You know, they're not yet firefighters.
They hope to be firefighters one day they might be firefighters. So you've got three words in this sixth word headline that entail the notion of they aren't firefighters yet. Why do you need all three? And so it's interesting that there's this enormous amount of hedging that separates the women from being firefighters.
And I think, okay, well, that ties into a set of assumptions that circulates in our society about us not expecting women to be firefighters. And then we say, okay, well, is there any other evidence in here that this article is drawing on the assumption that we don't expect women to be firefighters? And we say, okay, we could look down to, okay, actually in the second paragraph, there's two sentences and it's not just about the muscle, it's about teamwork. You say, okay, that's an interesting set of sentences there.
It's not just about the muscle, it's about teamwork. And those two sentences are working to construct a kind of relation between them. It's a kind of not only but also relation. It's not only about the muscle, it's also about teamwork, it might be a gloss for those two sentences.
And the structure, so we've got what's called a relationship of cohesion, how do those two sentences go together? And we could say, okay, well, the first sentence by saying it's not just about, we're putting forward something that people accept as given information. We expect firefighting to be about muscle. So that's the expectation.
And so the new information is actually, no, it's not just what you expect. It's also about this. It's also about teamwork. And so the whole article is about the women building their muscles and how they have to do that, right?
And but it's not just about that. It's also about this other thing, but the rest of the article isn't about the teamwork, it's about the muscle. And so what I think this is pointing to is that it's drawing upon this cultural association between muscles, firefighting, and the fact that women don't have what it takes to be firefighters because it's harder for them to develop their muscles, right? Now you and I can argue that point about how hard it is for women to develop their muscles.
But the important thing here is that it's not made explicit any of these assumptions. The article is just drawing on them implicitly, right? And so what happens then is we accept, or we are led to accept that the gender gap in the New York Fire Department, 10,500-0 firefighters and only 52, is kind of natural, right? It's not because there are gender inequities.
It's not because there are cultural stereotypes that need to be overcome. It's because women aren't strong enough, right? No, it doesn't explicitly say that because it's explicitly said that we have something to argue against. But it's not that.
It's implicitly stated. And if you sort of took Fox News to task, they would say, no, we never said it was that. But so much of the article depends upon that assumption that it leads us not to question some of the structural inequities. Why are there so many male firefighters and only 52 female firefighters?
Okay, so that's just an example of what you might do with critical discourse analysis. And what is it that we're actually doing there? So what I'm doing is I'm taking this text and I'm treating it as a thing. And I'm asking the question, what is this thing doing?
And what are some of the processes by which this text as a thing came into being? And we look at it critically and we say, this thing that came into being might be contributing to structural injustices in the world. So when we look at this thing, we want to look at the processes by which this thing, this text came into being in order to contribute to these structural injustices. So we could draw upon a kind of Marxist idea, a sort of historical materialist mode, which is something that critical discourse analysis aligns with.
We could say in the same way that you might take a piece of clothing off a rack in a department store and you might look at that piece of clothing and rather than just look at it as a piece of clothing as a thing, you say, what are the processes by which this thing came into being? So if I take a women's top off the rack and I look at it and let's say a cost, the price on that is like $6 or $6 or something like that. And you think, well, that's interesting. How did it come into being that this article of clothing cost £6?
And you say, how did this article come into being at all? And then you might say, what are the processes that brought this article clothing into being? And so you say, okay, well, if it's a cotton top, somebody had to grow the cotton, somebody had to pick the cotton and then the cotton had to be treated and then it had to be woven, it had to be made into fabric, woven into fabric and then it had to be dyed and then it had to be sewn and threw out that entire process and then it had to be distributed and then it had to be priced. So those are the processes in short of how that object came into being.
And then we look at it critically and say, wow, that's a lot of processes for something that only costs $6 or £6. So we then ask, okay, well, who's picking the cotton in the fields? What are the processes by which that's going to be? Who's doing the weaving?
Who's doing the dying? Who's doing the sewing? How much are those people getting paid for their labor? And what are the conditions in which these people are working?
What are all the unseen processes that bring about this article of clothing that's just part of my everyday life and as I do see my world? Is this stuff outsourced? What parts of the world are potentially being exploited in order to make this garment? Those are the questions that you ask from a sort of Marxist perspective about an article of clothing.
And you're almost asking those same questions about the text. What unseen assumptions are going into the making of this text such that this text gets produced and such that these assumptions are covered over. They're implicit. We don't see them.
You know, in the same way that your garment doesn't generally say, you know, this number of workers were employed, this much money was spent on them. You know, here are the people making the profit. Most garments don't include that information. And similarly, like most news texts, don't say, okay, here are all the assumptions we're drawing on in order to make this text.
You know, here are the choices we didn't make. And we chose these choices rather than those choices for this reason. So you can see why I'm drawing to critical discourse. Well, maybe you can see why I'm drawing to critical discourse analysis.
And it's because I want to know how structures come to being and how my experience of the world is often that these structures are unjust or unfair. So I want to find out, well, how do they get there? Now, the interesting thing is the way I do critical discourse analysis isn't that. Even though I love that, I think it's really important.
It isn't what I do. And even though I just explained it in probably some enthusiastic detail, it isn't what I do. I use the same kind of grammatical analysis. I use systemic functional grammar or SFG.
I pick apart the text. I do often explore what other choices could be made. But my starting point is different. And actually, my philosophy about language and texts is different.
My philosophy about language and texts is not purely Marxist in the way that much critical discourse analysis is. It is colored with other philosophical perspectives. And I won't go into those now, but I'm just going to give you a little picture of where I am in relation to where critical discourse analysis is. And in order to do that, I want you to imagine a thing that is a text, right?
So maybe you could have a little word document or piece of paper or something. Here's your text or newspaper or something. Here's your text. I would need to imagine it existing in time, which it does.
And then I want you to kind of go backwards and say, okay, imagine the journalist writing that text and all the processes by which the text comes into being, all those choices that had to be made, why this text, rather than that text, why are we telling the story of the film rather than this story, how are we structuring it, what editorial choices are being made, et cetera. And so you're saying, okay, those are the processes that happened first before the text came into being. So it's a kind of looking backward. Doing critical discourse analysis is a kind of looking backward.
You can do it with a garment as well if you want. So you look at the t-shirt that you're buying from your department store and you say, what are the processes? And they go backwards. They go back to when the cotton was growing in the fields.
And let me move forward to think about all the processes that were required in order for this t-shirt to come into being. What I do instead is say, let's not treat the text as the endpoint and analyze everything that came before it. Let's treat the text as the middle point. And let's analyze the possibilities that come after it.
So yes, we can look at the text and we can say, okay, here are all the processes and these are all the assumptions and all the things that you need to gather together in order to make this text. And critical discourse analysis does that. It says there's almost this idea in critical discourse analysis that hidden in every text is some sinister secret to its production, which are you? More or less I agree with.
But I'm thinking in every text there's something else hidden. And it's not just its past, but it's also what you might call the seeds for transformation. So, when I look at a text, I say, what are the possibilities that I can find through a grammatical analysis of a text? What are the possibilities for a different, better, more expansive, more welcoming social structure than the thing that produced it?
When I look at a text for me, it's like I'm exploring something. I'm exploring new possibilities. When I do the CDA way, I often get depressed and a little bit bitter. Which is okay.
When I'm looking forward, there's a notion of a kind of exploration. And there's another way of looking at it, which is to say, as I mentioned in CDA, you always say I'm bringing my perspective to the text. And so I said to you, well my perspective is, well, there's lots of gender gaps in society and they're structural and we need to address them. And so that's the perspective I bring.
Now I can't bring a perspective to a text that I don't yet have, right? So my way of doing CDA, or my way of doing textual analysis, is to say I'm bringing a perspective to a text and I would like my perspective to shift. I would like my analysis of this text to open up the world for me in a new way. I would like to have new ideas after analyzing this text.
And so that's what happens when I'm doing grammatical analysis. What transformation will this text point me towards? What new ways of thinking about the world emerge when I look at this text? What potential is there?
And so for me analyzing a text is such an exciting thing because I know I'm going to come out of it with a different idea than I had when I went in. And possibly in our next episode of structured visions, I will give you an idea of my understanding of language and text that enables me to see a text as a container of seeds of transformation. So look forward to an upcoming episode of structured visions for that. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you'll join me next time.