8. What Is Alice Trying to Tell Us?

SCOTT MARSDEN

8. WHAT IS ALICE TRYING TO TELL US?

A Post-structuralist and Bakhtinian Analysis to Examine Subjectivity and Conflicting Voices in Career Discourse

Truth is not born nor is it found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 110) How can the conflicting voices and assimilation of words of others affect our conscious and unconscious thoughts, and how do life-choices, social experiences, knowledge and ideas, attitudes and values construct our ideological world and subjectivity? To answer this research question, I am using the interview with one high school student, Alice, as a case study to examine how her past and present subjec- tive experiences have influenced her utterances concerning her career choices as well as why and how her use of words reveal an ongoing dialogue of conflicting voices and subjectivities. My interest in using Bakhtin’s literary theory comes from his concept of dialogic aesthetics as a kind of conversation. It is concerned with how we connect with others and create a community through a dialogic and crea- tive collaboration with the audience. Can we see the ongoing dialogue and conflicting voices in the interview with Alice by utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) literary theory articulated in his Discourse in the Novel? How can a post-structuralist analysis reveal the conflicting voices and on-going dialogue? In this chapter, I draw on Bakhtin’s literary theory and post-structuralist analysis to make visible the varied and opposing voices within Alice reflected in the interview about her possible career choices. My analysis explores the contexts and conflicts within Alice that are central to understand why she uses the words in the interview. This analysis of Alice’s interview allows the reader to understand how ongoing dialogues exist within individuals, who are both sites for a range of possible forms of subjectivity and are subjected to a range of particular discourses in the form of conflicting voices.

BAKHTIN AND POST-STRUCTURALISM ON LANGUAGE In this chapter, I am interested in understanding how our modes of thought and individual subjectivity can explain the working of power on behalf of specific in- terests and our subjectivity as sites of struggle and potential change. By using post- structuralism along with Bakhtin’s theory of language, it is possible to examine subjectivity, social processes, and institutions to understand existing power relations and how individuals are made up of these conflicting processes.

In the latter part of the 20th century, post-structuralist thought has had a major impact on scholarship. Post-structuralist approaches draw on a variety of theories of language, subjectivity, social processes, and social institutions to conceptualize and analyze power relations, struggle, and strategies for change. Subjectivity is thought as a process, constantly being reconstituted in dialogue each time we think and/or speak. Thus, “the ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 341). In post-structuralism, the individual is always the site of conflicting forms of subjectivity. From and with language, we acquire ways of making sense of experience. As outlined in chapters 12 and 15 (both by Roth, this volume), for example, language constitutes the particular ways of speaking and thinking available to each member of society. Language, therefore, is integrally related to the forms of consciousness available to us. The discourses we acquire in and through participation in societal activity influence our ideological relationship with the world; they thereby mediate how we behave. A word is authoritative when it demands that we make it our own. It thereby enters into our consciousness. Here we affirm or reject it. Human beings are shaped by the words they use because consciousness develops when they learn a language that they take from others. The fact that each individual is constituted by more than one discourse that reveals many subject positions and opens the door for resistance to one fixed position and the possibility of other positions. This means a reversal of meaning and enables the subject to speak in his/her own right. Human knowledge is constructed from personal experiences and is a reflection of the mind as well as of the nature. The assumptions that Alice has about the world can and do help her make sense of the world around her, the way she sees the world, and the way she acts within and upon her world. By identifying many conflicting voices that influence how Alice speaks and acts, she can begin to recognize the conflicting voices and learn how to resist some of the fixed ways of speaking and acting. These conflicting voices are like ways of thinking and producing meaning and constitute the conscious and unconscious mind and the emotional life of Alice. Dialogic expression refuses to accept the assumption that there is one language, one isolated story through which the abso- lute truth can be articulated. These institutions are also sites of conflicts and domi- nant discourses, and are under constant challenge. Alice’s choice of words and how she put certain words together with other words show us a conflicting struggle within herself and is an ongoing process that has helped her make sense of her world-view which in turn influences her decision-making process. Her subjectivity is made up of conscious and unconscious thoughts. Conflicting forms of subjectivities provide her with voices and give meaning to her experiences and to her particular ways of thinking. From acquiring others’ words, she had her own words to make sense of her relations to the world around her. Bakhtin’s theory demonstrates how the voices of others become woven into what we say, write, and think. Bakhtin emphasizes that dialogue is not information exchange but a way of living. In his dialogic theory of language, he states that as human beings, we are all engaged in various dialogues, conversations, and dis-

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