2 Critical discourse Flashcards
Critical discourse analysis
The term ‘Discourse’ is originally related to language and communication. Often it is also described as ‘a debate’, or an exchange of arguments between people.
Nowadays, especially also under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault, it is used in a much broader way, comprising every kind of expression or utterance.
Foucault goes even further and says that also institutions, organizations, and maybe even buildings, urban configurations, objects, events, rituals, traditions, fashions, or whatever, can be seen as meaningful ‘expressions’ and thus as part of a specific ‘discourse’.
All these utterances, even if we do not know exactly who initiated them, together create a specific meaning, a specific pattern, a discursive structure. Such a discursive structure can be seen as a specific way of ‘talking’ about and understanding the world or a specific situation.
Analyzing these kinds of expressive patterns, or these kinds of discursive structures is what we call ‘Discourse Analysis’.
Background
Discourse analysis is rooted in the assumption that reality is to a large degree a social construction, and that in this social construction language plays a prominent and powerful role. Language as such is not neutral, but always an expression of a specific view on the world and the related values, priorities and selective knowledge.
Irrespective of our intentions all discursive utterances are doing something (Gee, 2005) and are creating specific meanings, and (re-)producing certain meaning structures, as well as societal realities. Language, therefore, is highly political.
Our discursive utterances are addressed to a certain audience and are focused on specific topics, related to the situation we are in at that moment. We are also using a specific language, with a specific vocabulary and maybe also a specific dialect or jargon, which is only understood by a specific community. Therefore, there is a close relationship between our discursive expressions and the (local) situation we are in, and the people we are communicating with, even though this relationship can sometimes also be rather ambivalent.
Clearly, this also implies that a discursive utterance is never something purely individual but is always related to a certain discursive community. Discursive structures cannot be carried by an individual alone and are therefore always a collective phenomenon.
Core elements
In critical discourse analysis, it is assumed that the social world including social identities and social relations are to a large degree constituted by discursive practices in everyday life. Critical Discourse Analysis wants to shed light on the linguistic discursive dimension of social, cultural and political phenomena and processes of change.
The social world is dialectically constituted and constituted by social practices, but the social world is not just determined by discursive practices, since social-discursive practices are as well rooted in and oriented to real, material (non-discursive) social structures.
Furthermore, critical discourse analyses do not want to separate the linguistic practice from its specific context and social interaction of which it is a part. It is specifically interested in the interrelatedness between linguistic practices and their contexts.
Critical discourse analysis is very sensitive to the role of power in the way discourses take influence on and dominate certain social groups. By revealing the role of discursive practices in the construction of meaning and by deconstructing certain discursive meanings, it tries to contribute to more even and equal power relations in the social construction of our social world.
Critical discourse analysis is, therefore, not politically neutral, but attempts to contribute to the emancipation of suppressed groups in our society, mainly by creating awareness for the way dominance is socially constructed through language and means of an implicit critique contained in unveiling the discursive mechanisms.
Challenges
Critical discourse analysis is sometimes criticized for not always being very clear in its distinctions between, discursive and non-discursive practices, and how they interact.
It is also not always easy to determine who is doing what in these discursive processes. It is the person who says something or is it the audience who interprets the utterance in a certain way.
Fairclough claims that it is important to analyze both sides, but clearly separating them while also relating them is sometimes rather tricky.
