. Discourse Critical An Introduction by JAN BLOMMAERT (1) PDF

Preview

Summary

Discourse This new and engaging introduction offers a critical approach to discourse, written by an expert uniquely placed to cover the subject for a variety of disciplines. Organised along thematic lines, the book begins with an outline of the basic principles, moving on to examine the methods and...

Description

Discourse This new and engaging introduction offers a critical approach to discourse, written by an expert uniquely placed to cover the subject for a variety of disciplines. Organised along thematic lines, the book begins with an outline of the basic principles, moving on to examine the methods and theory of CDA (critical discourse analysis). It covers topics such as text and context, language and inequality, choice and determination, history and process, ideology and identity. Blommaert focuses on how language can offer a crucial understanding of wider aspects of power relations, arguing that critical discourse analysis should specifically be an analysis of the effects of power, what power does to people, groups, and societies, and how this impact comes about. Clearly argued, this concise introduction will be welcomed by students and researchers in a variety of disciplines involved in the study of discourse, including linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and the sociology of language. j a n b l o m m a e r t is Professor of African Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Ghent University. He has undertaken fieldwork in East and Southern Africa, and in 2002--2003 he was awarded the Emile Verhaeren Chair at the Free University of Brussels. He is the author of State Ideology and Language in Tanzania (1999), co-author of Debating Diversity (1998), editor of Language Ideological Debates (1999), and co-editor of the Handbook of Pragmatics (1995--2002). He has also published in a wide variety of journals.

KEY TOPICS IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS This new series focuses on the main topics of study in sociolinguistics today. It consists of accessible yet challenging accounts of the most important issues to consider when examining the relationship between language and society. Some topics have been the subject of sociolinguistic study for many years, and are here re-examined in the light of new developments in the field; others are issues of growing importance that have not so far been given a sustained treatment. Written by leading experts, the books in the series are designed to be used on courses and in seminars, and include useful suggestions for further reading and a helpful glossary. Already published in the series: Politeness, by Richard J Watts Language Policy, by Bernard Spolsky Forthcoming titles: World Englishes, by Rakesh Bhatt and Raj Mesthrie Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation, by Sali Tagliamonte

Discourse A Critical Introduction JAN BLOMMAERT

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521828178 © Jan Blommaert 2005 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format - -

---- eBook (NetLibrary) --- eBook (NetLibrary)

- -

---- hardback --- hardback

- -

---- paperback --- paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Dell H. and John G.

Contents

Preface xi Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

xiii

1

What are we talking about? 1 The critical pool 5 Five principles 13 Central problems: the organisation of the book 16 Suggestions for further reading 20

2 Critical Discourse Analysis 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

3 Text and context 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

21

Introduction 21 CDA: origins and programme 22 CDA and social theory 27 Theory and methodology: Norman Fairclough 28 The pros and cons of CDA 31 Suggestions for further reading 38

39

Introduction: context is/as critique 39 Context: some general guidelines 40 Two critical conceptions of context 50 Forgotten contexts 56 Conclusions 66 Suggestions for further reading 67

4 Language and inequality

68

4.1 The problem: voice and mobility 68 4.2 Towards a theory of voice 70 4.3 Texts that do not travel well: inequality, literacy, and globalisation 78 4.4 Inequality and the narrative order 83 4.5 Conclusions 95 Suggestions for further reading 96

ix

Contents

x 5 Choice and determination 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

6 History and process 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

158

Introduction 158 The terminological muddle of ideologies 161 Polycentric systems, layered ideologies 171 Socialism and the socialists 175 Slow shifts in orthodoxy 184 Suggestions for further reading 202

8 Identity 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

125

Introduction 125 Times and consciousness: layered simultaneity 126 Continuities, discontinuities, and synchronisation 131 Speaking from and on history 1: ‘they don’t like US-us’ 137 Speaking from and on history 2: ‘let’s analyse’ 142 Conclusions 156 Suggestions for further reading 157

7 Ideology 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

98

Introduction: choice or voice? 98 The archive 99 Creative practice and determination 104 Creativity within constraints: hetero-graphy 107 Conclusions 122 Suggestions for further reading 123

203

Introduction 203 Identities as semiotic potential 207 What is left of ethnolinguistic identity? 214 Space, place, and identity 221 The world system in action 224 Suggestions for further reading 232

9 Conclusion: Discourse and the social sciences

233

Notes 239 Appendix: English translations of the documents in chapter 5 Glossary 251 References 256 Index 274

246

Preface

It is a wonderful opportunity to be able to produce a synthesis of work which in the present economy of academic publishing is dispersed over too many fragmented little bits. The opportunity was offered to me by Andrew Winnard of Cambridge University Press, to whom I express my gratitude. This is indeed a synthesis of thoughts and approaches developed over many years, and evidently too many people were involved in this process of development to even attempt to thank them all. I shall (have to) restrict myself here to those who directly influenced the genesis of this particular book. There are, first, a number of intellectual partners who will undoubtedly find many echoes in this book of conversations I had with them over the years. My close friends in the Flemish National Science Foundation network on Language, Power, and Identity are prominent among them. Jim Collins, Monica Heller, Ben Rampton, Stef Slembrouck, and Jef Verschueren have not only discussed almost all the issues treated here repeatedly and at great length with me, they have also read drafts of the book and provided extremely important comments and suggestions. Dell Hymes, John Gumperz (to whom I dedicate this book), Michael Silverstein, and Ron Scollon are all great sources of inspiration for my approach and also provided tons of illuminating comments and useful suggestions on the manuscript. From slightly further afield, I am sure that people such as John Haviland, Kit Woolard, Sue Gal, Brian Street, Bob Hodge, Nik Coupland, Johannes Fabian, and Judy Irvine will find numerous traces of their own work here, either because of the usual technique of reading and adopting, or because of direct contacts I had with them. I was able to write the draft of this book in the excellent and generous environment provided to me by the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago during the Winter Quarter of 2003. With the astonishing Regenstein Library as my working instrument, Paige Davis and Anne Ch’ien ensuring that I could work without being bothered by administrative or organisational details, and weather cold xi

xii

Preface

enough to lock me behind my writing table, the writing conditions were just ideal. Add to this the exceptionally stimulating intellectual environment provided by people such as Michael Silverstein, Sue Gal, Marshall Sahlins, George Stocking, Rob Moore, Flagg Miller, Sali Mufwene, Mara Tapp, and many others. And add to this, finally, a group of excellent students who were eager to serve as the first-line audience for the ideas I was developing in my writing cell. Some of them don’t know it, but a number of the ideas in this book emerged directly from talks I had with them (Gretchen, Matt, Elif, Christie, Jaclyn, Cassie, and the others: thanks). It was a treat. The same goes for my colleagues and students at home. I have had outstanding groups of students all along, totally committed to what they do and not afraid of explorative and innovative work, a privilege to work with but far too numerous to thank individually. May it suffice to say that almost all of this was developed as a result of my teaching work with them and my involvement in their individual projects which provided me with rich and widely varied empirical data. People such as Chris Bulcaen, Karel Arnaut, Michael Meeuwis, Katrijn Maryns, and Annelies Verdoolaege have been inspiring collaborators and critical, but always supportive, readers of my work. Thanks to all of them. Nothing can work, of course, without a family supporting such adventures and tolerant enough to suffer the long physical and mental absences that were part of this writing process. Therefore: Pika, Fred, and Alex, thanks and sorry. I am also sorry that my father, Paul Blommaert, did not live to see the completion of this book. This book is therefore also tied to memories of loss.

Acknowledgments

Various parts of this book have been previously published, sometimes in co-authorship with colleagues, all of whom I wish to thank for allowing me to re-use the product of our collective efforts. Thus, the groundwork for chapter 2 was laid in Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen (2000) ‘Critical discourse analysis’ (Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 447--466). Large parts of chapter 3 are drawn from Jan Blommaert (2001), ‘Context is/as Critique’ (Critique of Anthropology 21/1: 13--32). The section on ‘inequality and the narrative order’ in chapter 4 analyses data originally discussed in Jan Blommaert, Kay McCormick, and Mary Bock (2002), ‘Narrative inequality and hearability in the TRC Hearings’ (LPI Working Paper 8, Ghent, London, Toronto, Albany). And in the same chapter, the section on ‘inequality, literacy and globalisation’ partly recapitulates an analysis presented in Jan Blommaert (2003) ‘Commentary: a sociolinguistics of globalization’ (Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4: 607--623). In chapter 6, section 6.5 was originally presented in Jan Blommaert (1997) Workshopping: Notes on Professional Vision in Discourse Analysis (Antwerp: UIA-GER). And finally, section 7.5 originally appeared as Jan Blommaert (1997) ‘The slow shift in orthodoxy (re)formulations of ‘‘integration” in Belgium’ (Pragmatics 7/4: 499--518). I am grateful to Annual Reviews, Inc., Sage Publications, and Blackwell for permission to include these materials in this book.

xiii

1 Introduction

1 . 1 W H AT A R E W E TA L K I N G A B O U T ? Power is not a bad thing -- those who are in power will confirm it. They will argue convincingly that power is necessary in every system, for it is often that which allows the system to function in particular ways, without which the system would disintegrate or cease to operate effectively. Yet, power is a concern to many people, something that is easily translated into topics of discussion or narration. Power, its actors, its victims, and its mechanisms are often the talk of the town, and our everyday conversations, our mass media, our creative arts gladly use power as themes or motifs in discourses on society at large. Few stories are juicier than those of a president brutally abusing his power for his own personal benefit or for his own personal wrath against competitors for power -- All the President’s Men was a great movie. Few individuals are more fascinating than those who embody and emanate absolute power and are not afraid of wielding it in unscrupulous ways -Stalin, Napoleon, Mobutu, W. R. Hearst, and Onassis were all culture heroes of some sort in their days and afterwards. And scores of scholars ranging from Plato over Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, Gramsci to Foucault and Althusser have all theorised on the nature of power. Thus, we seem to have a strangely ambivalent attitude towards power: it attracts as well as repels; it fascinates and abhors at the same time; it has a beauty as well as an ugliness to it that match those of few other phenomena. This book intends to offer a proposal for critical reflection on, and analysis of, discourse, and right from the start I wish to establish that a critical discourse analysis should not be a discourse analysis that reacts against power alone. It is a commonplace to equate ‘critical approaches’ with ‘approaches that criticise power’. My point of view is that we need to be more specific. The suggestion I want to offer is that it should be an analysis of power effects, of the outcome of power, of what power

1

2

introduction

does to people, groups, and societies, and of how this impact comes about. The deepest effect of power everywhere is inequality, as power differentiates and selects, includes and excludes. An analysis of such effects is also an analysis of the conditions for power -- of what it takes to organise power regimes in societies. The focus will be on how language is an ingredient of power processes resulting in, and sustained by, forms of inequality, and how discourse can be or become a justifiable object of analysis, crucial to an understanding of wider aspects of power relations. I situate my argument in a particular environment: that of the present world system, that of so-called ‘globalisation’. A critical analysis of discourse, I shall argue, necessarily needs to provide insights in the dynamics of societies-in-the-world. In order to substantiate this, three central notions require clarification. The first one is the concept of discourse, our object of analysis; the second is the social nature of discourse; and the third is the object of critique in a critical analysis of discourse. Discourse

In this book, discourse will be treated as a general mode of semiosis, i.e. meaningful symbolic behaviour. Discourse is language-in-action, and investigating it requires attention both to language and to action (Hanks 1996). There is a long tradition of treating discourse in linguistic terms, either as a complex of linguistic forms larger than the single sentence (a ‘text’) or as ‘language-in-use’, i.e. linguistic structures actually used by people -- ‘real language’ (Brown and Yule 1983; and de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). This conception of discourse, broadly speaking, underlies the development of contemporary linguistic pragmatics. It has informed numerous studies in which, little by little, old and well-established concepts and viewpoints from linguistics were traded for more dynamic, flexible, and activity-centred concepts and viewpoints (Verschueren 1995, 1998; Verschueren et al. 1995; Mey 1998). This development was fuelled, on the one hand, by developments within linguistic theory itself, which called for more activitycentred approaches to analysis, the recognition of language-in-use as a legitimate object of analysis, and the discovery of grammatical and structural features of language operating at levels higher than the single sentence -- coherence and cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Tannen 1984). On the other hand, it was fuelled by intensified interdisciplinary contacts between linguists and scholars working in fields such as literary analysis, semiotics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, where conceptions of language were used that derived from Boas, Sapir, Bakhtin, Saussure, and Jakobson (Hymes 1983). It was

What are we talking about?

3

the (re)discovery of a radically different parallel stream of conceptions of language and analytical tools of analysing them that led to more mature approaches to discourse (Jaworski and Coupland 1999 provide a useful overview; see also Hanks 1989, 1996). I intend to follow this pragmatic stream, but I also intend to widen it by including conceptions of discourse that could be called fully ‘nonlinguistic’, in the sense that they would not be acceptable to most linguists as legitimate objects of inquiry. Discourse to me comprises all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of use. Discourse is one of the possible names we can give to it, and I follow Michel Foucault in doing so. What is traditionally understood by language is but one manifestation of it; all kinds of semiotic ‘flagging’ performed by means of objects, attributes, or activities can and should also be included for they usually constitute the ‘action’ part of language-in-action. What counts is the way in which such semiotic instruments are actually deployed and how they start to become meaningful against the wider background mentioned above. Recent semiotic work has shown how rather than single objects and instruments, intricate connections between all kinds of semiotic modes and media make up contemporary semiosis (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). A typical newspaper advertisement nowadays contains written text in various shapes and formats, ranging from headlines to small print, with differences in shape or colour that are meaningful. It also contains images, pictures, logos, symbols, and so on; it is of a particular size and it displays a particular architecture -- the overall makeup of such signs is visual rather than textual, or at least, the textual (content) cannot be separated from the visual (form). It occurs in a space--time frame: advertisements that are printed only once are different from those that appear every day over a period of time; those that appear on the front page have a different status from those that occur on page 6 of the paper. None of the components of the advertisement is arbitrary, but none of them is meaningful in itself: the object we call ‘discourse’ here is the total layout of the advertisement, the total set of features -- in short, it is the advertisement, not the text or the images. Contemporary discourse analysis has to account for such complex signs and needs to address them, first and foremost, as contextualised activities rather than as objects (Scollon 2001). So, though this book will offer primarily ‘linguistic’ materials, examples, and arguments, the wider set in which such items belong should not be lost out of sight. This is not a linguistic book.

4

introduction

The social nature of discourse

A second item that requires clarification is the social nature of discourse. Does discourse matter to people? Yes it does, and the clearest evidence for it is the simple fact that we use it all the time. It has been stated over and over again: the use of language and other meaningful symbols is probably what sets us apart from other species, and what accounts for the peculiar ways of living together we call society or community. There is no such thing as a ‘non-social’ use of discourse, just as there is no such thing as a ‘non-cultural’ or ‘non-historical’ use of it. But all of this is truistic; the full story is obviously far more complex and will require the remainder of this book to start being told. What concerns us here is how discourse can become a site of meaningful ...