THE LOCAL ACCOMPLISHMENT OF POWER: 
DIALOGIC SELVES IN PARTICIPATION 

    Jerry Gale & Steve Kogan 

Often, when considering social inequities based on race, gender, class and sexual orientation, we focus on broad contextual variables. We implicate patriarchal society, governmental policies, economic  forces, religious values and other socio-political factors.  While examining social inequity and injustice is essential, we often neglect how these power relationships are accomplished at the local, every day level of interaction. Yet the social matrix from which broader injustice occurs includes the moment to moment dialogue between people that occurs in all settings, be it in the family kitchen, on the street, in the bedroom, in a store, or in the therapy room. 

From a post-structuralist perspective, each interaction is a contested site of multiple discourses (Foucault, 1980).  Some stories and ideas (together with their associated actions and prescriptions for being) will predominate.  Others will be marginalized.  Some voices seem more "hear-able" and others are not permitted to make sense.  The contested nature of our lives and their effects on relationships often become felt but unseen. Once the movement and re-circulation of power becomes invisible, we grant particular actions and beliefs with the status of being normal or natural. Thus, through local micro-practices, based on notions of what is natural and normal for any given situation, we accomplish power in both its constructive and oppressive faces. 

We can begin to understand these micro-practices by recognizing that words are actions which do things (Austin, 1962). Discourse is a performance that demonstrates and achieves particular outcomes. By discourse (or talk, voice, language, etc.) we include verbal, paralinguistic, non-verbal and visceral aspects of communication. Rather than viewing language as a medium which represents a reality "out there", discourse creates, shapes, and maintains social identity and social institutions. Through the interactional accomplishment of talk, relationships and selves are continuously established. 

These views challenge both our ideas of the self as produced by society, and ideas of an independent autonomous self that can act outside or independent of context. Individual subjects are active performative agents and we create (and maintain) our society from the "bottom" up (Heritage, 1984). 

In considering talk a social action with effects, we focus on the co-management of conversation. From this perspective accountability becomes a relational activity (Day & Tappan, 1996).  We must examine ourselves from a position of community participation.  Racism and sexism are not only a social battle to march for, but can be resisted in how we construct our selves as therapists. What we say and how we say it has profound implications on the construction of narratives in therapy. Our accounts of what we intend to do (whether provided orally or written) can function to avoid accountability for our actions.  Post structuralist thinkers advocate a stance of "persistent critique," where our actions are examined in context, and spaces are created for a plurality of ideas. This means developing the ability (in mindfulness and action) to attend to the co-management of conversation in order to make a difference. 

The challenge arises in how to accomplish these ideas rather than merely intellectualize or champion them. Meaning and the limits of conversation are shaped by content, timing, non-verbal, and paralinguistic actions and their relationship to social identity and institutional context. What one intends to accomplish while speaking is not necessarily (and often not) related to what actually happens.   Indeed, one's inner voice can also obscure or gloss other voices as well. Hence there is a difference between what a person says he or she intended versus what he or she actually does. A person can point to his/her intention and say, "I'm not racist" but in an interactional encounter, perform an act that has a demeaning effect. The meaning of action cannot be determined by one's own account (Wetherell & Potter, 1992).  Our personal story of what we have done or tried to do shapes and is shaped by the stories we are living amongst. What this means is that we are at once both more responsible 
to those around us, and more free to have an influence on the character of our world. 
 
 

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words: Second Edition. London: Oxford University Press. 

Day, J. M., & Tappan, M. B.  (1996). The narrative approach to moral development: From the epistemic subject to dialogical selves. Human Development. 39, 67-82. 

Foucault, M. (1980). The history of sexuality, Vol. I: An introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage/Random House. 

Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge, 
England: Polity Press. 

Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the language of 
racism: Discourse and the legitimation of exploitation. New York: 
Columbia University Press.