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5. From Identity Politics to Dialogic Identities
- University of Iowa Press
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[5] from identity politics to dialogic identities Throughout this book, I have argued that the claims speakers make help to constitute knowledge and, through human agency, to turn understanding into action, to give substance to reality. This argument is not a particularly new one: it is fairly typical within the contemporary human sciences to reject what James Carey and others have critically characterized as a “transmission ” model of communication (language is at best transparent and at worst encumbered by extraneous noise) and to instead accord language a more constitutive role. As people make meaning of the world, whether in stories of self and histories (chapter 1), in mapping and naming landscapes (chapter 2), or in science-based claims about ecological processes (chapters 3 and 4), they select features of experience and draw them into relationships with speakers or writers and audiences. These relationships are consequential. The process of constructing them in language forms understanding, shapes decisions, guides action, and participates in the construction of the world. Science helps to decide the best actions for maintaining healthy relationships within society and nature. Naming provides concepts that formulate goals. Mapping guides plans for enacting those goals. Histories give us our moral lessons for the future. The stories we tell about ourselves shape our identities, what we believe, and how we act. A rhetorical perspective on language emphasizes this active component of meaning, showing how understanding points to the future, not just the present or the past. By also pointing out the contingency of claims, rhetorical analysis underscores that there are multiple possible futures that cannot be clearly adjudicated outside of deliberation. This hope in deliberation answers the commonly held belief—rooted in a transmission model of communication—that some views are right and others are wrong, which flattens rhetoric into a process of convincing others of a preformed set of ideas (or failing to convince others, or compromising, as the case may be). Once contingency is recognized as an inherent aspect of all truth-claims, deliberation instead becomes a way to dialogically invent (that is, simultaneously discover and create) an informed plan of action. Yet contingency does not imply a lack of constraint or responsibility. The concept of socioecology acknowledges that any action will impact others within a relational system. Through the symmetrical rhetorical analysis of the previous chapters, I have sought to show how attention to a reality that admits contingency might further mutual respect and create space for those who differ to speak together about how to relate to one another and to their world. This dialogue need not imply agreement, but it does imply willingness to grant validity to others’ perspectives and openness to evaluate one’s own position and to possibly transform it from another’s point of view. James Zappen, in his reading of Bakhtin, advances this understanding of dialogue. Zappen explains that “[d]ialogized heteroglossia,” a Bakhtinian concept referring to the interaction of diverse discourses, “is the interanimation of languages that occurs as each language is viewed from the perspective of the other” (11, emphasis added). This perspective does not erase difference , but it does imply transformation. Rhetorical analysis can create space for dialogue, and it also performs some dialogizing transformation itself, but in this final chapter, I wish to focus explicitly on actual dialogues, between myself and my informants or reported by informants. Within these dialogues, I focus my analysis on explicit identifications, making a full circle back to my first chapter, but with a twist. Rather than set narrative identities apart as a way to fence off sections of a field, I will rely on my informants to put identities in relationship to one another and reconfigure them in dialogue. I begin by examining stereotypes that constrain thought but end with an examination of how informants dialogically invent new identifications that imply the transformation of consciousness and learning from one another. The Reification of Conflict Those who wish to engage in dialogue must address grazing issues, and address one another, in a context saturated by conflict. This conflict persists , in part, because of the ready availability of negative stereotypes. These reified representations of identities do not welcome potential interlocutors , and those who wish to speak do so in the knowledge that their words 138 ] From Identity Politics to Dialogic Identities will likely be prejudged. More insidiously, even the best-intentioned speakers frequently internalize aspects of stereotypes, and they must struggle against their own consciousness to responsively...