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.