INT. J. SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY, 2001, VOL. 4, NO.

I, 5 - 9

Understanding talk: directions from Bernstein's sociology

RUQAIYA HASAN

A theory must [not only] be capable of providing an explicit, unambiguous description of the objects of its analysis. ... [but it] must [also] ... provide rules for their empirical recognition, description and modalities of realization. ... [T]he principles of description, ... derived from the theory, must interact with the empirical contextual display so as to retain and translate the integrity of the display. ... bringing about a dynamic relation between theoretical and empirical levels. ... Ideally, the principles must have the potential of exhausting the possibilities. This means that they have the potential not only of describing imputed regularities to the displays but of showing their diversities. (Bernstein 1996: 93)

Occasionally there arrives a scholar with sufficient courage and integrity to probe the unpalatable even in the face of carelessly hostile readings riding high on the wave of popular sentiments. Basil Bernstein was one such. Throughout his working life his quest remained the sameto understand and to reveal how patterns of oppression and often unwitting collusion in oppression maintain themselves in modern progressive societies and what potential there is for social change. The last three decades of Bernstein's research are often perceived as moving into a substantially different direction, but it is my reading that his research never abandoned the basic question with which it started, though over the years the theory gained by painstaking refinement and elaboration which made the principles of his theoretical framework remarkably rich and explicit. T o quote him on the basic question that engaged him:
The substantive issue of ... [this] theory is to explicate the process whereby a given distribution of power and principles of control are translated into specialised principles of communication differentially, and often unequally, distributed to social groups/classes. And how such a differential/unequal distribution of forms of communication, initially (but not necessarily terminally) shapes the formation of consciousness of members of these groups/classes in such a way as to relay both opposition and change. (Bernstein 1996: 93)

For Bernstein it was not sufficient to talk only of the pathology of communication, no matter how eloquently: he was interested in showing how the pathology comes about, what produces it and what it produces in its own turn. And again, Bernstein was almost unique among sociologists in not just paying lip service to the centrality of linguistic processes in the production and reproduction of societies. In fact communication has a special place in his theory: it is through communication by various semiotic

International Journal of Social Research Methoclologv ISSN 1364-5579 print/ISSN 1464-5300 online 2001 Taylor &' Francis Ltd htlp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13645570010028549

RUQAIYA HASAN

modalities, but most importantly through language, that the 'outside becomes the inside and the inside reveals itself (Bernstein 1975)a conceptualization of the cultural historical processes of the shaping of consciousness which recalls Vygotsky (1978), but backed by a theory which provides a much clearer understanding of the social structuring of discourse in society. Not surprisingly, communication whether it occurred in everyday life or in the context of official pedagogy was for Bernstein an important instrument in the multiple layers of 'translations' that his ambitious theory attempted, linking the smallest human action, the most ordinary seeming talk ultimately to the principles of social organization, to the production and distribution of power within societies. The theorization of communication is what makes explicit the processes whereby the 'invidious' nature of this distribution plays a crucial role in its own reproduction largely by defining the reality of and for social subjects. As the Bernstein's language of description became more rigorous, later Bernstein offered one of the richest accounts of what it is to communicate. To understand his views on what underlies the social subjects' participation in discourse is to understand the true meaning of speaking (see Bernstein 1990: 17, figure 3.1): each act of speaking is a social event, behind which lies the history of the individual and so the history of the community of which the individual is a member. This is an understanding of the semiotic process which in fact provides the most powerful complement to Vygotsky's account of the role of semiotic mediation in the development of mind in society. And certainly in the domain of discourse analysis, Bernstein's concept of the invisible and visible components of the communicative act complement our understanding of the true nature of social context, which on the one hand points to cultural history and on the other to speaker's desires, needs and beliefs. This is the theme that I very briefly want to develop below. In linguistics, it is taken as axiomatic that in the words of de Saussure (1966), in parole the individual is the master: speakers can say anything they want, and certainly the truth of this claim is undeniable. But until quite recently the gulf that divides can say from do say did not receive the attention it deserved. Implied in this gulf was a paradox: while the freedom of parole promised novelty and uniqueness, experience of people talking informed that most discourse is unsurprising, true to expectation, and that it fulfils the promise of originality but rarely. What imposes the typical regularity, what predicts the predictability of talk? These questions did not engage many linguists until the work of Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1975), further flavoured by ethnomethodology, finally offered an opening. Thanks to Malinowski (1923), Firth (1957) and Halliday et al. (1964), those of us who practised systemic functional linguistics (henceforth SFL) arguably fared somewhat better: by linking talk to social context, it was possible for SF linguists to show that talk and the occasion of talk are systematically related, that it is this relation that governs the regularity and predictability of talk. The interest of SFL in what people say was not accidental: it arose from accepting Firth's prescient rejection of what in Bernstein's terms is Saussure's strong classification of langue and parole. I want to give a very

UNDERSTANDING TALK: DIRECTIONS FROM BERNSTEIN'S SOCIOLOGY

brief indication of what SFL achieved by taking as its object of enquiry both the system and the process of languageboth what langue potentially permits the speaker to say and what speakers typically do say as parole. Treating context as an element of linguistic theory, SFL proceeded to describe the structure of social context {alias the contextual construct) in terms of the three parameters of field (i.e., social activity), tenor (i.e., participant relations) and mode (i.e., modalities and means of contact): any one instance of context is a configuration of the specific values of these three parameters, sometimes referred to as contextual configuration. Halliday argued that the structure of language is as it is because language as process is shaped by its participation in the processes of living. In support of this argument Halliday (1979) pointed to the close realizational relation between the three parameters of context and the internal form of language: each contextual parameter has the potential of activating choices from specific areas of meaning and wording. These three specific areas of meanings and wordingsthe ideational, the interpersonal and the textualform the resource for the construal of field, tenor and mode, respectively. This prehension between context, semantics and lexicogrammar was taken as proof of the metafunctional nature of language. In the realm of discourse, context became the crucial explanatory principle for analysing the generic structure potential of text types: the generic structure was said to be activated by the specific character of field, tenor and mode (Halliday and Hasan 1985). This principle permitted a systematic description of the regularities within text types. It appeared as if by approaching context from the point of view of discourse, SFL had arrived at a powerful language of description capable of explicating the principles that underlie both the regularities of the contextual displays and their diversities. SFL was in full agreement with Bernstein on the systemic nature of context whereby 'what counts as context depends not on relationships within, but on relationships between contexts' (Bernstein 1990: 15). It, however, did not problematize the speaker's recognition of contexts in the way that Bernstein did: contexts came to have an identity completely independent of the subjects active within the contexts. Further, at least in some varieties of SFL, notably Martin's genre based model, field and in specifiable cases mode were prioritized as furnishing the basis for the analysis of the structure of genres, which further underplayed the role of the speaking subjects in relating to the occasions of their talk. In my view both these problems have the same origin: how the social subject is conceptualized in relation to context. In SFL, interactants were seen in terms of their agency, what they were doing, e.g. salesman-buyer; in terms of their relation to each other, both ascribed, e.g. mother-child and achieved, e.g. expert-novice; and in terms of the social distance between them, whether and how frequently, the history of their communication had brought them together before and if so in what range of fields. But, of course, we know that all mothers do not talk the same way even while engaged in the same activity, in some sense of the word same (Cloran 1999, Hasan 2000). Their sense of what the context is a context for is critically different. To understand why this should be so, we need to read carefully

RUQAIYA HASAN

what Bernstein referred to as the 'invisible' component of communication (see Bernstein 1999: 17, figure 3.1 and discussion). The code theory relates this component to the subject's social positioning. If we grant that 'ideology is constituted through and in such positioning' (Bernstein 1999: 13), then we grant that subjects' stance to their universe is being invoked: different orders of relevance inhere in different experiences of positioning and being positioned. This is where the nature of what one wants to say, not its absolute specifics, may be traced. Of course, linguists are right that speakers can say what they want to say, but an important question is: what is the range of meanings they freely and voluntarily mean, and why do they prioritize those meanings when the possibilities of making meanings from the point of view of the system of language are infinite? Why do they want to say what they do say? The regularities in discourse have roots that run much deeper than linguistics has cared to fathom. If we grant that positioning is in a systematic relation to the distribution of power and principles of control, then we grant also certain tendencies toward classification and framing. These tendencies play a part in every aspect of our communication. Currently, the Bakhtinian term 'hybridity' is much in vogue. Of course, at the visible level of communication both the fact of intertextuality and hybridity are, well, naturally visible! In making observations about these phenomena, where they occur, what form they take, our description has achieved what Chomsky called observational adequacy. This is an important element in the creation of a theory and in the development of its language of description, but it falls short of explanation, without which no theory is complete. Bernstein's analysis of how subjects are positioned and how they position themselves in relation to the social context of their discourse, offers an explanation of hybridity, or genre-combination (Martin 1992) in terms of the classification and framing practices of the speaking subjects. In researching mother's everyday talk with their children, my colleagues and I found that speakers' social positioning is the most powerful concept for understanding discourse both its local meanings and its global structure. It is positioning which underlies the invisible stratum of their communication, which in turn underlies their visible communication, which is what linguists describe. To put it this way is not to play down the importance of visible talk; it is simply to insist on the complexity of understanding talk. Visible communication is precisely that which impinges on the other, and as such its power cannot be denied. As Whorf (1956) said 'talk is the best show man puts on'; Bernstein shows us that behind this show is an impressive panoply, which we ourselves have created, and what is more we have created it largely by talking, and what is more this refers to the visible talk that impinges on the other. However, to understand the source of this discursive power is to see in the visible the mark of the invisible and thus to arrive at a deeper undertanding of talk. To quote Bernstein again:
[A] specific text is but a transformation of the specialized transactional practice; the text is the form of the social relationship made visible, palpable, material. ... Further the selection, creation, production, and changing of texts are the means whereby the positioning of the subjects is revealed, reproduced and changed. (Bernstein 1990: 17)

UNDERSTANDING TALK; DIRECTIONS FROM BERNSTEIN'S SOCIOLOGY

References
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