Contrarian Instincts # 5: FAIRCLOUGH, Semiotics Aspects of Social Transformation and Learning

Rogers, R. (2011). An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, 2nd edition. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Chapter 6 – Norman Fairclough, Semiotics Aspects of Social Transformation and Learning

“Social structures are abstract entities. One can think of a social structure […] as defining a potential – a set of possibilities. […] Social practices can be thought of as ways to control the selection of certain structural possibilities and the exclusion of others.” (p. 120)

I must admit that I found this article confusing in many parts. For example, the author introduces a personal definition of language and affirms that it “defines a certain potential, certain possibilities, and excludes others”. Then, he brings an example: “the book is possible as a phrase in English, book the is not.” Well, didn’t he just use it? What is his definition of “possibility”? Is it semantic? Semiotic? Syntactic?

Fairclough’s point of view seems to underestimate the influence of social elements. The movement “from abstract structures toward concrete events” appears itself as an imposition of an ontological hierarchy.

I don’t agree with the author, when he asserts that language “becomes increasingly overdetermined”. In my opinion, this is the very nature of language, almost its “essence”, and it cannot be “overdetermined”. Language is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in what I would call “the alleys of the concrete”.

His definition of “orders of discourse” (p. 120) seems very arbitrary too, as well as his definitions of style and ideology.

As opposed to his “mild” approach to the role of texts in the construction of the social world (social constructivism), I think that, in turn, the social world plays a fundamental role in the construction of texts. Furthermore (just to play his world-game), his construction of the argument against the social world as textually constructed appears like an abstract construal.

The rest of the article is based on these arbitrary assumptions, and the inordinate use of abstract terms and categories marked by strong personal overtones, makes the text cryptically abstruse.