Discourse Ks – Gonzaga Debate Institute 14

Generic Answers

Permutation – Do Both

Permutation IS critical discourse analysis - we need to revisit texts on different levels and ask ourselves if this is the most productive mode of communication and restructure the texts as need be

McGregor, Mount Saint Vincent University Department of Education Professor, 03*

(Sue, 2003, kappa omicron nu fórum, “Critical Discourse Analysis-- A Primer”, http://www.kon.org/archives/forum/15-1/mcgregorcda.html, accessed 7-5-14, CLF)

How to Conduct Critical Discourse Analysis

In order to do this, we need some skills to conduct a critical analysis of our own and other’s discourse. van Dijk (2000) acknowledges that CDA does not have a unitary theoretical framework or methodology because it is best viewed as a shared perspective encompassing a range of approaches instead of one school. The remainder of this primer will draw from these many approaches as it focuses on setting out some useful skills in critically analyzing written text. One key principle of CDA is that the way we write, and what we say, is not arbitrary—it is purposeful whether or not the choices are conscious or unconscious (Sheyholislami, 2001). Also, while CDA can also focus on body language, utterances, symbols, visual images, and other forms of semiosis (signs and symbols) as means of discourse (Fairclough, 2002), this paper will be limited to analyzing written language. 2

Huckin (1997) recommends that one first approach a text in an uncritical manner, like an ordinary, undiscerning reader, and then come at it again in a critical manner. Price (2002) said it well when she noted that engagement without estrangement is to submit to the power of the text, regardless on one’s own position, thereby accepting the reading and offering unquestioning support of the status quo. To offset this "take," coming at it a second time with a critical eye involves revisiting the text at different levels, raising questions about it, imagining how it could have been constructed differently, mentally comparing it to related texts. Also, it is important that one does not start to decipher the text word by word; rather, one should place the text in its genre (type of text including a journal article, media piece, government position paper, public speech, manual, textbooks, conference paper). Each genre-orientation has a style of its own set of characteristics that identify it—a template of sorts. We can all recognize an advertisement (well—it used to be easy until infomercials were invented), a journal article, a technical manual, a curriculum document, a government position paper--they all have different building blocks that make them unique from other types of documents. One simple example is a scientific journal article that typically includes a problem statement, hypotheses, literature review, theoretical underpinnings, sampling and method, results, analysis and discussion, and conclusions plus recommendations. Because these rules, for how to structure the genre, belong to the institution that owns the genre, the genre becomes a means through which the institution extends power.

Power is everywhere and it lies in our discourse—can be both destructive and productive, creating both power and resistance

Gaventa, European energy infrastructure program Leader, 03

(Jonathan, PowerCube, 2003, “Foucault: power is everywhere”, http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/, accessed 7-5-14, CLF)

Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1991; Rabinow 1991). Power for Foucault is what makes us what we are, operating on a quite different level from other theories:

‘His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them’ (Gaventa 2003: 1)

Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63). Instead it is a kind of ‘metapower’ or ‘regime of truth’ that pervades society, and which is in constant flux and negotiation. Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’:

‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991).

These ‘general politics’ and ‘regimes of truth’ are the result of scientific discourse and institutions, and are reinforced (and redefined) constantly through the education system, the media, and the flux of political and economic ideologies. In this sense, the ‘battle for truth’ is not for some absolute truth that can be discovered and accepted, but is a battle about ‘the rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true’… a battle about ‘the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays’(Foucault, in Rabinow 1991). This is the inspiration for Hayward’s focus on power as boundaries that enable and constrain possibilities for action, and on people’s relative capacities to know and shape these boundaries (Hayward 1998).

Foucault is one of the few writers on power who recognise that power is not just a negative, coercive or repressive thing that forces us to do things against our wishes, but can also be a necessary, productive and positive force in society (Gaventa 2003: 2):

‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’.  In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.  The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’ (Foucault 1991: 194).

Power is also a major source of social discipline and conformity. In shifting attention away from the ‘sovereign’ and ‘episodic’ exercise of power, traditionally centred in feudal states to coerce their subjects, Foucault pointed to a new kind of ‘disciplinary power’ that could be observed in the administrative systems and social services that were created in 18th century Europe, such as prisons, schools and mental hospitals. Their systems of surveillance and assessment no longer required force or violence, as people learned to discipline themselves and behave in expected ways.

Foucault was fascinated by the mechanisms of prison surveillance, school discipline, systems for the administration and control of populations, and the promotion of norms about bodily conduct, including sex. He studied psychology, medicine and criminology and their roles as bodies of knowledge that define norms of behaviour and deviance. Physical bodies are subjugated and made to behave in certain ways, as a microcosm of social control of the wider population, through what he called ‘bio-power’.  Disciplinary and bio-power create a ‘discursive practice’ or a body of knowledge and behaviour that defines what is normal, acceptable, deviant, etc. – but it is a discursive practice that is nonetheless in constant flux (Foucault 1991).

A key point about Foucault’s approach to power is that it transcends politics and sees power as an everyday, socialised and embodied phenomenon. This is why state-centric power struggles, including revolutions, do not always lead to change in the social order. For some, Foucault’s concept of power is so elusive and removed from agency or structure that there seems to be little scope for practical action. But he has been hugely influential in pointing to the ways that norms can be so embedded as to be beyond our perception – causing us to discipline ourselves without any wilful coercion from others.

Contrary to many interpretations, Foucault believed in possibilities for action and resistance. He was an active social and political commentator who saw a role for the ‘organic intellectual’. His ideas about action were, like Hayward’s, concerned with our capacities to recognise and question socialised norms and constraints.  To challenge power is not a matter of seeking some ‘absolute truth’ (which is in any case a socially produced power), but ‘of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1991: 75). Discourse can be a site of both power and resistance, with scope to ‘evade, subvert or contest strategies of power’ (Gaventa 2003: 3):

‘Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it…  We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby a discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.  Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart’ (Foucault 1998: 100-1).