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ABSTRACT
This essay is both a scholarly and personal endeavor to hold Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and its shift toward Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) accountable to claims of doing critique. First, we deconstruct CDA, and its slippage into an unaccountable ontology of intentionality, hiddenness, and hegemony. As an example of how unaccountable claims might shortchange what critical discourse work can accomplish, we take our own analysis to task. Next, we examine the concerted effort of CDS scholars to reconstruct and reclaim CDA critique by way of reflexivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinarity. We close with a proposal: if CDA’s unfolding into CDS supports an evolution of the critical as material action, then it must identify what matters and move us to do something that matters. We offer some suggestions about how to move forward.
Notes
1 Rebecca Rogers, ed., “Interview with James Gee,” in Companion Website to Rebecca Rogers, An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298/interview.asp (accessed October 12, 2015), original emphasis.
2 Kate Pantelides and Mariaelena Bartesaghi, “‘So What Are We Working On?’ Pronouns as a Way of Re-Examining Composing,” Composition Studies 40, no. 1 (2012): 24–38; Mariaelena Bartesaghi and Kate Pantelides, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in International Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Christine S. Davis (New York: Wiley, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0050.
3 Ruth Breeze, “Critical Discourse Analysis and Its Critics,” Pragmatics 21, no. 4 (2011) 493–525; Sarah Cobb, “A Critique of Critical Discourse Analysis: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Role of Intention,” Communication Theory 4, no. 2 (1994): 132–52.
4 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.
5 “The Storms Keep Getting Stronger. And So Do We.” Time, September 25, 2017.
6 Karen Tracy et al., “Critical Discourse Analysis and (U.S.) Communication: Recovering Old Connections, Envisioning New Ones,” Annals of the International Communication Association 35, no. 1 (2011): 246.
7 François Cooren, “In Media Res: Communication, Existence, and Materiality,” Communication Research and Practice 1, no. 4 (2015): 307–21.
8 Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, eds., “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory, and Methodology,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 2.
9 Joanna Thornborrow, Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2002).
10 Roger Fowler et al.’s articulate deconstruction of how the seemingly mundane rules posted in a swimming club function as “syntactic stratagems” of passivization, nominalization, and re-lexicalization that reconstitute the authority between speaker/writer(s) and hearer/reader(s) is a brilliant example of the critical linguistics project. See Roger Fowler et al., Language and Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
11 Teun A. van Dijk, “Interdisciplinary Discourse Analysis: A Plea for Diversity,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 95.
12 Michał Krzyżanowski and Bernhard Forchtner, “Theories and Concepts in Critical Discourse Studies: Facing Challenges, Moving Beyond Foundations,” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 257
13 Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); David Payne and Jenny Gunnarson Payne, “Critique Disarmed, Ideas Unharmed: A Laclauian Approach to Emancipatory Ideas,” in Tracking Discourses: Politics Identity and Social Change, ed. Annika Egan Sjölander and Jenny Gunnarsson Payne (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 49–78.
14 Marianne W. Jørgensen and Louise Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 69 emphases added.
15 Charles Antaki et al., “Discourse Analysis Means Doing Analysis: A Critique of Six Analytical Shortcomings,” Discourse Analysis Online 1 (2003): 17, http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/previous/v1/n1/index.htm.
16 See Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
17 Benno Herzog, “Discourse Analysis as Immanent Critique: Possibilities and Limits of Normative Critique in Empirical Discourse Studies,” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 278–92.
18 Kenneth J. Gergen, “Social Pragmatics and the Origins of Psychological Discourse,” in The Social Construction of the Person, ed. Kenneth J. Gergen and Keith E. Davis (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985), 112–27.
19 See Steve Woolgar and Dorothy Pawluch, “Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations,” Social Problems 32, no. 3 (1985): 214–27.
20 Michael Billig, “The Language of Critical Discourse Analysis: The Case of Nominalization,” Discourse & Society 19, no. 6 (2008): 785.
21 Fowler et al., Language and Control, 27–34.
22 Charles Antaki, “Producing a ‘Cognition,’” Discourse Studies 8, no. 1 (2006): 9–15; Mariaelena Bartesaghi, “How the Therapist Does Authority: Six Strategies for Substituting Client Accounts in the Session,” Communication & Medicine 6, no. 1 (2009): 15–25; Barbara Schneider, “Power as Interactional Accomplishment: An Ethnomethodoogical Perspective on the Regulation of Communicative Practice in Organizations,” in Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations, ed. Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thalls (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2012), 181–99; Thornborrow, Power Talk.
23 Roger Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991), 80.
24 See Peter Muntigl, “Politicization and Depoliticization: Employment Policy in the European Union,” in Politics as Talk and Text: Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse, ed. Paul A. Chilton and Christina Schäffner (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2002), 45–79.
25 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (London: Longman, 1995).
26 C. Wright Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American Sociological Review 5, no. 6 (1940): 904–13.
27 Ruth Wodak, “Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry,” Pragmatics & Cognition 15, no. 1 (2007): 203–25.
28 Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and the Denial of Racism,” Discourse & Society 3, no. 1 (1992): 88.
29 Teun A. van Dijk, “Socio-cognitive Discourse Studies,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 26–43. The work of Christopher Hart is another example.
30 See Mariaelena Bartesaghi, “Conversation and Psychotherapy: How Questioning Reveals Institutional Answers,” Discourse Studies 11, no. 2 (2009): 153–77.
31 Thornborrow, Power Talk.
32 François Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2010).
33 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Revised Edition, From the ‘History’ Chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 90.
34 Chilton, Paul, Hailong Tian, and Ruth Wodak, eds., Discourse and Socio-political Transformations in Contemporary China (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2012), 7.
35 Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier, “Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Foucaldian Critical Discourse Analysis and Dispositive Analysis,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed., ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 34–61.
36 Deborah Cameron, Working with Spoken Discourse (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 140. This is radically different from Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski’s analysis of elite as an aspirational and ideological status, irrespective of class or wealth. See “The Alchemy of the Upwardly Mobile: Symbolic Capital and the Stylization of Elites in Frequent-Flyer Programmes,” Discourse & Society 17, no. 1 (2006): 99–153.
37 Theo van Leeuwen, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 3, 2nd ed., ed. Keith Brown (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), 293.
38 Bartesaghi and Pantelides, “Critical Discourse Analysis.”
39 For a piece on transcription as both practice and metaphor for a way to generate new conversations about the same text that becomes different data for each analyst, as well as the rich tradition of CA’s data sessions, see Mary Bucholz, “The Politics of Transcription,” Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000): 1439–65.
40 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: Routledge, 1996).
41 Maria Stubbe et al., “Multiple Discourse Analyses of a Workplace Interaction,” Discourse Studies 5, no. 3 (2003): 378.
42 Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress, “Critical Linguistics,” in Language and Control, ed. Fowler et al. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 196–97.
43 Karen Tracy and Julien C. Mirivel, “Discourse Analysis: The Practice and Practical Value of Taping, Transcribing, and Analyzing,” in Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research, ed. Lawrence R. Frey and Kenneth N. Cissna (London: Routledge, 2009), 153–78.
44 Krzyżanowski and Forchtner, “Theories and Concepts in Critical Discourse Studies,” 257.
45 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” trans. Lydia Davis, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 1), ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 118.
46 John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, eds., “Introduction,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–10.
47 Mariaelena has collected some narratives and email exchanges from a few students. So far, they support that the practice is experienced as traumatic, but faculty tell a different story.
48 Felicitas Macgilchrist, “Textbooks,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 525–39.
49 Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski, “Word-things and Thing-words: The Transmodal Production of Privilege and Status,” in Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations, ed. Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 199.
50 Rick Iedema, “Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as Multi-Semiotic Practice,” Visual Communication 2, no. 1 (2003): 29–57; “On the Multimodality, Materiality and Contingency of Organizational Discourse,” Organization Studies 28, no. 6 (2003): 931–46; “Discourse Studies in the 21st Century: A Response to Mats Alvesson and Dan Kärreman’s ‘Decolonializing Discourse,’” Human Relations 64, no. 9 (2011): 1163–76.
51 William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 75, qtd. in Iedema, “Discourse Studies in the 21st Century,” 1170.
52 Iedema, “Discourse Studies in the 21st Century.”
53 Ibid., 1173.
54 Iedema, “On the Materiality, Contingency and Multimodality of Organizational Discourse,” 932.
55 Herzog, “Discourse Analysis as Immanent Critique.”
56 Tom Bartlett, “Positive Discourse Analysis,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 133–48.
57 Krzyżanowski and Forchtner, “Theories and Concepts in Critical Discourse Studies,” 257.
58 Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000): 447–66.
59 See Thomas Huckin, Jennifer Andrus, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon, “Critical Discourse Analysis and Rhetoric and Composition,” College Composition and Communication 64, no. 1 (2012): 107–29. See also the work of Jannis Androutsopoulos, Susan C. Herring, and Crispin Thurlow.
60 Terry Threadgold, “Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures,” Linguistik Online 14, no. 2 (2003): 32. http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.14.821.
61 Susana Martínez Guillem, “Rethinking Power Relations in Critical/ Cultural Studies: A Dialectical (Re)Proposal,” Review of Communication 13, no. 3 (2013): 201; see also “Race/Ethnicity,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 359–71.
62 See Emmanuel A. Schegloff and Harvey Sacks, “Opening Up Closings,” Semiotica 8, no. 4 (1973): 289–27. As we pay homage to this classic article in conversation analysis, we playfully invite others to re-open our conclusion as they wish.
63 Rogers, “Interview with James Gee.”
64 James Paul Gee, “Discourse Analysis Matters: Bridging Frameworks,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11, no. 4 (2016): 343–59.
65 Karen Tracy, “Discourse Analysis: Bridging Frameworks or Cultivating Practices?” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11, no. 4 (2016): 365.
66 Nico Carpentier, “Discourse-Theoretical Analysis,” in Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2017), 343–75. Here, Carpentier draws on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse Theory and gives the example of how the residents of the split island of Cyprus are able to listen to each other’s struggles via an independent radio station, while not agreeing to end the conflict.
67 Michel Foucault, Power (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3), ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 2000), 336.