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Discourse in Late Modernity, Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis

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 Journal ofhttp://eng.sagepub.com/
English Linguistics

Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis

Pepi Leistyna
Journal of English Linguistics 2001 29: 183
DOI: 10.1177/00754240122005305

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JEngL 29.2
Leistyna / Chouliaraki,
(June 2001)Fairclough, Discourse

Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. By Lilie

Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999. 168. ISBN: 0-7486-1082-0.

Reviewed by Pepi Leistyna

University of Massachusetts, Boston

It is imperative that linguists and educators (and all social theorists and cultural
workers for that matter) move beyond the mainstream conceptual limitations of dis-
course presented as multiple utterances produced within a social context. Unfortu-
nately, this definition, virtually disconnected from the historical, economic, social,
and institutional relations within which language is produced, only invokes analy-
sis around such depoliticized aspects as semantics, pragmatics, and the para-
linguistics of body language and prosodics.
Over the past century, more critical understandings of language, from Valentin
Volosinov and Mikhail Bakhtin to Michel Foucault and beyond, have given rise to
definitions of the concept of discourse that are far more socially and politically re-
vealing. From such critical perspectives, discourse has evolved into the complex
“ways in which reality is perceived through and shaped by historically and socially
constructed ways of making sense, that is, language, complex signs, and practices
that order and sustain particular forms of social existence” (Leistyna 1996, 336). As
Stuart Hall (1997, 6) observes,

Discourses are ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a partic-

ular topic of practice; a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices,
which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct asso-
ciated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society.

These systems of communication, informed by specific values and beliefs, play a

significant role in shaping human subjectivities and social reality and can work to
either confirm or deny the life histories and experiences of the people who use
them. If the rules that govern what is acceptable in a particular society/context are
exclusive, discourse can be a major site of contention in which different groups
struggle over meaning and the protocol of participation.

Journal of English Linguistics, Vol. 29 / No. 2, June 2001 183-189

© 2001 Sage Publications
183

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184 JEngL 29.2 (June 2001)

To read into the embedded ideologies of existing symbolic orders, progressive

theorists have vigorously pursued the practice of critical discourse analysis
(CDA)—a link between critical social theory and linguistics. Contributing to the in-
creasing enthusiasm and theoretical complexities of CDA and taking up the culture
wars over representational politics, the authors of Discourse in Late Modernity,
Lilie Chouliaraki—an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen—and
Norman Fairclough—professor of language in social life at Lancaster University
and author of a slew of seminal texts, including Language and Power, Critical Lan-
guage Awareness, Discourse and Social Change, Critical Discourse Analysis, and
Media Discourse—insist that a critical perspective of language and its inextricable
relations to power and authority should be central to any study of society. They
work to show how the multiplicity of aural and visual semiotic systems is in fact
pedagogical and formative, rather than merely a vehicle of expression and reflec-
tion of reality. While such analyses and presuppositions are common among critical
social theorists and those in cultural studies, these authors advance the discussion
as they endeavor to provide a more clearly articulated theoretical and methodologi-
cal foundation for CDA.
In the introductory chapter, “Discourse in Late Modernity,” Chouliaraki and
Fairclough, recognizing that there are multiple forms of critical discourse analy-
sis—many of which they cogently argue are theoretically ambiguous—set out to
house their work in the social sciences. To do so, the book travels some back roads
to critically appropriate ideas from various intellectual camps, most notably
structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, anti-colonialism, and
feminism. Not only does such contextualization (which happens throughout the
book) effectively give the reader a basic sense of the authors’ politics and concep-
tual underpinnings within the realm of CDA, as well as their assumptions about so-
cial reality, but it also contributes to understanding the social and political role that
language and representation play in contemporary society—how language as codi-
fied culture is produced, legitimated, disseminated, and consumed. In addition, it
foreshadows the book’s ultimate goal of establishing within CDA a trans-
disciplinary agenda for critical social research.
Examining the lenses through which we come to understand the social world
around and within us, this chapter, which includes an analysis of an advertisement
about the homeless, illustrates the point that discourse, as well as the multiple
semiotic systems firing simultaneously therein, works to shape how we see, inter-
pret, and act as socialized beings. Understanding advertising as a major pedagogi-
cal force in the promotion of values and beliefs—let alone commodified prod-
ucts—the authors illustrate how critical discourse analysis is both a theory and a
method and must be a major focus of contemporary research, praxis, and demo-
cratic dialogue. As they point out, this is especially important as university systems
are increasingly corporatized (see, e.g., Aronowitz 2000).

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 Leistyna / Chouliaraki, Fairclough, Discourse 185

Chapter 2, “Social Life and Critical Social Science,” initially examines the so-
cial world and our lives therein, within what are referred to as “social practices.”
Practices—described in the book as “habitualized ways, tied to particular times
and places, in which people apply resources (material or symbolic) to act together
in the world” (21)—are shown, through specific examples, to be inextricably linked
to unequal relations of power and the concomitant struggles that such asymmetries
produce. Chouliaraki and Fairclough clearly demonstrate that the production and
reproduction of social practices are dialectically connected with a plethora of other
defining forces, especially discourse and its discursive and linguistic structures.
Working from a position in which “ideologies are domination-related construc-
tions of a practice which are determined by specifically discursive relations be-
tween that practice and other practices” (27), Chouliaraki and Fairclough under-
stand the workings of hegemony—in the Gramscian sense of the term—and the
central role that ideology plays in gaining consent and reproducing social inequi-
ties. What is crucial here is that they refuse to reduce their analysis of discourse (in
its many forms) to historical materialism, at the expense of other cultural aspects of
social life. In other words, while by no means deterministic in their appropriations
of Marxism, they nonetheless understand economics and the capitalist mode of pro-
duction as a major manufacturer of culture. At the same time, unlike most
poststructuralists who also focus on language and semiosis, Chouliaraki and
Fairclough do not reduce the social world to discourse (i.e., textual reductionism).
Through a critical ontology and epistemology, the authors subsequently evalu-
ate the various ways in which social reality is observed and theorized, and they
work to rupture what they see as an unnecessary binarism that exists between
“interpretivist” and “structuralist” perspectives. Instead, the two critical educators
call for what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as constructivist structuralism (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992). In other words, they take structuralism’s major contribution
to social analysis (“shifting the focus away from entities and their substance to rela-
tions between them, so that the social field can be seen as a system of relations of se-
lection and combination”) and join it with the constructivist view, which “is con-
cerned to explicate how those systems are produced and transformed in social
action” (32). In this way, the reader is apprenticed into the ability to simultaneously
research, understand, and transform the imposed ideological parameters of social
life. As the authors state, “Every moment in the structure/action dialectic is a mo-
ment in the power struggle over whether the social world is to be maintained as it is
or changed” (32).
In chapters 3 and 4, “Discourse” and “The Critical Analysis of Discourse,” the
“constructivist structuralism” theoretical orientation is applied to language. Chap-
ter 3 focuses on the social ontology of discourse, that is, on language in social life.
The authors contend that while communicative interaction is a potentially creative
social practice, it is nevertheless shaped by social structures that it reproduces and

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186 JEngL 29.2 (June 2001)

transforms. Using a random example of dinner table conversation, Chouliaraki and

Fairclough illustrate the essential generative, emergent qualities of social interac-
tion and, like John Shotter (1993), demonstrate that interactive discourse is a “joint
action” or the result of coproduction. The chapter also offers an important discus-
sion of the interpenetrating relationship of face-to-face interaction and mediated
quasi-interaction and the ways in which interpersonal communications and discur-
sive practices occur inside of existing structures, relations, and processes of con-
temporary societies. This dual analysis embodies Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s
suggestion that any investigation of communicative interaction correspondingly
needs to combine interactional (hermeneutic, interpretive) analysis and structural
analysis. In addition, they investigate Volosinov’s (1973) formulation of a dialecti-
cal theory of language and discourse and explore contemporary movements toward
such a theory within systemic functional linguistics.
Chapter 4 presents the logic for CDA’s evaluation of language and representa-
tion. Using Roy Bhaskar’s (1986) model of “explanatory critique,” the authors pro-
vide an elaborate framework for CDA for actually conducting such analysis. In
brief, the framework calls for a specific process of inquiry: naming a problem, ac-
knowledging what is in the way of understanding the problem, theorizing the func-
tion of the problem in social practice and how it contributes to reproducing the ex-
isting social order, finding potential solutions to the problem at hand, and reflecting
on the entire process of analysis. They comment on each part of the process, and
they move through the paradigm’s weaknesses and possibilities.
In the spirit of postmodern theory, Chouliaraki and Fairclough problematize
positivist notions of “objective research” and argue instead in favor of ethnographic
reflexivity in the interpretive process. Furthermore, they recognize the polysemic
nature of text—that while images, sounds, and words have intended meanings, their
actual interpretation can vary. But the crucial contribution lies in their elaboration
of how hybridity/interdiscursivity is an irreducible characteristic of complex mod-
ern discourse. Bringing this idea to life, the chapter provides a reanalysis and en-
hancement of texts put forth by Dorothy Smith (1990) in her book Texts, Facts and
Femininity: Exploring Relations of Ruling of how social life can be textually medi-
ated and how a variety of different discourses and genres (e.g., legal, political, and
literary) are used in the interpretive format.
Chapter 5, “Narratives of Late Modernity and a Research Agenda for CDA,”
provides a more systemic look at the mobility of language and communication to-
day. Chouliaraki and Fairclough grapple with the role of neoliberalism and global-
ization in the reconfiguration of capital and how language is used to represent and
reinvent such social formations. The authors use narratives and themes of late mo-
dernity, most specifically the theories of David Harvey, Anthony Giddens, and
Jurgen Habermas, as well as narratives of postmodernism, to frame the current state
of modernity and to suggest a research agenda therein. As they state, “Our aim is to

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 Leistyna / Chouliaraki, Fairclough, Discourse 187

attach CDA, not to a particular social theory but rather to a field of critical research
which is also a field of contention between theories” (75).
The agenda section of this chapter actually acts as a problem-posing session that
targets the potential pitfalls for CDA within the framework presented in chapter 4.
The dialectical areas of concern are as follows: colonization/appropriation, global-
ization/localization, reflexivity/ideology, and identity/difference. They add,
“There are two pervasive concerns within this agenda which cut across items and
are therefore best not included themselves as items: power and hybridity” (93).
Though setting a research agenda for CDA, it is important to note that this new
book is not a call for stabilizing a universal method therein. As Chouliaraki and
Fairclough argued earlier, “CDA as a method should be seen as constantly evolving
as its application to new areas of social life is extended and its theorization of dis-
course correspondingly develops” (59). Nonetheless, as explicit throughout the
book, a transformative political project is fundamental to their agenda of critical
discourse analysis. What is most important with this recent contribution to the liter-
ature is that the authors understand that theory in itself is social practice. Unlike
structuralists who wipe out social agency altogether in the name of universal pro-
cesses, mechanisms, and relational systems that constitute relative permanences
within practices, Chouliaraki and Fairclough embrace social transformation. This
is a major virtue of their new book: while it provides a great deal of theoretical in-
sight, it never takes its eye off of the desperate need for praxis in contemporary soci-
ety; that is, it embraces the inextricable relationship between reflection and social
agency. From the very beginnings they argue,

Thus the basic motivation for critical social science is to contribute to an

awareness of what is, how it has come to be, and what it might become, on the
basis of which people may be able to make and remake their lives. And this is
also the motivation for CDA. (4)

Unlike postmodernists who also assume a conservative stance by collapsing into

cultural relativist positions or overly localized struggles abstracted from meta-
narratives that dissect larger cultural and oppressive practices, Chouliaraki and
Fairclough consciously contribute to eradicating oppressive sociohistorical reali-
ties. As such, while concerned with micro/localized theorizing, this book does not
simply dismiss larger narratives of oppression, and it makes critique over passive
observation a priority. As they state up front, “Although epistemic relativism must
be accepted—that all discourses are socially constructed relative to the social posi-
tions people are in—this does not entail accepting judgmental relativism—that all
discourses are equally good” (8). Recognizing discursive interaction as an active,
reflexive, interpretive, and collaborative process, the authors push forward the role
of CDA in the production and dissemination of counterdiscourses. They recognize

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188 JEngL 29.2 (June 2001)

that agency entails reflexivity, that resistance can topple abusive systems, and that
critical discourse analysis can and must play a significant role in this very process.
Acknowledging the dialectic of globalization and localization and calling for
both a micro and macro analysis, chapter 6, “Language, Space and Time,” critically
appropriates from the works of Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein to analyze the struc-
tural constraints and symbolic control of social life within particular domains of so-
ciety, such as public schooling. As previously stated, Chouliaraki and Fairclough
advocate for a more transdisciplinary research approach that reveals how dis-
courses interpenetrate each other, rather than fragmenting and thus disarticulating
social formations from other influences (i.e., simply looking at education in a vac-
uum).
Exploring Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) post-Marxist theory of
discourse and other poststructural theorizations, chapter 7, “Discourse, Difference
and the Openness of the Social,” moves from the earlier realm of deconstruction of
oppressive signifying systems to an even more optimistic view of disarticulation
and rearticulation. This section of the book reveals how productive spaces of resis-
tance and cracks of agency in social life bring existing discriminatory and
exclusionary practices within realistic reach of eradication. In short, Chouliaraki
and Fairclough use postmodern conceptions of identity and difference that recog-
nize contingency, and they call for coalition building across borders.
Chapter 8, “Critical Discourse Analysis and Linguistics,” closes the book by
carving a path on which systemic-functional linguistics, which has given rise to
critical linguistics and much of CDA, plays a much more sophisticated role in criti-
cal discourse analysis. While systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) has acted as a
resource for textual analysis, Chouliaraki and Fairclough want to move beyond the
methodological limitations that only make use of a systemic grammar of English in
text analysis. Hoping to further the insights into the generative nature of semiotics,
they insist that the relationship develop

not only in terms of using SFL as a resource for analysis but also towards a
theoretical dialogue over such issues as the relationship of semiotic to social
change, and the nature of what systemicists have called ‘semologic’—the
generative power of the semiotic, or its generative ‘mechanism’ in terms of
critical realism. (139)

Although the authors throw in the disclaimer that this new book is not an intro-
duction to CDA, they nonetheless do a fine job of situating the theories and litera-
ture and defining their terms. While you will still need a knife and fork to get
through it, the meal is more than worth the work. In fact, this book is a must-read for
anyone involved in critical social theory, cultural studies, linguistics, applied lin-
guistics, media studies, communications, education, and sociology. Not only does

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 Leistyna / Chouliaraki, Fairclough, Discourse 189

it broaden the contemporary field of discourse analysis in terms of forging a con-

ceptual foundation for it in the social sciences and offering a critical social research
agenda, but by contextualizing the historical and political relationships within
which discourse manifests, it represents a major step forward in the decolonization
of language and representation.

References
Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate
University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1986. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso.
Bourdieu, P., and L. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexsive Sociology. Cam-
bridge, UK: Polity.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Prac-
tices. London: Sage.
Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.
Leistyna, Pepi. 1996. Glossary. In Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of
Critical Pedagogy, edited by Pepi Leistyna, Arlie Woodrum, and Stephen
Sherblom, 336. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review Press.
Shotter, John. 1993. Conversational Realities. London: Sage.
Smith, Dorothy E. 1990. Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring Relations of Rul-
ing. London: Routledge Kegan Paul.
Volosinov, V. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

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