Critical discourse studies: where to from here?

Abstract

This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies.

Keywords:

• critical discourse
• Marxism
• poststructuralism
• postmodernism
• materialism
• historicity
• constructionism
• social psychology
• subject
• interdiscursivity
• Foucault
• interdisciplinary

Notes

Typically these included studies of legislative language and law (such as Bhatia, 1987; Candlin, Bhatia, & Jensen, 2002) and legal texts (such as Gunnarsson, 1984), and English in academic settings (EAS) (Swales, 1990), which were largely descriptive and “to find more adequate writing strategies and to reform language” (Gunnarsson, 1997, p. 290).

Gal (1989, p. 348) points out that dissatisfaction with “the abstraction and determinism of French structural Marxism” also stimulated an interest in culture from anthropologists interested in political economy.

I use the term constructionism to refer to social psychological (Gergen, 1994; Harré, 1986), anthropological (Deetz, 1994), and sociological (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) accounts of social reality. Constructivism, which I do not deal with here, I take to mean as the way that individuals' mental categories provide the means for interpreting the world (Delia, 1987).

Fairclough and Graham (2002) later elaborate this constitutive notion: “The constitutive work of discourse is not viewed idealistically as ideas being realized in material reality: the value relation as an ‘abstraction’ is already material – language is the ‘matter’ which the mind is ‘burdened with,’ as the German Ideology put it – and the ‘abstraction’ is ‘objectified’ as a ‘symbol,’ itself a synthesis of idea and matter.”

It should be pointed out that following a rejoinder by Collins (1999) he acknowledges Bourdieu's weak view of language, but says that Hasan was attacking a fairly dated essay from the 1970s. Furthermore, he found it curious that Hasan had failed to mention the link between habitus and capital that Bourdieu draws.

I do not go so far as Camille Paglia, who regards Foucault's theory of power as “foggy and paranoid” (see http://www.neoliberalismo.com/Foucault.htm)

However, conversation analysis (CA) has had a difficult time assimilating into CDA. In an exchange of articles Schlegoff (1997), regarded as the founder of CA, Wetherell (1998), and Billig (1999), Schlegoff argues that CA and CDA are compatible provided they stick to the rules, as it were (see Mey, 2001). However, the rules themselves are rather contested. CA, says Schlegoff (1997), means that the text is analyzed using the tools of analysis that exclude contextual factors and the relations of power, letting the text “speak for itself.” Wetherell (1998) rejects this, saying that the narrow focus of CA attention itself imposes “one narrow understanding of participants' orientations and relevance on the field as a whole” (pp. 404–405). Similarly, Billig (1999) questions the notion of letting the facts speak for themselves because the “response should not be to seek to discard all sociological assumptions, as if a pure empiricism were possible” (p. 556). Nonetheless, CA has been used by Iedema (1999), analysing scientific-technical discourses to show how conversational participants in a technical situation use structured exchange to recontextualize the meaning of the phenomenon before them. From a critical feminist perspective, Stokoe and Smithson (2001, p. 237) assert that “CA's analytic aims are compatible with those of feminist researchers whose goals include focusing on the subjective experience of their participants” (see also Kitzinger, 2000; Kitzinger & Frith, 1999).

For more on the incorporation of SFL into the methodology of CDA see Wodak (2001).

The literature, of course, is large. However, recent significant writings (such as Alvesson & Willmott, 1992; Chan & Garrick, 2002; Collinson, 1994; Du Gay, Salaman, & Rees, 1996; Garsten & Grey, 1997; Knights & Morgan, 1991; Morgan & Sturdy, 2000; Townley, 1993; Yenhouda & Weitz, 2000) provide a small representation of the possible lines of inquiry.

There are, of course, limitations on the collaboration. In particular, Moscovici tends to see conflict in interpersonal and group terms (Galam & Moscovici, 1994), rather than as resulting from imbalances of power.

This ecological metaphor of discourse resonates with Gregory Bateson (1972). Scollon (2001) also speaks of “the ecological unit of analysis” as one of his theoretical principles of mediated discourse analysis.