CDA in Researching Language in the New Capitalism

Critical Discourse Analysis in Researching Language in the New Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdisciplinarity and Textual Analysis. Norman Fairclough

I figured from the references of this paper, that the previous paper 'Dialectics of Discourse' was actually published in 'Textus' 14, 2001.

Critical Discourse Analysis in researching language in new capitalism' is very useful attempt to show how and why CDA should incorporate a transdisciplinary dimension in its approach to make a strong case in social sciences.

The paper seems to be an elaborated version of his Dialectics of Discourse paper. In this one Fairclough brings about some actual discourse analysis of a policy making document which has been put forward by Tony Blair. Along with this rather detailed analytical discussion of this text, he further develops the idea of how discourse analysis can contribute in social sciences and at what stage a linguistic analysis should come to play a role in social science project of this sort.

He goes on arguing that for an entity like new capitalism there are three levels of existence; one is the 'social structure' which is the abstract sketch of macro dimensions of what 'should' or 'should not' be. And of course, the actual level where things actually happen and the impact is felt. However, the relationship between the two is not a direct one and it is mediated by what he calls 'social practices. ‘social practices can be thought of as ways of controlling the selection of certain structural possibilities and exclusion of others and retention of these selections over time in particular areas of social life’ (page 15) and in the same line he argues, language shows the same pattern from the conceptual level of what 'can or cannot be' to what is being actually produced in different linguistic forms i.e. text. Here too, there is an intervening level which is called ‘orders of discourse.

Orders of discourse are social organisations and control of linguistic (semiotic) variation, and their elements (discourses, genres, and styles) are correspondingly not purely linguistics categories but categories which cut across the division between semiosis and non semiosis and can act as a bridge between disciplines in transdisciplinary research (Page 16)

And this is where he argues due to multidimensionality of orders of discourse that transdisciplinary research should be carried out. In doing so there is an important framework to be presupposed and that is the notion of realist ontology. If we agree that what we 'know' does not exhaust what 'is' then we should be more cautious of what we come to know as pure linguists about texts as the forces at work in the production of discourses are not limited to linguistic elements and thus we should recognise the need to work on common social opacity of textual analyses by developing our resources for textual analysis through a transdisciplinary way of working (page 17)

Dialectics of Discourse

Dialectics of Discourse of Norman Fairclough is a paper that I don’t know where it has been published or submitted to. I guess I printed it out when I was in Iran. It must have been something available on line.

In this paper which seems to be quite a new one in terms of the notions being discussed, Fairclough asserts that discourse is not the only ingredient of social practice, and that discourse is one element among others however, he believes that discourse internalizes all the other elements without being reduced to them (page 1) because social relations, social identities, cultural values and consciousness are in part semiotic (same page)

Based on his socio-cultural approach in doing CDA he defines the main job of CDA as accounting for this dialectical relationship between discourse and the other elements of social life. He defines 'Orders of Discourse' as the discursive/semiotic aspect of a social order (page 2)

Later on he says: ‘discourses as imaginaries may also come to inculcate as new ways of being, new identities’. (Page 3) ‘Inculcation is a matter of, in the current jargon, people coming to 'own' discourses, to position themselves inside them, to act and think and talk and see themselves in terms of new discourses’. (Same)

He acknowledges that people may at first 'self consciously' try to position themselves inside a certain discourse while they still are aware of their attempts and goes on to point out that there is a mystery on how people move from the self conscious attempt of rhetorical deployment to the stage of owning the discourse and become unconscious about it. Obviously there exists the same mystery if you go the other way around.

To me this is exactly what Van Dijk is trying to figure out by his socio-cognitive approach. He tries to account for the process in which a social adaptation of discourse becomes part of personal cognition and understanding of people and forms a framework for their future actions. This is where, I think, CDA has to incorporate insights form psychology to explain things.

This inculcation concept took me to something which is not necessarily coming out of what Fairclough says here but it is an absolutely interesting one. It made me think about a phenomenon in the contemporary socio-political discourse in Iran where concepts, jargons and key vocabularies of a certain new discourse were confiscated in favour of a more formal and heavily dominant discourse.

I need to think about it more systematically but as it seems this is a process where the more hegemonic discourse somehow 'eats up' the new alternative discourse by suddenly shifting to adopt the concepts of the alternative discourses' jargons and vocabularies as attractive containers and filling the stolen concepts by the content of the old, traditional ideological contents.

An example is the case of contemporary political discourse of Iran when reformist Khatami introduced a lot of new concepts to the society like, civil society, law-abiding citizen, accountability, democracy and the like. This new rhetorical deployment caught on very fast as it was an attractive alternative discourse and was welcome by many people. However, before this new discourse could really get into the ownership phase of the socio-cognition of people the bigger dominant discourse tackled it by confiscating its concepts to its own interest by a discoursal projection in adopting this new rhetoric in its discourse while giving it the old conservative content. As the dominant discourse was very much in preferential position in accessing the public media, it could easily recycle most of the new concepts in favour of the old ideologies and cause a great confusion among gross root people as they swiftly lost tract of what was being sought and at the same time it caused great despair among more intellectual layers as they could see how their reformist discourse is being ‘eaten up’ by the dominant group and how it is turning into its conter-dicourse.

As there was no chance -in terms of media and bureaucratic apparatus- of clarifying the differences in what both groups mean and there was a major inequality in accessing to discourse on the reformist part, the whole discourse was derailed and hence dried.

This discursive-political manoeuvre was among very interesting moves of conservatives to try and curb the discursive power of the reformist in an interesting game of discourse chess.

I am not aware of any other cases of this, although there certainly are other cases. It can be classified as one of strategies in the discourse battles of social and/or political practices of countries like Iran. This is what I call ‘confiscation of discourse’ or ‘discourse projection’ and I am sure this phenomenon can be traced back to the sociological structure of everyday social life in Iranian community, hence not an ad hoc process in isolation.

Discursive Analytical Strategies

'Discursive Analytical Strategies' by Neils Alerstrom Andersen, Policy 2003

In this book Neils Akerstrom Andersen collects the theoretical analytical strategies of Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, and Luhmann.

The writer who has apparently been translating extensively from these four people tries to provide a sketch of these figures’ writings and at times tries to find a way to connect their analytical tools.

I found his account of Foucault very useful and helpful where he gives a simple understandable account of what Foucault has been saying in his different works and what has emerged based on his theories. It helped me understand why Foucault is a source of reference for many scholars.

The next figure was Lacalu whom I found interesting and relevant to discourse analysis. Niels' account of Laclau under the title of 'Discourse Theory of Ernesto Laclau' seems like a relevant and useful reference for theories of what is being done under the general title of CDA.

The book in general clarified -to some extend- some of the concepts which have been lingering in my mind for some time. Like the concept of Derrida's deconstruction which is touched upon on page 57 under the heading of 'Origins and definition of Deconstruction'.

There is an interesting section in the book; 'Appendix B: Further reading' where he classifies the research which have been inspired by the theories of these above mentioned figures.

Ruth Wodak’s 'Disorders of Discourse' and her 2000 publication 'From Conflict to Consensus' have been mentioned under Foucault and Luhmann sections respectively.

well, some books

'Discourse and social change' of Fairclough is an interesting book that I read weeks ago. It gives his review of the approaches to DA in the first chapter moving on to discussing Foucault and then in chapter three talks about a social theory and discourse and elaborates on his famous three dimensional conception of discourse diagram. Apart from the book as a whole which I find a very important source for CDA, there is this last chapter under the title of doing discourse Analysis which can be useful and helpful. I had already read his 'language and power' (1989) and 'CDA' (1995)about 6 years ago and this one fills the gap between the two.


There are some other books that I skimmed through more or less, reading the relevant materials. I had a look at 'communicating Gender in Context' co-edited by Wodak and Kotthoff specially Wodak's article. I found many of the authors here not very much known to me.

There were two other books 'Prison Discourse' by Andrea Mayr and 'CDA and Language Cognition' by Kieran O'halloran which are basically their PhD dissertations. I had a look at them. They are good examples of interdiciplinarity of CDA.