Alec McHoul

Why do we think that there are 'psychological' problems, and that therapy or medication offers the answer? This book will tell you how it comes to be that we think we have psychological problems, and why it is that 'needing' therapy is increasingly the answer. And, if we are to produce a future where we can help ourselves, without helping the business of therapeutics, it outlines some of the ways that we might re-think our selves. The version of human experience promoted by psychology defines twenty-first century western culture. That a way of understanding ourselves unheard of 100 years ago now dominates the 'helping' professions and the common sense of everyday conversation, TV talk-shows and magazine problem pages, is remarkable. This book examines how this knowledge of ourselves is produced, packaged and marketed. We demonstrate how the psychological professions sell themselves as the authority of human nature, and on appropriate forms of 'help' for personal distress. That is, we show the methods by which psychology — as a self-conscious social, cultural and entrepreneurial project — both defines an ever-increasing range of human experience as needing its expertise, and then markets proprietary solutions to ordinary people, aspiring professionals and other disciplines.

Three approaches to analyzing institutional talk are introduced by internationally-recognized experts: Conversation Analysis, Discursive Psychology and Critical Discourse Analysis. The main section of the book ("Applications") illustrates these approaches by taking the reader through the process of analysis in such instances as how pilots talk in aircraft cockpits, how computer helpdesks work and how political speeches are constructed. Finally, the book opens up some theoretical and methodological controversies that occupy practitioners today. In this way, readers are introduced to the most recent ways of seeing how talk is critical to making the modern world work.

Translated from the French by Pierre van Osselaer and Alec McHoul, the six essays of Visual Identities are an important contribution to the growing field of industrial semiotics. Floch's major strength is his analysis of signs in a way that is both industrially relevant and textually precise. Until recently, there have been two quite different and distinct ways of understanding commercial signs, such as logos and advertisements. Industry-based work has tended to look at questions of marketing and has often been reduced to the mass psychology of 'appeal' and audience research, whereas the textual analysis of commercial signs has tended to come from limited positions of identity politics and criticism (Marxism, feminism, etc.) Floch manages to find a way between (and also outside) these traditions. In doing so he has produced a book that will interest industrial practioners in advertising, marketing and design, as well as students and academics in semiotics.

Popular Culture and Everyday Life offers a broad-randing survey of social and cultural theory, while also issuing an audacious challenge to contemporary cultural studies with its emphasis on speculation, rather than observation-the spectacular, at the expense of the routine. Combining an analysis of power and subjectivity drawn from cultural studies with perspectives on the everyday provided by ethnography, textual reading, ethnomethodology, and discourse analysis, Toby Miller and Alec McHoul invite us to question our participation in both dominant and subcultural practices. To achieve this end, each chapter focuses on a routine practice, such as eating or listening. Each opens with a summary of key ideas on the relevant subject, considers the discourses that construct these practices, and concludes with one or more empirical investigations. By acknowledging the historical specificity and mundane character of popular culture and everyday life by looking at everyday practices in their own right rather than merely as representations of something else, the authors open up the possibility of a significant departure in cultural studies.

In Semiotic Investigations, Alec McHoul develops a theory of meaning that he calls "effective semiotics" - a theory that investigates "the ways in which signs have meaning by virtue of their actual uses". McHoul expounds his theory of effective semiotics - of "meaning-as-use" - in a series of provocative chapters on diverse topics. He begins by examining the relations between semiotics and history and between semiotics and specific communities. He elaborates on the nature of these relations by demonstrating the "effective semiotics" of a particular photograph from the 1880s, episodes from the film Singin' in the Rain and the Batman comics, literary works, children's primers, popular accounts of science, and many other objects, artifacts, and experiences. Semiotic Investigations advances its own comprehensive theory of signs while ably examining works by such distinguished philosophers and theorists as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Lyotard, Kuhn, and others. Yet the book isalso down-to-earth and clearly written, with an eye towards a startling range of "ordinary" and "uncommon" experiences. It will be required reading for linguists, philosophers, semioticians, anthropologists, literary theorists, and students of cultural studies.

Who are we today? That deceptively simple question continued to be asked by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault, who for the last three decades has had a profound influence on English-speaking scholars in the humanities and social sciences.; This text is designed for undergraduates and others who feel in need of some assistance when coming to grips with Foucault's voluminous and complex writings. Instead of dealing with them chronologically, however, this book concentrates on some of their central concepts, primarily Foucault's rethinking of the categories of "discourse", "power", and " the subject".; Foucault's writings contribute collectively to what he himself calls "an ontology of the present". His historical research was always geared towards showing how things could have been and still could be otherwise. This is especially the case with respect to the production of human subjects.

This book explores some of the ways in which contemporary literary theory can be used to read fiction. In particular, it focuses on Thomas Pynchon's three novels to date and his collection of early stories. The theories exploited are concentrated in the work of Jacques Derrida which has been variously labelled deconstructive or more recently grammatological. The boundaries between biography, criticism and fiction are challenged to such an extent that the gentre of the text itself is part of the game that its readers are invited to play. Alec McHoul also wrote Telling How Texts Talk: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology and Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science. David Wills has also written Self De(con)struct: Writing and the Surrealist Text and also Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory together with Peter Brunette.

Two distinct but related things are going on in these essays. They try to give specific instances of how ethnomethodological studies of a particular variety of social subject, 'readings', might get underway. In treating textual exchange, these essays make a small contribution towards the extension of ethnomethodology's scope - an extension into that sphere of interaction lying beyond the purely 'face-to-face' domain. This is certainly no unique step. Indeed a corpus of relevant materials has begun to emerge quite recently (particularly Psathas, 1979b; Schenkein, 1979; Anderson and Sharrock, 1979)(1) Giving instantiations of reading-analytic work in ethnomethodology is the first thing, then. The second is to examine ethnomethodology's relation to 'textuality' more generally; to pose problems for its analytic practice, for its conception of 'science'/'theory' and for its reliance upon the 'methodic' as a real order of events; and to pose those problems in relation to questions of 'reading' and 'text'. These two aspects of the work need not be seen as distinct.