Journal of Sociolinguistics 11/5, 2007: 661681

A step too far: Discursive psychology, linguistic ethnography and questions of identity
Margaret Wetherell
The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
This paper argues that linguistic ethnography needs to include psychology as well as language and culture in the list of objects it studies, and build a dialogue with discursive psychology, which similarly focuses on discourse in contexts of use. Discursive psychology, and its variants, are introduced and, using a fragment of interaction from the U.K. reality television programme Big Brother as an illustration, ways of investigating personal order through discursive research are explored. It is argued that the investigation of identity and peoples investments in particular identity positions should not be impeded by, for instance, conversation analytic methodological prescriptions or the concerns of psycho-social researchers that the study of psychology through the study of language is a step too far.

KEYWORDS: Identity, linguistic ethnography, discursive psychology, psycho-discursive practices

In his paper for this Special Issue Rampton (this issue) presents the development of linguistic ethnography in the U.K. as an example of the new interdisciplinary regions (Bernstein 1996) shaping contemporary academic life. Linguistic ethnography brings together, in the same analytic space, approaches which have traditionally worked on different objects: linguistics takes language as its object while ethnography, of course, privileges culture. Linguistic ethnography, as a marriage of the two, investigates acts of communication in their contexts. Linguistic ethnographers, building on the knowledge base of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, study the discursive patterns found in everyday interactions and aim to situate these in the dynamics of wider cultural settings. The result has been, from my perspective, some hugely important pieces of research and some of the most inspiring and exciting discourse work to be found anywhere. But marriages can be excluding and even stifling. In this paper I want to suggest that linguistic ethnography needs to open up to a further partner psychology. The study of language and culture are not sufficient in themselves. Psychological assumptions and presuppositions are unavoidable when language production is studied in its contexts of use. Rampton argues, for instance, that
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meaning takes shape within specific social relations, interactional histories and institutional regimes, produced and constructed by agents with expectations and repertoires that have to be grasped ethnographically. He goes on to suggest that meaning is far more than just the expression of ideas, and biography, identifications, stance and nuance are extensively signalled in the linguistic and textual fine-grain (this issue: 585). Already, here, language users and their psychology have been theorised people are agents; they have pre-existing expectations which are apart from and beyond their language performances which are signalled in talk. As psychological assumptions go these are lightly sketched and form a pragmatic initial frame (although the notion of signalling needs unpicking) but, clearly, linguistic ethnography will need to engage further with the psychological. It will need to keep building on the past engagements of interactional sociolinguistics and neo-Vygotskian research, for instance, with topics such as thought, learning, development and identity. In practice, most of this dialogue is likely to be with variants of what is usually called discursive psychology, that is, with forms of psychology which also focus on language use and on discourse as social action. My aim in this paper is to introduce discursive psychology to a sociolinguistic audience and illustrate what it might offer linguistic ethnography focusing specifically on questions of identity and peoples investments in particular identity positions. I also want to pick up and discuss a core debate around the psychological which is as crucial for linguistic ethnographers as it is for discursive psychologists. This is the question of the relation between language and the psychological when is it a step too far to investigate the psychological through the discursive? What are the limits on the merging of the psychological with the linguistic and with the cultural? I want to offer in this paper an expansive and optimistic picture of what research on discourse can offer when it turns to a topic such as identity and peoples identifications. But in doing so it seems necessary to argue, first, with discursive psychologists influenced by conversation analysis who want to set strict methodological prescriptions limiting the ways in which the psychological can be brought into investigations of language use, and then, second, with psychosocial researchers who are equally unhappy, for very different reasons, with the project of exploring the psychological through the discursive. The first section of the paper introduces discursive psychology. The second section then presents a fragment taken from Big Brother, a U.K. reality television programme, as an illustration of issues of identity and investment. The next two sections of the paper then introduce and argue against the objections of conversation analysts and, then, psycho-social researchers. I conclude that if, as Rampton argues, linguistic ethnography has the advantage of opening up linguistics while tying down ethnography, then adding a broadly defined discursive psychology to the mix has the advantage of unpacking the biographical agent and the performing subject.
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DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Discursive psychology dates from the mid to late 1980s, becoming most strongly established in the 1990s (cf. Antaki 1988, 1994; Billig 1987, 1991; Billig, Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton and Radley 1988; Burman and Parker 1993; Edwards and Potter 1992; Harre and Gillett 1994; Parker 1992; Potter 1996; Potter and Wetherell 1987; Wetherell and Potter 1992). Broadly speaking, discursive psychology can be seen as yet a further manifestation of the general turn to language, turn to culture or turn to discourse found across the social sciences and humanities. It represents the working through for psychology of the emphases on signifying practices and meaning-making emergent in the last 30 years or so. In the case of discursive psychology, this was reinforced by the social constructionist movement in social psychology (Gergen 1985; Shotter 1993), feminist psychology (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 1995) and critical psychology (Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine 1984). Discursive psychology draws on a range of intellectual resources including many which also inspire linguistic ethnographers such as ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the work of Bakhtin/Voloshinov, narrative analysis, Wittgensteins philosophy and post-structuralist discourse theories. Early work (e.g. Potter and Wetherell 1987) took an integrative standpoint attempting to pull together a diverse set of influences (including semiotics and speech act theory), into new syntheses. This work emerged in part from debates with the then dominant Chomskian view of language in psychology. Against Chomsky, and much of psycho-linguistics, discursive psychologists chose to focus on language performance, on everyday language use, and the action orientation of language. We argued that to understand the psychological import of language it is not helpful to study language outside its contexts of use as an abstract system of rules, as an independent and autonomous structure or as a form of knowledge which is best codified in dictionaries or grammar textbooks. The focus should be instead on situated activity. Equally, discursive psychology took, for the most part, an anti-realist position, in line with its constructionist allegiances, rejecting simple, naive realist or correspondence models of language. Language, it was maintained, does not act like a mirror faithfully reflecting the world, and, most importantly for psychology, there is no easy route through self-description to the true nature of worlds and minds beyond. As Derek Edwards (1997) put it, this is a rejection of the view that language is a do-nothing domain, transparent, neutral, non-intrusive, a reflection of activity rather than activity itself. The development of discursive psychology was driven by several goals. First, simply, to extend and improve qualitative research methods not just in psychology but across the social sciences through trying to think more systematically about the actual nature of text and talk, the data which is at the heart of any qualitative investigation, and exploring new analytic concepts. Second, we hoped to address psychological topics such as the study of emotions, rules and representations
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in cognitive psychology, social representations theory in social psychology, the study of social categories and social categorisation, theories of attitudes and public opinion, attribution theory and work on gender, prejudice, stereotypes, racism, intergroup relations, political psychology and the psychological basis of ideology. Finally, we were curious about new ways of theorising and studying the psychological in talk and texts. The emphasis in discursive psychology is on the publicly available social practices which constitute the psychological. Much work (following Wittgenstein) has focused on the discursive practices or language games which determine how mental predicates knowing, remembering, feeling, perceiving, seeing, thinking, etc. gain meaning as recognisable activities. As Billig (1997) reminds us, Wittgenstein argued against the view that psychological words such as I remember, I think, I feel stand for internal processes which provide their criteria of use. Rather the criteria for use emerge from the communicative practices in which these words are embedded. Through looking at how people talk about mental states, researchers can therefore study something which is hugely significant the criteria and practices a community develops and through which it recognises and constitutes its psychological life. Such work tends to be anti-cognitivist (Edwards 1997; Potter 2000; Potter and Edwards 2001). Cognitive psychology investigates thought and mental life as individual activities contained within one isolated person. Thinking and feeling are treated as invisible, solitary, difficult and special activities, mysterious and ineffable. Discursive psychological research suggests a different view which puts the thinker in motion, in conversation. It looks at the mundane, at interaction, talk, and collective sense-making and discovers that the psychological is noisy, dialogical and distributed. Billig (1999a) points out, for instance, that even when alone, engaged in private rumination, the individual is in the company of others and in the company of their culture. Thinking is suffused with dialogue, with the words of others, and those words bear the marks of their social contexts of use and historical struggles over meaning. Thought, emotion and motivation are, thus, not ineffable nor invisible but built from public practices, and minds and selves are constructed from cultural, social and communal resources. One interesting difficulty when working in interdisciplinary regions is that tensions in the contributing strands can persist and pull apart the new combination as the region as a whole grows. In recent years discursive psychologists have moved in different directions and have taken up different stances and orientations within the broader umbrella of discursive work in psychology. The field of discursive psychology now includes, for example, a group most excited by the possibilities of conversation analysis (cf. Wooffitt 2005) and engaged in rigorous and detailed fine-grain work. For this group a key interlocutor remains cognitive psychology (Edwards 2006; Te Molder and Potter 2005) although members of this grouping also work on identity more broadly and on naturally occurring interactions in sites such as residential homes, neighbourhood mediation sessions, child protection help-lines and National
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Health Service gender identity clinics where identity issues are at stake (e.g. Antaki, Finlay and Walton in press; Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Potter and Hepburn 2003; Speer 2005; Speer and Parsons 2006; Stokoe and Edwards in press). Meanwhile, other discursive researchers in psychology (including myself) have remained more focused on issues in social psychology and have not been so persuaded by the apparent limits and boundaries placed by conversation analysis around the object of study (e.g. Abell, Condor and Stevenson 2006; Billig 1995; Condor 2006; Edley and Wetherell 1997; Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman 2002; Phoenix and Frosh 2001; Reicher and Hopkins 2001; SeymourSmith and Wetherell 2006; Taylor 2005; Wetherell 1998; Wetherell and Edley 1999; Willott and Griffin 2004). This loose grouping, sometimes called critical discursive psychology, combines micro and macro discourse approaches including, increasingly, narrative analysis and often combines these with other approaches such as psychoanalysis or social identity theory in social psychology. In my own work I have continued to reiterate the value of integrative concepts such as interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions which in themselves have diverse origins and histories. (The concept of ideological dilemmas comes from Billig et al. 1988; subject positions as developed by Davies and Harre 1990; while interpretative repertoires originated with Gilbert and Mulkay 1984. See Edley 2001a for a review of all three concepts.) In summary, the main commitment of discursive psychology, shared by linguistic ethnography, is to studying talk-in-interaction. Discursive psychologists study discourse as a practical, social activity, located in settings, occurring between people and used in practices. We usually take discursive practices, rather than the individual, as our unit of analysis. And, because we are psychologists, we are interested in studying how people do psychological things emotions, memory, gender, identity, knowledge in talk and texts, as discourse. Some of us are also arguing that the way in which the psychological is organised in discourse is not inconsequential. Rather, these practices are profoundly constitutive of peoples subjectivity, of the possibilities for being human and for being a social actor.

THE CASE OF JADE AND THE QUESTION OF INVESTMENT IN IDENTITY POSITIONS

Given these commitments and interests, identity is one of many topics where an alliance between linguistic ethnography and discursive psychology will be highly productive. For discursive psychology, as I hope I have demonstrated, identity practices are bread and butter. Linguistic ethnographers study the communication of biography and social position and try to understand its organisation and patterns and then the implications for social life. Both approaches have produced rich and interesting work on identity practices. (For some recent examples see Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Benwell and Stokoe 2006; Harris 2006; Maybin 2006; Rampton 2006.)
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This section sets up a brief example to explore further the resources and frames linguistic ethnography and discursive psychology share and could bring to the study of identity. I am going to focus in this example on the question of peoples investments in discursive positions. Why do people invest in some particular subject positions or discursive identities rather than others and repeat these over time? This topic of investment or, in conventional psychological terms, individual differences, personality, character or motivation has been seen as a tricky and problematic issue for discourse studies (Hollway 1984). As I shall demonstrate in the final sections of the paper, it is an area where the anxieties mentioned in the introduction around the limits and boundaries of language research in relation to the psychological bite especially forcefully. The discursive fragment in Extract 1, lightly transcribed, comes from the 2002 series of the reality television programme Big Brother produced by Endemol and shown on the U.K.s Channel 4.1 It is a piece of interaction between two of the inhabitants in the Big Brother house, Jade and Spencer, and was screened in one of the week-night review programmes which presented an edited version of the days events in the house. Extract 1
Taken from Big Brother, Channel 4, 2002 Series (12.50 p.m. Day 13, Jades Birthday) Jade has left the main room and gone to talk to Spencer who is still in bed. Jade: Do you row boats? Is that your job? (Spencer: mm) Like yknow, like on the river Thames, when you go for them tours? Are you one of them? No? (pause) Because I know two people, one of them, a man called Ben, hes one of those people who row boats when you go for tours and the other one Will, he actually works on the boat and he says he has got a wicked job because he gets drunk every single night. Is that one of your jobs? (Spencer: No) Whats your one then? Spencer (trying to be still asleep): Yknow you see in Venice, people on gondolas and the man standing at the back of the boat pushing them out. Jade: They dont do that on the Thames though, do they? Spencer: Nuh, you, I dont work on the Thames, do I? Im from Cambridge. Jade: You dont have the Thames there? (Spencer: Nuhh) Oh I thought the Thames went there. Yes, so you work in Cambridge on a little river bank or something then? Spencer: Yes, on a little river bank. Jade: Why, is there a river called the Cambridge river? Spencer: Yes, the Cam. Jade: Really? You swear? I only thought there was the Thames. I thought that was the main one in (pause) in London? Spencer: It is, but I dont live in London. Jade: (scratching head) (laughs) Im confused. I thought Cambridge. Hang on. Spencer: You thought Cambridge was in London.
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Jade: Yeah. (laughs, puts her head down on bed laughing) I knew Birmingham werent in London, but I thought Cambridge was in London. Spencer: Would you like to go and tell the group what you just said? Jade: Naoooo (laughs). Spencer: You thought Cambridge was in London? Jade: Yeah, in London. But a bit out, in London, but a bit out, obviously not (inaudible). You know you get Bermondsey, Lewisham and all those sort of places. I thought Cambridge was in London. Spencer: Cambridge is a city. Jade: But we have got a city in London. Spencer: Yes, the city is called London and there are different parts of it. Cambridge is a city. Jade: Of where, Kent? (laughs) I know Cambridge is a city. Spencer: (incredulously) Of where, Kent? Jade: Well, Bermondseys (pause) Londons, Englands a country and Londons a city and Bermondsey is just a throw off. Now where are you? Whats your country and whats your things (laughs). Im confused. Spencer: (incredulously) What country do I live in? Jade: I know you live in England. I know you live in England. Spencer (in mock teacherly voice): In England. The city is called Cambridge. The county is called Cambridgeshire (Jade: inaudible). The region is called East Anglia. Jade: East Anglia? Thats abroad. Is there not a place called East Anglia abroad? Spencer: Jade, have you been taking stupid pills again? Jade: No, I swear (laughing). Is there not a place called East Anglia abroad? Every time they talk about East Anglia, I actually think theyre talking about, like that aeroplane business, like loads of flights, like next to Tunisia and places like that. Is there not a place called East Anglian? Really! I dont know where Ive been. I am just a bit dim on that side, on the geography and stuff. I thought Cambridgeshire was in London. (laughs) I did.

This interaction transfixed the viewing public and later the nation via the internet and the tabloid newspapers. The tabloids had been engaged in a systematic campaign of abuse directed at Jade and this new revelation stoked their fire. The East Anglia moment has since become one of the best known of the series. Interestingly, Jade went on to become one of the most successful Big Brother contestants of all time, maintaining still today lucrative minor celebrity status. Spencer has disappeared from view. Indeed, as I write, Jade has become embroiled in a second intensive burst of publicity. Re-entering the house as a contestant in the 2007 series, she has become embroiled in a serious row over racism in the Big Brother house. Our focus, however, is the earlier 2002 episodes. There are many points of interest in this extract including the construction and management of knowledge and the nature of taken-for-granted culture,
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the distributed and social nature of thinking and Jade and Spencers gender performances. What, however, does this extract tell us about Jade as a person, her identity and subjectivity, and her personality and character? What is going on here? Does Jade really not know where Cambridge is? Is she flirting? Perhaps we can read her as a Bermondsey Marilyn Munro? Why does she not seem to mind that her ignorance of geography has been revealed? I have argued that a very fruitful way of exploring questions such as these about who Jade is and what she is doing in this extract is to rephrase broad issues about identity as questions about what could be called personal order (Wetherell 2003). Personal order is derived from social order but is not isomorphic with it. A person, such as Jade or any individual, is a site, like institutions or social interaction, where flows of meaning-making practices or semiosis (Hodge and Kress 1988) become organised. Over time particular routines, repetitions, procedures and modes of practice build up to form personal style, psycho-biography and life history and become a guide for how to go on in the present. We can see, for example, that the everyday practical activity of an institution, such as a university, is ordered by the resources and procedures available for knowing how to go on which are derived from past practice. In a similar way, a person or individual is a site displaying this same kind of open continuity. In the case of personal order, the relevant practices could be described as psycho-discursive (Wetherell and Edley 1998). Psychodiscursive practices are those which among the sum of social practices constitute a psychology, formulate a mental life and have consequences for the formation and representation of the person. This framing of identity and investment as personal order opens up a number of investigative routes. Ethnography provides the tools and analytic imagination for exploring such order across a range of contexts and from the potential perspective of life history. The concept of subject positions or positions in discourse developed by Davies and Harre (1990), which is central to discursive psychology, offers a systematic way of charting any patterns which might be revealed. Such subject positions, in my view, need to be analysed from macro, meso and micro discursive viewpoints. On the one hand there are the broad cultural slots or locations offered to people to speak from. In Jades case social class and the current ways in which class is worked through as identity in British culture are obviously going to be important as are gender and her mixed race background. Wood and Skeggs (2004), for example, have been investigating some of the new ways of telling oneself emerging in the U.K., and the role of reality television in constructing new kinds of ethical selves and reconstructing working-class identity as bad choices which are then voyeuristically consumed by reality television audiences. Then, from a micro rather than a macro perspective, there are the more fleeting aspects of nuance, stance and footing which have interested many linguistic ethnographers and also discursive psychologists drawing on conversation analysis. At what could be described as a meso level, there are the regularities and repetitions in relational positioning visa ` -vis others often most evident in peoples narratives, but not exclusively so. All of these micro, meso and macro positions (and their different chronologies) are
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produced and lived out by Jade as her unique personal order and identity. All are relevant also to understanding investment. To get a handle on the particular interaction in Extract 1, we need, first, to look at what happened before this conversation and what led up to it. In fact, this was Jades second visit to Spencer that morning. On her first visit she was unsuccessful in engaging his attention Spencer was resolutely asleep. For the first ten minutes or so of Jades second visit, Spencer continued to be disengaged, still trying to sleep, and not responding to her while she chatted to him sitting on the bed beside him. Jade tried out a range of topics to attract his attention. And by continuing to ask him questions, and with the new topic of what he does and the whereabouts of the River Cam, she succeeded as we can see in the transcript. Spencer began to talk back, responded to her and became reasonably animated. We could argue that at one level what Jade is doing through not knowing her geography is eliciting attention and obtaining a fairly warm response from Spencer his words about stupid pills etc. may be harsh but on the tape the tone is not. But Jade seems to be obtaining that attention through occupying what could be described as a kind of narcissistically invested down subject position. In the Big Brother household as a whole around this period Jade appeared to be preoccupied with carving out an identity for herself as bubba as she was called by the group the baby of the group who didnt know very much, who was allowed and expected to be incompetent. When my colleagues and I at the Open University analysed this extract (as part of a broader collective project on Big Brother) we wondered if this episode had a rather sado-masochistic edge. Jade engages Spencers attention by revealing her ignorance, putting him in the powerful and knowledgeable up position. It was quite painful and poignant to watch her do this. Jade seems to give Spencer the power to judge, to teach and to determine her adequacy. Her only power ostensibly in this interaction seemed to lie in that step of giving him the power to start with and what she gets in return is some minimal warmth and interest in her. Yet, Jade clearly also delights in her own incompetence, seems unperturbed and, of course, being the baby in a group is a powerful position as well as a source of weakness. Over and over again in interactions in the Big Brother house around this period Jade put herself in what could be described as psychologically equivalent down positions, and the frequent response from others was interest, attention and incorporation into the group as well as ridicule and some contempt. In terms of identity practices and subject positions, one plausible hypothesis is that this is a case of repetition. In other words, being the included, delightful but ridiculed baby might well involve a power relationship or set of mutual up/down subject positions that Jade may have experienced many times previously and that she is now repeating in this new context. It is a familiar identity practice for her, in other words, which may well have been used in other contexts. With these simple, impressionistic, initial observations and speculations I am beginning to sketch out and describe a particular pattern of interaction which may
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be indicative of Jades personality or character and, if we had the data, certainly this working hypothesis could be explored more systematically along with the other characteristic and possibly contradictory relational subject positions Jade regularly adopts. Our observations suggest that she has an investment in particular kinds of identity positions, and repetition is evidence of this investment and motivation. It will be fascinating to track, in due course in relation to this, the Big Brother Jade of 2007, where a very different additional set of subject positions and repetitions also emerged. To summarise I am arguing that the resources of discursive psychology and linguistic ethnography provide some creative ways of investigating psychological investment and personality. A useful framing for both linguistic ethnography and discursive psychology is to approach this through the notions of personal order and psycho-discursive practices. Standard ethnographic modes of investigation and analytic concepts such as subject position, among others, are likely to be useful in exploring this further. This kind of investigation also involves a particular kind of conceptualisation of psychology commensurate I believe with the general project of discursive psychology. But at this point my sketch of the way a more comprehensive analysis of Jades discourse might unfold runs into two kinds of objections. First, there is the objection from psycho-social researchers that the discursive apparatus I am developing will never be able to satisfactorily explain investment and, second, from some discursive psychologists that discursive psychology should not even begin to try and read character from discourse. The next two sections will outline and argue against these concerns.

A STEP TOO FAR: VERSION ONE

I will take first the objections raised by those discursive psychologists who align themselves with the methodological prescriptions and practices of conversation analysis. For this group the extension of discursive work to issues of personality offends a number of principles. It offends, for a start, against a basic dictum that discourse analysis (or linguistics) offers simply a theory of language in use. As Edwards (1997, 2003) has eloquently argued, discourse analysis is a theory of discourse it is not a theory of psychology, society or life in general and to pretend that it is so, and to extend it to questions of investment or character, is to mistake its object of study. In effect, such an extension of discourse research is seen as immodest, and some would say, undemocratic. Why? Because it involves the analyst in legislating on the nature of the world and assumes the analyst has a right to impose their viewpoint over the standpoint of the participants in social science research. Driving this response is the methodological principle followed by conversation analysts (Schegloff 1992, 1997) which suggests that the task of the analyst is not to interpret the world but to study how the world has already been interpreted by participants. Edwards (1997) describes this as epistemological constructionism. In other words, discursive psychologists taking this standpoint see their task as
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investigating how the participants in an interaction construct their accounts and formulate versions of events, including formulations of their own and others psychological states. Analysis is the business of showing how interactions are put together and knowledge-in-practice is made, describing the regularities and forms of order underpinning this making. The argument is that all we have access to is language-in-use. We do not have access to peoples mental states, only to how they describe these states moment to moment. A thoroughgoing and consistent constructionism, then, should focus just on these constructions without trying to ground them further (Potter 2005). The anxiety, therefore, about investigating character or personality, subjectivity and identity, or peoples actual investments in subject positions is that it immediately moves off this seemingly comfortable and logical territory. My preliminary sketch towards an analysis of Jade above, for example, is likely to lead, if done properly and in detail, to some ontological (albeit relative) claims about who she is and what she is like. It will lead to interpretations of her personal order. While these interpretations would be based on Jades own commentaries on herself and on patterns in her interactions with others, they are likely to constitute an account which differs substantially from her own versions of herself. I will be not merely describing how Jade constructs the world but drawing conclusions about her nature and the organising subjectivity producing those constructions. Edwards (1997) points out that everyday lay accounts are full of ontological claims that is, claims about the real nature of the world and the objects in it, and claims too about states of mind and the nature of mind. The analysts task he suggests is to do something different. Analysis should not add further ontological claims of our own about what is really going on, and what people are really like, but should simply describe how participants do it and in this way build cumulative knowledge of peoples practices. This seems an apparently benign, valid and obvious restriction on the activities and range of convenience of disciplines like discursive psychology and linguistic ethnography. It meshes with and exemplifies the anti-realism of discourse theory noted earlier and is consistent with the critique of a view of language as merely descriptive, a transparent conduit to the real nature of the world, events and peoples reasons for their actions. My own view, however, is that such a restriction on discursive psychology and linguistic ethnography is unacceptable and indeed unnecessary (Wetherell 1998). It leads to the collection of a particular kind of data small fragments of interactions transcribed in great detail. And, it leads to an especially narrow analytic gaze on that data and its context. Famously, for example, Schegloff (1997) has argued that the analyst can not conclude that macro discursive resources, gender or social history or the long conversation of community and institutional life (Maybin 2006) have a bearing on what happens in any specific interaction unless it can be shown that in the data these things are directly relevant to participants in the interaction right here and now. My aim here, however, is not to rehearse further the already extensive debate on this subject (see Billig 1999b, 1999c; Edley 2001b, 2001c; Schegloff
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1998, 1999a, 1999b; Weatherall 2000; Wetherell 1998). In effect, I want to advocate in place of these overly restrictive methodological prescriptions, epistemological constructionism combined with what Edwards (1997) describes as an ontological constructionism. This latter term is useful clarification of what is at stake in further developing discursive psychological and linguistic ethnographic perspectives on identity. Ontological constructionism is characteristic of post-structuralist work, constructivism in developmental psychology, socio-cultural approaches in anthropology and is found in various other brands of constructionism in the social sciences. It applies to those approaches which develop a meta-theory of mind, the psyche and the nature of social relations using constructionist principles to guide their empirical analyses. Such approaches theorise and present arguments about the nature of mind and subjectivity at any given moment. But unlike essentialist approaches it is not assumed that individuals have a fixed or determined nature and are expressing an inherent self in their talk and actions. Rather social actors are seen as unfinished, agentic and as continually in the process of construction and reconstruction. These shifting and mobile selves are seen as being built from social and cultural resources, from the voices of others, from interactional patterns of early family life and other (life-long) socialising institutions. Discursive psychology conducted from an ontological constructionist perspective becomes the study of not just how selves are made but what kind of person is made (Wetherell and Edley 1998). This kind of discursive psychology attempts to describe the configurations of identity and subjectivity which result at particular moments and which might be maintained for shorter and longer durations. It also attempts to describe the cultural resources, struggles, interactions and relations that the person is working with and how these have been mobilised, temporarily stabilised and turned into their own personal order. Many constructionist theories of self and identity draw on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin/Voloshinov (e.g. Hermans and Kempen 1993; Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Maybin 2001; Wetherell and Maybin 1996) to understand this figuring process. Holland and Lave (2001) describe these theories, through their own elegant concept of history-in-the person, as presenting a dialogic view of self and subjectivity. The self, they argue, is an orchestration of the practices of others (2001: 15). And they go on to outline a classic ontological constructionist account:
Dialogically constituted identities are always re-forming somewhere between positions institutionalized on social terrain and their habitation as it is made meaningful in intimate terms. Identities live through practices of identification. Subjectivities are neither simple reflexes of social position . . . nor simply the meaning that individuals give to these positions. Subjectivities and their more objectified components, identities, are formed in practice through the often collective work of evoking, improvising, appropriating and refusing participation in practices that position self and other. They are durable not because individual persons have essential or primal identities but because the multiple contexts in which dialogical,
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intimate identities make sense and give meaning are recreated in contentious local practice (which is in part shaped and reshaped by enduring struggles). (2001: 29 30)

Ontological constructionist approaches, therefore, shift the unit of analysis partially back from discourse to the individual social actor. They thus raise rather different and sometimes difficult ethical issues not confronted by epistemological constructionists. (One problem, for example, in even a very brief and preliminary analysis of a public figure such as Jade, is to mark out a position which is different from the kind of harassment she received in 2002 from the media and to justify a kind of psycho-analysis done without permission.) The shift back to the individual and to psychology is accomplished, however, with a very different (and much more robust) theory of the psychological than found in traditional psychology as the final section of this paper will try to demonstrate. It is also perhaps clear that there would be considerable advantages in further tying down often vague and loose constructionist accounts of identity found in sociology and anthropology through much more systematic empirical analysis. Here both discursive psychology and linguistic ethnography have a lot to offer.

A STEP TOO FAR: VERSION TWO

In recent years there has been a backlash against constructionist meta-theories of identity, particularly Foucauldian (big discourse) theories of subject positions and subjectification (e.g. Elliott 2001; Hollway and Jefferson 2000, 2005). These critiques of Foucault and post-structuralism are often extended inappropriately to all discursive research on identity, although this research, as we have seen, is a more complex, varied and nuanced synthesis of a wider range of intellectual resources. A constructionist account inspired by Bakhtin plus Foucault plus conversation analysis (as difficult as it might be to hold those things together) is a very different approach from classic Foucauldian theory. Leaving this confusion aside, what are the objections emerging here to the opening out of discursive psychology and linguistic ethnography to include identity and questions of investment? From the critics perspective, the account of self and identity found in discursive work is too monochrome (Frosh 1999, 2002; Hollway and Jefferson 2005; Walkerdine 2006). Discursive research, they maintain, offers an account which is too general, disembodied and pallid. How can discourse analysis deal with the drama and passion of personal life? Constructionist approaches, it is suggested, inevitably ignore what the North American feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow (1999) tantalisingly calls in the title of her book the power of feelings. It is worth presenting Chodorows argument in some detail as her book engages with the more socio-cultural kinds of constructionist approaches to the study of self and identity described in the previous section. Her book is an extended critique of constructionist epistemology and cultural ethnography from a relational
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psychoanalytic standpoint. Chodorows main objection is to what she sees as an over-emphasis in constructionist thought on cultural meaning as constituting subjectivity.
Social and cultural thinkers from a variety of fields have tended to assume that cultural meanings are the primary determiners or shapers of experience and self. Some take a more constructionist approach and claim that people create meaning by drawing on available webs of cultural meaning, but even these theorists seem to assume that whatever meanings are invented or created in this way come entirely from a cultural corpus or stock. (1999: 129130)

She wishes to draw a distinction between cultural and personal meaning, arguing that only the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis can capture personal meanings.
Psychoanalysis is first and foremost a theory about the creation of personal meaning . . . [it] illuminates the power of feelings, the ways that powerful unconscious inner realities and processes shape, enliven, distort and give meaning and depth to our experience. (1999: 12)

Personal meaning, she argues, is created in and is an expression of internal subjective psychic reality.
Psychoanalytic investigation suggests that people are motivated or driven, in order to gain a sense of a meaningful life and manage threatening conscious and unconscious affects and beliefs, to create or interpret external experiences in ways that resonate with internal experiences, preoccupations, fantasies, and senses of selfother relationships. (1999: 14)

Personal meaning is a reflection of a dynamic unconscious and feelings. And by feelings Chodorow means feeling-based internal stories or proto-stories such as unconscious fantasies which havent yet been formulated in language. She argues that we have a set of innate psychological capacities or mechanisms for creating personal meaning including transference, projection, introjection and fantasy. Through these capacities or processes, collective, cultural, external stuff is taken inwards and transformed, so that when it is pushed outwards again as social action it is inflected and shaped by the psychic. Transference, in particular, is the means by which we personally endow, animate, and tint, emotionally and through fantasy, the cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, cognitive and embodied world we experience (1999: 14). There is much to ponder in Chodorows work including her reminder of the autonomy of the psychological and the dangers (pointed to also by Edwards) of extending the domain of discourse indefinitely so it becomes a theory of everything rather than a rather good approach to studying language-in-use. Chodorow, in my view, is right to suggest, for example, that the processes of meaning-making are very different in different realms or sites and there will be different formative processes involved. It must be the case, for example, that inner
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voices or conversations held inside the head, privately, with oneself as sole auditor, are a very different kind of discursive practice than, say, accounts of self in job interviews or even in psychotherapy. And, it would be fascinating to explore empirically the notion, for instance, of proto-stories or feeling-based internal stories as these appear in external discursive accounts and become performed. Where I disagree with Chodorow, and other psycho-social or psychoanalytically influenced critics of discursive work, is their separation of the personal from the cultural or the social from the psychological (Wetherell 2003; see also Edley in press) along with the lack of reflexivity about the functioning of psychoanalysis as a discursive formation in its own right but that lack is a story for another day (see Parker 1997). There is often a commitment in new psychoanalytic writing to putting the psychic and the social together yet, typically, internal worlds are seen as behind discursive or language practices, determining their nature, content and expression. It is assumed that underneath the flow of discourse or the flow of practice can be found unconscious drives, identifications, repetitions, acts of repression, strong, hidden feelings, and so on. The metaphors of depth and distance (behind and underneath) are frequently evoked to explain this sense of another place. The surface of practice is seen as a chimera conditioned by a real determining psychic underbelly (see, for example, Hollway and Jefferson 2000, 2005). This approach would understand any patterns in Jades discourse over time, such as the repetitions in subject positioning I pointed to above, as driven unconsciously, only comprehensible through an analysis of the psychic mechanisms and processes involved. I am never really sure how psycho-social researchers define the unconscious (Wetherell 2005). But one consequence, I think, of the appeal to unconscious psychological forces which lie underneath and behind practice is the rendering of subjectivity or psychic reality almost beyond further empirical investigation. We are left, as Michael Billig (1999a) has persuasively argued, with autonomous and deep psychological properties like repression, splitting, or Melanie Kleins paranoid-schizoid position, for example, posited as properties of human minds and used as explanatory principles. These processes stand outside social relations and social action and in some unspecified way act on social and cultural material to add a psychological twist to our utterances and accounts. My objection, in brief, is to the psychological models that still underpin psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has itself gone through a minor version of the constructionist turn (Mitchell 1993). And indeed Chodorows relational approach is a part of a broader movement in psychoanalysis to develop a more social, less instinctual, account of developmental process (see Dawson 1994 and Redman 2001 for good examples of such a move applied to gender identities). But this is a partial constructionism without a theory of discourse (except in cultural studies versions where the discourse theory is the still rather structuralist and oddly ungrounded account supplied by Lacan). It is a form of constructionism with very little sense of everyday language practices and their patterned nature. It is a constructionism which needs in my view to incorporate an understanding of the
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logic of practice (Bourdieu 1992; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and von Savigny 2001) into its psychological models. In other words it needs an understanding of forms of order which are not cause-effect sequences, mindless correlations, prescriptive rules, mysterious dynamics, drives, etc., but which follow the structuring but agentic, organised but could be otherwise, inter-subjective and reflexive order of practice (Wetherell 2006). As noted above, my preference is to explore the acting out of identity and personal order as patterned everyday methods, as psycho-discursive practices. Jades playing dumb identity performance, for example, is best analysed, I would argue, as a routine, a method, something she knows how to do, a way of being which works for this moment as it has probably worked in the past. She slips into it just as Spencer slips into, for a moment, teaching. It is a methodical practice, open, accomplished in situ, new for this context but conditioned by past practice rather than, say, an unconscious drive, a role, or a programmed script. It would be interesting and challenging to re-work all the standard psychoanalytic concepts such as projection and splitting as psycho-discursive practices (as Billig 1999a, has done for repression). It would be interesting also to re-think the positions found in relational psychoanalysis such as the depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid position through the lens of an expanded notion of subject position (see Wetherell 2003). Psycho-discursive practices are not necessarily mysterious or necessarily expressive outpourings of a deep inner psyche. They are frequently procedures or routines that people know how to do in talk, making meaning as they go. Take, for example, Chodorows notion of transference this process by which the person animates or inflects the external world with their internal preoccupations and personal meanings. That is very familiar, of course, we can recognise that we do such things and create versions of the world wildly at odds with others versions. But why call it transference isnt it just the constructive work which we study all the time? I am curious to see what happens to psychoanalytic readings if one replaces transference with construction in these texts. I also suggested earlier that psycho-discursive practices play a central role in the constitution of subjectivity. This leads to a different, truly psycho-social, psychological theory of the social actor. What it means to be a person, the formulation of an internal life, an identity and a way of being in the world develop as such ethnomethods are worked upon externally with others and internally by oneself, and move inside to form what James Wertsch (1990) called the voices of the mind. Constructionist traditions in psychological anthropology, the work of Bakhtin/Voloshinov and social constructivist developmental psychology, as noted, have studied the ways in which stories, dialogues and others voices are carried inwards to form mental life. Subjectivity and identity are best understood, I am suggesting, as the personal working up and collision of communal methods of self accounting, vocabularies of motive, culturally recognisable emotional performances and personal histories of sense-making.
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CONCLUSION
One of the most enduring contributions of discourse research and socio-linguistics has been to demonstrate that everyday language use which once seemed too chaotic and arbitrary to study is in fact relatively, and sometimes highly, ordered. In this paper I have reviewed some of the issues around extending the study of such order into investigations of identity and investment. In this I have been following the trajectories suggested by the rather different but overlapping projects of linguistic ethnography and parts of discursive psychology. I have tried to rebut those discursive psychologists and psychoanalytic researchers who would dispute that discursive work can or should make such a contribution. I hope I have demonstrated that such an extension is not an unseemly step too far, as some have feared. On the contrary it opens up new empirical avenues and, most excitingly, provides new conceptual frameworks and new theoretical languages for engaging with some very old problems.

NOTE
1. Big Brother is a U.K. reality television show which involves a group of people entering and living in a specially constructed Big Brother house where nearly their every move and conversation will be recorded. Footage from the Big Brother house is shown live during the day with an edited highlights programme each evening. The viewing public vote to evict house-mates over a number of weeks and the winner is the person who proves most popular with the public. Housemates are selected from the large numbers of people who audition each year. The Big Brother extract used in this paper is part of a corpus of material collected by the Discourse and Psycho-Social Research Group at the Open University. Id like to thank my colleagues, particularly Wendy Hollway, Peter Redman and Kath Woodward, for their permission to draw on our joint reflections on this material.

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Address correspondence to: Margaret Wetherell Social Sciences The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom m.s.wetherell@open.ac.uk

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