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​Blog 2 - Discourse Communities, Environmental Discourse, Ecolinguistics, and Intersectionality

 

 

Discourse Communities and Ecolinguistics

 

James Gee’s discussion of big “D” Discourses suggest that they are living and breathing entities. They are rule-bound (around issues of legitimacy and who can speak), yet changing and changeable. Gee frames discourses as socially and politically embedded within culture, and that “it is sometimes helpful to think about social and political issues as if it is not just us humans who are talking and interacting with each other, but rather the Discourses we represent and enact, and for which we are ‘carriers’” (18).  Gee uses the metaphor of the dance as a frame for helping us to understand both the material nature of the Discourse enacted, the co-ordinations “of people, places, times, actions, interactions, verbal and non-verbal expression, symbols, things, tools, and technologies that betoken certain identities and associated activities” (23), but also function rhetorically (“the work we do to get certain things recognized in certain ways and not others”), hence social practice, primarily, but not always, enacted through language. James E. Porter presents a similar notion to Gee that discourse communities span professional, public, and personal spheres, and that we are always actively engaged in and members of many overlapping communities. Like Gee, Porter also notes that gate-keeping nature built into many/most social discourses: “a discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are appropriate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on those objects, what constitutes ‘evidence’ and ‘validity,’ and what formal conventions are followed. Porter is primarily concerned with discourse as enacted through writing, and indicates how a socially-situated identity (within a Discourse community in Gee’s sense), is both constrained and yet also a free actor insofar as they “follow the rules” of the discourse, perhaps in order to change or break them. “We are constrained insofar as we must inevitably borrow the traces, codes, and signs which we inherit and which the discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do what we can to encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand our semiotic potential – with our goal being to effect change and establish our identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter” (230, emphasis added). Thus, Porter and Gee suggest that responsible membership in a discourse community, guided by the gate-keeping “masters of the dance” (Gee) to ensure the legitimacy and authority of the enactment of a given discourse, may have as a goal social change, both within the discourse as well as within ourselves.

 

The Australian environmental linguists Peter Mühlhäusler and Adrian Peace posit an environmental discourse writ large (which they define as “the linguistic devices articulating arguments about the relationship between humans and their environment” (458)), and they distinguish between discursive and metadiscursive practices – “discourse refers to specific ways of talking about particular environments and their futures. Metadiscourse refers to practices of theorizing, which categorize issues to establish their significance” (458). (Although I might be writing within the discourse of environmental rhetoric, this blog post is metadiscursive thought.) Given the radical complexity of climate science and ideology, and the radical uncertainty of competing accounts of what is happening now, and future claims in light of that uncertainty, Mühlhäusler and Peace “interpret environmental discourse as an attempt by risk society members to make sense of the global changes that affect them” (459). Mühlhäusler and Peace conceptualize their field of ecolinguistics as an integration of “language with its cultural and natural environment…We begin with language because one can use language about all effable aspects of the world; but the converse is not the case. There is discourse about the environment, but no environment without discourse” (467). The nod to the cultural inclusion, the sociolinguistic element in environmental rhetoric, is key. In discussing the high degree of ambiguity around the very notion of the term “environment,” they note that “environment in essence is an anthropocentric notion” (458) – the “nature” in the “environment” we envision through language is both a sustaining mother-like provider (Gaia) and a (real and potential) threat to human life and longevity. Mühlhäusler and Peace analyze the what and how of environmental discourses through an ecolinguistics lens, which helps to reveal the potential and peril of environmental messaging. Messaging at the commercial and corporate level can devolve into green tokenism

 

Success and Challenges

 

Mühlhäusler and Peace analyze the what and how of environmental discourses through an ecolinguistics lens, which helps to reveal the potential and peril of environmental messaging. Messaging at the commercial and corporate level can devolve into green tokenism, and their notion of greenspeaking – “replacing or postponing environmental action by just speaking about it in ‘green’ language” (467) colors corporate and media discourse to the extent that is largely style over substance at these macro levels of discourse. Greenspeaking, coupled with the compounding static that endless messaging of environmental doom, in the context of its complexity and uncertainty, can be nothing other than ultimately confusing. How is this language being understood by the audience? “Hearers are exposed to messages they do not completely understand even when ‘ecoliterate’ and numerous conflicting messages are encountered. This concept suggests a classification of hearers into those who are ecoliterate…and those who ignore or filter out messages, or suffer from ecofatigue” (461). I would argue that many of us fit both categories.

 

Yet Mühlhäusler and Peace’s project is to argue for potential ways out of these frustrating and negative (theoretical) metadiscursive trends. Through ecolinguistic and ecocritical lenses, scholars are situating the intersections of language, culture, and politics as a re-visioning of the metaphor of an ecology of language. The interconnections and community implied by the term “ecology” and a valuing of linguistic diversity allow for positive potentialities in communicating across cultures and languages. Noting the unequal messaging seemingly privileging the more photogenic and anthropomorphically attractive charismatic megafauna (“whales, seals, wolves, tigers, koalas, pandas, and dingoes”) over “biologically equal or more important species” (463), or the accusation that “Euro-American discourses often ignore the plight of inhabitants of developing nations,” Mühlhäusler and Peace report a shift to redress these imbalances, a move towards a biocultural diversity framework, which “implies that the well-being of languages is a prerequisite for the well-being of natural species” (463). These new models of linguistic ecology and biodiversity give space for connections between the discoursal domains of language, culture, science, and politics. They are answers to critiques of the traces of environmental discourses which wittingly or not function to exclude diversity in accounts of the human and non-human experiencers of climate crises.

 

Personal Experience

 

I have been hearing and reading the doom and gloom messaging around environmental discourse my whole life. It’s a feature of our cultural inheritance. As a child, it was both frightening and awe-inspiring in scope, and competed with science fiction in that regard, for that very reason, in my cultural imaginary. It seemed too fantastical to be real, really.

 

As I got older and began to understand the complexity a bit, it was the human complicity of narco-capitalist impulses and deliberate propagandist obscuring of the science in/against environmental discourses which became most infuriating. But…what can you do? What can you do when low-level terror or apathy are your options? Where does your focus lie when work, family obligations, health, personal tragedy, all the stuff of our day to day, drives away the terror and uncertainty of that stuff out there, far away from us (me!) in both distance and time, beyond the time of our lives even…what can you do?

 

What I can do. Locally. In small ways, at the very least. Asking my friends and colleagues what they do. Take a course on environmental rhetoric and do some deep thinking and meditation on the issues we are reading about. Discussing environmental issues in China and Asia with my students. Instilling a critical awareness of what greenspeaking and green tokenism are as necessary tools in their critical literacies. I can do more, of course. But I am doing this. It’s something.

 

Understanding Intersectional Climate Urbanism as a Component of all of our Urban Communities

 

Gee and Porter, in their discussion of discourse communites (plural) imply a recognition of what has come to be known as intersectionality. Rachel McArdle writes that intersectionality is “based on the recognition that factors of identity can combine, intersect, and interact in different situations for different people, creating landscapes of discrimination and privilege” (303). I think McArdle helpfully expands on conceptions of the intersectional with the addition of the framework of kyriarchy. Race, class, gender, ethnicity all have their concomitant systems of oppression, and kyriarchy accounts for these systems en masse. (It’s not all about patriarchy and “the man.” A lot of it is, though.) What McArdle is doing is expanding climate concern to not exclude the marginalized whose experiences of climate realities may be quite different from the “mainstream” often addressed by the media. Coupling intersectionality with kyriarchy shows how “groups already battling with systems of inequality and marginalization are more likely to be affected by the negative consequences of climate change” (303). What McArdle is doing by re-imagining climate urbanism in this way is revealing potential blind spots the mainstream might not see, and the particularities, complexities, and realities of marginalized groups in light of climate change. The challenge would be to frame what is uncovered using both an “altruistic” and “biospheric” value system (Armstrong et al.) that might be both intelligible and palatable to a mainstream audience.

 

 

Armstrong, Anne K., Marianne E. Krasny, and Jonathon P. Schuldt. Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators. Cornell University Press, 2018.

Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. Routledge, 1999

McArdle, Rachel. "Intersectional Climate Urbanism: Towards the Inclusion of Marginalised Voices." Geoforum 126 (2021): 302-305.

Mühlhäusler, Peter, and Adrian Peace. "Environmental Discourses." Annual Review of Anthropology 35.1 (2006): 457-479.

Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 34-47.

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