Ron Harre's work on the importance of discourse in the field of social constructionism begins with a disclaim (Harre, 1993: 3). While not disputing the concept of individual humans as 'artefacts, products of social process', the most important of which are linguistic and otherwise discursive, Harre refuses the assumption that individual action is always and only socially caused. Individuals, according to Harre, 'are built to be capable of autonomous action'. Significantly for this study, that autonomous action includes the social construction of meaning; for Harre 'the meanings of social events are created, not given' (Harre, 1993: 77). Although it is in social contexts that this creative meaning-making takes place, it is individuals who do the creating, and it is through the symbols of language that they do it. Moreover, the symbols could not exist without these individuals - 'there could not be languages and discursive processes unless there were brains buzzing... and vibrations in the air and marks on paper' (Harre, 1993: 204) without the participation of individuals in them.
Standing in partial contrast to Harre is Ian Burkitt (1991), who presents a critique of traditional views that maintain that the individual's self and the world are separate entities in opposition to each other. In Burkitt's conception of the self as social, and of human beings as continually engaged in social relations, there is little space for a view, such as Harre's of the self as autonomous, as capable of acting on the world as well as interacting with it. Burkitt charges Harre with arguing contradictory claims: on one hand, that 'the public and collective order [is] the basis for social and personal being', and on the other hand that 'the social order is...created by the intentional actions of individuals' (Burkitt, 1991: 75).
While he does not suggest that the notion of the individual is altogether false, Burkitt does privilege the claim that individuality is socially based, and that common-sense Western understandings of the individual human being as 'psychological monad' (Burkitt, 1991: 17), whose individuality is established at birth, are erroneous. He further rejects the notion of meaning-making as a function of the individual mind as, at best, incomplete (1991: 84-85), since for him such interpretations fail to take sufficient account of society itself as a creator of meaning. Rather, he holds that personality is created by forces external to the individual, and shaped by power relations, whose' repression [takes] the initiatives and motives for action away from rational control' (1991: 214).
With regard to the question of language as one of these social forces, Burkitt (1991) draws heavily on George Mead's contention (1934) that the means by which we individuals come to know our own experiences is through knowing others' experiences of us, specifically by becoming 'objects to ourselves' - absorbing and adopting others' perceptions of ourselves 'within a social environment or context of experiences and behaviour in which both [we] and they are involved' (Mead, 1934: 138). For Mead, and for Burkitt, it is language - 'communication in the sense of significant symbols... directed not only to others but also to the individual himself' (Mead, 1934: 139) - that permits this process of self-objectification. Burkitt's view of individuality, or the self, as something that develops rather than being present from birth, similarly echoes Mead's contention that 'the self... arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individuals within that process' (Mead, 1934: 199). Neither Mead nor Burkitt orders subjectivity prior to sociality. On the contrary, the conceptualise communicative acts as forming, and informing, 'the capacity for subjective reflection' that becomes self-consciousness (Burkitt, 1991: 34-35). Similarly, Harre's (1993: 4) view of the self as mutable, socially informed 'location, not a substance or an attribute' that comes into being in contexts in which an individual is 'already treated as [a person] by the others of their family and tribe', is reminiscent of Mead's construction of the self-as-object-to-itself.
Discussion concerning the relationship between language, thought and indentity has also located itself in sociolinguistics since the time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Edward Sapir's (1929: 162) contention that 'the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' foreshadowed Benjamin Whorf's statement, nearly three decades later, that '... the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions that have to be organised... largely by the linguistic systems in our minds' (Whorf, 1956: 213). These assertions, like those of Mead (1934) and Harre (1993) relating to the social self modelling for the individual self, harmonise with Lev Vygotsky's understanding of 'the true direction of the development of thining [as moving] not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual' (Vygotsky, 1997: 36). Indeed, according to William Frawley and James Lantolf, Vygotsky maintained that 'a human being is from the outset social (i.e. dialogical) and then develops into an individual (ie. monological) entity' (Frawley & Lantolf, 1984: 146). And Lacanian thought, arguably, goes even further with respect to the relationship between language and the self. Lacan's argument, asserts Bruce Fink, is that 'without language there would be no desire as we know it - exhilarating, and yet contorted, contradictory, and loath to be satisfied - nor would there be any subject as such' (Fink, 1996: 76).
Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
(pp. 32-34)
