At the same time, we’ve seen that there is a more subtle way in which the very struc-
ture of Socratic questioning is reflexive, using pragmatic structure in the classroom to
impart a new, heavily indexical orientation to the reading of conflict stories. Here we might
talk of a slightly different dynamic, in which the classroom discourse’s indexical structure
teaches through a reflexive mirroring (as opposed, for example, to teaching through a more
semantico-referential “explanation” of what it seeks to convey). At this more local level,
then, we might talk of a kind of iconic indexical structure to classroom discourse, just in
the sense that it reorients students through a mirroring indexical calibration of classroom
discourse to the metapragmatics of a new textual ideology. Arguably, then, there is a double
indexical mirroring of legal-discursive structures occurring through Socratic method teach-
ing. This would only further reinforce a sense of fit between the classic pedagogy and what
it seeks to impart, regardless of its actual efficacy.
- There is, however, an interesting commonality between Collins’s lowest status
group and the law school class analyzed in this section; in both, there is arguably a break
with the “liberal” notion that semantic meaning is what a text is all about. Instead, the
meaning of texts lies in the pragmatic orientation that teachers impart through regiment-
ing classroom speech. At the same time, there is an obvious difference between highest
and lowest status classrooms. The low-ability students are taught to submit to the text—
to pronounce it and nothing else—whereas the law student’s pragmatic discipline is aimed
at mastery and manipulation. In exploring contrasts among such differing social settings
and approaches to text, we can begin to see the relation between social power and the regi-
mentation of text, enacted in the critical process of socialization to text through the de-
and recentering of written texts in classroom speech. We can also see that it would be a
mistake to read transparently from discourse form to social function. - Although the parallel is striking, I do not mean to imply here any transparent
continuity between the discourse style of the classroom and the discourses used in legal
practice of various kinds. Rather, the classroom discourse is a semiotic disciplining to a
new form of reading and discursively organizing written texts, and this form of reading
will of course be multiply recontextualized in the various speech settings of legal practice. - See Chapter 6. In Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients, Sarat and Felstiner demon-
strate that divorce lawyers commonly urge their clients to separate off parts of themselves,
distancing from emotion in order to concentrate on forming a self that thinks effectively
in legal terms. As we will see, law professors urge a similar separation on their students,
pushing them toward a self defined in terms of legal-discursive positioning. See Mehan,
“The Construction of an LD Student,” 274, for discussion of a broadly defined distinction
between the removed stance of professionals and the more local, contextual construction
of self found in everyday discourse. I locate the abstract self of law school and legal dis-
course within this broad professional category, but I also point to distinctive features of
the abstract individual who emerges in and through legal language. - Footing will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. The concept is adapted from
the work of Erving Goffman, who distinguished different possible kinds of positions people
could hold in producing speech. For example, the person who speaks an utterance is the
“animator,” while someone who composed the words spoken is the “author.”
Silverstein would characterize the original Socratic dialogues as in fact a form of “dia-
lectic monologue” in which a single voice in the Bakhtinian sense is presented through
the literary device of adjacency-pair structures, (A 1 ;B 1 );(A 2 ;B 2 );... for speakers A and B
(personal communication, 9/23/05). We see the closest approximations to this in the more
canonical Socratic classrooms of this study, but only when things are going relatively
smoothly. (See Transcripts 4.2 and 4.3, for some rather mixed examples from one of the
pilot study classes, which used the most strictly Socratic style, and Transcripts 7.1, 7.3, 7.4,
246 Notes to Pages 58–59