Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age

Bryan Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351328623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gerontology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although attitudes toward the aged and their care are inherent in any society, gerontology itself is a relatively recent field of study and practice. Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age applies the methods of discourse analysis and textual analysis to texts and documents in this newly evolved and eclectic fi eld. Green explores and identifies the literary methods and discursive regularities through which aging and the aged have been made into objects of study and treatment, and which together form a mode of knowledge production that will infl uence future texts in the field.Because such formats of representation limit rational diagnoses of problems and rational courses of ameliorative action, policy implications in the fi eld of gerontology are a major interest of this study. Another interest is methodological. Within the broader constructionist approach to social reality, Green takes the position of "constitutive realism": the notion that social reality is linguistically constructed, primarily in speech and writing.The book's two aims are to describe analytically the fi eld of gerontology. The field is important both for its growing academic presence and for its practical eff ects on discourse and policy concerning old age. It also hopes to help develop possibilities of inquiry associated with the linguistic, literary, and rhetorical turns of social science in recent years. Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age is a substantive investigation, at considerable theoretical depth, of gerontology itself, as well as a methodological treatise with broader implications for social science as it focuses upon the discourse of various professional fields.

CHAPTER
1

Text, Discourse, and Social Reality: A Methodology of Analysis

This chapter presents a systematic exposition of the base concepts of the study, text, and discourse, within a methodological strategy I will call constitutive realism.

Constitutive realism supplies a rationale for making the linguistic structure of gerontology the key for understanding what it is, and for assessing its social and political significance, that is, the significance of what it does. Such assessment, the task of critical evaluation, returns social analysis to its contexts of lived experience, without which it degenerates either into irrelevance or harm. Constitutive realism locates the pragmatic relevance of textual analysis in the linguistically constructed nature of social reality, finding there also the grounds of critical appraisal. This basic continuity of analysis and appraisal along the plane of language reduces the temptation to introduce extraneously grounded, hence analytically arbitrary categories of valuation from religious, political, philosophical, and other systems of ideology.

The Definition of Constitutive Realism

Sociologists have long hesitated between nominalism and realism in deciding the status of terms for collective structures. Either a term is only a nominal convenience and heuristic fiction (posing the threat of reductionism), or it names real entities (posing the threat of reification or misplaced concreteness). Given this choice, constitutive realism obviously comes down against nominalism. The choice itself, however, is misleading and false in its standard form, a predicament that can only be escaped by strongly qualifying the term realism. This can be seen by close inspection of the received alternatives. It turns out that they are two sides of a single methodological coin rather than mutually exclusive options.

The coin itself I would call substantialist realism. Reality is conceived as a substance, perhaps animate and organic, perhaps inanimate, but in any case something concrete and sensate. The only difference between standard sociological realism and nominalism is in where the substantialist accent of reality is placed. In the former, it is placed on transindividual structures existing in society, culture, and history; in the latter, it is placed on individuals and their observable actions. The position taken by constitutive realism is that where social reality is concerned any substantialist image is wrong, regardless of where it is projected. The appropriate question is not where is social reality located and in what entities but how is social reality achieved, produced, or constructed, and by what means? The reality of collective structures is that of codes, grammars, scripts, language games, and generic rules, not that of concrete entities. Social reality is linguistically constructed in and by acts of communication, especially speaking, hearing, writing, and reading. This is the basic principle of constitutive realism.

The Linguistic Construction of Social Reality

The principle does not say there is nothing outside language, which would be logically indefensible (see, Keith and Cherwitz, 1989) and experientially absurd; only that there is nothing definitely and specifically social outside language. (Even attributions of sociality to bees, ants, and other creatures depend on their movements having a legibly semiotic structure that is language-like: a simulacrum of society.) To claim that social reality is constructed, and can only be constructed, in language use is not to deny other reality formations around, before, and behind language. Supposed proofs of substantive reality such as Dr. Johnson kicking a stone or G. E. Moore raising his hands to audiences of philosophers (Hazelrigg, 1989, Vol. 1:457) are beside the point. Johnson did not kick a social fact, and the facticity of the supposed demonstration lies in the words representing it. Whatever realities come to us through other modes of experience they become definite social realities only in linguistic representations and semiotic adjuncts of language. Habermas, in an early, more clearly constructionist phase of his work, said that “what raises us out of nature is the only thing we can know: language” (Habermas, 1971:314). What raises us out of nature is society, and society is composed in and through language use. To language use also belong the seemingly indispensible devices whereby tracks of construction are brushed over, in passing, to leave apparently objective things externally given, for example, discourse devices that objectify aging and the aged.

It follows from the principle that social reality is made in and of language that there is no such extralinguistic thing as aging or the aged (or any other sociological category). They are rendered realities achieved in linguistic practices of naming, describing, classifying, referencing, and the like, both in ordinary language and specialized discourse. (The latter is our direct concern here, but its achievements of reality effects depend on continuity with ordinary language devices, a point to be explained below.) Here we need to guard against another possible misunderstanding of the principle. It does not imply a libertarian capacity to remake social reality by remaking language: idealism with a linguistic turn. Language studies reveal performative conditions of appropriateness and comprehensibility that are binding on users. For example, generative rules and deep structures underlying grammatical sentences (Chomsky, 1957, 1972), “text-grammar” rules of topical organization (van Dijk, 1972, 1977), “conventional implicatures” (Grice, 1975; Karttunen and Peters, 1979), “semantic concomitants” of words (Durgnat, 1982), semiotic structures of meaning (Greimas, [1966], 1983), generic rules of writing (Ricoeur, 1976), fields of intertextuality (Barthes, 1981; Riffaterre, 1984), and rules of local interpretation (Grice, 1975; Sacks, 1972a,b, 1984). In the present study I seek rules and necessities of gerontology binding on anyone who would enter its field, in a broad sense, the grammar of the field, where grammar means the “implicit governing practices and conventions” (Finch, 1977:158) and the constitutive necessities of a language game. (Wittgenstein’s concepts of grammar and language game will be an important resource in the analytic chapters.) The principle of constitutive realism does not then say that social reality is subjectively created or inter subjectively imagined. It accepts the objective existence of social reality relative to individuals but locates that objectivity in constitutive structures of language, not in substantialist metaphors of externality. Social facts are not to be treated as things; their reality cannot be understood in that way. Neither, however, are they to be treated as mere artifacts of labeling, definitional invention, or shared imagination. Social realities are not merely constructed by language users at their pleasure, they are semiolinguistic structures in their own right, sui generis.

Text and Discourse: A Duality of Language

The peculiar elusiveness of linguistic phenomena as objects of study is evident in the protean complexity of conceptual inventions to grasp them. Charles Taylor observes an explosive growth in linguistics marked, like human sciences in general, by “mutually irreducible” approaches and theoretic warfare (Taylor, 1985:215). Yet there is in the encircling confusion one steady beacon, a repeated methodological message: concepts capable of doing justice to language must come in pairs that represent its double sidedness: the double sidedness of something whose operations simultaneously fold back on themselves and extend outward to things beyond—having to do one kind of operation in doing the other, or needing the absence of things to function as language, yet needing their virtual or projected presence to mean anything.

In Saussure’s (1959) initiation of scientific linguistics the idea of necessary double sidedness is conveyed in the image of the front and back, recto and verso, of a sheet of paper. It follows that for every incision on the referential, propositional side of language there is a congruent one on the semiotic, textual side. The relation is not, however, quite this clear and isotopic. As Saussure explores the semiotic side of language— calling it langue, the code-system of language, in complementary opposition to parole, the individual execution of a code-system in speech or writing—it becomes obvious that its dynamics of meaning are different, even antagonistic to those of the propositional side, the execution surface, of language.

Taking the basic semiotic entity to be a sign, Saussure dissolves it into two complementary and opposite components: material signifier and signified idea. Signifiers belong more to the infolding side, the purely linguistic side, of language (just as langue does compared to parole), consequently they are for Saussure the appropriate focus of a scientific linguistics; his method moves always in the same direction. Even at this juncture there is another division and one more step toward a grasp of pure language stripped bare of discursive content. Signifiers too are doublesided. In relation to an idea they have a certain signification, something a sign stands in place of, but they also have relations of similarity and difference to each other, conferring on them a pure language value (Saussure, 1959:114-117). Thus the terms mouton in French and “sheep” in English have the same signification—hence their exchangeability in translation—but not the same language value because the English term belongs to an associated set (a paradigm) that includes “mutton,” for which there is no equivalent in French. Hence the language values are different, making a complete, literal translation impossible. One needs to ask, therefore, of a term like “the aged” not only what it stands for but where it stands in relation to other terms in companion sets. The language values of signifiers depend on relative position in a sign system, not on necessary connection to the concepts with which they are fused, nor, of course, to real world references of the concepts.

Saussure’s distinctions suggest a radical opposition between the sig- nificatory dynamics of language in itself and the requirements of discourse, especially discourse aiming deliberately for conceptual stability and referential anchorage. Paul Ricoeur nicely describes the situation:

Language no longer appears as a mediation between minds and things. It constitutes a world of its own, within which each item only refers to other items of the same system, thanks to the interplay of oppositions and differences constitutive of the system. In a word, language is no longer treated as a ‘form of life’, as Wittgenstein would call it, but as a selfsufficient system of inner relationships.

At this extreme point language as discourse has disappeared. (Ricoeur, 1976:6)

Ricoeur’s point is reinforced in considering Charles Peirce’s separate formulation of semiotics, which, even though more oriented to the pragmatics of communication, also identifies self-sufficient dynamics of meaning in language itself. I cite Peirce not only as another witness, however, but for the sake of his concept of semiosis to describe those dynamics, a valuable concept I want to adopt for later use. It serves beautifully to identify the dispersive strains to which a discourse is subject by its linguistic base, yet which discourse forms around and depends on to convey its propositional, referential, informational kind of meaning.

Umberto Eco makes the same point as Ricoeur, that while every act of communication “presupposes a signification system as its necessary condition,” every such system “is an autonomous semiotic construct that has an abstract mode of existence independent of any actual communicative act it makes possible” (Eco, 1976:9). Autonomy is implied in Peirce’s model of signification. A sign represents an object not actually present; for example, through analogical equivalence, as in maps and diagrams, or through convention, as in symbols and words. However, a sign can represent an object only for an interpretant idea (an interpretant belonging, I would say to the language competence of a speaker, hearer, reader, and writer). Peirce says that a sign brings the interpretant into the same relation to the object that it has itself, thus mediating one to the other. The crucial point is that the interpretant can enter the significatory chain only as another sign related to another object for another interpretant, and so on indefinitely. Peirce invented the term semiosis to describe this “trirelative” process of signification (Eco, 1976:15).

We can see here an inherent tension between the dynamics of signification and the requirements of empirical discourse. Peirce emphasizes that the trirelative actions of semiosis are not resolvable into actions between pairs of its elements, yet this is precisely what empirical discourse demands. It needs (and its rules of writing dictate) sign-object pairs to achieve clear referential identification, and object-interpretant pairs to secure propositional definiteness. Discursive security demands constant division and control of the trirelative process. First, to prevent a slide into unlimited semiosis where there are no ultimate interpretants to guarantee the validity of signs (in methodological terms, to dispel the spectre of relativism and cognitive anarchy), and second, to overcome the self-evident fact that signs in themselves are empty of reality, thereby threatening to rob empirical discourse of its one indispensable principle: the falsifiability of propositions. As Eco rather melodramatically observes: “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie” (Eco, 1976:7).

Ricoeur (1976) articulates the problem of language and discourse in terms of a dialectical polarity between event and meaning: “all discourse is actualized as an event, all discourse is understood as meaning” (Ricoeur, 1976:12). While retaining his use of “meaning” to describe proposititional content, I will extend the concept of event to mean more than the active moment of a communication. In events of discourse there are also events of language, the self-governing operations called semiosis. There are two main events in semiosis: combination by closeness in linear chains of signs and selection from sets of equivalent signs at each link of a chain. Saussure calls them syntagmatic and associative types of sign relations: “Whereas a syntagm immediately suggests an order of succession and a fixed number of elements, terms in an associative family occur neither in fixed numbers nor in a definite order.… A particular word is like the center of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite number of coordinated terms” (Saussure, 1959:126). Modern semioticians prefer to speak of associative type relations as the paradigmatic plane of language. For Jakobson (1956) this plane is governed by the principle of similarity whereas the syntagmatic plane is governed by the principle of contiguity. Jakobson (1960) took a crucial extra step in correlating these types of semiotic relations to rhetorical figures of speech (syntagmatic relations of contiguity to metonymy and paradigmatic relations of similarity to metaphor), thus building a bridge to literary theory and the analysis of written meaning. I will follow these leads in relation to the linguistic working of key words like aging and the aged in the production of gerontology discourse.

All discourse must control the dispersive pressures of language along the axes of contiguity and similarity. The demand is especially acute and performatively distinct in writing, however, due to its detachment from personal presence and immediate context. This is made clear in the problem of what linguists call indexical or deictic expressions (Levinson, 1983:45-96 offers an overview). These are terms such as “I,” “you,” “here,” “there,” “this,” “now,” which acquire definite meaning only in pointing to someone or something present, that is in ostensive reference to an immediate context. In situated speech virtually every utterance is a contextually determined indexical expression; in writing there is nothing for words to point to except other words and interpretive conventions of reading/writing. The task of referential fastening passes in writing from a present context to possible worlds projected within an interpretive frame. This point concerning the conditions of communicative sense in writing leads us back to the concept of discourse, showing in another way the dialectic of discourse and text.

Intentional pointing to possible worlds is at the heart of Frege’s concept of the reference of a sentence (Frege, 1970; see, also, van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983:Ch. 4). Sentences dominated by the referential function, by that interpretive frame, are read as propositions, and propositions are the basic units of discourse. It can be argued, then, that “discourse is the equivalent for written language of ostensive reference for spoken language” (Ricoeur, 1976:88). There is, however, a decisive difference between these functional equivalents that crucially shape the dialectic of text and discourse. Ostensive reference in speech points to a present, embodied context of communication; discursive reference in writing points to possible worlds apparently transcending language yet being composed in it. In writing, language uses its own resources to achieve a self-transcendence of language. More exactly, the reality that propositions reference is linguistically emergent and immanent but in reading is effectively made external and translinguistic. Analysis of discourse must then include the literary, linguistic, and rhetorical means whereby reality effects of possible worlds are produced in the course of reading. Only then can it properly demonstrate how knowledge effects are yielded in referencing those possible worlds. The investigation of reality and knowledge effects is a basic concern of the present study.

To conclude, and accepting that “a written text is … discourse under the condition of inscription” (Ricoeur, 1976:23), we can say that text and discourse are two sides of a single phenomenon—written communication—operating on joint but opposing principles of meaning. Textual meaning operates on purely internal principles of sign relations (those of contiguity and similarity); discursive meaning operates on principles of external reference to translinguistic possible worlds. Internal sign relations (semiosis) composed under conditions of writing will be called textuality. Textuality belongs to the semiolinguistic base of discourse and must be included in a discourse analysis. As in comprehending anything linguistic, representation of the phenomenon has to be double sided.

The Concept of a Field of Discourse

Gerontology is a discipline discourse, the foundation of a knowledge community, and as such must project a possible, investigatable world in accordance with rules, protocols, and generative formulas constituting a definite area of scholarly work. Whereas in everyday discourse the production of reality and knowledge effects is a diffuse commonplace of ordinary language, in discipline discourse it is a methodically organized expertise. I will not deny the role of ordinary language in the production of specialized knowledge [ethnomethodological studies of natural science: (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Garfinkel et al., 1981; Gilbert and Mul- kay, 1984) have demonstrated its indispensibility even there], but there is a difference and it must be marked. The concept of a field of discourse helps to do this.

French scholars have been as much at the forefront in theorizing the discursive side of language as the semiotic side. Two in particular are relevant to defining a field of discourse: Pierre Bordieu and Michel Foucault. The French term champ connotes a field of battle (between ideas, theories, epistemologies), a field of play (the play and interplay of signification), and a space of action and practices (practices of discourse in communicative action). Bordieu, talking more generally of the social spaces ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Text, Discourse, and Social Reality: A Methodology of Analysis
• 2 The Foundations of Gerontology
• 3 The Grammar of Dependence and Care in Gerontology
• 4 Mechanisms of Field Organization in Gerontology
• 5 Dispersal and Integration of “The Aged” in Gerontological Discourse
• 6 Openings and Closings to Critical Reflection in Gerontology
• Bibliography
• Index