Utilising discursive positioning in
counselling
JOHN M. WINSLADE
California State University, San Bernardino, California, USA;
e-mail: jwinslad@csusb.edu
ABSTRACT Foucault's concern with the production of subjectivity has led to the development of
positioning theory, as it has been called by Bronwyn Davies, Rom Harre´ and Luk van Langenhve.
The concept of discursive positioning has particular value for counselling because it shows how people
are positioned in discourse in particular moments by their own and by others' utterances. Positioning
theory also points to the efforts people make to resist and refuse discursive positions they are called into
in conversation. This article demonstrates how listening to the nuances of discursive positioning in a
conversation can enrich professional practice. I shall use several examples from narrative counselling
conversations in order to demonstrate these principles in action.
Introduction
Michel Foucault has left a legacy of concern with the ways in which subjectivity is
negotiated in relation to the `great anonymous murmur of discourses' (Foucault,
1989, p. 27) that swirl around the social world. He was at pains to distinguish
this perspective from the dominant humanistic perspective in psychology, a
perspective that has been very influential in the assumptions that underlie
much counselling practice. Rather than a focus on how the self is predicated on an
inner self-actualising potential, or on a set of biological instinctual drives, he
sought to decentre the position of the individual in the authorship of his or her own
life and to place the work done by and through discourse in a much more central
place.
That this decentring is not to be confused with an erasure of the self altogether
was made in clear in his later work on the `technologies of the self' (Martin et al.,
1988). Here, he articulated a view of self as always in process of creation (and of the
individual person as agentive in this creation) rather than as determined by social
structure or family of origin dramas or environmental contingencies. Foucault's
arguments have opened up the beginnings of a psychology that does not rely on a
singular location of the self or on the possibility of stable identity. Rather
constructionist writers have articulated a vision of a self that is multiply located in
competing stories, and produced over and over again in the process of interaction,
British Journal of Guidance & Counselling,
Vol. 33, No. 3, August 2005
ISSN 0306-9885/print/ISSN 1469-3534/online/05/030351-14 # 2005 Careers Research and Advisory Centre
DOI: 10.1080/03069880500179541
that is, in discourse, rather than proceeding out of a programmed inner core
(see Burr, 1995).
When people come to counsellors for assistance, they are usually focused on the
immediate struggles of their personal lives and are not routinely concerned with the
need to tackle widespread social discourses or bring about social change. There
would, indeed, be ethical concern about counsellors who set out to politicise the
counselling session in a way that was focused on general social change without
addressing the particular local experience of the client. At the same time, approaches
to counselling that do not take cognisance of the effects of power relations can be
accused of failing to understand the production of psychological problems in social
contexts. For example, an account of depression that solely features chemical
changes in the brain, or anger turned against the `self', or cognitive distortions of
thinking and omits mention of a person's unemployment, poverty, experience of
domination in a marriage, internalised effects of `the gaze', or social marginalisation
on the basis of race or sexual orientation can scarcely be considered adequate. [1] So
the question arises, how can counsellors work with a consciousness of the effects of
pervasive social discourses and at the same time attend to the particulars of personal
experience? Much counselling theory until recently has neglected this question and
has focused solely on the construction of the individual psyche in the dynamics of the
nuclear family and the immediate interpersonal environment.
Introduction to the concept of discursive positioning
Building on Foucault's concept of subjective positioning, Bronwyn Davies and Rom
Harre´ (1990) suggested the value of thinking in terms of `discursive positioning'.
I want to argue here that it is a concept that offers us some leverage in addressing local
and particular experiences without losing sight of powerful social discourses within
which subjectivity is constructed. It is in this relationship between the personal and the
social that people live their lives and it is here too that they experience the problems that
they bring to counselling. The concept of positioning is useful in the conceptualisation
of the counselling task because it focuses attention on this relationship.
Positioning theory argues that people take up positions in relation to discourse in
the very moment of making an utterance in a conversation (including, of course,
counselling conversations). Each utterance [2] must necessarily be situated in
discourse simply because it uses discursive material (words and meanings) in order to
make sense. Bakhtin (1986) has elaborated a dialogical perspective of the utterance
that suggests that everything we say has no meaning in itself but only in response to
other utterances in a dialogue or in the history of dialogues in a particular genre of
conversation. His notion of the utterance parallels Foucault's (1972) version of the
statement (in French Foucault's use of e´nonce´ carries more of the sense of
illocutionary force than the English term statement). These different sources work
together to provide theoretical support for the concept of discursive positioning.
An utterance is not just a representation of discursive meanings that have their
existence somewhere else. It is also where the event of discourse production takes
352 John M. Winslade
place. As we speak, we create and exchange pieces of discourse. This productive
function of discourse was also an important aspect of Foucault's concern. People are
not just recipients of the influence of social discourse. They are also producers (and
reproducers) of it in their participation in social exchange. Thus, each utterance,
even if just for a moment, creates a social relation (or participates in the creation of
sets of relations). The utterance structures this relation, sets up relative speaking
rights, and creates an immediate moral sense of `moment by moment oughtness'
(Linehan & McCarthy, 2000, p. 442) for each of the participants in a conversation.
Foucault's (1978, 1980) notion of disciplinary power established through the
institution of social norms relies on the multiple repetitions of utterances that
contribute to the patterned mosaic that constitutes a social discourse. In making
utterances, individuals seek to establish positions for themselves, both in an
immediate relation with an `other', but also in relation to the many other exchanges
that go to make up patterns of discursive exchange.
At the same time as we establish a discursive position for ourselves in making an
utterance, we also offer the other person(s) we are addressing a position (or a choice
of positions) from which to respond. They are called into particular positions, not
just in obvious terms like agreement or disagreement, but also in much more subtle
ways as affiliating with, and implicitly giving support to, whole frameworks of
meaning. If each utterance establishes a position in a social relation, then the other
points in that relation are necessarily implied in the utterance. Any position in a
relation creates an implicit (even if not explicitly stated) platform for another to
respond from and gestures towards the other an invitation to stand upon that
platform in making a response. The analysis of positioning therefore deconstructs the
illocutionary force of an utterance. Jacques Derrida's (1997) approach to deconstruction
in which the relationship between explicit meanings and the implicit
background reference to a chain of deferred meanings is echoed here.
As people speak, they position themselves not just in immediate relation to the
other person(s) in a conversation, but also in relation to utterances in other
conversations (Bakhtin, 1984, 1986). As someone speaks to a counsellor and
describes her personal experience, she may have moments where she is conscious of
how what she is saying may sound, not just to the counsellor's ear, but to the other
significant figures in her life. Her utterances may, moreover, be responses, not just to
the counsellor's immediate words, but also to the many messages she has been
exposed to from friends, relatives and media sources. The concept of positioning
therefore suggests a process of production of the self that is intertextual (Bakhtin,
1986; Kristeva, 1986), and always constructed in a complex relational field, rather
than, say, referenced primarily inwards to biological drives.
The politics of meaning-making
As a theoretical tool, the concept of positioning strengthens the link between
pervasive discourses that permeate the social world and the particulars of localised
exchanges of meaning. Any utterance in a social interaction (including those in
Discursive positioning 353
counselling conversations) calls upon a discursive background in order to make
sense. It carries traces of the assumptions built into the concepts and language
formations that live in this discursive background and it relies on these in order to
build the basis for speaking and, at the same time, to build the basis for the relation
that is being spoken into. As it does so, often outside of the conscious intention of the
person making the utterance, it is inserted into a social context made up of patterns
of meaning. In the process, any utterance can be shown, even in a small way, to shore
up the assumptions that are built into the foundational meanings of the statement
and to undermine other possible meanings.
Because there is a range of possible meanings, we often find ourselves in the
middle of a contest about which meanings will prevail. The discursive field of
contested meanings that is thus established can be understood as a political field.
Prevailing meanings can have material consequences for people's lives because they
necessarily privilege certain positions in social relations over others. In the contests
over meaning the politics of meaning-making are played out. In order to appreciate
what is taking place in the politics of meaning-making, it is necessary to draw upon
theories of discourse control, discourse dominance or discursive hegemony. Some
meanings will come to dominate the understandings of participants in a conversation,
not so much because of their superior truth value, but because they resonate
more strongly with the dominant discourses that hold sway in a social field. These are
the meanings that have been authorised with institutional legitimacy, blessed with the
assent of the most privileged social groups, or, through constant repetition by the
majority of people, have just come to be accepted as how things are. Such meanings
begin to serve a hegemonic function (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001) in relation to other
possible meanings. Other meanings, and by elaboration, alternative identity
positions, are thus systematically excluded by processes of social legitimation and
authorisation. It is simply much harder to get such alternative meanings heard.
Because speaking rights in relation to a substantive topic may be effectively
revoked in this way, discursive positioning is about processes of social constraint as
well as about social production. The analysis of sexist language, for example, has
provided many examples of exclusionary positioning for women. A similar analysis of
disability discourse has shown how the repetition of patterns of disabling language
produces disability as much as bodily impairment (Oliver, 1996). Unequal
conditions of possibility in social relations are created by the use of sexist language,
or the language of disability, through the recognition and legitimation of some
people's actions and not others. Such hegemonic processes can even obscure the
possibility that other meanings exist. Any single usage does not achieve what the
overall pattern of such discourses achieves, and hence those who object to particular
usages are frequently accused of overreacting. But any single usage nevertheless relies
on the existence of the discourse pattern in order to make sense.
This idea of positioning builds on Foucault's (1978, 1980) descriptions of how
power becomes constituted in the everyday exchanges of life. It accounts for how
people take up, say, gendered subjectivities, even when this costs them personally. It
allows for distinctions between `forced' and `deliberate' positioning of either
ourselves or of others (Harre´ & van Langenhve, 1991, p. 399), and between `tacit
354 John M. Winslade
and intentional' positioning (Harre´ & van Langenhve, 1991, p. 398). And it also
accounts for ways in which people are effectively silenced through being excluded
from legitimate positions from which to speak (Drewery, 2003). This view entails an
understanding of power in Foucault's terms as a `constitutive force' (Davies & Harre´,
1990, p. 46) realised primarily in the exchange of utterances.
The advantages of positioning theory for psychology
The advantages for psychology in general, and for counselling in particular, are both
theoretical and practical. Positioning theory (as it has been called; Harre´ & van
Langenhve, 1991) enables a study of the detail of how discourse operates in the
production of relationships and of personal subjective responses. And it also enables
counsellors to talk with their clients about the discursive positions they choose to take
up rather than to simply accept those they are offered. That is, discursive positioning
is not just about the establishment of meanings in an abstract way. It is deeply
implicated in the production of the identity narratives that people recount in
counselling. Indeed, it is possible to advance a notion of identity as a product of the
clustering of repeated identity positions accepted and taken up in a multitude of
conversations, rather than resorting to essentialist explanations of personality (see
Burr, 1995, for a social constructionist deconstruction of the notion of personality).
Positioning theory makes cultural influences visible in discourse on a momentby-moment
basis but avoids essentialising such cultural influences as determined by
membership of social categories, referencing them instead to the contested world of
discourse production. And it makes visible the ways in which people resist and refuse
the discursive positions they are offered in the midst of conversational exchange.
Because it includes a focus on the subtle nuances of contradiction and discontinuity
(Davies & Harre´, 1990), it opens space for people to make choices, to take stands, or
to protest injustice. In other words, the possibility of contradiction enables us to
exercise agency. In this way, the concept of discursive positioning creates more
leverage than overly generalised notions of cultural identity that are currently popular
in the multicultural counselling literature.
In other words, discursive positioning leaves theoretical room for changes to be
possible on both personal and social levels. It enables us to understand individual
experience as swept by the winds of cultural trends, which sometimes blow in
different directions at different times and places. At the same time, it underscores the
difficulties, not just of their own making, that people must wrestle with as they turn
into the wind and negotiate changes in their personal worlds. At such moments, it
also allows people to make links between personal stands they are taking and the
wider politics of meaning-making in their social worlds. Rather than just asserting
personal autonomy, for example, a person may be seeking to make a change in his
personal life and to conceive of this as taking a stand on behalf of others as well as on
his own behalf. People do draw strength from social movements for their personal
projects.
Discursive positioning 355
There are, moreover, research implications that emerge from a consideration of
positioning theory. There is much potential for the analysis of discursive positioning
to be incorporated in what is currently known as `critical discourse analysis', as
championed by Burman and Parker (1993), Billig (1998), Chouliaraki and Fairclough
(1999), Fairclough (1992) and Parker (1992). An explicit focus on the
analysis of discursive positioning in conversation can potentially shed much light on
the detailed outworkings of the politics of meaning-making. Such analysis is
`deconstructive' and at the same time facilitative of the emergence of new
possibilities. This kind of research has the potential to open to view the work being
done by dominant discourse `behind our backs' to create personal subjective
experience and culturally patterned social relations. It is worthy of much greater
attention in the field of counselling because its potential explanatory power.
Positioning theory in counselling
I shall now turn to an explanation of the practical value I see of the concept of
positioning in the process of counselling. This explanation shall be accompanied by
some examples of exchanges from counselling conversations. It is based in a narrative
approach to the practice of counselling, which aims to help people disidentify with
stories that are proving problematic in their lives and to re-position themselves in
alternative narrative trajectories that are more satisfying. This approach was initially
elaborated by family therapists Michael White and David Epston (Epston & White,
1992; White & Epston, 1990; White, 1989, 1995, 2001). They have been joined by
numerous others who have articulated a narrative practice in various formulations
and in a variety of contexts (for example: Bird, 2000; Freedman & Combs, 1996;
Monk et al., 1999; Winslade & Monk, 1999; Zimmerman & Dickerson, 1996). Tina
Besley (2002) has previously foregrounded in this journal the debt that is owed to
Foucault by narrative therapy.
What distinguishes a narrative approach to counselling (along with some other
`postmodern' approaches like solution-focused brief therapy*/Berg & Miller, 1992;
de Shazer, 1985, 1991*/and collaborative language systems therapy*/Anderson,
1997) is its rejection of an essentialised understanding of the origins of human
subjectivity. Assumptions that are jettisoned include the idea that problems are
hardwired into people's personalities, that a person's `true' nature will emerge if
repression is removed, that the cultural world restrains the individual from reaching
their autonomous destiny, that counselling is primarily aimed at the cathartic release
of emotion, or that symptomatic behaviour can be traced back to underlying personal
deficit conditions.
Instead, a narrative perspective suggests that a person's problems and struggles
in life, and their resources for dealing with those problems, are largely cultural in
character. They are produced within stories, or in discourse. If, as counsellors, we are
to help people make shifts in their stories about themselves, then we need to work
explicitly with the effects of dominant discourse in their lives and with the discursive
resources that they can muster to re-author preferred stories to serve as the basis for
356 John M. Winslade
going forward in life. Thus, what is understood as `natural' in some counselling
approaches is de-naturalised in a narrative approach and understood within the
context of discourse. However, it is clearly not possible to change a dominant
discourse within a single counselling conversation. This is because the concept of
discourse, as articulated by Foucault, refers to a patterned set of meanings and social
practices established through a multitude of conversations (written and spoken)
across a wide social landscape. It thus makes no sense to speak of an individual
having his or her own personal discourse. If an individual is not therefore in charge
of a discourse, how can we entertain the possibility in counselling of discursive
shifts?
It is here that the concept of positioning becomes useful as a psychological
concept. While a dominant discourse must be conceived of as larger than the
individual, it also has personal effects. Individuals are positioned by and within
discourse and such positioning has particular material effects in their lives that can be
traced and understood. In a narrative approach to counselling, the practice of
building externalising conversation (White & Epston, 1990) is a technique built upon
this assumption. Rather than making a pathologising assumption about the origins of
a problem in a personal deficit in the client, a narrative practitioner will typically seek
to locate the problem that brings a person to counselling outside the person and in
the world of discourse and story. This is the world in which meanings are being
contested, in which power relations are negotiated, in which privileged social
positions and marginalisation are established, and in which injustices and abuses of
power occur. The practice of externalising also brings with it a close examination of
the deeply personal effects of the internalisation of dominant discourse in persons'
lives.
But people also resist the effects of dominant discourse in their lives. Through
social movements they develop alternative discourses with which to contest the
power of dominant discourse. Thus, for example, the discourses of decolonisation,
multiculturalism and biculturalism have developed to contest the dominance of a
discourse of Eurocentric superiority. And feminism has developed a counter-story
to the dominance of patriarchal discourses. In their personal lives, people also resist
the ways in which they are positioned within dominant discourses and seek to reposition
themselves in more favourable positions. A counselling conversation can
be conceived of as an opportunity to express this resistance to the power of
dominant discourse and to craft a viable position in an alternative discourse. So
while a discourse cannot be changed in one conversation, positioning within a
discourse can change. A counsellor can assist a person to negotiate a positioning
shift within a discursive field of play to significantly re-shape the negative effects of
a problem and to open up new possibilities for living, based on positions of
resistance. From this perspective, the purpose of counselling is always political,
since it is always about taking a stance within a contest for privileged status of
particular meanings.
A process for a counselling conversation that pays attention to discursive
positioning might work through the following steps:
Discursive positioning 357
1. Build trust in a relationship and explore the problem(s) that brings a person to
counselling.
2. Develop an externalising conversation that deconstructs the problem story and
locates it in the world of discourse.
3. Map the discursive positions that the person is invited into by the problem story.
4. Identify the person's efforts to resist being positioned in this way.
5. Inquire into the person's preferences for the kind of re-positioning that would
make a difference.
6. Develop an account of such position changes that is located in personal history,
in a community of membership and also in alternative discourses/knowledges
that can serve to sustain the positioning shift in the face of the continued
assertion of dominant discourses.
In order to illustrate these ideas, let me refer to some exchanges from counselling
conversations. These examples are fictitious exchanges in that the dialogue is
constructed for this purpose, although each is based on an actual counselling
conversation, with many details and identifying information changed. The content of
the counselling conversations on which these examples were based was drawn from
some practice counselling tapes produced by three students in a Masters level
counsellor education programme. [3] Some of their words are preserved but others
in the responses are my own additions. Each conversation is so heavily edited for the
sake of brevity that it bears little relation to the original exchange.
Example one
Janine: `When I was 7, I just had to do one little thing wrong and my mother
would beat me. She wouldn't hold back. It was awful. I used to hate her. We
used to live in a trailer park and the neighbours used to hear me scream and
then look at me funny for a few days. Then when I got to be a teenager she
would tell me sometimes you're never going to be worth anything, you're
not going to do anything.'
Counsellor: `What effect did that have for you?'
Janine: `It has stayed with me and when I am feeling down it comes back
and haunts me.'
Counsellor: `So it has wormed its way inside you and it affects you. What
does it affect in your relationships with others?'
Janine: `It makes me feel like I am different all the time and that I don't
really belong with people who are smart or have a nice house or a good job.'
Counsellor: `So it undermines your sense of being OK in yourself.'
Janine: `Yes, I think it's half the reason why my identity always seems to be
lacking something, because of all the self-doubt that I have accumulated.'
Counsellor: `Do you ever resist that self-doubt and not let it run the show?'
Janine: `Well, sometimes I think things like how stupid it all is and how my
mother was just feeling hopeless about her own life and really there's no
358 John M. Winslade
reason why I can't think of myself as being as good as anyone else.'
Counsellor: `Is there anything that helps you to stay with that thought and
not let it fade away in the face of the self-doubt?'
Janine: `When I think about my daughter and what I want to give her for her
life. As a Mum now I try to provide a safe environment for her. I try to be
very fair about disciplining her. And I try to be a lot more loving than my
mother was. Plus I am continuing my studies and I want her to grow up
seeing me do that and knowing that a better life is possible rather than being
told it's hopeless all the time.'
In this example, Janine is describing being positioned by a discourse of social
class as it was repeated to her by her mother's utterances. She has internalised this
discourse and it has an ongoing effect on the identity positions she has available to
her in a wide variety of social interactions. It is not hard to imagine such identity
positioning affecting her employment prospects, the kinds of relationships she might
seek out, and the life projects she might consider herself fit for. The counsellor's
responses do not hold her responsible for this positioning, nor do they ascribe these
positions to the dynamics of her family of origin. Instead, they are located through a
process of externalising as products of the kinds of discourse that might have
circulated in her family and in the trailer park in which she grew up. They were
expressed to Janine through her mother's utterances and physical abuse of her. The
self-doubt that Janine references as an effect of the internalisation of these utterances
[4] helps construct the identity positions from which she now interacts with others.
The counsellor externalises the self-doubt too, in an effort to create room for Janine
to disidentify with these identity positions. In the process, a window opens up in
which Janine expresses an alternative position, based on the idea that her sense of
worthlessness is a `stupid' idea and that really she is as good as anyone else. The
conversation begins to craft a story that is based on such re-positioning. It will need
to be developed a lot further than it is here but the opening is there for the expression
of resistance to being positioned in this particular dominant discourse.
Example two
Maria: `Most of the time I just ask myself why did this happen? Why did my
marriage break up? These questions just go round and round in my head.'
Counsellor: `So the questions trouble you a lot. Do they ever get answered?
Do you have troubling answers that bother you too?'
Maria: `I think I wasn't good enough. I wasn't a good enough wife.'
Counsellor: `In what way might you be ``not good enough''?'
Maria: `He would tell me that he didn't love me any more because I got too
fat. And it's true, I did put on too much weight. I just wasn't attractive to
him any more.'
Counsellor: `What was that like for you?'
Maria: `It really hurt. He was judging me in such a shallow way and it was
just not fair.'
Discursive positioning 359
Counsellor: `So, on the one hand you were tempted to believe the story that
you weren't a good enough wife, but on the other hand you wanted to
object and say that's not fair.'
Maria: `Yes but after he left, I was so upset and I just felt so bad about
myself and I blamed myself a lot.'
Counsellor: `You lost touch with the ``it's not fair''.'
Maria: `Yes.'
Counsellor: `What if we were to talk a little about the ``it's not fair'' story?
To give it more of a chance to stand up to the story of you not being good
enough. Would that be of interest to you?'
In this example, Maria is experiencing prolonged distress as a result of her
husband's decision to leave their marriage. The particular character of her distress is
referenced to some questions and possible answers to those questions that she has
internalised and is replaying over and over in her head. In other words, her distress
can be understood not so much as an essential response to separation as an
expression of her positions in the particular discourses that have been governing the
process of separation. In the context of these discourses, the meanings she has
available to her are very demeaning of her worth as a person. They entail a harsh
judgment of her on a scale of attractiveness which is patriarchal in nature. Her
husband's words reproduce the effects of the male gaze on the female body which she
internalises and measures herself against (and of course is found wanting). So she is
invited into a position of self-blame for the end of her marriage. Along the way,
though, she mentions a small voice in her that would protest and say that this is not
fair. It is an opening to an alternative discursive position that expresses her resistance
to being positioned as worthless and unattractive. The counsellor picks up on this
expression of resistance and offers her the chance to participate in a conversation that
carries the potential for re-positioning to take place.
Example three
Rhonda: `My family say things to me like, why are you wanting to go and
study more? Why don't you get a proper job? Why don't you find yourself a
man and get married?'
Counsellor: `So do those messages get to you, do they get under your skin?'
Rhonda: `Yeah they make it hard. But they don't stop me. I have had to
work hard on myself not to believe that stuff, not to give in to those values.
Sometimes I have to give myself a poke and say, look around you. Look at
what they are wanting for you. Is that enough to make life worth living? It's
hard but I keep thinking, who wants to be satisfied with a life that's not
worth much?'
Counsellor: `So does it feel like those family stories are betraying you
360 John M. Winslade
through not supporting your hopes and dreams?'
Rhonda: `Yeah well a bit. But it's not them really, that's society speaking.
Think about it. We women learn that if you don't have a man, if you don't
have a relationship, you're nothing. So we go out of our way for a
relationship. Even if we know that this man is not treating us right, even if
he is cheating on us, we will go out of our way to make it work. Why?
Because we don't want to be thought of as less than . . . So we put up with a
lot of things that we shouldn't have to. That's why it's important to me to
get myself together now so that my children in future see something
different.'
Rhonda is an African-American woman who is active in her own deconstruction of
the discursive positions she is being offered by `her family'. These positions are based
on social divisions along racial and gender lines established through the systematic
reproduction of dominant discourses of race and gender. Rhonda is invited to accept
and internalise the implications of these discourses for her own identity and life
decisions. She expresses, however, a determination to resist these position calls and
to articulate her own identity in defiance of dominant discourse. She is determined
not to be thought of as `less than . . .' Her analysis is articulate and more sophisticated
than most and her personal project of re-positioning is well-advanced. At the same
time, she expresses a sense of struggle. It is still hard to resist the ongoing position
calls that the dominant discourses of race and gender exert. It requires ongoing
vigilance. The counsellor's job then becomes one of giving her space to listen to
herself `speak herself into existence' (Davies, 1991) through her re-positioning
efforts. It will also be necessary for Rhonda to continue to develop a membership
community (either in her family or outside it) that recognises and validates for her
the positions of resistance to these dominant discourses. This might be an important
focus of counselling in this context.
These are three brief examples of a counsellor listening to the stories that a client
tells with an ear for the discursive positions into which a person is being invited and
then opening a conversation in which those positions are to some degree
deconstructed. In the process, the possibility of re-positioning in relation to a
dominant discourse is opened up. Once a person makes a commitment to such repositioning
the task of counselling then becomes one of developing a sustainable
account of this new position and weaving it into daily life. The dominant discourse
will, of course, continue to exert its influence and issue its position calls in an
ongoing way. Care needs to be taken in this process that the resistance to the
dominant discourse that is articulated belongs to the intentional world of the client
and not to the political predilections of the counsellor.
Each of these examples illustrates the practical value of listening for the effects of
discursive positioning and the possibility of inviting people to turn the discursive gaze
back on itself. As a particular discursive positioning is evaluated and either accepted
or rejected, individuals have the opportunity to re-position themselves and, in the
process, to renegotiate their relationships and their identity conclusions. Thus
counselling can be conceived of as an opportunity for reflection upon the personal
Discursive positioning 361
effects of the operation of discourse and for the intentional construction of
alternative discursive positions, where this is what a person prefers.
In addition, there is theoretical value in the concept of discursive positioning. It
is a theoretical tool that enables close inspection of the detail of conversation and the
ways that people negotiate meanings. Such close inspection provides material for the
theorising of the kinds of discursive shifts and changes that counselling is supposed to
support. Until now, most discourse analysis studies have focused on the ways in
which people work up identity projects through the establishment of subject
positions that draw upon discourse, including ways in which people resist the
influence of dominant discourse. Less attention has been paid to processes by which
people shift and change positions. How people make changes in identity projects is
crucial, however, to the kind of research that might inform the practice of therapy.
Positioning theory promises sensitivity to the moment-by-moment negotiation
of meaning in conversation. It combines well with critical discourse analysis in its
attention not just to the immediate features of conversational exchange but also to
the background functioning of dominant discourse to render meaningful the content
of what is said. It combines the analysis of content with the analysis of linguistic
process. It enables a researcher to show, not just that there are substantial `orders of
discourse' (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999) at work in the background of a
conversation, but also how particular utterances in moment-by-moment interaction
shape and re-shape the relationship of participants to these background orders of
discourse. It therefore has potential as an analytical tool in counselling research and
in the development of, and understanding of, the ways in which counselling produces
effects in people's lives.
Notes
[1] See Waldegrave et al. (2003) for an argument along these lines.
[2] I am using the term `utterance' in the way that Bakhtin (1984, 1986) articulates it, in preference to
alternatives such as the `statement'. `Utterance' may refer to a range of discursive events, from a
spoken sentence, including a monosyllabic response, all the way to a lengthy written text. The term
that Foucault uses in French is `enonce´', which has something of the same sense of illocutionary
force.
[3] I would like to acknowledge the contribution made by Megan de Witt, Leon McNaught and
Michelle Myers for agreeing to let me use examples from their taped practice counselling
conversations and for their respective clients (other students in the same university) who also
generously contributed their time and personal stories to the process.
[4] See Michael White's (2002) article `Addressing personal failure' for an analysis of the relation
between experiences of self-doubt and power relations as they are constituted in discourse.
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(Accepted 10 April 2005)
364 John M. Winslade