The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

3 Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse: Language as Praxis in Lacan

63 3 Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse Language as Praxis in Lacan Suzanne Barnard The Crisis in Psycholinguistics A lthough language is often invoked as a uniquely human accomplishment, the study of language in psychology has failed to capture language as a human and, therefore, essentially social and ethical phenomenon. In particular, since the formation of psycholinguistics as a discipline almost half a century ago, theoretical accounts of language have been framed almost exclusively using descriptive language and explanatory forms imported from the natural, physical, and mathematical sciences. Drawing metaphors for the language-subject relationship primarily from neurobiology, artificial intelligence, and computer science, 32582 Chap 3 4/18/00, 9:25 AM 63 64 Suzanne Barnard psycholinguists typically privilege nativist and cognitivist models of language development and use. These models have been adopted, however, without much reflection on broader questions concerning their implicit assumptions about language, human subjectivity, and social interaction. Over the past two decades, psycholinguists have increasingly recognized the failure to reflect on such basic assumptions as a significant obstacle to understanding the psychological, social-interactional , and ethical-political nature of human language. Many have underscored the disparity between psycholinguistic theory and recent psychological approaches that emphasize the role of language in forming the social institutions and discursive practices within which the subject is recognized (e. g., social constructionism and hermeneutics), but few psycholinguists have attempted a serious reconciliation of these traditions. Instead, attempts at recuperating the social and intersubjective dimensions of language use have taken the form of post hoc alliances with various linguistically oriented social science and humanities subdisciplines, including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophical pragmatism, to name just a few. To be fair, psycholinguistics has benefited from the shift in focus this strategy has effected—the shift has lent legitimacy to the study of sociolinguistic phenomena and has contributed to the emergence and consolidation of “socially oriented” subdisciplines such as discourse analysis and pragmatics. Ultimately, however, even these “new” approaches remain limited by a reliance on many of the same basic assumptions of the nativist and representationalist models that have dominated the field since its inception. As the European psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit (1983) has argued: Recent expansion of socio, -psycho-, and linguo-linguistic theory . . . consist to a large extent in a proliferation of auxiliary hypotheses about social-interactional features of human language tagged onto or superimposed upon a shared heritage of Cartesian assumptions about its nonsocial, individual psychological essence. The tacitly taken-for-granted image [of the subject] . . . is essentially that of an asocial, but highly complex computational and information processing device. And the pattern emerging when we try to combine recent multidisciplinary “pragmatic” theories into a coherent whole is indeed a rather blurred and incoherent picture. (p. 91) 32582 Chap 3 4/18/00, 9:25 AM 64 Socializing Psycholinguistic Discourse 65 In proclaiming that they appeared doomed to repeat the errors of their nativist and representationalist predecessors, Rommetveit was one of the first to suggest that the emerging “social” psycholinguistic subdisciplines would not ultimately provide the much-hoped-for resolution to the discipline’s “social” crisis. Since then, an increasingly well-developed body of critical literature has borne out Rommetveit’s prediction. The current state of affairs in psycholinguistics is one in which the pragmatic and socialinteractional dimensions of language are observed, analyzed, and theorized without any serious questioning of the rationalist model of the subject nor the representationalist model of language implicitly informing such work. As a result, language is understood to be “social” to the extent that it serves as the transparent communicative intermediary between the ideal domains of a monad subjectivity and an “objective” reality. The theoretical impasse that this state of affairs represents has a very complex history that I will only partially elaborate here. My particular interest in this history is to highlight certain of its “symptomatic ” trends, ones that highlight most dramatically the rationalist and structuralist biases that have produced this chronic crisis. These are perhaps most evident in the work of Noam Chomsky, whose “Universal Grammar” has arguably been the single most significant influence on theory and research in mainstream psycholinguistics. Chomsky’s ideas have radically shaped the character of American psycholinguistics as a discipline and, in spite of the fact that his work has been persuasively criticized on multiple grounds, Universal Grammar and its progeny continue to gain currency both in the United States and around the world...