Discourse Communities 1.2

P.1 Our social contexts

This post includes the second in a series of introductory lectures on Discourse communities as well as some homework for further reflection.

Read Lesson 1.1 first if you missed it!

In Discourse Communities 1.1 I wrote about what Discourse communities are and how we might begin to recognize them in our own lives. In this post, we are going to examine the ways that Discourses define themselves internally and in opposition to other Discourses.

In “Discourses and Literacies”, James Paul Gee lists several “important points” about Discourses:

1. Discourses are inherently “ideological” . . . They crucially involve a set of values and viewpoints about the relationships between people and the distribution of social goods, at the very least about who is an insider and who isn’t, and often, too, many other things as well.

The clearest example of this would be the Discourses of political parties. A party’s platform is a description of its ideology in the form of policies and values that they purport to support. You can see examples of the American Republican and Democratic party platforms by clicking the links. Both of the major political parties make it clear through their policies, propaganda, rhetoric, and imagery what their values are, as well as the way they view relationships between people, the distribution of both social and economic goods, and who they see as an insider and an outsider to their party.

But what about other types of Discourses? A church/religious tradition usually has some sort of document (the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, etc.) to prescribe ideology and leaders to interpret it in an official way; a family will usually have a particular set of values and rules prescribed by one or more adults in the family (e.g. if parents value “hard work” they may attempt to impart this to their children by expecting them to complete chores or hold a part-time job, if parents value “academics” they might expect their children to maintain a 4.0 G.P.A. or join particular extra-curriculars, if they value “quality time” they might have a lot of family game nights, etc.); and a friend group or clique might have “rules” or a shared set of values (e.g. “On Wednesdays we wear pink”, “girl code” or “bro code”, etc.).

This is obviously not to say that the document or the rules of the community are always followed by its members. Not all Christians follow follow the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself”. Politicians often lie and pander to get elected and then fail to follow through with promises they never meant to keep. Children might rebel against their parents rules and friends might break their “code”. But whether the rules and values are clear or hidden, fair or unfair, written or unspoken, followed or a source of hypocrisy, complied with willingly, maliciously, unwillingly, or broken, they exist in some capacity.

2. Discourses are resistant to internal criticism and self-scrutiny since uttering viewpoints that seriously undermine them defines one as being outside them. The Discourse itself defines what counts as acceptable criticism. 

You can see this every time a member of the Discourse uses the “no true Scotsman fallacy” or “appeal to purity” to (dis)prove a claim about the community. This is why it can often be difficult to critique a community: the opinions of outsiders are irrelevant and insiders who question the values of a Discourse are often made to choose between remaining an insider and disavowing their critique or they themselves are shunned and seen as an outsider.

I have seen this happen when someone began to question and study their religion in earnest, leading to a crisis of faith. They either have to suppress their feelings of cognitive dissonance to remain part of the group, or they must choose to leave and become “apostates”, and just like the no true Scotsman fallacy, an apostate is often not seen as someone who was Christian and then stopped being Christian, rather, they are seen as having never been Christian to begin with. Perhaps this is why many churches are losing members but instead of looking internally to examine why, they have proclaimed, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

3. Discourse-defined positions from which to speak and behave are not, however, just defined internal to a Discourse, but also as standpoints taken up by the Discourse in its relation to other, ultimately opposing, Discourses. The Discourse we identify with being a feminist is radically changed if all male Discourses disappear.

As politicians have become increasingly polarized, political parties have very much begun to define themselves by what they are not as much (if not more) as by what they are. Much of the Democratic messaging in the 2020 and 2024 campaigns of Biden and Harris could easily be boiled down to “it’s us or Trump, we’re good and Trump is bad, vote for us to avoid a second Trump presidency”. Simultaneously, Trump & Co. ran a campaign supporting the identity politics of the wealthy, male, and white by attacking everyone they consider “other”.

High school cliques like goths, punks, jocks, nerds, etc. often define themselves both by what connects them to one another (shared interests, aesthetics, and attitudes) but also by what separates them from other groups at school. We aren’t weird, we aren’t superficial, we aren’t cringe, we aren’t stupid, etc. There is an “us” and there is a “them”. We are like “us” just as much as we aren’t like “them”.

4. Any Discourse concerns itself with certain objects and puts forward certain concepts, viewpoints and values at the expense of others. In doing so, it will marginalise viewpoints and values central to other Discourses. In fact, a Discourse can call for one to accept values in conflict with other Discourses of which one is also a member. 

You might, for instance, belong to a religion that promotes homophobia or misogynistic viewpoints or is anti-choice, but you you have a gay brother whom you love and a daughter who you are raising to respect her own bodily autonomy and you yourself had to have an abortion to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. You might even consider yourself to be a feminist and a progressive. The more Discourses you are a part of, the more likely you’ll find yourself belonging to groups that will ask you to reject the values of other groups you belong to.

This is one reason that having personal integrity and a clear understanding of your own personal values is important; knowing what you believe will help you to avoid the peer pressure of the communities that you belong to, to attempt to shape the Discourse from the inside, or even to leaving communities that are out of alignment with your personal values.

5. Finally, Discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society, which is why they are always and everywhere ideological. Control over certain Discourses can lead to the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status) in a society. These Discourses empower those groups who have the least conflicts with their other Discourses when they use them. Let us call Discourses that lead to social goods in a society “dominant Discourses’ and let us refer to those groups that have the fewest conflicts when using them as ‘dominant groups’. Obviously, these are both matters of degree and change to a certain extent in different contexts. 

It is quite easy to look around and observe that there are three structures from which all privilege and power is organized: Economic/Class, Racial/Ethnic, Gender/Sex. The tools used to promote these hierarchies are colonization and imperialism. We live in an extremely hierarchical society that is divided in a way best understood by exploring the oft misconstrued and maligned philosophies of Critical Race Theory, intersectional feminism, and economic models like the “gift economy” or communism.¹

When we discuss Discourses as “intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society”, we are talking about the ways that in a white supremacist, patriarchal, oligarchy, those with the most power will always be white, male, and wealthy. The American “founding fathers”, so often mythologized in our history were by and large white, male, and wealthy. Many of them were plantation owners who owned other humans as property. White supremacist, classist, and gender hierarchy are baked into the very foundation of this country.

In our modern age, the effects of this can still be clearly felt. Think about it this way: whoever is in charge of making the “rules” of a society will most likely choose to make rules that benefit them and people like them. Once these rules are established and seen as “tradition”, they become difficult to change in any meaningful way, especially if people are trained not to question these rules or punished for doing so. To return to Gee’s second point, we might be told that those who follow the prescribed rules of white supremacy, male supremacy, and wealth supremacy are “good patriotic Americans” and those who question these ideologies are “un-American”.

The types of “rules” that a hierarchical society sets will be both written and unwritten, and will pervade every aspect of our life. For example, a white supremacist society will construct things like HOAs to maintain segregation (one of the best films I’ve seen, Them, delves into this in a terrifying way) or rules about what constitutes “professional” hair and attire that exclude many natural hairstyles of primarily black people. A male supremacist society will devalue the work done by women, train boys to see them as sexual objects, and create rules around what it means to do gender correctly so that people of all genders police ourselves and one another when we are seen as doing it “incorrectly”. A capitalist society which values wealth will convince its constituents that there are only two kinds of people: “winners” and “losers”. Life is a zero-sum game where you are either a boss or an employee, a landlord or a tenant, a have or a have-not.

These rules were made and thus they can be unmade. In order to do so, we must first interrogate, examine, critique, and understand them.

Some questions you might answer for yourself about your own Discourse communities:

• What are the ideologies, values, and viewpoints of the Discourses that you belong to? How do these align with your own personal values? Where is there cognitive dissonance? How can you tell an insider from an outsider?
• Do you have any critiques of your Discourses? Do you feel empowered to share these critiques within the community? Are members punished or ostracized for critiquing the Discourse?
• How does the Discourse community define itself against or in opposition to other communities? Are there Discourses that you have strong feelings of opposition towards? Where did this opposition come from?
• Do you belong to Discourses which are in conflict with one another? How do you handle these conflicts? Are there some communities that you belong to that take precedence over others?
• What kinds of power do the Discourses you belong to hold? Do you use this power in your life? Are there privileges that come with being part of certain Discourses? In what ways might you hold more power in some communities that you belong to or over some communities which you do not?

In lesson 1.3 of this topic, we will delve deeper into Discourse communities by looking at the ways in which Discourses are the products of history.

1. A great example of these intersecting hierarchies can be seen in The Handmaid’s Tale. The primary organization of Gilead society is along gender lines. But this does not mean all men are equal and all women are equally subservient to them. For example, women are divided into castes (visually seen by the red outfits of the handmaids, the blue of the wives, the white of the daughters, the green of the Marthas, and the brown of the aunts) and may hold more or less power based on this. ↩︎