 The need for a critical and engaged study of this force has become more apparent in the country. You will notice the proliferation of claims known as by the highest officials of the land that they have been misinterpreted or misquoted, thereby effectively constructing an excuse from taking responsibility over their pronouncements. The action arguments to themselves the absolute authority over meanings of words, which sadly cannot be claimed by just anyone. Interpreted authority is a privilege of the few. This force, being studied critically, is nothing new. But because this force is an inscapable aspect of human-made experience, there is a tendency to dismiss it as nothing more than a natural consequence of our interaction. Studying this force from a critical lens gives us an opportunity to see that in many instances our interaction with others and the manner by which we accomplish such is contingent on the structures that reinforce inequality of power and society. In other words, not all engage in particular discourse situations will have the same chance to speak and the same opportunity of getting heard. This fact is very easy to realize. The more important task of critically engaging discourse however is the recognition that multiple voices should be allowed to speak and be heard and that is what a critical study to discourse should work hard for. Ideally, a profusion of multiplicity of voices in form, sensitive and intelligent is the essence of a true democracy. In actual practice, there is a concept need to fight for. Alan Bell, the renowned social linguist, proposes that our main thrust as scholars of language, communication in discourse should be the critical social linguistics of voice. Voice metaphorically has been a powerful representation of active engagement and participation in society. Methodologically, the study of voice as a discursive practice points to the importance of interrogating what Pierre Bourdieu calls structure in structures or those sides of power that limit our legitimate position as participants in the making of society. Critically studying discourse also means knowing beyond what traditionally has become the main focus of the field. The discursive turn in the social sciences and cultural studies have given near-dedicated focus to semiotics, science, language and meaning. I agree with Margaret Weatherall's assertion that it is imperative to include the entirety of the human experience as social practice in deeply understanding discourse. She turned the direction of effective discursive practice in which meaning and language are not separate from the body and emotion in our pursuit to fully comprehend the human social experience. What is exciting about this course analysis and its extension, effective, discursive analysis is the possibility of the research projects that we could come up with. For example, in studying emotions and its role in our daily discursive lives we can include in the analysis the politics, the encumbrances that we are having when we deal with our emotions generally. Emotions, the emotions are a very important topic in this course analysis because usually between emotions of a natural occurrence and natural effect of our daily interactions with people. When you experience sadness, when you experience happiness for example, when you get angry, when you get frustrated over certain things we see it as a natural consequence of the human experience of our limitation as a human person. But what we don't realize usually or in many instances emotions are also social. There is a term called emotional habitus and it is a combination or a fusion of what pair would you term habitus or the dispositions that we have been taught to live in our daily lives from birth to our death. Emotional habitus is basically teaching people how to respond emotionally in a proper manner. For example, there are certain emotions that we automatically relate to certain people. Disgust, happiness, anger. These emotions are sometimes automatically categorized as being the proper emotions for certain circumstances of certain people or certain people are included. Recently I remember a news about a study that was conducted and the study is about which country is the most emotional in the world. I remember that the Philippines figured as the most emotional country or if not one of the most emotional countries in the world. That is a very interesting assertion and a very interesting premise. When we say that Filipinos are one of the most emotional people in the world, what does that mean? How do we analyze critically emotions and how do we analyze emotions with our daily dispersive practices or communicative practices? We must remember that emotions are, although they are experienced by the body, although they are experienced by the individual person, it is connected, it is completed in dispersive situations. There is no use at being angry without being angry at anyone. There is no use with being sad without showing it to people that you are sad or you are happy. Usually in the simplest sense we try to elicit emotions from the emotions that we try to perform. Performativity of emotions is one of the tasks of effective dispersive analysis. When we say performing emotions, that has so many other repercussions. For example, when we perform a certain emotion, what is the reason for performing it? Or can we perform just any emotion in any circumstances that we have? There are certainly certain circumstances that will allow for certain emotions and in that case we will realize how social emotions can be. It is not just individual but it is a social practice, it is a social experience. One good example about the sociality and relationality and the intricacy of the relationships of emotions so our daily existence is guilt. This emotion of guilt could effectively be seen in the experience of overseas workers. Filipino overseas workers are one of those groups that has so many emotional baggage. They will be sad at leaving their families and their countries. They will experience fear in going to a new place in those countries. But what is one of the most important and significant emotions that are attached to being overseas workers or filling overseas work emails, and that is guilt. Guilt is the basic emotion in diasporic cultures. The classic definition of diaspora from the experience of the Jews is configured by this whole idea that they are experiencing guilt because they are part or they are away from their homeland. And in the future, the myth is they will have to return home. Although that is a classic definition of the diasporic experience, it could be applied to other diasporic cultures and specifically it could be understood by looking at the experience of Filipinos who decided to work abroad, temporary migrants, or Filipinos who decided to permanently reside outside the country, the permanent migrants. There is this recurring, never-ending sentiment in the Philippines that if you're Filipino and you decided to either work abroad leaving the country or your family temporarily, or if you decided you made the decision to permanently reside abroad, that you are doing your country at this service. And that is one of the principles of guilt. It is interesting because this sentiment is not just reinforced by your fellow Filipinos. It is not just reinforced by people around you, by your family when your children, for example, ask you why you had to leave them or when your family members ask you for money. They try to extract the proper response by making you feel guilty. So these are the personal reasons for feeling guilty. But what we don't realize is that the Philippines state in particular is also cognizant, is also aware of the heaviness of the emotion, the particular emotion of guilt in Filipinos moving overseas so that they use it as a way to make those Filipinos who decided to leave the country to feel attached to the Philippines and why is that so? Why is it important for the state to ensure that Filipinos leaving the country, whether for good or temporary, will still have that feeling of attachment to their homeland? One of the reasons is that statistically, because the Philippines state relies heavily on overseas workers' remittances and one way of assuring that Filipinos were abroad would regularly remit to their families, which in the end will benefit the country, is to make them feel that they have a certain attachment and that could be enacted by the feeling of guilt. In many of the state-produced texts, for example, Handbook for Filipinos Overseas in Philippine Overseas Employment Agency reports, we could notice how these things, how guilt, combined with the whole emotion complex, attached to guilt, sadness, longing, fear, anxiety, all of these things that point to the general emotion of guilt is being harassed by the state so that it will assure that even though there is a transnational movement of Filipinos, meaning Filipinos were able to transcend the national borders, they will still have a supranational control over, not just over the minds of the Filipinos, but their emotions. And when you control emotions, it is harder to break. It is more difficult to break free from because you feel it is natural. So when you make Filipinos feel guilty about leaving the country, so when you make Filipinos feel guilty about leaving their families behind, it is not just the natural feeling that you try to enact, it is a natural effect of leaving your family behind that you try to make them recall. It is a social and national concern that you are trying to uphold, that you have to make sure, the state has to make sure, that these Filipinos never forget where they came from and what is the reason for that? Perhaps you could say that it is because to instill a nationalistic sentiment even if you try to decide to leave the country, but in a more practical economic manner and discourse studies is very big on deeply studying discourse to include numbers and not just qualitative analysis of the social experience. What this points to is the assurance that economically these people will still benefit the country by supporting the families that they have left behind in the Philippines. So that is one example, one case of how emotion could be understood in a more critical manner. So when you say guilt, at the guilt specifically experienced by Filipinos who decided to leave the world, what we can say is that there is a personal, individual, emotional response of leaving, but we should also look at the larger social practice and that is configured by an informed social analysis and social analysis would tell us that guilt may be individual, but it is also social, it is also political, and it is a national concern. One other exciting aspect of a critical study is the attention given to extra linguistic elements of our meaning-making practices in our culture or in society. Traditionally, this course has depended on the discipline of linguistics in dealing with the studies of daily discourse and situations and trying to understand how people use language and communication. This course studies has conventionally regarded linguistic components and basic concepts and basic theories as the major framework for analysis. But recently, there have been movements, there have been efforts to include not just language as the main configuring element of our meaning-making but to include semioptic resources that are also important in trying to make sense of our daily lives. This means that when we try to understand this course, we don't just try to understand words used by people. We try to understand signs and symbols, we try to understand color and sound, for example. We try to understand, for example, in print, the layout, and the typography. So all these things are part of the semioptic resources that we have in trying to understand specific, recursive situations. The importance of a multi-modal analysis, and that's what we call the specific area of studying this course from a multi-semioptic perspective. Multi-modal semioptic analysis is concerned with the interaction of not just language but all the things that we use in moving out of our lives. For example, the choice of color, of the clothes that we wear when we go to specific places, when we attend specific functions, the type of voice that we use in certain recursive situations. These are all part of a more thorough and more fine-grained study of this course. In studying this course in a multi-modal perspective, we are concerned about the entirety of the discursive experience, not just words, not just language, but everything that are potentially meaning makers in our society, in our daily practice of engagement with other people. One interesting case is the recent elections. When we try to remember what happens during electoral campaigns, the best way to analyze electoral campaigns as a discursive situation is to look at it from a multi-modal semioptic lens. That means it's not just the words of a candidate that we try to pay attention to, because we all know that they speak in a particular genre. So they speak Filipino during times of elections, during times of campaigns, because Filipino is a choice, it's a language, it's presumably the language of the common people, the language of the masses. But in reality, after the elections, they would tend to hear them speak English, because that is one of the official languages of the Philippines. It is a marker of intelligence, a marker of status. Aside from what they say during elections, we can also look at the way they trace, for example. What are the specific choices of physical appearance that we notice in these candidates? We try, for instance, to see the specific campaign materials that they have, the campaign videos that they use to entice voters to vote for them, which what are the extra linguistic elements present that would paint them in a particular manner. So these things are part of the multi-modal analytic framework. We will notice that this theory, this particular lens, actually is derived from our daily experience, because when we engage with other people, we do not just understand them, or we do not just try to comprehend them, to understand them by listening to their words. We judge people, or in a more diplomatic way of saying it, we try to understand or analyze people by looking at their entirety. The words they use, their mannerisms, the way they trace, the things that they have, the kind of voice that they use in particular situations, probably the hairstyle that they have, the color of mobile phone covers that they opted to use. So these are all indicators of particular characteristics of the person. In linguistics, they call it indexicality in language. When you say indexicality, these are the features of language that will give you an idea of the physical, the biological, the psychological, and the social characteristics of the particular person using that particular language. So, for example, when someone opts to speak in English, it's not just because that person prefers to speak in English. In a society like the Philippines, where there is a very specific and very complex linguistic politics, the choice of English is not just explained by your preference. There is a reason for trying to speak in English, and there is a reason for trying to speak in English in a particular situation. So that is an index of, for example, probably status or class or intelligence. So these indexes could also be applied to other means of making meanings, aside from language, the clothes that you wear, the shoes that you wear, the way you talk, the way you speak. And if you think about it, this is merely an operationalization of what would you call habitus. I was talking about earlier. So habitus is the seemingly natural disposition of people in acting and thinking and making decisions. The theory of habitus is very interesting and very, very important because what it says is that people are not naturally inclined to be what we think conventionally they should be. People, for example, the working class is not actually naturally inclined to say things in a certain way or to do things in a certain way or to make decisions in a certain way in a similar manner. A person with an upper class upbringing is not naturally predisposed to these kinds of certain behaviors. But what habitus tells us is that because from the beginning of your life on Earth in society you are trained to do certain things in a certain manner to think in certain ways, to make decisions in certain ways. It's as if these things have become a natural part of your being, of your being upper class or of your being working class. So what habitus says is that these are not natural. These are not universal. These are all relative and these are all social, sociological, cultural. Because they have become long standing in our lives it feels like this is the natural way to be. So what multimodal discourse analysis does is to operationalize how we think ourselves to act naturally. It's very interesting when we discuss, for example, the cause of the habitus because he said is that even in the way we walk, even in the way we stand and I automatically just corrected my posture because this is a particular situation where I should have a clear particular proper posture. So these things are not natural but we are trained to be certain ways. So multimodal discourse analysis actually creates the very fine brain and almost a technical way of understanding how habitus is implemented and experienced in our actual daily life. So in terms of the decision making that we do it is manifested in our physicality, in the entire program of our performing ourselves daily. The performance of the self is, when you think about it, it's a basic, discursive project. We perform ourselves daily and sometimes you think that this is the natural way that we ought to be because this is who we are. That expression express yourself or be who you are is actually a very risky and dangerous motto in life. When you say be who you are or express yourself what does it actually mean? It means simply that you be or you act the way you want to be but that is not possible because we are always in case, we are always under particular social systems and these systems that we are in construct our social relations and our social relations actually determine how we conduct ourselves in our daily dealings with people. So the performance of the self is a very critical project. We might not realize it because that's the way we've come to see ourselves but if we think about it more critically if we look outside ourselves we will realize that we are always within particular systems and these systems, these structures exert power in our decision making. It doesn't only mean that it exerts power in how we plan ourselves in our future in how we plan our daily lives and how we think but more importantly it actually influences how we behave and the most natural behavior that we have in society as social beings could be understood as an effect of our belonging to particular social structures. So what does it mean? Does it mean that we are forever doomed to being robots or automaton of these structures? No, we must remember for example we must remember for instance what Giddens constructed as the continuing and dialectic relationship of structure and agency and this is very relevant in this course analysis. There are structures that govern our lives but we have the agency, we have our own power to make decisions for ourselves. This doesn't mean that we will escape certain structures but at the very least it will mean that we will be very aware we will be made aware that we are under certain structures and that there are times that we should interrogate there are times when we should question these structures. So the dialectic relationship of structure and agency is always in existence, it is always happening. As individuals we may belong to certain institutions like the family where we have our certain religions we belong to a government, we belong to a state we attend a particular school with particular pedagogical philosophies but at the end of it all we are individuals and we can make certain actions that could deliberately question that could deliberately protest. So that is the power of this course and I think that is the main idea of the critical analysis of this course. In our daily existence we engage with other people we engage with society and that is the entire makeup of ourselves. In our daily existence we are under structures but that doesn't mean that we don't have the power to change certain systems in the way we see fit and in the way that we make life more liberating for ourselves and for others as well.