Norman Fairclough he is born 1941 and he is emeritus
Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of
critical discourse analysis, a branch of sociolinguistics or discourse analysis
that looks at the influence of power relations on the content and structure of
writings.
Fairclough's theories have been influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael
Halliday on the linguistic field, and ideology theorists such as Antonio
Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu on the
sociological one.
Since the early 1980s, his research has focused on
critical discourse analysis - including the place of language in social
relations of power and ideology, and how language figures in processes of
social change. his main current interest is in language (discourse) as an
element in contemporary social changes which are referred to as
'globalisation', 'neo-liberalism', 'new capitalism', the 'knowledge economy'
and so forth. Over the past three years have been working specifically on
aspects of 'transition' in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Romania, from
a discourse analytical perspective.
his own recent contribution to this research has included three main
elements:
- Theoretical
development of critical discourse analysis to enhance its capacity to
contribute to this area of social research
- Developing
approaches to linguistic analysis of texts and interactions which are
adapted to social research
- Application of this theory and
method in researching aspects of contemporary social change
he has maintained research contacts with Lancaster since his retirement
through collaborative projects in the Institute for Advanced Studies and the
Linguistics department on the 'knowledge-based economy', the Bologna reforms of
higher education in Europe, and 'moral economy'.
Fairclough through CDA, investigates how discursive practices are ideologically
shaped by relations of power and struggles over power and explores how the opacity
of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor providing
power and hegemony. Opacity means that the linkages between discourse
and ideology might be unclear to those involved.
Fairclough preaches for the education in critical language awareness
in the teaching of the mother tongue to equip learners with the capacities and
understanding of the powers and hegemony involved and to emancipate them
in the struggle against alienation of marketization and give them a
meaningful choice to be democratic and effective citizens.
Discourse (abstract noun) language
use conceived as social practice.
Discursive event instance of language use, analysed as text,
discursive practice, social practice.
Text the
written or spoken language produced in a discursive event.
Discourse practice the
production, distribution and consumption of a text.
Interdiscursivity the constitution of a text from diverse
discourses and genres.
Discourse (count noun) way of signifying experiences from a
particular perspective.
Genre use
of language associated with a particular social activity
Order of discourse totality of discursive practices of an institution,
and relations between them.
Book Summary
The book is a collection of ten papers on critical discourse analysis which
were written between 1983 and 1992 and were published between 1985 and 1993.
Section A : Language, ideology and
power
In this section, the author develops an analytical framework (theory and
method) to study language in its relationship to power and ideology and the
struggle against domination and oppression of linguistic forms.
1.- Critical and descriptive goals in discourse analysis
In this article, the author views social institutions as containing diverse
“ideological-discursive formations” (IDFs) associated to different
groups of the institution and there is usually one IDF which is clearly
dominant. Dominant IDF has the capacity to “naturalize” ideologies, to
win acceptance as non-ideological common-sense. The goal of CDA is to
“denaturalize” the discourses. Naturalization gives dominant ideologies
tha status of common sense, and thereby makes them opaque (there are no
longer visible).
Assumptions: 1) the verbal interaction is a mode of social action
and this presupposes a range of “structures”; 2) these structures are also the products
of action, so actions reproduce structures.
To build his framework, Fairclough integrates “micro” and “macro” research
and identifies three levels of social phenomena: the social formation, the
social institution, and social action. The institutional frame includes
“formulation and symbolizations of a particular set of ideological
representations: particular ways of talking are based upon particular ‘ways of
seeing’” (p.38). Ways of talking and seeing are inseparably related. Social
institutions are pluralistic and this leads to institutional struggles that are
connected to class struggles.
Even though some concepts developed in this paper were not taken in
consideration in further work (like the IDF concept), Fairclough considered
that some aspects of this article are significant. First, the claim that
ideologies are primarily located in the “unsaid” (implicit propositions).
Second, norms of interaction involving aspects of the impersonal meaning and
forms (i.e. turn-taking systems) may be ideological as well as the “content” of
texts. Third, the theorization of power as in part “ideological/discoursal”.
Even casual conversation has its conditions of possibility within relations of
ideological/discoursal power.
2. - Discourse representation in media discourse
The article is based on the analysis of a set of five newspaper articles
and argues that the detail of text is tuned to social structures and power
relations within which the media operate, and has ideological effects in
mystifying relations of domination. The paper is an application of the emergent
CDA framework to a specific case and identifies the “convertionalisation” of
public discourse.
The articles are analyzed on the base of Direct Discourse (DD), Indirect
Discourse (ID) as converted DD and unsignalled codes (UNSIG) that is secondary,
discourse without being explicitly marked as represented discourse and
which the author calls “dissemination”. UNSIG is the main mode for
dissemination, and all instances of UNSIG involve dissemination.
The author identifies two tendencies in the
representation of discourse in the five articles:
- “Tendency
1: low demarcation between primary and secondary discourse” (p.61).
Newsgivers (the media) have come to adopt
the position of mediators. This shift reflects economic pressures
to make news a more “saleable commodity” in order to win more readers and
advertising possibilities. The author identifies three roles of media: 1)
animator – the person who is actually making the marks on paper; 2) the author
– the one who puts the words together and3) the principal – the one whose
position is represented by the words. Newsgivers are animators, sometimes
authors and even principals, when in reality they are not. Access to the media
is most open to socially dominant sectors and it can be regarded as transmitting
the voices of social power-holders. This doesn’t mean that they are always
transmitting a conscious distortion or manipulation of the information; rather
they can be regarded as built into common-sense professional practices. In this
way, media legitimize and reproduce existing asymmetrical power relationships
by assimilating the voices of the powerful to voices of “common sense”.
- “Tendency
2: focus upon representation of the ideational meaning of the words used”
(p.61).
News tends to be seen as very much a
conceptual and ideational business (statements, claims, beliefs and positions)
rather than feeling, circumstances, social and interpersonal relationships. The
focus is on ‘what’ and the ‘how’ is left outside. This assumption is that words
themselves are ideationally transparent and the myth is that the media are a
‘mirror’ to reality. It supposes that reality is transparent and can be ‘read’
without mediation or interpretation. News media can be seen as an ideological
process of considerable social importance.
3. - Language and ideology
In this article, the author explores the
theoretical question of what sort of relationships are between language and
ideology. Ideologies reside in texts but it is not possible ‘read off’
ideologies from texts because meanings are produced through interpretations of
texts and texts are open to diverse interpretations.
Language is imbricated in social
relations. Language is a material form of ideology, and language is invested by
ideology. Discourses have three interrelated dimensions: social practice,
discoursal practice and text. Ideology enters in the ideological elements of
producing and interpreting a text and in the ways in which these elements are
articulated together and orders of discourse rearticulated in discoursal
events. Ideology is reflected on the ‘content’ but also on the ‘form’. Formal
features of texts at various levels may be ideologically invested.
Hegemony, a concept that
originates from Lenin but further elaborated by Gramsci, is “leadership as well
as domination across the economic, political, cultural and ideological domains
of a society” (p.76). Hegemonic ideologies become naturalised, or automatized
in common sense. People are faced with ‘ideological dilemmas’, which they
attempt to resolve or contain through discoursal forms of struggle. Hegemonic
struggle can be conceptualized and analyzed in terms od the view of discourse
even though hegemony is a process at the societal level, whereas most discourse
has a more local character.
An apparent democratization of discourse
involves the reduction of power asymmetry between people of unequal
institutional power. Discoursal democratization is linked to political
democratization, and to the broad shift from coercion to consent, incorporation
and pluralism in the exercise of power. But it can be seen in pessimistic terms
as illusions of democracy. For instance, counselling, that has its origins in
therapy, is now a very spread technique across many institutional domains.
Counselling is seen as giving space to people as individuals and look like a
counter-hegemonic practice. However, it has a disciplinary nature in various
institutions. Hegemonic struggle is partly through counselling and partly over
counselling.
Limits of ideology. Not all discourse is irredeemably
ideological. Furthermore, CDA can systematize awareness, critique ideology and
arise possibilities of empowerment and change.
Fairclough was later not happy with the
view of ideology in this paper but underlined that the features worth noting were
“the idea that discourse may be ideologically creative and productive, the
concept of ideological complex, the question of whether discursive practices
may be reinvested ideologically, and the broad sweep of features of texts that
are seen as potentially ideological” (p.26)
Section B: Discourse and
sociocultural change
4.- Discourse, change
and hegemony
This article links the ‘macro’ domain of
state, government and policy with the ‘micro’ domain of discursive practice, by
way of the concept of ‘technologization of discourse’.
Fairclough regards technologization of
discourse as an important resource in attempts by dominant social forces to
direct and control the course of major social and cultural changes which are
affecting contemporary societies. This argument is based on the theory of power
of Gramsci and his concept of ‘hegemony’ and on the consideration that
hegemonic struggle is embedded to a significant degree in the discursive
practices of institutions and organizations.
5. - What might we mean
by “enterprise discourse”?
This paper is an analysis of ‘enterprise
discourse’ in the political speeches of a minister in Thatcher’s government,
and in a brochure produced by his ministry. The article highlights the diffuse
nature in changes in discursive practices. A change appears explicitly in the
political speeches as shifting in the meanings of the word ‘enterprise’. The
three meanings of the word ‘enterprise’ are: 1) engagement in arduous
undertakings, 2) disposition of readiness to engage in undertakings of
difficulty or risk, and 3) ‘private business’ as a collective noun. Fairclough
hierarchically orders in salience the different meanings of the word
‘enterprise’ and explains how a sociocultural change may be discoursally
realized through a restructuring of such hierarchical relations, by means of a
manipulation of context and cotext.
The author also identifies levels of
explicitness of enterprise discourse. A most explicit level, where enterprise
discourse are overt discourse topics; a second level, the discoursal level,
where enterprise discourse is still overtly present in describable features of
texts and a third level, a subdiscoursal level, where enterprise discourse is
an implicit interpretative resource.
Enterprise discourse is not a well-defined
closed entity, but rather a set of tendencies and cannot be located in any
text. The focus needs to be rather on processes across time and social space of
text production and the wider strategies of texts readers.
6.- Critical discourse
analysis and the marketization of public discourse: the universities
In this paper, Fairclough analyzes of
discourse samples which illustrates the marketization of higher education in
Britain. As examples, he uses extracts from advertisements for academic posts, materials
of a conference, a CV, and undergraduate prospectuses. The focus is on shifts
in the identities of groups within higher education, especially academics, and
upon authority relations between groups, for example, between institutional
managements and academic staff or students.
Fairclough identifies three sets of
interconnected developments in contemporary discursive practices,
characteristics of the language and discourse in late capitalist society:
1.- Contemporary society is
‘post-traditional’: This means that traditions have to be justified against
alternative possibilities rather than being taken for granted; that
relationships in public based automatically upon authority are in decline, as
are personal relationships based upon rights and duties. People’s
self-identity, rather than to be a feature of roles, is reflexively built up
through a process of negotiation. This negotiation requires highly developed
dialogical capacities. The ‘informalization’ (or ‘conversationalization’) of
public discourse can be seen as a colonization of the public domain by the
practices of the private domain. On the other hand, it can be seen as an
‘appropriation’ of private domain practices by the public domain.
2.- “Reflexivity, in the sense of the
systematic use of knowledge about social life for organizing and transforming
it, is a fundamental feature if contemporary society” (Giddens, p138).
Technologization of discourse can be understood as the constitution of expert
systems (as developed by Giddens) whose domain is the discursive practices of
public institutions.
3.- Contemporary culture as ‘promotional’,
‘consumer’ culture point to the marketization and commoditization and about
seeing the discourse as a vehicle for ‘selling’ goods. The genre of consumer
advertising has been colonizing professional and public service orders of
discourse, generating many new hybrid partly promotional genres (such as the
genre of contemporary university prospectuses).
The colonization of discourse has
pathological and ethical effects. There is a serious problem of trust on the
discourses but there is a deeper consequence: it is increasingly difficult not
to be involved oneself in promoting, because self-promotion is becoming
part-and-parcel of self-identity. This calls the ethics of language and
discourse. A critical awareness of language and discourse would then be a
urgent prerequisite for democratic citizenship and a urgent priority for
language education.
Fairclough concludes that CDA is a
resource for people who are trying to cope with the alienating and disabling
effects of changes imposed upon them.
7.- Ideology and
identity change in political television
Like in the previous article, CDA is
applied to discourses. Instead of analysing written documents, in this article
analyses media discourse – specifically, one section of the late-night
political discussion and analysis programme which was broadcast during the 1992
general election in Britain. Fairclough argues that the discourse practice of
the programme effects a restructuring between the orders of discourse of
politics, private life, and entertainment, through a mixing of some of their
constituent genres and discourses. ‘Chat’ is an emergent television genre that
is an institutionalized simulation of ordinary conversation as a form of
entertainment and humour. Humour takes an important role as it is taken as a
ground-rule that requires any serious political talk to be lightened by
humour.. The domain of politics is then restructured through redrawing of its
boundaries with leisure and the media and the everyday life. The complex
discourse practice is realized in heterogeneities of meaning and form in the
text. The complexity of the discourse practice gives rise to a high level of
ambivalence du to the mix of genres. The complexity appears also to place heavy
demands upon participants and cause difficulties for them which are manifest in
disfluencies and in failures to observe the humoristic rule, which are treated
as sanctionable behaviour by other participants. The paper concludes with a
discussion of the ideological effects of these changes in political discourse.
Section C: Textual analysis in social research
8.- Discourse and text: linguistic and intertextual analysis within
discourse analysis
CDA claims that close analysis of texts
should be a significant part of social scientific analysis of a whole range of
social and cultural practices and processes. Some discourse analysts try to
reduce all of social life to discourse, and all of social science to discourse
analysis. This is not the right approach. Discourse analysis has to take into
consideration the social and the cultural aspects and also the
linguistic-discursive forms of domination and exploitation. Critical awareness
as a factor of domination should be developed and spread.
CDA has to establish itself as a method in
social scientific research and must move beyond a situation of
multidisciplinarity and pluralism towards interdisciplinarity, which implies a
higher level of debate from different approaches, methods and theories.
Furthermore, Fairclough claims that CDA papers should reproduce and analyse
textual samples in the original samples in the original language, despite the
added difficulty for readers.
Even though the author observes a
‘linguistic turn’ in social science, he exposes the four reasons why textual
analysis ought to have a more widely recognition as part of the methodologies
of social science:
The theoretical reason is that texts
constitute one important form of social action (linking the ‘macro’ level with
the ‘micro’ level). An important point is also that language is widely
misperceived as transparent, so that the ideological effects of language are
overlooked.
The methodological reason is that texts
constitute a major evidence for grounding claims about social structures
The historical reason is that texts are
sensitive barometers of social processes, movement and diversity, and texts can
provide a good indicator of social change.
The political reason is that through texts
the social control and the social domination is exercised (and indeed
negociated and resisted).
CDA see texts as a powerful basis for
analysis but what is also important for the analysis is what is absent or
omitted from texts. “Choice entails exclusion as well as inclusion” argues
Fairclough (p.210).
Structures and relations have become more
unstable, and practices more diverse and open to negotiation, such that there
are many hybridizations of traditional medical, counselling, conversational,
managerial and marketing genres and discourses.
CDA needs a developed sense of and
systematic approach to both context and text. The signifier (form) and
signified (content) constitute a dialectical and hence inseparable unity of the
sign, so that one-sided attention to the signified is blind to the essential
material side and vice versa.
Section D: Critical language awareness
9. - Critical language awareness and
self-identity in education
Power is predominantly exercised through
the generation of consent rather than through coercion, through ideology
rather than through physical force. Change and instability make that forms of
power and domination are being radically reshaped, i.e. general processes of
institutional marketization and discursive facets of sociocultural
processes of detraditionalization and informalization and the technologization
of discourse as a peculiarly contemporary form of intervention in discursive
practices to the sociocultural change.
Some official educational reports claim
that is vital for schools to teach pupils standard English. There is an
assumption that schools can help iron out the effects of social class and
equalize the ‘cultural capital’ of access to prestigious varieties of English
but standard English is promoted without developing a critical awareness of it.
It also creates a socially legitimized stigmatization of English varieties.
The author concludes that the founding
motivation for CDA is the emancipation and the building of emancipated
forms of social life.
10. - The appropriacy
of “appropriateness”
This article deals
with the concept of ‘appropriateness’ in language, and the commonplace
view that varieties of a language differ in being appropriate for different
purposes and different situations. Fairclough argues that appropriateness
provides an apparent resolution of the paradox that se of standard English is
to be taught, while use of other varieties is to be respected; that an
appropriateness model of variation is the acceptable face of prescriptivism;
and that giving an appropriateness view of language variation the status of
knowledge inn language awareness teaching serves an ideological role. He
also suggests that the attempt to contain ethnicity- and gender-related
variation within the appropriacy model shows the need to go beyond it.
Books
- Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse
and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Fairclough, Norman (1995). Media
Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
- Fairclough, Norman (1995). Critical
Discourse Analysis. Boston: Addison Wesley.
- Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman
Fairclough (1999). Discourse in Late Modernity
- Rethinking Critical Discourse
Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Fairclough, Norman (2003). Analysing
Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
- Fairclough, Norman (2007).
(Ed.). Discourse and Contemporary Social Change. Bern.
