Writing: Notes on Reflexive or Dialogic Style 對話性風格寫作的注意事項

You will need to read and re-read this resource. Some of it should be clear at once and other parts might be confusing. 您將需要閱讀和重新閱讀這個資源。它在當時應該是明確的，但是在其他地區，可能會造成混亂。
As you proceed through the unit the strange bits should make more sense than they might at first. Talk with your friends and teachers about these ideas! Lynne will return to them in lectures. 

Notes on how and why to write in a reflexive or dialogic style 關于為什么寫作和如何寫作一篇對話性風格的文章。

1. General總則

Here are some explanations of and directions on how to write and think in a so-called ‘reflexive’ or ‘dialogic style’.
這里有一些解釋和寫作的方向關于怎么寫所謂的“反身性”或“對話風格”的文章。
Note the word 'dialogue', meaning communication and an open exchange of ideas and signs between (equal) humans. Reflexive style involves writing in such as way as allows you to dialogue with your readers, yourself, one another. You also expect and encourage people to respond. Reflexive style is the opposite of what I call 'writing like an encyclopedia', i.e. writing authoritatively and objectively about 'what is'  - fact truth etc.  You try to define and nailing everything down in the name of some valorised language and methods because (implied), 'I am the expert ' .... etc.

This style will be familiar to some of you. For example if you have a background in media and communication studies, art history, cultural studies, semiotics, fine arts, photography, dance, drama, music, or literature, it’s normal.  For those majoring in strongly empirical disciplines at first attempt it might go against your training to drop the objectivist, quasi/scientific style you have learned to identify as ‘academic’ and 'impartial'. You may find reflexive style a challenge if your major discipline tends to be principally quantitative and oriented to science as its major epistemology. Any discipline that tells you not to personalise and not to use ‘I’ probably falls into this category, whether or not you were conscious of it before. Quasi-scientific style is still authoritative, revered, and de rigeuer in many professions and countries. You were probably told to write like this in High School if you were writing an academic essay. It is also the commonsense style adopted by authorities qua powerful people in many countries (politicians, scientists, policy makers, lobbyists, civil servants, psychiatrists, lawyers, police ... even some film critics).

However, thinking and writing reflexively is a skill you can profitably learn if you don’t already know it. An open-minded, thoughtful approach will help you find your own voice. It will teach you a lot about how cinema-people connections and other forms of social meaning construction and authorization work in the world. No one should be writing reflexively simply to follow orders, or because they are ‘true believers’. If you want to talk about the reasons and/or have grounds to question the requirement of reflexive style in AAM220 assignments, please speak up in classes or run your ideas by Lynne or Emma. We do not expect everyone to do it the same way or be at the same level but we do expect you to experiment with finding your own voices. Please give it a go! When the final Test rolls around if you do not write reflexively you will lose marks (unless you mount a brilliant defence of objectivism).http://ukthesis.org/Essay_Writing/  

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2. Why do it?為什么去做這個？

In every human culture, two major elements or metatheroretical concepts known to philosophers as ‘epistemology’ and ‘ontology’ are linked.
在每個人的文化理解當中，兩個主要的元素或元哲學家的“認識論”和“本體論”的理論概念是聯系在一起的。
Both are matters of cultural learning. They change constantly over time, within human consciousness, and as different priorities and knowledges and techniques for observing communicating and recording are developed. They also vary widely between cultures, and subgroups within cultures. Epistemology and ontology are inextricably linked in your everyday thinking and behaviour whther or not you know it. You are a natural philosopgher. They also go to make up music, news reports, films, body language, fashion, as well as in a formal method like science and its findings.

Ontology, or for us cultural ontology, is the content or subject matter of ‘knowledge’: ‘what we know’, or ‘what-can-be-known’. 'What' is in our cultural universe.

Epistemology, or for us cultural epistemology, is the methods we use to perceive and interpret - to make sense and to convince ourselves that we know (or don't). In short, ‘how-we-know’. One method is smell, another is taste. What are some others?

What we know and how we know are linked and are inseparable in human behaviour, real films, real audiences etc. I am only dividing them up formally now as a philosophical exercise designed to promote conscious and aware film analysis.我們知道的東西，以及他們如何聯系，這些東西在人類的行為中是分不開的，真正的電影，真正的觀眾只是把它們正式作為一種哲學運動，旨在提高人們的意識和使人們能夠欣賞分析電影。

These two elements inform everything we know. They are in sign systems and the rules that govern communication in any language. They are in films, in whatever a filmmaker, funder, or crew were thinking and attempting: all the encoding. They are integral to the decoding that audiences do. Ontology and epistemology inform how anyone makes sense of what they read or see on screen.  They inform your professional understandings and choices of appropriate media/cinema studies concepts theories and methodologies to use. 

The reasons why you might choose to use a reflexive style are just as important as how to do it. Dialogic or reflexive style teaches us about the links between epistemology and ontology, and how, in the actions and minds of human beings, their constant interactions and thinking literally produce culturally learned impressions of ‘knowledge’, ‘fact’, or identities that are seemingly stable, permanent or and relatively slowly changing. According to leading poststructuralist theorists like Michel Foucault, these impressions of knowledge and stability in the world and in human identity emerge from human engagements with discourses, as what he terms ‘truth effects’. In the social world, discursive arrangements are the realm of the allegedly ‘Real’. For example, perhaps you feel you have been developing a little expertise in relation to your family, where you all ‘came from’, and how you personally intersect with mediated globalization. But this doesn’t give you the ultimate or definitive power to say exactly who you are or who ‘they’ are without fear of a contest or changes in everyone’s ideas, information, framing etc. All the members of your 'family' will see themselves and one another a little differently, and tomorrow, as your frames change, you will also change your mind. Watch any episode of the reality TV programme, ‘Who do you think you are?', to see these processes of change in action. Highly recommended! There are copies in the library.

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To relate this to our AAM220 subject matter, there are two major branches of theories that I will talk about that are called 'Structuralist' and 'Poststructuralist'. Both groups argue that the way that people make and interpret film texts is a matter of our engagements with the above cultural sign systems and rules. Structuralists tend to use ideas like ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘social negotiation’. They will discuss certtin auduence groups such as by age or langauge or gender. Poststructuralists talk about personal and group 'identity discourses’ (see Stuart Hall (1990) for example. Poststrucuralists refer to your and my major perosnal identity stories as call ‘grand narratives’ (grands recits in French) and also the interior processes of sense-making. Examples of identity discourses include 'nation', family, ethnic group, religion, political identity (say 'green', 'democrat' or 'communist'), health, age, and gender.  For poststructuralists, these basic identities and social arrangements are produced by and are represented (in mediated performances) within big overarching patterns that Foucault calls 'technologies' and 'apparatuses'. Thus for example, the major apparatus of bio-power includes all the elements that a person with a Western European-inflected cultural training and background (e.g. a descendent of white colonisers) would see as an ordinary part of a person, or 'the human condition' (e.g. sex, age, family, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, morality, intelligence). Some of these we see as socially learned or achieved, others we see as ‘natural’. For example anyone using the story of ‘blood’ to talk about ‘family’ or heritage is using a racialised discourse that comes from the C18th- Western European colonizers. For explanations of related ideas such as 'race' and blood', and their history, see Spencer (2006) E/R and Seidman (2004) E/R

By explaining 'truth effects' as the results of the ways power-and-knowledge are invented, enacted, communicated and perpetrated culturally and socially, poststructuralists are arguing that what we call 'Truth' is inescapably political. Thinking about reflexivity therefore asks you and me to focus centrally on the ‘politics of knowledge’ and dnabates and the changes that occur. In AAM220 we are especially interested in the politics of knowledge that surround films made by first peoples in ‘postcolonial’ times, or during/after times of struggles for independence, recognition, equality, recovery, compensation and so on. It might at first be a stretch to see the relevance of understanding an identity such as a religion, nationality, ethnicity, or a gender as a ‘truth effect’, but in the postmodern world it is important to consider this! I will mention poststructuralism throughout the unit. For more see  Mills  (2004) '‘Discursive structures’, inDiscourse E/R). For weeks 1-7 read McKee, A 2003, ‘ What is textual  analysis’ in Textual analysis, a beginners guide. (EBook). Textual analysis is a method mostly allied with structuralist approaches.
 

• Poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of Modernist style research and thinking argue that the responsible way for a professional to live in the postmodern and postcolonial periods is not simply to 'chronicle' or 'record' something, as a naïve scientist, archivist, ethnographer or photographer might.  It is to become conscious of the processes of interpreting and communicating through sign systems and to develop new understandings of cultural and political issues that create new art, films etc. For us, examples will include how important group shared ideas such as ‘nations’, ‘ethnic’ groups or ‘authenticity’ are represented and responded to in films made by first peoples dealing with colonialism.

• Anyone who writes a purely factual essay, pretending to be ‘objective’, and without any references to active audience processes including their own, that is, who does not at least try a reflexive style, is likely to lose marks. Run your first attempts by me or Emma and we will explain further in classes.

任何寫作文章的人陳述的都是一個現實，而且也試圖去解釋客觀的東西，但是卻是沒有任何有力的證據，去支持他們的論點，但是，至少嘗試了一種放射性的對話寫作風格，但是，這也意味著將會丟失分數，在未來的課程中，我們也會試圖去解釋這些，做出嘗試。