Episode 57: Redneck roots

Hello, and welcome to episode 57 of Structure Visions. Structure Visions is a space for I explore new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Dirty Clark and I'm very grateful for you listening today. You are very welcome here.

Today's episode is called Redneck Roots, which relates to an extract of a conversation I'm going to share with you. In the last episode, things got a little bit abstract and I promised that I would bring them a little bit more down to Earth and I always try to bring them down to Earth by talking about real conversations with real people. So we'll be discussing that today and just to give you a little reminder or if you haven't listened to the last couple of podcasts, I have been working with explaining how my work differs from the area of linguistics that probably most informs me and that's critical discourse analysis. So in episode 55, I explained a little bit about critical discourse analysis and I said that just to summarize that, I said the main difference between critical discourse analysis or CDA as it's often abbreviated is that for CDA, the text is the end point in a process of production.

It's like the product of a process of production is the end point. And for me, I said that the text is a midpoint and hopefully that will be a little bit clearer today. And then in episode 56, I talked about language and I said I had a slightly different way of understanding language from the more typical view of language and also a view that CDA implicitly I think draws on. And I said that language is a communication device but not primarily a communication device.

For me, the interesting thing about language is that it's an information structuring device. So we happen to use, so people happen to use human languages to communicate. But the important interesting thing about language is that it's an information structuring device. And so if CDA sees language as a mechanism for communication or for representation through communication, then for CDA, you might look at a text and say, okay, how has the world been represented in this text?

You're out of beer versus I drank your beer. So two different versions of the world communicated in two different ways, represented in two different ways. And CDA says, why was that choice made? Why did the person say you're out of beer rather than I drank your beer?

And what motivated those choices? And how could it have been otherwise? And for me, when I look at a text, it's less about how has the world been represented, although that's always an element of it. But the important thing for me is, ah, okay, language enables human language is unique from all of the other language systems of the earth.

Human language is unique because it allows information to be structured in a distinct way from how information is structured in other earth domains. Okay, so then I say, so how is the information being structured in this particular text? And when we put our attention to how the information is structured, what new possibilities emerge? And so for me, the text is the midpoint.

Okay, yes, it is the product. It is that there was a process. There was a communication process. Yes, human beings were wandering around communicating to each other.

And in the process of that, they created this text. And what we see when we look at the text is a particular way of structuring information. And that's why I say we're at the midpoint. And then I say, then we bring our attention to the way that the information is structured.

And out of that combination of the attention we're bringing to it and the information structure itself, a new information structure can emerge. And so for me, that element, so it is a form of critical discourse analysis. But it's a way, in my mind, the way I look at it, it's almost like you're looking at some kind of swirly thing, some kind of swirly pattern in like a liquid solution, right? And you see that the solution is swirling in a particular way.

And when you put your attention on it, you notice that there's a possibility that it might swirl in a different way. That's kind of the way. If I tried to describe what's happening in my mind when I'm doing my form of CDA, that's one thing that comes to mind. Other things come to mind.

But we'll start with that one. And I promise that I was going to get a little bit more grounded this week. And that means, like I said, that we're going to be looking at a conversational extraction. Now, I tend to look at conversational extracts, not exclusively, but I love conversational extracts for lots of reasons.

Mostly I just enjoy what people have to say and I enjoy recording them. But I don't just look at them, but they are one thing that I look at. CDA often looks at written texts. And a couple of weeks ago, I used the example of the newspaper articles, but it does not exclusively look at written texts.

It also looks at conversational extracts and many other types of extracts. But conversational extracts are not outside of the realm of the CDA methodology. So today we're going to look at a conversational extract. And I'm going to start by giving you what could be like a classic CDA type analysis.

And when I say classic, I'm drawing mostly upon Norman Faircloth's work and also upon Lily Schulieraki and Norman Faircloth's work, Discourse and Late Modernity. And their way of doing critical discourse analysis is sometimes called a dialectical relational approach. So that's just that there's other ways of doing CDA, but I just wanted to give you a sense of where I'm coming from when I'm doing my CDA analysis, that I'm saying is classic or typical or whatever. It's actually that sort of fair cloth or Schulieraki and Faircloth way of doing CDA.

Okay. So I'm going to ask you to follow along with me in a conversation. What I'll do is quite a long conversation. And I'll make the, I think I'll make a PDF of the transcripts.

We're going to look at two transcripts and I'll make those available for you on the website, which is StructuredVisions.wordpress.com. So if you go to the episode 57 of that, you'll find a link to the PDF, I hope you will, because I will think that available after I record this. And the conversation I'm going to talk about today is actually one that I discussed many moons ago in episode seven, which I think was called the isolated individual. So I'm going to come back to that.

So you don't have to listen to episode seven and you certainly don't have to remember it if you listen to it a hundred years ago. But I just wanted to let you know that it's the same, it's the same one that I'm going to do after all different aspects of it. And what's happening, there's three participants in this conversation, Christina, Luke, and me. And we're sitting around at a dinner table where actually in my apartment, when I lived in Strasbourg in France, and I had my, it's actually a tape recorder, this was a long time ago, but I actually had the tape recorder in the middle of the table.

And so everybody knew the tape recorder was there and the people's names have been changed and many of the distinguishing things in the transcript have been changed. And we're talking about our hometowns. And Christina is particularly talking about the town that she comes from. And I, as I mentioned in episode seven, I'm calling her hometown, Awaville, which is the name of the town, but I call it that because one of the key themes of this extract is how she wants to get away from Awaville.

So I'm calling it Awaville. And so here we are, we have this conversation again, we're talking about our small towns. And I'll just read you some of it. So we're right now, if you're looking on the PDF, if you've paused the podcast and you've accessed the PDF, we're looking at extract one.

And Christina's talking about Awaville. She says it has, Awaville has like a big Catholic church and a Kmart and a kind of laughing world laughing about it, having a Kmart and Luke is like, what's that's all it has. And Christina says, and a former army depot, like they closed the armo depot recently and said the whole place is like dying. And so there are these little towns that like back in the day when they opened the army depot, it was in Awaville.

And so people like sort of coming to Awaville because all the army guys lived there and it was helping the economy and then they closed it. And so now all these people who live like in the little towns outside, like in the middle of nowhere, people are moving out and Awaville's not making very much money. I don't think any more and all that fun, happy stuff. Okay.

And so then she goes on to talk about her leaving Awaville. I asked her, does it seem deserted in line 22? And she says, yeah, I mean, even since I left, I graduated from high school and moved out the next day. And so we're laughing about that how quickly she moved down.

And I say, who does that? That's in line 27. And in line 30, she self-corrects. Christina says, no, I actually moved out that night.

I was packed. I was packed before I went to graduation and I graduated and I went to a party and left like that night and slept in Frederick, which was the place where she was going to college. And I said, you weren't ready to go for you. And Christina says, ma'am, Awaville is not, you know.

And then in line 43, I said, did you spend all four years in high school there? And Christina says, yeah, in line 45. But then later in line 52, she says, have I shrugged off my redneck roots? In line 55, please do tell me.

So you know, have I, have I, have I lost my past? Have I gotten away from it? I really hope I have. Okay.

So let's look at this from a kind of dialectic relational CDA perspective. It's a ferricle of, shoelier-rachian-ferricle of type of perspective. And we're going to say, okay, this text is a conversational text. It is the end point.

It is the product. And we say, okay, what were the, what were the elements that were involved in producing this product? Okay. So who produced it?

Okay. Well, we say, what was a joint production? There were three people producing this text. And we can look at the context of these three people.

We see these people as social actors, right? These are people acting in their world. They are not constituted by discourse. This is important from a CDA perspective.

This is a practice theoretical perspective. They are producing a text and they are drawing upon various resources to produce this text. And they also are working within certain constraints from their context, from their environments, and their social setting. So they're in an informal setting and so their text will reflect their, they'll be producing it in order to reflect the informality of the setting.

So when Kristina is talking, she's using an informal register. So she's saying things like, all the army guys live there. You know, so she's wearing these little guys rather than army, what else would you say? Army men, army people, army folk?

No, even say folk. But anyway, the word guys, army guys is, she's drawing on an informal register. When she says back in the day, so rather than being specific and saying in the year of the day, whatever, she's saying back in the day to both that highlights the informality of the register, it also creates a kind of storytelling aspect to what she's doing. So all of this is in keeping with the social context of it being an informal casual conversation.

She uses discourse markers like like in the little towns, like in the middle of nowhere, that's in lines 14 and 15. So again, all of these things that are her drawing on that informal casual register. Now from a more, a kind of more focused perspective is to say, okay, now what resources, and we'll focus specifically on Kristina now. So, you know, what resources is she drawing on in order to produce a particular representation of the world?

And so we say, okay, well, discourse is let's just think of them as ways of understanding the world and ways of talking about the world and recognizable ways of understanding and talking about the world. And so on the one hand, if you look at lines 10, she says when they open the army, so from lines 10 to 15, she said that these are towns, when they open the army depot, people started coming in, the army guys lived there, it was helping the economy, and then they closed it, and then everybody had to move away. Or many people did move away. And so here we can say we're still in an informal casual register, but she's drawing on a particular discourse, and we can even label it, we can call it the discourse of socioeconomic disfunction, which is not designed to label it.

But she's saying she's drawing upon this notion that's understandable, which is a particular place prospers when money has been invested into it, and decisions can be made, and so the money in this case is invested into the army depot, and decisions can be made that will change the flow of that money, and these are socioeconomic decisions, and there's the economic decisions, you know, at the governmental level, in this case the local government, they closed the army depot. That has an impact on the social organization of that area. So she's drawing upon this notion of socioeconomics, maybe disfunction is going too far, but drawing on the discourse of socioeconomics, and so we have a way of explaining or representing what happened in a way though. Now if you notice, when you move to line 23, she starts drawing on a different discourse, it seems deserted, yes, even since I left, I graduated from high school, I moved out the next day.

No, I actually moved out that night. I was packed, I was packed before I went, I graduated, I went to a party, and I left that night and I slept in Frederick. And so here we have a different type of discourse. That discourse that she's drawing on there seems to me to come from some kind of individualism, like we call it the discourse of rugged individualism, which is to say, I made decisions, and I took action and I moved away.

So on the one hand, and there's two discourses are like in juxtaposition, and there's a clear dividing line between them. At one point she's talking about socioeconomics, and in the next point we're talking about individualism and individual action. I got out, I graduated the second I could get out, I got out. And there's all kinds of words that indicate that shift in the discourses, but also we can look at the syntactic patterns and the transitivity patterns.

So in the discourse of socioeconomics, there's lots of material action clauses, and they, so material action clauses like they opened the army depot, people started coming, it was helping the economy, they closed it, so there's all these material action processes. The actors or the agents of those processes is usually they, right? So they opened it, they closed it, and sometimes it's people. People started coming to a wayville, so we've got they, and we've got people.

So even when we're thinking in terms of these participants in the clauses, so even when we're looking at the transitivity of these clauses, we can see that they fit in with this discourse, which is the discourse of socioeconomics, which is there are they, these unnamed people who make decisions about the economy, and then there's the people who are affected by those decisions. So within the discourse of socioeconomics, we have the participants that kind of constitute that discourse, the they and the people, the people who make the decisions, and the people who are affected by those decisions. Now if you then move into that second bit that seems to start around line 23, we have this discourse of the individual, and appropriately it seems to be structured along lots of more material action processes, material action clauses. I left, I graduated, I moved out, I packed, I was packed, I went to graduation, I graduated, I went to a party, I slept in Frederick, so all of those are material action clauses, and as you'll have noticed, the agent, the participant who's functioning as agent there is always I, the first person.

So that fits in with what we would expect, perhaps in a discourse of individualism, where there's a constant I in the grammar, who's an actor, who's doing stuff to change things in the world. So we move from a they and people situation, you know, people who make the decisions and people who are affected by them to an I situation, I'm doing something about my world. So that, so what we see from a critical discourse analysis perspective, that this is a text that Kristina's drawing upon resources to produce this text, and some of the resources that she's drawing upon are linguistic language resources, and some of them are more like discourses, so larger patterns that make sense to her audience. And then the critical element of that might be, okay, let's look at that and see how the world is represented, and see what, how else it could be represented, and see what meanings might be masked by this particular way of representing the world.

So we could say, ah, well, she's shifted from the issues in a way they'll be structural and socio-economic, she's juxtaposed that with it being about an individual needing to get out. And I talked about this a little bit about this, I talked about it in different terms. And so in the first discourse, or the first part of the text, it's like these people made these decisions and they caused other people suffering, right? But then in the next part of the text, it's like I did something about it, I did what I could, and what I could do was get out.

And then later in the text, it's like I am better for having done that. I've shrugged off some aspect of my class, I've shrugged off my redneck roots, there's some aspect of my socio-economic position that I want to distance myself from. And then later in the text, which I haven't put here, she then accuses other people, particularly her brother, of not taking the actions that they need to take to get out of it. And so it's like, well, she's shifting the responsibilities.

And the first part is a structural issue. There are people who made decisions that affected people's lives badly. And then the second part is like I took action, I got out. And effectively I'm better than other people who didn't get out, who didn't make the decision to get out and didn't organize their lives so they could get out.

And so when we see those two discourses juxtaposed, we can say, well, one actually masks the other. If we put all of the attention on what the individual can do to get out of a bad situation, we are then taking away attention from the people who are actually responsible for doing it. You know what I mean? So there were actually people who made a decision that had an impact on other people.

And those are the people that Kristina goes on to blame. What she does is she goes on to blame the people who don't make the decision to leave. And so the critical element of that is to say, well, this can bring our awareness to a way of representing the world. And it's a relatively common way of representing the world, which is to say there's a structural inequality.

There's a structural form of oppression, no matter how small that oppression might seem. And the answer to that is not to question the structural element, the socioeconomic element, and instead to put the impetus on individual actors. If you're in a bad situation, it's your fault and you've got to get out of it. So there's our critical perspective, or one potential critical perspective.

And what we could say is we could look to other texts and say how often does that come up, how often are people as individuals made responsible for decisions that are actually at a more structural level. And that is a kind of critical discourse analysis way of looking at it. Now it's not the only one, obviously. There are other ways of doing critical discourses on this text or on any text.

It's always an interpretive act, as you've imagined, as you figured out. But that, to me, is a kind of standard critical discourse analysis. The text is the product. It represents the world in a particular way.

It's the critical element is consciousness raising. When we become aware of how the world is represented, we can notice if something is being disguised or masked, and we can be alerted to that. And we can start thinking about them in different ways. So what about the way I look at it?

Okay, so I look at it in those ways. Like I say, CDA is probably the part of linguistics that has the biggest impact on my work. But there is a slight difference. And so for me, yes, it is the case that you have three social actors who are communicating with each other and they're producing a text.

But then once the text is produced, I kind of ignore the social actor part of it. I stop thinking of it as something that someone has produced in order to communicate something, or in order to represent the world in a particular way. Now, I don't totally lose that. But for all intents and purposes, I say, okay, let's not worry about what the people are communicating and how they're representing the world.

Let's move the social actors to the side for a while. And let's look at this text as an artifact of a particular way of structuring information. Okay, and so when I do that, I might notice all of the things that I noticed, you know, the first part of this episode. But I also am looking at the information structure, but the main thing I think is, if I look at this closely and I bring my attention to this artifact, and I notice the way the information is structured, I will start to see a transformative moment.

There'll be a moment in that text where a new way of structuring information emerges. And that's always the thing I'm looking for. I almost always find it. Okay, so how did I find it in this text?

Okay, so in this text, I expanded my vision a little bit, and I went a little bit further along in the conversation. So I added an extract to extract one. So I have about five minutes later, maybe even three minutes later, in the conversation, we're still talking about a way though, and we've been comparing a way though to other places. And in extract two, Christina, just before this, I've mentioned to Christina on for later those types of places that you're talking about, like a way though.

And Christina says those little places where they're all in the NASCAR, and we're all like, yeah, exactly. And Christina then says in line four, I feel bad saying that, because my mom is all about NASCAR, like she knows all the drivers line eight. And she's into like that Indian kind of art, you know what I mean? With the beads and the feathers and stuff, and then in line 12.

And like everything I say about Red Nax is like, what, like my mom? You know what I mean? It's my mom. And I'm like, and then she says in line 23, but it's cool though.

She says in line 23. I'm not like I'm not embarrassed to be to like introduce her to people or anything like that. And then Luke says, this is my mom, unfortunately. Christina says no, but seriously, she moved to this.

This is in line 34, because like she moved to this, this like little, this little like Western North Carolina, middle and nowhere town, and it's like she belongs there. Okay, so when I put, look at that longer piece, and there's a piece in the middle that's interesting too, but I don't have time to talk about it today, when I look at that longer piece, and I'm seeing it as a way, a mechanism for structuring information, it is a particularly structured information artifact you like, and I'm not worrying about how the social actors are representing things. I'm just looking at it as a frozen in time way of structuring information. And I'm starting, what I start to do is looking for, is to look for patterns, and these patterns emerge in interesting ways.

Let's start with extract two, line one, those little places where they're all into NASCAR, right? So you're familiar, if you've listened to me, you're familiar, I always sort of draw attention to this sort of demonstratives, those little places. So we have this determiner of those, and it's a demonstrative, and it's selective. So what it's doing is it's saying to you, hey, I'm going to draw a circle around something, and I would like you put your attention on it, and those means it's distal, so it's kind of far away.

So it's like, those houses in the distance, those little places where they're all into NASCAR. Okay, well, obviously those places aren't available to our media, in a garment, so we're being asked to imagine that these places exist, that those places exist, right? So we're asked to draw upon them. Those little places where they're all into NASCAR.

Within that nominal group, those little places where they're all into NASCAR, we have an embedded clause where they're all into NASCAR. Okay, so look at that, they're all into NASCAR, and then that gets repeated later in line four. My mom is all about NASCAR. Okay, so they're all into NASCAR, my mom is all about NASCAR.

Okay, so that's interesting because the only difference, one case we've got all into, one case we've got all about, but the only other difference is between they and my mom. And the interesting thing about it when you listen to it is my mom has stress on it. You can tell in the transcript there's a colon after the O, which indicates that the O is a little bit longer, but when you listen to it, you also notice that she stresses the word mom. My mom is all about NASCAR.

In the first line, they're all into NASCAR. We aren't being told who the reference of they are, you know, so whoever they are, we don't know who they are. We assume they're the people who live in these little places. So they're all into NASCAR.

So we've got this amorphous group of people who are all into NASCAR, and then we have a very specific person. And that specific person is signaled by the kinshipter mom, the possessive pronoun, my, right? So there's only going to be one person in all of the world who is Christina's mom, my mom, and then by the stress, which is called contrastive stress. So it's in a place where you wouldn't expect stress in the tone group.

So she has to put the stress on in a place where you wouldn't normally expect it. They're all into NASCAR's. My mom is all about NASCAR. So what we have is this amorphous group of people that we can kind of judge because they're in these little towns and we don't really like them.

But among those people is one specific person, and that one specific person is my mom. Okay, so we've got a pattern there. All in NASCAR, my mom is all in NASCAR. We go from general to specific.

We've got information. We've got this sort of way of structuring information where we've got this group, and then we've got this specific. Let's look for another pattern, and then I'll try to bring it all together. Excuse me.

So if you go to line 34, so the end of extract two, so she, meaning my mom, moved to this little like western North Carolina middle and nowhere town, and it's like she belongs there. Okay, western North Carolina middle and nowhere town. Does that remind you of anything in this whole set of extracts? Go back to extract one, line 15, lines 14 and 15.

Now all these people who live like in the little towns outside, like in the middle and nowhere. We've got these two references to the middle and nowhere. And interestingly, there's another pattern that happens when you look at these two middle and nowhere references. Line 13, they closed it.

Okay, then they closed it. So the army depo, they closed it. And so now all these people who live like in the towns outside, like in the middle and nowhere. We've got two processes.

We've got closed and live. So closed is a material process, and lived is I think it's a relational process. So somebody did something in the world, a material action process. And then that caused a result, which is that people then lived somewhere.

So they they were already living there. But what happened was as a result of closing the army depo, where they lived became the middle and nowhere because of the economic status. So we've got the material process and then the relational process and two different actors for each process. So they closed it, meaning the government or yeah, the government and then the people who live.

So the they and the people material process, the living relational process. Now let's jump ahead to Kristina's mom, line 34. She moved this little like Western North Carolina middle and nowhere town, and it's like she belongs there. Okay, we've got the middle of nowhere.

We've got the middle of nowhere town, right? And then we have two processes moved and belong. Moved is material and belong is relational. So previously we had two processes closed and live material and relational and now we've got moved and belong material and relational and moved the agent is she my mom.

And then it's like she belongs there. So in both cases, the actor is the she. So in the one case, it was they did something and then the people lived there. They did the material action and the people were doing a relational process.

In the second case, it's she moved mom did the material action thing and she belongs. She's doing the relational thing. Now she moved she belongs. So first of all, the material action is the moving to the middle of nowhere town.

Now you would not imagine that anyone would move to a middle of nowhere town because middle of nowhere suggests low economic status, nothing going on, not enough money. She moved there. She made the decision. She took the action, right?

So maybe rugged individualism, right? But the rugged individualism is not to get out of the middle of nowhere town is to move into it. And then what happens next? She belongs there.

Relational process. She's the one doing the relating, right? But you don't relating, you don't only talk about in terms of a doing. There is a relationship and the relationship is that she belongs.

And so when I have an image of this, I have this image of this person moving into this new setting and I have an image of this town like surrounding her, like embracing her, like coming up and making it so that she belongs, right? So a second to know, Christina was criticizing all these people for kind of being too rednecky to leave their poor town. And now she's saying, actually, you know what, my mom is a redneck, right? My mom has this socioeconomic status that I don't approve of, that I'm trying to escape.

And she's moved into a place that has kind of wrapped itself around her. We have a new information structure here, the possibility for a new way of understanding how a self can be immersed in an area rather than people coming in and the economy thriving because people are spending money and all the rest of it. Instead, we, and rather than this idea of, ah, you know, I'm in this socioeconomic status and I'm trapped, right? Or I've been hard done by it.

Here it's, I have this socioeconomic status, I have this status, I have this identity. I move to this place where the economy probably isn't great. And I am surrounded by belonging. And so to me, this is a new way of understanding a type of information, which is the relationship between people in their towns that isn't divorced from the socioeconomic, but isn't completely, isn't completely organized according to cause and effect, right?

So she belongs there. Does she belong there as a result of having moved there? Well, okay, we shouldn't be able to belong there. She didn't move there, but it's almost like she belonged there first.

So this sense that an area that a place can surround a self and that that might be more important than economic prosperity, not that those two things are necessarily, you know, disconnected. And so that then makes me want to rethink how I understand the relationship between people and their economies, people and their material surroundings. When I'm looking at that text, I see the information restructuring itself in a particular way by paying attention to the grammar. So that's the slight difference between what I'm doing with CDA and what I think people like Faircloth and Shilly Rocky and Faircloth are doing with their CDA.

For me, yes, there are social actors producing this text with the production process and the resources they're drawing upon isn't the most important thing. For me, it's how is the information organized? And when I put my attention to it, what new information structures emerge and the critical element is and how does that enable me or others to rethink the social structures that govern our everyday lives? Thank you so much for listening and I hope you'll join in next time.