On 'Adding' CDA to Poststructuralist Cultural Studies

Linguistik online 14, 2/03

Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures

Terry Threadgold (Cardiff)

Introduction

Of the three key terms in the first half of my title, not one is ubiquitously well defined, or understood in the same ways, in the different national, global, disciplinary or interdisciplinary contexts in which each may actually be discursively or performatively produced and enacted. Cultural Studies has been defined as an interdisciplinary endeavour 'concerned with the analysis of cultural forms and activities in the context of the relations of power which condition their production, circulation, deployment and, of course, effects.' (Bennett 1998:60) This definition, broad as it is, might also cover a whole range of other kinds of disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavours: media and communication studies, some forms of semiotics, and work in any of the many disciplines - e.g., Anthropology, Sociology, Education, Philosophy, History, Geography, Linguistics - influenced in the last twenty years of the twentieth century, and heavily critiqued and rewritten, by the same forms of critical and cultural theory that formed cultural studies itself. It is this kind of complexity that caused Angela McRobbie to talk of the 'messiness of cultural studies' (1992: 722). In all of these places certain theoretical assumptions are now taken for granted: a social constructionist view of language; the idea that realities and subjectivities are constructed in and by language; that subjects construct themselves and the worlds they inhabit in their everyday uses of language; that power relations are constructed and deconstructed through these processes; that what we call the social and culture are similarly constructed and deconstructed; that this activity is characterised by narrativity, that changing narratives, telling stories differently, might change the social world and that the goal of work on and with language is a politics committed to social change through what Eco (1979) would have called a semiotic labour on and with texts.

Media Studies, for example, if we allow that the media involve 'cultural forms and activities' through which power relations are constituted, in its current 'production, text, reception' model, fits Bennett's definition of Cultural Studies and is in fact often a part of what Cultural Studies does (Durham/Kellner 2001). Media Studies however as we shall see below does often include content and discourse analysis as part of its repertoire, something that is more rare in Cultural Studies.

What Cultural Studies (Grossberg/Nelson/Treichler 1992; Gray/McGuigan 1993; Bennett 1993; Morley/Chen 1996; Curran/Morley/Walkerdine 1996; Storey 1996) usually does not do is canonical literary texts, since it was set up historically in many places in direct opposition to the perceived class-based elitism of literary studies. Literary Studies (Valdes/Miller 1985; Rice/Waugh 1989) on the other hand, or English Studies in those places where that term has remained undeconstructed by postcolonial theory, also formed and rewritten under the influence of critical theory, actually now shares with cultural studies the understandings and theories of language I have summarised above. Cultural Studies is also remarkably lacking in history (Steedman 1992). It does offer varying kinds of engagement with critical theory (see below), at one time almost as much of a challenge to literary studies as cultural studies itself was, and engages in intermittent skirmishes with Critical Discourse Analysis: but 'discourse analysis' in Cultural Studies is derived from poststructuralist philosophies and theories and is not the same thing as Critical Discourse Analysis.

Critical Theory is also often characterised both within and without Cultural Studies as 'poststructuralism' or 'postmodernism' and increasingly seen as having to do loosely with 'a linguistic turn' in the human sciences (as described above) which had strong effects in Cultural Studies and which is now, for those who characterise it thus, either thankfully almost behind us or something that we should endeavour to forget, or a continuing problem (Norris 1992, 1993; McRobbie 1994). On the other hand, current forms of Critical Discourse Analysis are almost all strongly influenced by Critical Theory and have been consequently largely rewritten as enterprises in the same period that Cultural Studies has been coming to prominence and becoming institutionalised.

To be asked in this context to write about the relevance of Critical Discourse Analysis to Cultural Studies is therefore to ask for a good deal of clarification of some of these issues and then some hard decisions about relevance, pragmatics, and the new contexts in which we teach and learn. In my case, it has also forced me to remember the arguments I made in 1997 about the issue of linguistics and critical discourse analysis in relation to feminist theory (Threadgold 1997). Why was it that feminist theory never used linguistics, unless of course the feminist theorists were linguists, and did poststructuralist forms of linguistics have anything to offer feminist theory? Theoretically, many of the issues are similar to the issues raised now by this question in relation to cultural studies. However, they now need re-thinking in the context of nation states made porous by new technologies and economic globalisation, and at the local level, communities, and classrooms, reconstituted by flows of licit and illicit bodies, information and capital, in ways which we have hardly begun to theorise. Kondo (1990), Wilson/Dirlik (1995), Lowe (1996), Gordon (1997), Baker Jr., Diawara/Lindeborg (1996), and Saldivar (1997) are among the very few texts which have seriously begun to address these issues. We have become more or less adept in these contexts at re-imagining and homogenising our students as 'markets' to be attracted by lists of quality assurance defined 'aims and outcomes' promising economic benefit and a secure future. The question of the relevance of Critical Discourse Analysis to the teaching of Cultural Studies relates to a different kind of pedagogic agenda, one based on a vision for the future and a new narrative of what it is that we are about which needs to be constructed out of some of the complexities and confusions within which we now work, all of which have histories which also need to be remembered.

On 'Adding' CDA to Poststructuralist Cultural Studies

A recent book by Barker/Galasinski (2001) provides me with a complex but typical example of the way some of these issues play themselves out in practice: and of the difficulties and problems inherent in trying to separate cultural studies and critical discourse analysis (CDA) in their current forms in order to argue that what cultural studies does would be done better with 'the addition' of CDA. This is what the book argues. It is subtitled 'A Dialogue on Language and Identity', a focus with which I have much sympathy, especially since we are told that it resulted from events in the authors' biographies through which they found themselves respectively 'dislocated' culturally or positioned as 'legal alien' (2001: 22-23). Having recently experienced the first myself in a migration the other way, from Australia to Wales, and currently working on precisely these issues, I have found the book extremely valuable. That said, I want to explore for a minute the way it does its work, because it is symptomatic of the issues with which we have to deal in asking the question about CDA and Cultural Studies.

The first chapter is constructed as a review and summary of what Saussure, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault (critical theory) have contributed to the 'philosophy of language' currently informing work in Cultural Studies. It is both a 'position' chapter and an introduction (2001:2). But the critical theorists are not the only other characters in this narrative. Raymond Williams is compared to structuralism (2001: 4-5), Hebdige's (1979) semiotic work on youth culture with Paul Willis's (1977; 1978) commitment to ethnography (2001: 6-7), and structuralist work is seen as succeeded by audience and consumption studies, and a concern with the relationship between media and culture (2001: 7-8). There are two arguments here: first that work on the practices and beliefs of ordinary men and women is a form of progress beyond structuralism and semiotics, and second that although it involves 'talk' and 'speech texts' (2001: 8), none of this work shows any evidence of 'detailed language analysis'.

The reading of 'Poststructuralism and the Crisis of Representation' which follows begins with the critique of ethnography (Clifford/Marcus 1986), which rewrote it as a literary genre and a conversation, but could not use the tools of structuralist semiotics because by then these 'were the subject of attack by Derrida and poststructuralism' (2001: 9). An account of Derrida's critique and influence follows and its tenets (p. 21) are generally accepted by the authors with the difference that they see this kind of work as having produced a 'high textualism' which rejects any kind of 'ethnographic or empirical work' (2001: 11). Derrida's influence in cultural studies, feminisms, postcolonial theory and new Marxisms is acknowledged but his influence is argued to have been 'not wholly benign' and is said to have 'little practical use' politically, being a 'new language' intelligible only to 'an elite intelligentsia' (2001: 11-12). First, Derrida has always understood that deconstruction cannot escape empiricism (Spivak 1988: 292) and argued that the politics of deconstruction is precisely about unsettling, displacing hegemonic conceptual systems in order to effect social change. (1972/1982: 329). Let me quote Derrida here:

I do not believe I have ever spoken of "indeterminacy" whether in regard to "meaning" or anything else. Undecidability is something else again. ... I want to recall that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are highly determined in strictly concern situations (for example, discursive - syntactical or rhetorical - but also political, ethical etc.) They are pragmatically determined. The analyses that I have devoted to undecidability concern just these determinations and these definitions, not at all some vague "indeterminacy". I say "undecidability" rather than "indeterminacy" because I am interested more in relations of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilised through a decision of writing (in the broad sense which I give to this word which also includes political action and experience in general. (1988: 148)

It is because some people have understood Derrida's 'new language' as being about many of the things proponents of CDA regard as a crucial part of a cultural politics and have been prepared to struggle with language in order to unsettle the huge stabilities of discourse that feminists, postcolonial theorists, queer theorists and other radical groups have in fact found deconstruction to be of immense political value. The very politics of identity which is developed in Barker/Galasinski could not have been articulated without the 'new'/difficult 'language' that deconstruction provided. They argue themselves after all for a cultural politics involving writing new stories with 'new languages' (2001: 61). It is too easy then to repeat the cliches about Derrida whose most recent writings on Algeria, globalisation/peace, continue to give the lie to the argument that deconstruction lacks political usefulness (2002)/if we, the proponents of CDA are not prepared to struggle with 'new languages' when we find them we have to ask who out there will be so prepared?

In Barker/Galasinski an account of Foucault follows the critique of Derrida, with the criticism that his work has been used more 'to inspire studies of ... discipline' than ... 'power to' (2001: 14), that it does not, in other words, provide a theory of agency. Wittgenstein/Rorty are then introduced as the antidote to poststructuralism because in their work a certain kind of pragmatism plays a large role/shows how 'the endless play of signification' is stabilised in actual practice/everyday life (2001: 14-18). Ethnography is rehabilitated for continued use/CDA is introduced (rewritten as sharing a good deal with the cultural studies described earlier). CDA is presented as a theory offering the 'potential for a systematic/repeatable insight into the linguistic form capable of unravelling social practice' (2001: 25). On the other hand cultural studies, without CDA, has been 'unable to show precisely how the discursive construction of cultural forms is achieved in everyday life' (2001: 27). There are elements of this narrative which I would want to contest and I will return to them below.

Chapter 2 is an account of a kind that is much rarer in CDA. On language, identity and cultural politics, it reviews and introduces a wide range of complex theories of the subject from Foucault and Lacan to Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Laclau. It covers feminist work on the body, questions of culture and biology and performativity. But again there are antidotes provided to the perceived failure of poststructuralist theories of the subject to provide a theory of agency or to account for the way in which social change might actually happen: personal construct psychology, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Giddens. This is a complex chapter which ends with a discussion of the cultural politics of language and identity (2001: 56 ff.) and the argument that these things are best studied 'not in terms of philosophic argument', 'or as the signs of dead texts alone' but by exploring the ways in which 'identity claims are achieved in day to day linguistic encounters' (2001: 61). The chapter is, like the first, very dependent on the poststructuralist work it attempts to rewrite as a pragmatics for linguistic work. However the poststructuralist influence also changes fairly radically what CDA looks like in this book, at least in terms of the ways in which the linguistic tools in chapter three are framed. This becomes a CDA that is much more in tune with the issues current in contemporary cultural studies and one which explicitly addresses the issue of the need for new theories for new realities discussed above.

It is interesting that it is to Rorty that the authors turn for a theory of rewriting, what they call a 'politics of re-description':

The language of cultural politics brings oppression 'into view' and expands the logical space for moral and political deliberation. This does not involve the discovery of truth, or less distorted perception in opposition to ideology, but the forging of a language with consequences which serve particular purposes and values as part of an evolutionary struggle which has no predetermined destiny. Cultural politics does not need essentialism or foundationalism but 'new languages' in which claims for justice do not sound crazy but come to be accepted as 'true'.... (2001: 57)

The lessons of poststructuralism have been well learned here, embodied in the list of what cultural politics is not, although it is Rorty's theory that is being discussed. This in turn is critiqued for its failure to analyse power or to employ sociological analyses of 'the institutions and organisations which produce and distribute cultural texts' (2001: 58-59). In relation to the second, parallels are drawn with Bennett's (1998) critique of cultural studies for 'displacing its politics onto the level of signification and texts' (2001: 59) and failing to deal with the same issues. West's (1993) methods for cultural politics are then listed as: deconstruction, demythologisation ('mapping the social construction of metaphors that regulate descriptions of the world') and demystification ('a partisan analysis of the complexity of institutional and other power structures' to reveal possibilities for social change and to link new theory to communities and networks of real people) (2001: 58). It is the last which both Rorty and cultural studies are seen to lack. I comment here only in passing that theories of rewriting of at least equal value to this enterprise could have been developed from feminist, postcolonial and queer theory as well as new Marxisms.

Despite the dominance of poststructuralist theory in the above, when we reach chapter 3 'Tools for Discourse Analysis', and despite the acknowledgement of the self-reflexivity required of the analyst, and the inclusion of intertextuality as a feature of text, CDA looks pretty much like a standard summary (a good one) of the theories of language we have become familiar with above and Hallidayan functional linguistics. There is a nod towards CDA as itself theory, but it is claimed now to provide a methodology which is replicable, systematic and verifiable. This return to the language of the social sciences and of social science research methods text-books is interesting. I think there are good reasons why CDA can never really be all of these things and they have to do, as Halliday himself argued (Threadgold 1997: 104 ff.), with the ineffability of grammatical categories and the differences between a grammatics as metalanguage and the actual textures of language in use. In this it compares with most social science research methods and poststructuralist ones with the difference that the latter acknowledge the difficulties of making such claims. While I would use the same kind of checklist of tools as is used here, I would also want then to theorise them (of which more below).

The difficulties inherent in making such claims are nowhere more clear than in the two case study chapters (Barker/Galasinski 2001, chs. 4 and 5). Each is rich and detailed in its reading of masculinity and ethnicity as constructed in everyday linguistic performance, but neither in fact uses very much of the apparatus set up in chapter 3 as a replicable methodology. Both depend to a large extent on the experience and erudition of the researchers, and would in fact be difficult to replicate precisely, although I take the point that the very theories of language we work with assume that language is a patterned and systematic phenomenon, that similar texts will occur in other contexts, and that some of the same kinds of results will be likely if similar questions are also asked of the texts. My point is that a great deal of interpretative work goes on in such analyses, whether at the level of deciding which grammatical category is most significant for this set of texts, or of mapping the texts onto contexts by looking at larger structures like language and religion (Barker/Galasinski, ch. 5).

For example, this analysis focuses on agency structures in the narratives about ethnicity, deciding to use transitivity, but making conscious decisions to ignore the 'explicit inscription of blame' in favour of 'the ascription of responsibility in a linguistic sense' (2001: 145). That decision can only come from the researchers' knowledge and experience of this population and the texts they are analysing: 'blame was expected to be laid by the Poles on the Ukrainians' (p. 145) and so was of less interest. A structuralist analysis might have called this a foregrounded choice. That these are interpretative and context-bound decisions would be to be expected from a theorisation of the identities, the subjectivities and habitus of the researchers, but that precisely makes them unlikely to be entirely replicable. And indeed if we look at the review of other work on the linguistic markers of ethnicity with which the chapter begins we find that Wodak et. al. (1999) and Meinhof/Galasinski (2000) have already made distinctively different kinds of interpretative choices in their analyses of the discourses and narratives of ethnicity in other contexts. None of this should be surprising in terms of the theories of language and identity which the book sets up as its framework in its early chapters. Nor do I see the inevitability of interpretative differences in the doing of CDA as a problem. Part of the richness of such analyses is in what can be seen and read from different perspectives. However these differences do not sit easily with arguments about objective, systematic, replicable and verifiable social science methodology.

The question of the performance here of text/context relations is also interesting. The researchers argue very convincingly for their analysis as demonstrating an anti-essentialist view of ethnicity which is context-bound and associated with living in a particular community (2001: 129, 135). Yet the context is in fact constructed by the researchers as a fairly narrow (and textual) account of a history related to the second world war and its aftermath: publications made available by the community council and a historical debate in a local newspaper (2001: 128). On the other hand the knowledge of the way language and religion or working practices contribute to the contradictory constructions of ethnicity in the narratives is largely read off the narratives themselves, historicised and projected into the community context as evidence of the context-bound nature of the constructions (e.g., 2001: 135). That is, there is no obvious demystification in West's (1993) sense of sociological analysis of institutions and community practices independent of the textual analysis. The interview texts are 'read' with some of the tools of CDA, but overall the reading does not look so very different to the kind that might be done by sociologists or anthropologists without the trappings of CDA.

There is no overt reference to intertextuality, or to the ways in which the interview data contributes to an understanding of the discourses, genres or narratives of ethnicity current in this particular context, nor is the positioning of speakers in and by those discourses, genres and narratives explicitly theorised in relation to institutional, organisational and family contexts, and what Halliday would have called the social semiotic of material histories, geographies, languages and religions, for example. Such a framing might have engaged in a different kind of analysis and understanding of the production of heteroglossic and dialogic texts and of 'fluid multiple identities' than that which is given here when the focus is on ethnic identity as 'the achievement of speaking subjects' (2001: 149). That is, the attempt to argue for CDA against, or in addition to, poststructuralist cultural studies seems in fact to have failed at the level of deconstruction too, in that it has looked at the binary positioned, disciplined subject/ agency, and opted almost entirely for agency, under-theorising the ways in which the speakers are also spoken by the discursive, narrative and generic intertexts which construct them as they construct their identities. In fact it seems to me that the deconstruction would involve seeing agency as always being about being both multiply positioned and agentive simultaneously. That is why as speakers we have conscious control over generic structures but not over the fragments of intertext we chunk together to make texts.

The analysis also makes no attempt to build in, in any other than implicit ways, any of the theorising of the body that is evident in the earlier poststructuralist part of the book. How do these discourses and narratives form and brand bodies in these ethnic encounters? How do we link the materiality of the texts of the interviews to corporeality? Judith Butler's work on performativity is used here but the non-textual body is not very much in evidence except in so far as we know that the texts were produced by members of a 'real' community.

I am being too critical here of work which in fact I admire. My point is that even here the differences argued to exist between CDA and cultural studies in relation to explicitness and replicability are not very great. I have deliberately used a more explicit metalanguage of the kind I myself have used about intertextuality, to show how another CDA researcher might formulate the same issues, but also to argue that some such explicit metalanguage, or an agreed set of them, needs to be in place before we can make large claims about the replicability of our CDA methods or their great advantage over other approaches to textuality.

In what follows I will continue to move recursively back and forth between poststructuralist and CDA approaches in order to establish what each seems to offer before reaching some conclusions and answers to the question of the relevance of CDA to cultural studies.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1152