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discourse analysis' withln contemporary psychology?

After May 1968


The events of May 1968 clearly illustrated the need for an alternative model of potical change. By the ear1y 1970s, new formations of protest grew out of the Jessons of May 1968 - the women's movement the gay liberation movement, the prison movement, the anti-psychiatry movement, the antinuclcar and the ecological movcments - all of whicb required a new critical theory to understand its processes. Tbe character of these movements highlighted the inadequacies of tradional Marxism which tended lo reduce them to class struggles or homogenize them into the labour movement (Poster. 1984). The new order of social problerns seemed to lie beyond the base/superstructure model of Marxism, a problem Althusser attempted to address in his reformulation of ideology. The new phi1osophers' (Foucault, Deleuze Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Castoriadis. Lefort and Lefebvre) refer to a group of French intellectuals who revised tbeir thougbr in line with the political exigencies ot May 1968. Going beyond Althusser's position meant having to abandon structuralism and directly confront Marxism by initialing a number of moves: firstly, a rejection of Althusser's functionalist reading o ideology as a monolithic form of state power; secondly, a rejection of the subject of humanism who always exists prior to social relations; and, thirdly, emphasize the conslitutive effect of signification. Based oo their readings of Nietzsche, both Foucaul' and Deleuze sougbt a more flexible and differential model of power to explain wh~ the labour movement failed to pull together in May 1968. They argued for a model 01 power that operates locally and accordin:, to specific historical conditions. Furthermore power does not function to repress individuals, but produce them through practices o signification and action. Signification. unlikc theories of representation, does not refer to actions and things. but are themselve' actions which 'intervene with thlngs' (Bogue 1989).

CONTINENTAL DEBATES
A Foucauldian conception of discourse emerges from very specific historical and cultural conditions, namely French debates between humanism and Marxism. Our aim is to briefty outline sorne of the intellectual debates and potical events out of wlch the concept of discourse emerged. During the 1960s, issues of meaning became the focus of interest for radical social theorists. Saussurian linguistics was applied by structuralists at a time when humanist conceptions of authorship and experience dominated social theory. According to structural linguistics, language was a homogenous system govemed by a general structure of rules. However, structuralism failed to initiate a decisive break from humanism; its tendency to privilege linguistic constants, its failure to theorize conflict and its general disregard for context offered little cballenge to the humanist notion of timeless human na !Ure. Prior to the events of May 1968, humanism and Marxism engaged in a number of key debates. Althusser ( 1970) too k a finn anti-humanist stance, arguing that bourgeois institulions attribute agency to individuals only to hide the determining effect of social structures on behaviour. Marxism formu1ated a precarious position of having lo provide an account of subjeclive conduct withoul reducing a theory of the subject to class relations or reinstating the rational subject of humanism. After the events of 1968, and the subsequent failure of the French Communist Party (PCF), it was generally be1ieved the PCF 'missed the mood of the workers, ignoring their more radical demands ... they acted to separate rather than weld together the various - worker, student and petty-bourgeois - forces (Macdonell, 1986: 15- 21).

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that fonned an obstacle to re-theorizing subjectivity. So, bow did tbe insertion of discourse in psychology literally 'change' the subject? Firstly, the tum to discourse initiates a radical decentring of psychology's subject. The subject wbose 'coherence' and 'rationality' was the discovery of repeated measurement, classification and calculation, whose ahistorical, ex.istence formed the Jocus of cognition, was now opened up to the very apparatuses and techniques through which it was constituted. Psychology's subject emerged from myriad domains - the asylum, the hospital, the family, the school, the court - wherein psychological instruments were standardized, formalized and calibrated. Psychology's subject took shape among the diversity of concems - racial degeneration, intellectual decline, juvenile delinquency, industrial inefficiency, childhood sexuality and development - made visible and calculable by political authorities. Far from guaranteeing the discovery of the subject with all its hidden pathologies and latent capacities, the project of positivism fonned the very regime of production through which a psychological subject appeared. In short, changing the subject began witb linking its production to various technologies of power. But it is true that, with the turn to discourse, psychology encounters a new set of problems. After all, discourse is not really a ' theory' of tbe subject. What it offers is an explanation of the local and heterogeneous positioning of subjects within relations of power. Power, in this sense. is not the possession of individuals, but operates through individuals by acting upon their actions 1 . The problem that begins to emerge is one of reconciling difference with heterogeneity. For instance, the effect of decentring the subject of psychology is one of exposing the multiplicity of power relations througb whicb it is constituted. The subject is not so much a ' thing' but a position maintained within relations of force - the mother, the wife, the father. the worker, the child, the delinquent, the patient, the criminal, and so forth. Furthermore, these multiple

positionings are contradictory and discontinuous; they are not roles that pre-ex.isting subjects take up, but an emergent space formed among vectors of force-relations. A further problem is that subjects are not discourses nor are they determined by them. ln TJze Subject and Power, Foucault (1982) is at pains to specify tbe element of chance through which subjects are formed. The contradktory nature of subjectivity is not, as it is ordinarily understood, a ' logical ' problem. There is a sense of affirmation with which the subject manages to escape a pure determination. Because power acts on possible actions there is always the possibility of acting 'otherwise'. This is the ethical dimension of freedom expressed more clearly in Foucault's later works on govemmentality (1991) and Greek subjectivity (1986, 1997a, 1997b). Bur the problem of difference is not quite pul to rest and becomes the focus of concern in the third and final section of Changing the Subject. After the moment of deconstruction, the irreducible difference of subjectivity becomes an affinnative possibility, but, as the authors state, '[itj is not enough to explain the possibility of subjectivity' (Henriques et aL, 1984: 204). lndeed, if subjectivity is the site of multiplicity, of continuous and discontinuous forces, states and feelings, then what is ' the specificity of the construction of actual subjectivities in the domain of discursive practices?' (Henriques et al., 1984: 204). In the absence of any tbeory of subjectivity, discourse provides a clearing for reconstructing the subject of psychology. Foucau1t himself was re1uctant to ascribe interiority though at times he aUudes to the 'soul' as that spatial dimension trapped within the subject of normalization (Foucault, 1977; Butler, 1997). Many would tum to psychoanalysis to find ways of combining the multiple and contradictory positionings of the subject within power (Hollway, 1989; Parker, 1997; Walkerdine, 1988; Zizek, 1992, 1997). Possibilities of combining discourse with psychoanalysis were found in Lacan, whose work presupposes a decentred and divided subject. Also, there is room within Lacanian analysis to demonstrate how the

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thought to be an alarming deterioration of the national stock. Statistical calculations of census material estimated that the lowest twenty five percent of the adult stock was producing fifty percent of the next generation. It was in terms of a solution to degeneracy that opened a space for the formation of a psychological complex. First, psychology would deploy around the behaviours of children various instruments for the detection of feeble-mlndedness, and second, devise techniques of measurement that would effectively discriminate the 'normal' from the 'idiot', tbe 'inteUigent' from the 'deficient'. So had begun the great campaign of socialization out of which the individual of psychology would emerge as the rational ideal of civilized society. Rose's Foucauldian reconstruction of psychological knowledge shows how its conditions of formation lie among 'a complex series of struggles and alliances between distinct discourses organized into various strategic ensembles' (Rose, 1979: 58). This strategic dimension of knowledge/power reveals the complex linkages and operations in which psychology served as a technology in the administration of the social.

Developmental psycho/ogy/pedagogy
Valerie Walkerdine's (Venn and Walkerdine. 1978; Walkerdine, 1984) work on developmental psychology and child-centred pedagogy uses Foucauldian genealogy to give a much sharper focus to a contemporary problem. Taking the apparent failure of tbe 'pedagogy of liberation' in the late l970s as her starting point, she traces a history of the discursive practice of child-centred pedagogy. This is partly a strategy of demonstrating that the claims of developmental psychology are historically specific, and that the psychological basis of 'the problem of pedagogy' forecloses the possibility of posing radical solutions. Tbe genealogical approach adopted here is more explicilly a deconstructive enterprise for

investigating the conditions of possibility for modero primary school education in Britain, and the circumstances in which 'the child' emerged as a specific object of science (for more on this, see also Chapter 23 in this volume). How did pedagogic practices become suffused with the notion of a normalized sequence of child development? How did psychology transform classrooms from the disciplinary apparatus of speaking, hearing and replicating to the child-centred practices in which teacber training, classroom design and currculum materials would liberate the potential for autonomy, exploration and play? The first step is to disentangle the scientific discourses from practices of child-centred pedagogy. Notions of development are separated from the self-evident continuity of 'ontogenesis' and traced back to nineteentbcentury technologies of classification and individual regulation. Compulsory education in oineteenthcentury Britain emerged from concems about the moral degeneration of the population, and formed part of an ensemble of tecbniques for the prevention of crime and pauperism. Scbooling would stimulate lhe intellect. give instruction in an orderly and virtuous course of life. and foster a spirit of independent labour. These were tbe principies inscribed on the Bentham-lik:e machinery of ' monitorialism' - a mechanjsm for the moral regulation of souls through constant monitoring and ceaseless activity. 1t was amid the development of normalizing interventions of population statistics and demographic studies of 'class' that sorne intellectual observers began to demand the promotion of 'understanding' over the discipline of habits. Pbilanthropists and progressive educators like Kay-Suttleworth and Owen believed that monitorialism did nothing ro foster 'affection, imagination and the realization of potential'. Pedagogy should not be lhe mechanical reproduction of the moral but the extension of the natural and normal. ll was such counter-arguments lhat transformed the 'schoolroom' into lhe 'classroom' as sites for the normalization of

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a sophisticated method of grasping mathematical principies (Walkderdine, 1984: 193). The point of Walkerdine's gencalogy is not to dismiss psychology or dispense with current methods of pedagogy, bul to show that one can deconstruct the tendency of reducing problems in learning to psychological explanations of normative, rational development. In both case studies we ha ve tried to show how genealogy is a metculous study of the formation of objects, the transformation of practices, the intersection of chance-events as conditions for the production of discourse. Both show genealogy can be conducted in a variety of ways and according to different objectives. Rose's reconstruction of the psy-complex is almost exclusively an engagement in primary and secondary historical material. His object is not so much the focus on a contemporary problem but retracing the birth of psychology ro its moral, poltica), economic and technical conditions of emergence. Walkerdine's genealogy is more directly a counterpoint for understanding contemporary practices of child-centred pedagogy. She combines historical material with video and interview data to give clarity

and sharpness to a contemporary problem. Neither genealogy prescribes solutions but each seeks to establish an alternative relationship to our contemporary regimes of psychological truth.

WAYS OF DOING FOUCAULDIAN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS


In this section, we wanl to discuss two things: first, we want to give a sense of how Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) differs from other discursive approaches, to show how it articulares its object ata different leve! of explanation than, say, ethnomethodology or linguistics; and, secondly, we offer a light sketch of what a Foucauldian approach might look like. In what follows, we want to avoid delimiting a Foucauldian analytic to a set of formal principies but offer sorne methodological signposts that analysts might apply to critica) psychological work (see Box 6.1 for a summary of sorne methodological guidelines for conducting FDA). So. what does Foucault mean by 'discourse' and how does it differ from Anglo-American versions? Firstly, it would seem that when

BOX 6.1 Sorne Methodological Guidelines for Conducting Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Se/ectng a corpus of statements

Acorpus of statements are samples of discourses that express a relationship between 'rules' and 'statements'. Criteria for selecting statements might include: 1 samples of text that constitute a 'discursive object' relevan! to one's research 2 samples that form 'conditions of possibility' for the discursive object 3 contemporary and histOfical variability of statements: i.e. how is the same object talked about differently? i.e. how and why do statements change over time?

4 identify and collect texts: i.e. policy documents, intellectual texts, newspapers, semistructured interviews, autobiographical accounts, ethnographic observations and descriptions, etc.

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guidelines for the analysis of texts, practices, and subjectivity.

Selecting a corpus of statements


The analyst must recognize discourse as a 'corpus of statements' wbose organization is relatively regular and systematic. The first task. then, is selecting tbe kind of statements appropriate to one's research question (see Carabine (2001); Fairclough (1992: 226-7); Kendall and Wickham (1999: 42-6); Parker ( 1992) for different but very useful explanations for how this might be done). Given the historical dimension of Foucauldian work, a corpus of statements would not only include a variety of discourse samples that will generate answers to a question about our relation to the present, but al so incorporate samples tbat are bistorically variable. This temporal variability is an importan! way of showing how a given object say, 'madness', 'criminality' or 'delinquency', has been spoken about differently in the past and exposed to different fonns of regulation, punishment and reform. 1! is important to note that what binds a corpus of statements together in terms of its interna! validity is that eacb statement forms the 'conditions of possibility' for the studied phenomenon. Furthermore, because Foucauldian analysis is more interested in discontinuiry than continuity, a corpus of statements seeks to adequately reflect the diversity of discursive practices, and pinpoint their transformation over time and across different institutional spaces. The kinds of texts we choose to include in our corpus, again, relates to thc kind of questions we are asking. FDA can be applied to any kind oftext, thougb Foucault himselfwas more interested in historical documents, legal cases, sets of rules and descriptions of institutional practice, and even autobiograpbical accounts and personal diaries (see 'L Pierre Riviere (Foucault, 1978a) for an unusually lucid explanation of how Foucault conducted his inquiry). Parker suggests that FDA can be carried out 'wherever there is meaning' (Parker, 1999a: 1), but this is

perhaps a little misleading since Foucault actually resisted reducing discourse to 'meaning' (cf. Foucault, 1972; cf. Hook, 200la; Rose, 1996). Rather than how meaning is constructed in an interactional setting, be was more concerned with how 'games of truth' are played out among more global. political domains. But to say this is the only way to conduct FDA is unnecessarily limiting. So long as FDA is conducted in terms of recognizing the 'genealogical background' of the study. then any context or setting is suitable for analysis. There are five kinds of 'text' that are suitable for FOA, though tbe list is by no means exhaustive; tbese are:
1 2 3 4 5 Spatiality and social pradice Political discourse Expert discourse Social interadion Autobiographical accounts

Firstly. texts can be constructed by means of personal observation and description of spatial and architectural surroundings, and the kinds of social practices they give rise to. These 'ethnographic' texts are derived by the researcber's field notes of a given setting. like parks, hospitals. urban architecture. and sites of cultural production. Sccondly, FDA is cornmonly performed on political discourse, like policy documents, parliamentary debates. press releases and official reports on matters relating to governmental processes. Thirdly, discourse analysis usually makes an object of expert discourses found among intellectual texts, like official publications, research and emprica! findings. Fourthly, FDA is widely conducted on a variety of speech activities and settings such as in situ interaclion (e.g. naturally occurring talk), institutionaJ talk (e.g. doctor-patient relations), semistructured interviews. telephone conversations (e.g. therapeutic discourse), focus group discussions and audio-visual documentation of interactions (e.g. classroom activities). Conversation analysis provides a more technical approach for understanding the

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by Rose ( 1996). For Rose, technologies are not specificaiJy located within an interactional context, but refer to 'any assembly of practica! rationality governed by a more or less conscious goal' (Rose, 1996: 26). They are usually located beyond text, and refer to an assemblage of knowledge, instruments, persons, buildings and spaces which act on human conduct from a distance. In this sense. Rose is more interested in understanding the constitution of human subjects through technologies of power. But there is another way of thinking about technologies which is more suited to psychological inquiry. Technologies can also make sense of the interaction between oneself and others and how power is exercised over oneself in the technology of the self. Because technologies are forros of 'practica! reason' they are realized simultaneously as material and discursive practices. A conversation, for instance, is not merely the construction of sorne object in language and thought, but also the act of accomplishing or performing something. In this sense, it is not entirely incompatible with FOA to draw on the rhetorical aspects of interactional activities. For cxample Michael Billig's (1991) work in rhetorical psychology explores the argumentative and persuasive nature of talk as resources which inform everyday reasoning. In this sense, we might think of technologies as particular kinds of 'truth games' in which participants engage in conflicL competition and power. Technologies may also take the form of more technical and subtle forms of interactional activity like accountbuilding, turn-taking, and case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986). General! y speaking, however, conversation analysis approaches tend to shift the focus away from issues of materiality and power by attending to the technical organization of talk which often assume the equal participatory status of its speakers (see Wooffitt (2005) for an excellent discussion on the differences between rhetorical psychology and conversation analysis). But there is also another sense of technology that applies to how individuals problematize and regulate their own conduct in

accordance to particular goals. We examine these ethical relations of 'self on self' later in the section.

Subject positions
As we have seen, discourses not only constitute objects in various and, sometimes, contradictory ways, but they also offer positions from wbich a person may speak the truth about objects. A subject position identifies 'a location for persons within a structure of rigbts and duties for those who use that repertoire' (Davies and Harre, 1999: 35). But 'positioning' also involves the construction and performance of a particular vantage point (Bamberg, 1994); it offers not only a perspective from which to view a version of reality, but also a moral location within spoken interaction. Tbis is not dissimilar to how the 'moral adequacy' (Cuff, 1994) of people's accounts are linked to the 'moral order' in which they seek to locate themselves (Sacks, 1992). A key point bere is that moral location and moral order are intimately linked in spoken interaction and are themselves practica! technologies for speaking the truth (Hodge, 2002). Margaret Wetherell (1998) also shows how a poststructuralist conception of subject positions finds sorne compatibility with conversation analysis. In her ethnography of middle class masculine identities she shows how conversation analysis provides greater analytic potential for understanding subject positions within conversational processes. Wetherell (1998: 401) shows how subject positions are 'local, highly situated and occasioned', and that claims of 'sexual prowess' by one young maJe is managed by occupying a variety of subject positions: diminished responsibility ('drunk'), externa! attributions of success ('lucky'), interna! attributions of success ('out on the pull'), an agent engaged in consensual sexual play ('she fancied a bit a rough'), imrnoral ('moral low ground'), etc. The variability of these positions are given sorne order by referring to broader discourses of male sexuality as 'performance and achievement' and an ethics of sexuality

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Angela narrates a story of humble working class beginnings, living a comfortable rural life wberein financia! disadvanrage is counterbalanced by feelings of freedom and familia! security. At the age of 16 Angela leaves scbool and moves to Sydney to live with friends and find work. The traosition to a large city is narrated as a growiog sense of maturity and personal autooomy. Fantasies of urban life are sho1t-lived, bowever, as friends begin to migrare to other cities, and the precarious circuits of shared accommodation raise feelings of isolation despite regular casual work in a calJ centre. The retum to community is narrated as a painful loss of autonomy, coupled with the sense of closure tbat cbaracterizes her current welfare position. A sense of self struggles to emerge witb any clarity as sbe tries to supplement her income with sporadic casual work in the local service iodustry. But despite the constraints of welfare and work, Angela narrares an acute sense of psychological agency:
1thtnk that there is a lot more choices elsewhere,like when 1moved back from Sydney and 1said to mum '1 am never going to work in a supermarket, 1am not going todo this and 1am not going todo that'. and then after about a year 1asked mum '1 wonder if they ha ve got any jobs at the checkout' ... 1don't know tt ts ust the sttuatton 1 am tn and 1am not happy and 1am starting to realtze that you can 't be too choosy and money is money and worl: is work and you have to do the shttty jobs somettmes to move on and do somethtng better. that's how it goes, you can't just jump into the right job straight away and expect that that ts going to be it, then um the fact that 1am open minded about it all rather than '1 am only going todo this', especially in town where there are not that many opportunities, or that many different kind of jobs . .. everyone has so many options, it tS only ltmited by what they thtnk ts, the hmtts around them, but 1 mean hke if 1really wanted to 1could get up and leave, 1mean 1 have done it before on less than what l've got now and did it, so it is just myself that ts maktng it a problem . . so in that sense that is where my freedom if you like is a httle bit limtted ... tt is a lot harder to do it, but hke really 1 have got nothtng holding me back, 1can go and do whatever 1want.

There are two problematizations of interest here. The first precedes the oarrative in terms of the possibility of reading Angela's

story as one of dependency - a subject who lacks the personal resources to find regular work in the community. The second relates more directly to the personal, affective dimension of the narrative - the growing loss of autonomy and the awkward moral management one must perform to evade the stigma created by the former. The position of tbe 'welfare dependent' threatens to subsume the more virtuous position of the 'jobseeker', in which case Angela must present herself as having undergone sorne kind of personal and moral transformation. What is also interesting is the particular 'technology' from whicb the affirmative voice draws. ln the absence of any real change in tbe material circumstances of community, it is primarily a psychological relation to self that emerges as a new valuation of work: the 'shitty' checkout job is transposed into a lucrative possibility. not because material circumstances demand any form of paid work, but because 'selfrealization is a more praiseworthy way of articuJating self-reliance. In order to evade the stigma of depcndency, Angela draws on a 'psychological' technology of selfimprovement to position herself in alignmenr with a moral order. Despite the lirnited opportunities of community, ooe is confined only by one's abiliry to make choices. This account constitutes the kind of resilience and fantasy of Hexibility that has become a coodition of modern wage-labour. For the young female worker there is no sense of work offering long-terrn security other than fonning a transient relay in the maximization of cxperience and tlle on-going construction of an individual biograpby. Angela's narrative. we think, exemplifies the kind of psychological autonomy that younger generations of workers are now enjoined to thlnk as possibilities for the active construction of identity and lifestyle through the fantasy of unlirnited choice. What of course recedes into the background is the broader structural exigencies and constraints that rnight render this discourse of subjectification hopelessly inadequate in addressing the insecurity

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Another more serious criticism is the claim that poststructuralism eliminares a social actor. But perhaps this is unfair. When Foucault ( 1970) provocatively declared 'the death of man' at the end of The Order of Things. it was suggested that humanist philosophy had finally run its course. But wbere anti-humanism dispenses with a theory of agency it does not mean tbat poststructuralism can no longer speak sensibly about acting subjects. Anti-humanism reminds us that what we call human being is now 'under erasure' - no longer stable, reliable or serviceable (Hall , 1996). Following Derrida (1981), we are not forbidden to think of human subjects as capable of action but what can be thought about subjectivity, identity, personhood, etc., is now placed at the limits of thought. Hence, poststructuralism only requires a minimal or ' thin' conception of the human material on which history writes (Patton, 1994). We have given sorne basic guidelines of Foucauldian analysis as a way of doing social critique. For critica! psychology, this means recognizing how psychology and other forms of knowledge are instrumental in making up our curren! regimes of the self. Recent analyses of advanced liberal govemment show. for instance, how goveming in the narne of the social enjoin new forms of contractualization linked to new problcmatizations, new strategies of control, and new subjects of control. A potential for future inquiry would diagnose new technologies tbat seek to maximize our freedom througb auronomization and responsib/ization of self (Rose. 1999). And quite rightly, tbese technologies are found among the details of conversations as weU as wider programrnes of imervention. We think a Foucauldian approach would benefit from importing linguistic tools from conversation, rhetorical or positional analysis so long as analysts never take their genealogical eye' off the problem. Whatever the horizon of research, Foucauldian analysis makes explicit the historicity of the objects we interrogate.

NOTES
1 'lt is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possble acttons; it incites. it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme il constrains or forbids absolutely; but it ts nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acttng subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action' (Foucault, 1982: 220). 2 'The normattve production of "good teaching means that the teacher must experience herself as inadequate, feel guilty, anxious and tnsecure. lf the chtld has faled. by implicatton the teacher's gaze has not been total enough, she has not provided enough experience, has committed the "stn" of "pushtng" the child. Alter all, wtthin the parameters of the discursive practice, all children would and could develop correctly if only the teacher were good enough' (Walkerdine. 1984: 193). 3 Space prohibits a full discussion of the genealogical context of Australia welfare reform. Sufftee to say, the regulation of the poor through the moral reconstruction of conduct is not a new techntque, but emerged from classical liberal thought particularly among policies that were tnstrumentaltn the birth of state welfare. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 can be read as an attempt to distmgUtsh the undeservtng poor from the deserving poor, leaving the undeservtng to fend for themselves in the new national labour market, while placing the deserving poor under the cruel and deterrent conditions of the workhouse. The intellectual contnbution of Bentham, Malthus and Riccardo were influentJal in naturalizing a domain of poverty. while at the same time distinguishing 'pauperism' as the proper object of regulation. This resonates with present arguments about 'welfare dependency' whteh arguably reactivate a discourse of pauperism. But nineteenthcentury virtues of independence, self-responsibility and self-discipline are given a new ethteal gloss: independent labour is said to foster self-respect and selfesteem, to restore confidence and identity. Arguabfy, the present condtltons of assistance are designed to elicit the self-managing capacities for whom psychological training ensures the moral reformation of self, the ethical reconstructton of will, so that the poor might be quickly recycled tnto flexible labour markets. 4 ... there is a danger that dtscourse analysis as commonly conceived tn applied linguistics will increasingly come to define the questions that can be asked about language use' (Pennycook, 1994: 120).

REFERENCES
Adlam, D., Henriques, J., Rose, N., Salfield, A., Venn. C.. and Walkerdine, V. (1977). Psychology, ideology

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Parker, l. (1 999b). Critica! psychology: criticallinks. Radical Psychology. 1(1):3-18, http://www.radpsynet. org{journallvol1 1/Parker.html (accessed 7 May 2006). Parker, l. (2004). Discursive practice: analysis, context and action n critica! research, lnternationaf Journaf of Criticar Psychology. 10: 15Q-173. Patton, P. (1994). Foucault's subject of power, Pofiticaf Theory Newsfetter, 6(1):6Q-71 . Pennycook, A. (1994). lncommensurable discourses? Applied Linguistics 15(2). Pomerantz, A. (1986). Extreme case formulations: Anew way of legitimating claims. In G. Button, P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds), Human Studies (special issue: lnteraction and language Use), 9: 219-230. Pos ter, M. (1984). Foucauft, Marxism and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of lnformation. Oxford: Polity Press. Rose, N. (1979). The psychological complex: mental measurement and social administration, ldeology & Consciousness, 5:5-68. Rose, N. (1985). The Psychofogica/ Compfex: Psychol ogy, Pofitics and Society in Engfand 7869-1939. london: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rose, N. (1996). Jnventing Ourselves: Psychofogy. Power and Personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. ( 1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, H. (1 992). Lectures in Conversation, Vols 1and 11. Oxford: Blackwell. Threadgold, T. (1997). Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories. london: Routledge. Venn. C. and Walkerdine, V. (1978). The acquisition and production of knowledge: Piaget's theory reconsidered, ldeo/ogy & Consciousness, 3:67-94. Walkerdine, V. (1984). Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy: The insertion of Piaget into early education. In J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine (eds), Chang ing the Subject: Psychofogy. Social Regufation and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (1 988). The Mastery of Reason. London: Routledge. Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and poststructuralism in dialogue, Discourse and Society 9(3):387-412. Willig, C. (2001). lntroducing Quafitative Research in Psychology: Adventures in Theory and Method Maidenhead: Open University Press. Wooffitt, R. (2005). Conversation Analysis and Oiscourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critica/ Jntroduction. london: Sage. Zizek, S. (1992). Everything You Always Wanted To KnowAbout Lacan But Were Afraid ToAsk Hitchcock. London: Verso. Zizek, S . (1997). ThePiagueofFantasies. London: Verso.

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