[Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language] [Author: Fairclough, Norman] [April, 2010]

by Norman Fairclough

Excellent Book

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language, Academic, Research Methods, Philosophy, Textbooks

Paperback

First published May 18, 1995

Reviews

[Crystal Belle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Blah blah blah... There has got to be a better way to talk about language ideologies and power constructs.

[Karmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read a part of it for a course. "Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: the universities." An interesting look into how everything we do and everything we consume is an attempt to sell someone or something.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of the people that I have been supervising lately have been wanting to do a policy analysis and so I’ve suggested they might want to use Carol Bacchi’s work on What is the Problem Represented to Be? This is really useful, since it takes Foucault’s ideas and puts them into a framework that is easy to apply while still retaining his core idea of the relationship between power and knowledge. But when we get about half-way into the process I mention to them that one of the problems with Bacchi’s work is that it can seem overly proscriptive. Any method that has a number of steps is likely to suffer from that, I guess. And so I’ve been suggesting they consider moving to another form of analysis that is less proscriptive – Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis. The problem here, as some of my more observant students notice, is that CDA isn’t so much a method as a disposition and so it can seem like anything goes. This isn’t as fair a criticism as it might initially seem, but like anything else, CDA can be open to abuse. I generally get them to read his Language and Power – also coming out of the tradition of Foucault – but which provides a series of worked examples. From now on, I’m going to be more likely to point them to chapters in this book. This book is much more comprehensive, while also containing lots of examples of him using his method to make clear how it can be applied.

There is a chapter in this where he analyses a number of texts by Marx to show that Marx was a kind of early critical discourse analyser, and that his analysis developed throughout his career. The debt Fairclough owes to Marx and Bourdieu is at least as great as that which he owes to Foucault. And he also points out that Marx owes a huge debt to Aristotle in his dialectics – at least as much as to Hegel. I’ve found myself having to explain dialectics to people lately too. This is also something Fairclough spends a lot of time on in this book. For instance, he says repeatedly that dialectics is important because of how it treats things as being different, but not distinct. This is such an important point, but is more meaningful once you get an idea of what dialectics is actually about.

People often confuse dialectics with dialogue. This is compounded by the fact that it is often understood to have come from Socrates (truth through discussion or questioning) and is being used to understand how discourses work – which also seem to be about discussion too.

So, what is the dialectic? Essentially, it can be reduced to two absolute statements: that everything is connected to everything else and that everything is in a constant state of change. This sounds different from Fairclough’s claim that the dialectic is things being different, but not distinct – but only superficially. The problem is that we have a preference for thinking about the ‘thing-ness’ of things. That a thing is distinct from other things and to understand them we need to see their essence. The dialectic does not really spend as much time worrying about things – but rather is obsessed with relationships. That is, their non-distinct nature. In this sense we are asked to consider things as they spring forth from relationships, rather than of them existing in and for themselves. This should be reminiscent of Marx’s (and more particularly Bourdieu’s) understanding of social classes – that is, classes don’t exist in isolation from each other, even while they seek to differentiate themselves from each other, but rather that they need to be understood in relation to each other. That is, they constitute themselves by distinctions from each other, rather than as in isolation from each other. For the middle class to exist there must be an upper and lower class. One presumes the others and only exists in relation to the others too. And not only are these classes not isolated from each other, but they only make sense in the movement of each in relation to the others too. Change is inevitable, interrelationship is also inevitable. Focusing upon these processes is therefore the pathway to understanding each and the whole.

Forcing ourselves to look at these relationships is the key to critical discourse analysis. Because these relationships are inevitably also relations of power. And these relations of power are often made clear ideologically – in how language is used to justify or explain power as something that should be taken-for-granted. This means that critical discourse analysis focuses upon how systems of power use language to make the world make sense in ways that make the current state of the world seem natural and inevitable. How language is used in this process helps us to understand the workings of the relationships that exist in society. It is the critical aspect of the analysis of discourse. And discourse does not only mean written texts, although, clearly, this is a large part of what it does mean, but all of the ‘texts’ we encounter – from written, images, webpages, all the way to also how buildings and streets and institutions are formed and the enactments of civil rituals within these spaces too. Who gets to speak, what they are allowed to say, where they are allowed to stand, what they are likely to understand of the various texts they encounter. All of these are open to an analysis of CDA and in doing so the power relationships that are ‘hidden’ in them are brought to the fore.

Fairclough provides lots of examples of this in his chapters in this book. Analysing various texts to show the hidden assumptions they contain and how these work to impose interpretations upon the readers of those texts. As such, he shows what critical thinking looks like – how it is situated in interactions and how those interactions have symbolic and political meanings beyond what we generally assume.

This is a powerful introduction to how to perform a critical discourse analysis. It is a fairly long book, but that is actually a strength. I can’t recommend it too highly.

[Ethan Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but necessary reading. I suggest anyone serious about critical discourse analysis read this book. Making clear how power relates to discourse and how words and information subvert truth, encoding language in ways that only reveal themselves to those initiated in the methods of textual and discourse analysis is this books subject, and it handles it deftly; however, at times it can be prolix.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Necessary reading for critical researchers and those interested in politics behind language, and its implications. The book is more of a discussion around the area of critical discourse analysis than a practitioner's guide.

[Omitheus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read p9-24.

Used Fairclough’s model to substantiate my findings made in my political dissertation.

[Silvia Sorrentino · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intense but necessary reading. Very suggested to all future post-structuralist scholars.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice book which suceeds in connecting linguistic analysis with a much broader social, political and cultural frame and shows just how affected textual practices are by, for example, capitalism and outdated linguistic beliefs. The only problem is that it criticizes linguistics for not being able to provide a comprehensive set of tools that scholars from other fields of research might use, but is at the same time itself unable to suggest a satisfactory solution. Still, the analyses are extremely insightful since they point out to some truly disconcerting processes at work in our society.

[Syahril Siddik]

This is an excellent book for understanding how language and power interconnected investigating text in regard with its sociopolitical contexts allowing to uncover hidden message behind it. It is very recommended for students of language studies.

[Hans Henrik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Linguistics

[Tuan English]

great

[Yasir Ahmed]

i wana study for my topic