1. COMM 3180-01 Communication& Social Behavior
June 13, 2005
Language, Discourse,
and the Self

2. Discourse and Subjectivity (Burr, Ch. 6)
Personality vs. Identity
Identity and discourse
Subject Positions and Interpellation
Doctor-Patient
Teacher-Student
Identity is the sum total of subject positions we occupy at any given time
Identity as site of struggle and resistance

3. Resolving the “Problem” of Agency: Structuration Theory
Anthony Giddens
The “Duality of Structure”
Structure is both enabling and constraining
Structure is both an outcome of and a resource for action.
Practices and Performances

4. The Person in Dialogue (Burr Ch. 7)
Interpretative Repertoires (see Ch. 3)
Ex: The Discourse of Dating
Indexicality and Speech Act Theory
Accounts
Narratives
Why are the above social and not individual?

5. Discussion of Provocative Claims
The Social Performance of Emotions:
“expression of anger is less an outpouring of feeling and more a culturally relegated and normative mode of managing and putting into practice our society’s system of rights and obligations – its moral code” (p. 128)

6. Discussion of Provocative Claims
The Social Performance of Memory:
“Experience tells us that we are unlikely tells us that we are unlikely to find an absolute version of the truth against which we can measure the accuracy of accounts. When people are asked to provide an accurate account of an event, much ‘memory work’ is done to ‘build an acceptable, agreed, or communicatively successful version of what really happened’” (p. 131).

7. Discussion of Provocative Claims
The Narrative Performance of the Self
“We craft our lives according to a theme… This process should not be thought of as necessarily a conscious activity, although it sometimes is. We may not be in a position to readily articulate to ourselves the narrative that we have constructed about our life. It is useful to think of these narratives as the ways we live out our lives as well as the way we privately or publicly tell them” (p. 143).