• Language and social power/ inequality
• semiotics = ethnocentric
• language itself = sociohistorical phenomenon
• official language and political power; dominant language established through and restul of political contest/conquest
• Nation-state, grammar books, dictionaries, correct usage texts = process of normalization that consolidates power in hands of privileged elite (6)
• School = state's apparatus for Ý -- local/regional dialects, lived expressions of majority of people, devalued & marginalized
• Must attend to relations of power between speakers and hearers (7)
• Recognition of right to speak (and of associated forms of power and authority)
• Practical competence
• Draws on Austin 's performative utterance (8) = ritual performance and requires institution (i.e., set of social relations that endows individuals with power, status, resources) = gives individual authority for words to be heard/recognized/ acted upon

Theory of Practice: To move beyond binary of subjectivism/objectivism

• Habitus (12) = set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways
• Dispositions are
  • inculcated (taught); mould the body and become second nature
  • structured in that they reflect the social world from which the are learned
  • Durable -- write the body for life, unconscious
  • generative
  • transposable
• Gives practical sense of how to act
• Practical sense = a state of body, a state of BEING (as opposed to a state of “mind”)
  • “It is because the body has become a repository of ingrained dispositions that certain actions, certain ways of behaving and responding, seem altogether natural (13)
• Bodily or corporeal hexis = durable organization of one's body and of its deployment in the world (13) –
• “bodily hexis is a political mythology realized, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking . . . (examples of this in men and women – read this section carefully) . . . the body is the site of incorporated history” (13)
• We act through relation between habitus and social context/fields (14)
  • Cultural & symbolic capital
• Social field = sit of struggle in which individual compete for capital
• Linguistic Habitus = subset of dispositions comprising habitus, acquired in learning to speak in particular contexts
  • Inscribed in the body and forming a dimension of the bodily hexis (14)
  • Examples = articulatory styles, accents (how tongue positioned, mouth shaped, etc.)
  • Linguistic capital and profit of distinction (18)
• (self) Censorship = knowing fields so that we can produce suitable discourse

Symbolic Power/ symbolic violence:

• Active complicity in which those subjugated in hierarchy believe in the legitimacy of the power structure/hierarchy and the authority of those in whom institutions invest power
• “Enables relations of domination to be established and maintained through strategies which are softened and disguised and which conceal domination beneath the veil of an enchanted relation” (24)
  • Ex: = education
• Phenomenon of political dispossession (26)
  • Group creates itself w/institutional framework and delegates spokesperson on behalf of group
  • Spokesperson has to become trained in specialized language of political field
  • Field of production of political discourse inaccessible to non-professional

“The first step in creating new social relations, alternative ways of organizing social and political life, is to understand the socially instituted limits of the ways of speaking, thinking, and acting which are characteristic of societies today” (31)

March Bracher from Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change

•  Primary Desires: Desire to BE and Desire to HAVE

Identification: Language plays an important role in forming the foundational, structural identifications that constitute the basis of our identities and in producing ad hoc identifications with characters or positions in discourse, identifications that can prompt us to act in certain ways and that can also re-from or alter our foundational, structural identifications and thus change our subjectivity and our behavior as well” (22)

Identification as a MODE of DESIRE

• Three registers: Symbolic (signifiers) , Imaginary (Images) , Real (fantasies)
• The signifier holds the key to desire
• Master signifiers = identity bearing words that structure the subject, provide identity and direction (ex: man, woman, American, Christian)
• Master signifiers represent us to others –
• “when I encounter another human subject, it is really our representatives, our signifiers, that are communicating and negotiating with one another . . . [our] fate as a subject is at stake in the alliances and oppositions between master signifiers” (25)

We seek in discourse the repeated dominance of the signifiers that represent us; this validation provides security, well-being, identity, assures us that we are significant, that our existence matters (26)

• Without this validation in discourse, we feel alienation, anxiety, aggression
• Signifying chain: master signifiers (male, female, Christian, etc.) gather secondary signifiers
  • Ex: Master signifier male has secondary signifiers: strong, active, rational; master signifier woman has secondary signifiers emotional, passive)
• The master signifiers and the secondary signifiers that explain/expand/ extend that master signifier = signifying chain
• Discourses that get us to CHANGE get us to give up some secondary signifiers in order to retain and solidify our master signifiers (28)
• Linking/ metonymy = process by which master signifier is de-linked from old secondary signifier and re-linked to new secondary signifier in order to change identity
  • Ex: read pp. 49 – 50