APLICACIÓN DE LAS REGLAS DEL DERECHO CONCURSAL ESPAÑOL EN UNA

The above example is not in any way intended to exhaust a look at the indexical life of the focal discursive construction. Different oppositions could be set up to motivate a virtually unlimited number of overlapping indexical functions. Even based on only the kinds of causal propositions considered here, newspapers could index ‗conservative‘ vs. ‗liberal‘ or

‗objective‘ vs. ‗sensationalistic‘ identities, to name but two ideologically supported and thus widespread oppositions. Similarly, without any further explanatory details, consider some of the possible analytical perspectives that could emerge by comparatively crossing some typology of the propositions themselves with typologies relating to: genres of newspaper writing; periods of time; types of writer identity; types of reader/audience identity; types of relative writer-audience framings; types of represented interactional framings involving direct and indirect speech; and types of combinations of the propositions themselves as instances of other kinds of linguistically-mediated interactional acts such as arguments, insults and defenses, to name but a few. That this is not intended to be a complete list is the relevant point. Rather it demonstrates two preliminary conclusions emerging from the analysis above.

First, many other overlapping indexical meanings could be discovered as constitutive elements of this discursive construction. Second, to make assumptions about where and how to find propositional regularities for any particular discursive construction is to create the very

72 Though this can be seen in the data often this is so only through a complex inference. One has to have additional evidence about the way in which the writer (or quoted speaker) is being framed. It is rare that this political identity was explicitly stated in the newspapers studied here. Context did often make it obvious however. That said, the dominant form of evidence for this claim was ethnographic. Being one who obviously brought up this issue quite often in contexts of social interaction, I was often made aware (sometimes painfully so) of the identity indexicals that were involved. Moreover as the television media often relies on political oppositions to frame the structure of its content, I witnessed it in action numerous times in that context as well.

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terms through which the indexical ones are discovered and vice-a-versa. They are mutually interdependent. We return to both of these points in closing.

To this point in the analysis it would appear that a relatively fixed and stable discursive construction has been located. It is one constituted by a set of common propositions and an overlapping, second-order indexical regularity. In the name of a fuller understanding of the social life of discursive constructions, however, methodological issues, and the related theoretical implications that they entail, now force us to problematize this apparent conclusion. The problem is not that we have failed to exhaust the regular indexical life of this discursive construction because, at least in part, the indexical side of this (or any) discursive construction is dialectically the result of our methods for isolating out propositional regularities. Rather these problems should force us to see how, in general, all analytical representations of a discursive practice, both ours and that of any other interested parties in practice or in theory, are relative to a particular perspective. There can be no ‗pure‘

unmediated representation of a discursive construction. This is not to make the extreme, and ultimately absurd, claim that overlap and thus degrees of shared discursive reality do not exist. They do. Without them social communication would lack the presuppositional grounds on which it is based. It is however to claim that analysts create methods that are in principle no more or less privileged than those used by individuals and organizations with very different perspectives, methods and interests for representing ‗how people regularly talk about something‘. In closing this argument then, we will return to the data and work through a series of related moves that demonstrate this point. First, we will consider propositions that were vulnerable within the focal discursive construction based on this study‘s methodological assumptions. Second, we will move outside the results discussed above and consider a few causal propositions that weren‘t found frequently enough to be considered ‗common‘.

Returning first to a denotational approach, note how two of the common causal propositions reported (n. 35 and 36 found in the right-hand column in Tables 1 and 2 above) have yet to be mentioned. Like the others, they too were found to be common and thus members of this discursive construction. They were, however, relatively more isolated from reflexive interconnections than the others. That is, their presence was neither modeled on an implicit or explicit theme or theory within the data nor was it patterned from above by a more widespread ideology. As such, references to it were typically stated in or as the causal accounts themselves explicitly. In this sense, while still of course legitimate common members of this discursive construction, their relative isolation makes them somewhat vulnerable participants. This vulnerability, seen in semiotic terms, suggests the influence of a strong indexical component to these propositions. For those individuals sensitive to the sites from which this data was drawn, they stand out as indexically marked propositional elements in the regular discursive construction. For example, some propositions are more likely to be associated with particular kinds of speakers/writers or time periods and as such be interpreted as reflecting narrow ‗political‘ interests (cf. n. 35 on outdated macho values being associated with relatively older Israelis). Alternatively (as evidenced in n. 36 on Israelis‘ agitated psychological state), component propositions can index other discourses that restrict the reflexive support they find within a focal discursive construction. Mutual constraint and support, as these cases demonstrate, are not the only indexical relations found among the component parts of discursive constructions.

For our purposes here, we‘ll focus on the second causal proposition: an ‗agitated psychological state‘ offered up as an explanation for negative, but nevertheless

How Israelis Represent the Problem of Violence in Their Schools 165 understandable, behaviors (n. 36).⁷³ Propositions from widely circulating discourses about what it means to be an Israeli include those that both directly and indirectly relate to the political crisis that has tormented the region for many years. Jewish Israelis know that military service is mandatory and see themselves as surrounded by enemies. These views, along with among many other related ones, are parts of a discourse that include the related belief that they are therefore an understandably ‗nervous‘ people. They thus understand a reference to ‗the situation‘ (‗hamatsav‘) to include a complex of difficult social, political and primarily military pressures that hang dangerously over all of them at all times. In this ideological construction of what it is to be an Israeli, it is living with ‗the situation‘ that makes them a generally tense and irritable people, for whom negative behaviors, including violence, are the means by which these pressures, sometimes regrettably, find expression.

This widely known ideological proposition about the psychological state of the Israeli, though common, was relatively infrequent and (thus) isolated from reflexive interrelations with the other propositions in this discursive construction. The reason being suggested for the relative isolation of this proposition, however, is not because it indexically ‗belongs‘ to older Israelis, or even to some other specific sub-population or time or social context (see fn. 13 above), but rather because it overlaps in a very restricted way with another discursive construction. Understanding this requires us to consider briefly the discursive construction of military violence in Israel (Lomksy-Feder 1999, Lavie 1990).

In studying cultural discourses, outsiders are often surprised. Ideological elements from one practice can get metaphorically extended to some discursive practices, but (surprisingly) fail to get extended to others. One such surprising example in this case was how infrequently Israelis cited the military as a relevant institutional site for the problem of school violence in Israel. Indeed it was arguably the one major societal institution missing from Tables 1 and 2 above. To Western readers, this omission, at first glance, might seem almost conspiratorial.

The relatively shared views that military violence is an ‗unfortunate necessity‘ because Israel‘s hand is forced by ‗uncivilized terrorists‘ (‗who kill women and children‘ and

‗threaten Israel‘s daily existence‘) partially accounts for the fact that such a causal explanation was almost completely absent in this case study. Military violence is commonly represented as something that Israelis would prefer not to carry out. It is a justified form of

‗self defense‘. This is particularly the case in situations where military violence comes close to other discursive framings that mark it as potentially unethical or immoral. This demonstrates that ‗violence‘ too is a constructed cultural concept that is relatively constructed at least in part by the kinds of relative discursive constructions being studied here.

Metaphorically speaking, despite the many visually- and conceptually-based iconic similarities, these two discourses can be seen to oppose each other. ‗Students fighting each other in school‘ is not analogically comparable to ‗soldiers fighting an enemy in war‘, or even

73 The first of the two ideological propositions that has yet to be discussed: ‗outdated macho values‘ (n. 35) is a similar example in the logic of the ongoing argument and so is not being discussed in detail. In short, it was only just frequent enough to be considered a ‗common‘ proposition because it is likely to indexically overlap with an ‗older‘ (vs. ‗younger‘) writer/speaker identity. Ideologies about ‗what once was‘, like any others, have different distributions across different groups of people and if this particular ‗historical fact‘ about Israel is one that is less commonly told today (i.e. less widely distributed in the discourses enacting and commenting on different cultural activities), it is possible that it is because it is one that is less well known by younger Israelis.

In this sense, while it shows potential for a ‗political‘ divide in representing this particular discursive construction, there is little ethnographic evidence for that. It appears rather to be an element that is drifting out of relevance with time.

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‗solders fighting with Palestinian civilians in the territories‘. That said, it should not be forgotten that there is a commonality shared by these two discursive constructions: a generally agitated psychological state is found in both. What then is the difference or, put another way, how are these discourses both opposed and yet interrelated at the same time?

A state of psychological agitation commonly appears in causal accounts of school violence as a regrettable, but understandable, cause for the students‘ behavior. That same state, however, is only applicable to problematic instances of military violence. It serves as a psychological defense for military violence that could be considered at best ‗ethically troubling‘ and at worst ‗abusive‘. All of this however is framed by the difficult situation that Israelis find themselves in and thus the unfortunate need for military violence that they feel has been forced on them. Thus, the discursive construction of the violence in the military setting is, among other differences, not ‗problematic‘ in the way that school violence is. In school violence, recall, the violence is represented as ‗problematic‘ by ideological definition.

It is thus not the type of violence that can motivate the relevance of a state of psychological agitation for students. The political situation and the agitated psychological state which it fosters is more likely to influence them because they are young or because of the specifics of particular cases.

The argument here then is that this particular causal proposition remains relatively isolated and reflexively weak because it is found in a (less significant) discourse about school violence. To increase its reflexive strength would be to analogically map more of its indexical life into the problem of school violence. To do so, however, is to bring together cultural practices that are not mutually supporting. To do so is in essence to metaphorically suggest that Israelis are at least in part responsible for what then also becomes explicitly problematic military ‗violence‘ (vs. self-defense, etc.). A position like that, needless to say, can be taken as a sign of national disloyalty.

In studying the relationships among discursive constructions, the relative isolation of this kind of proposition in the focal discourse seems to be based on the fact that it indexes a different discursive construction in problematic, largely oppositional, ways. It points to its potential for becoming a destabilizing analogical force. While this ‗surprising‘ lack of a connection across these practices for Israelis is truly an ode to the relative ways in which cultural ideologies ‗travel‘ across distinct social practices in light of socio-cultural history, it is also contains a more general semiotic lesson about the analogical bases for the roots of ideologically motivated social change.⁷⁴

Turning to a second set of closing considerations, one can ask what can be learned from propositions that were not found often enough to be considered regular members of the focal discursive construction. Recall that the discursive construction under study here is about the secular school system in Israel. There is in fact, however, a powerful religious education system that exists independently alongside the secular one. If we isolate out the religious paper in this study, consider one new and at least for this particular newspaper, relatively common proposition. Along with the others, the religious newspaper participated in representing school violence (in the secular school system) as the result of general institutional and societal dysfunction. They were relatively unique, however, in frequently adding an interesting extension here. They extended the scope of this sign and saw school violence itself as one instance of many in a different discursive construction, one that was

74 I owe my realization of the importance of this point to Judith Irvine‘s thoughtful comments on my paper.

How Israelis Represent the Problem of Violence in Their Schools 167 almost completely their own in this study. They framed it as (yet) another sign of the moral deficiencies of secular Israel. Framed often as only one of the many signs of the mistaken ways of secular Israel, there was perhaps less of a need to focus on it. In any event, the larger point here stands. Had this study focused on religious newspapers, this firmly established causal proposition along with others would have changed what was presented above as the analytical view on what was ‗common‘. That is, this causal proposition would have changed from an indexically located proposition not considered common enough to be a part of the focal construction into a ‗common‘ one that constituted the construction. That is, the reflexive and relative nature of discursive constructions is an unavoidable conclusion.

Consider some final examples of causal propositions that were not cited frequently enough in the data to be considered ‗common‘ signs within this construction. In these cases, we see the introduction not of indexically marked propositions signaling some specific kind of speaker or social context, but rather propositions that largely indexed the relative influences of time on discursive constructions. These two propositions were not common, but they are arguably strengthening. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear what other regular indexical associations they will develop. They both related to the introduction of a large number of Russian immigrants into Israeli society at the time of this study. Their number, estimated at nearly a million in a nation of around six million at the time, suggests the obvious influences that these ‗new Russians‘ were already beginning to have on essentially all aspects of Israeli life. Relevant here however was their role as causal explanations for Israeli problems.

Violence in the school system was sometimes represented as the result of the ‗negative influences of immigrant children‘ and ‗youth membership in alternative groups‘.

Why were these propositions not found to be common enough to be included in this study? One obvious fact is that what they reflected was at the time a relatively new demographic fact. The discourses about Russians, and whatever roles those discourses were going to play in any others beyond those that included them as immigrants being absorbed in the project of nation-building, hadn‘t yet had time to crystallize. Even at the time of this study, however, supporting discourses were emerging. That is, the appearance of these propositions in the data was not completely culturally incoherent. Stereotypes of Russian violence (and ‗mafia‘ affiliation) and reports on the relatively high rates at which Russian children dropped out of school were two particularly widespread examples of mutually supporting ideologies.

Yet another reason for their under-representation in data drawn from written instances in widely read public newspapers relates to the fact that it was somewhat taboo to express these ideas in written form in a public forum, such as a newspaper. There was a verbal taboo, albeit a weakening one in recent years, on criticizing any specific (Jewish) ethnic group explicitly in any official, public forum. Such explanations run the risk of sounding ‗racist‘ (or, perhaps in more native Israeli terms, at the very least ‗anti-Jewish‘ or ‗anti-Israel‘). Indeed, given that published newspapers were the source for this study, both of the propositions aimed at the Russians typically used the Hebrew equivalent of politically correct language. In the first case, though clearly only Russian children were being referred to, there was a ‗polite‘

euphemistic overgeneralization of the referent to include all immigrant children. Similarly, though ‗alternative groups‘ is what was written, Russian youth gangs were the known referent.

Here too then one sees the relative nature of any attempt to represent a discursive construction. Indeed, it was in fact quite easy to document causal propositions about this

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problem that not only explicitly blamed Russian youth for the problem (as well as the influence of their parents on them), but did so without any concern for politically correct language. Such causal propositions, however, were only found in informal ‗neighborhood talk‘, house visits with neighbors after the Sabbath, barbeques with friends and family, and dinnertime conversations.⁷⁵ Whereas in public forums such claims ran a stronger risk of indexing a kind of racism in the writer/speaker, in informal settings the assumption seemed to be that everyone knew each other well enough not to come to that kind of conclusion and/or the racism was explicitly formulated or implicitly present and accepted as such. That such claims about this issue appeared to be normatively present only in informal settings is partly a result of the fact that they were not yet ideologically tolerated, at least officially, by any institutional voice in Israel. As above, in the discussion of the Israeli‘s agitated psychological state, this is due in large part to the fact that it opposes more dominant ideologies. In this case, the relevant ideologies are the dominant state discourse about the importance of a Jewish nation and thus the need to successfully absorb Jews from all parts of the world at whatever

problem that not only explicitly blamed Russian youth for the problem (as well as the influence of their parents on them), but did so without any concern for politically correct language. Such causal propositions, however, were only found in informal ‗neighborhood talk‘, house visits with neighbors after the Sabbath, barbeques with friends and family, and dinnertime conversations.⁷⁵ Whereas in public forums such claims ran a stronger risk of indexing a kind of racism in the writer/speaker, in informal settings the assumption seemed to be that everyone knew each other well enough not to come to that kind of conclusion and/or the racism was explicitly formulated or implicitly present and accepted as such. That such claims about this issue appeared to be normatively present only in informal settings is partly a result of the fact that they were not yet ideologically tolerated, at least officially, by any institutional voice in Israel. As above, in the discussion of the Israeli‘s agitated psychological state, this is due in large part to the fact that it opposes more dominant ideologies. In this case, the relevant ideologies are the dominant state discourse about the importance of a Jewish nation and thus the need to successfully absorb Jews from all parts of the world at whatever