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)