What Is Critical in Language Studies

Disclosing Social Inequalities and Injustice

Solange Maria de Barros, Dánie M. de Jesus, Solange Maria de Barros, Dánie M. de Jesus

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367858025
• eBook ISBN: 9781000191325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume examines the notion of criticality in language studies.

Drawing on the work of the Frankfurt School – Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, among others – the chapters in the volume examine a variety of linguistic contexts: from gender activism to web journalism, from the classroom to the open streets. It also presents theoretical and methodological guidelines to researchers interested in

• Expanding their critical outlook for meaning brought on by the notion of criticality in contemporary language studies.

• Understanding criticality in languages through historical, political, and social perspectives.

• Using linguistics and language studies as tools to dissect and disclose social injustices.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of language studies and linguistics, philosophy, politics, and sociology and social policy.

Part I
CRITICAL EMANCIPATORY RESEARCH

1
CRITICAL EMANCIPATORY RESEARCH

A tool for social transformation

Solange Maria de Barros

The thinkers of the Frankfurt School

In February 1923, young scholars Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Friedrich Pollock comprised the most renowned group of intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School, or the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research).¹ It was based on Horkheimer’s (1991) article ‘Traditional Theory and Critical Theory’, in which the philosopher draws attention to other aspects of reality, such as cultural, political, and psychological ones, which were not discussed by the orthodox and hegemonic Marxism of the time. Even though Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School followed orthodox Marxist thought, they went on to engage in a critical and intense dialogue with works by Kant, Hegel, Weber, Nietzsche, and Freud.

The term ‘critical’ stems from an attempt to surpass the limits of positivism, materialism, and determinism and to understand the contradictions of society. Philosophers saw the need to discuss the reorganization of society to overcome what they termed the ‘crisis of reason’, since this was the engine of conformity and preservation of the status quo. Moreover, they sought to develop an emancipatory theory based on a critique of domination. For this, they drew on Marx’s work to develop the concepts of critical theory and critiques of ideology, grounded in a philosophical and sociological perspective. The main interest of the Frankfurt School was, therefore, to find inspiration for a critical and in-depth analysis of society.

In the late 1960s, amid the second generation of thinkers, Habermas (2012) consolidated his epistemic turn with the publication of Theory of Communicative Action, which brought about a shift towards an ethical discourse. Habermas contends that people can make rational arrangements from a discursive perspective. According to Milman (1996), the concept of rationality proposed by Habermas’s theory is based on the practices of efficient communicative subjects. Through language, they are able to express their goals, collaborating freely to achieve them. It is through this consensual practice that subjects, according to Habermas, are able to boost their full potential for rationality, which he calls communicative action. The Habermasian notion of communicative rationality later became associated with other contemporary philosophical categories, paving the way for linguistics, including critical discourse studies.

From the Frankfurt School thinkers to critical discourse studies

The theoretical assumptions of the Frankfurt School gained renown and importance, having been incorporated into other areas of knowledge, such as law, psychology, philosophy, literature, the arts, education, and linguistics. The convergence between linguistics and critical theory – the central axis of critical discourse analysis (CDA) – is closely related to the theoretical framework developed by Habermas. It was this association with critical theory that opened up the way for language-based studies.

Bakhtin’s (1997) Marxist-inspired work entitled Marxism and the Philosophy of Language served as a basis for the study of language as a social, historical, and ideological phenomenon. Bakhtin proposes a linguistic theory of ideology, according to which ‘the word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence’ (Bakhtin 1997:36, my translation). He corroborates Marxist thought by conceiving ideology as located in the linguistic sign, since consciousness can exist only through its materialization in signs by means of social interaction.

Bakhtin’s ideas played a vital role in supporting Foucault’s (2001) work on the concepts of language and power. Language, as a space of hegemonic struggle, constitutes a means to understanding social contradictions. Dialogue or intertextuality (Kristeva 1980) – the idea that a text is always an intertext connected to a chain of texts in constant dialogue – is another of Bakhtin’s contributions. He influenced Faircloughian thought, particularly through the philosophical explanation regarding discourse and ideology. In his book Language and Power, Fairclough (1989) emphasizes the social theory of discourse, a theoretical and methodological proposal that became known as critical discourse analysis (CDA). Fairclough strives to explain and exemplify the social effects that operate in texts and the changes that might overcome the social relations of power underpinned by ideology.

In Analyzing Discourse, Fairclough (2003) broadens the debate by giving greater emphasis to textual aspects. For this, he uses Halliday’s (1994) systemic functional linguistics (SFL), having confirmed its potential for providing a clearer understanding of textual organization. According to Halliday (1994), the choices of the speaker/writer operate at all levels of discourse: lexical, syntactic, and modal. It is through them that the level of expressiveness is perceived in a given communicative situation. In this sense, linguistic analysis enables the interpretation of meanings found in texts. By expanding Halliday’s analytical model, Fairclough focuses on the relationship between textual levels and social levels.

From this perspective, using SFL can help the critical discourse analyst better investigate language from a microsocial and macrosocial point of view. With CDA, they can contribute to a more holistic view of the social context, further narrowing the link between text and context, between social and linguistic factors.

In the wave of critical realism

Critical realism (CR), as proposed by Bhaskar (1978, 1998), has foregrounded critical discourse studies and emancipatory research. As an international movement in philosophy and in the human sciences, it offers an alternative to the natural and social sciences as regards ontology – the issue of being – under which reality is denser. That is, it envisions an objective world that distinguishes a surface from something even deeper, and it subscribes to a non-empiricist ontology, in which the world is not only made up of events or facts. Bhaskar (1998) contends that science must serve to transform social reality, but the latter has profound dimensions which are not directly observable. In other words, in relation to ‘something that is below the surface’, there is something else deeper that cannot be discovered. This is what matters to critical social scientists who endorse CR. Knowledge must make sense in order for reality to be transformed. It is necessary to penetrate the roots of social problems, with their structures, mechanisms, and forms of power, visualizing an explanatory critique that can generate critical arguments for social transformation.

According to Outhwaite (1983:322), CR brings forth a notion of science as a human activity aimed at discovering a mixture of experimentation and theoretical reasons: the entities, structures, and mechanisms – visible or invisible – that exist and operate in the world. In the same vein, Vanderberghe (2010) compares the researcher to a miner, who digs deeply, moving between strata of reality (vertical dimension), and discovers a multiplicity of generative mechanisms that account for relationships between events (horizontal dimension).

In recent writings, Bhaskar (2002, 2012) has advanced the debate concerning the transcendental aspect of his philosophical approach, which he defines as ‘philosophy of metaReality’. Under his transformational view of the world – conceived as a systemic totality that encompasses several dialectically interconnected strata (physical-biological-semiotic-social-psychological-environmental-chemical, etc.) – each stratum has its own generative mechanisms and causal powers.

Therefore, CR sheds light on the ethical and moral issue of beings in the world, aware of the integration of their human agency into a transcendental totality that is pure unity and cooperation. Thus, the critique of power structures (which includes political and historical structures) involves, in a transformational sense, the critique of the (inter/intra) action of being in the world, i.e. a ‘base structure’ – the internal structuring of beings (Bhaskar 2002; Barros 2015, 2018) – as a fundamental causal mechanism of collective human emancipation.

Critical emancipatory research: a tool for social transformation

The critical emancipatory research (CER) paradigm emerged as the result of the predominance of positivist research procedures and methods in the global academic scenario. According to Groat and Wang (2001), CER is considered an umbrella approach that includes certain trends from critical theory. These authors, drawing on work by Guba and Lincoln (2011), summarize three main research systems, which they call post-positivist, naturalistic, and emancipatory. The post-positivist system is regarded as a traditional scientific paradigm that understands reality as objective and independent from the observer. In this type of approach, knowledge must be acquired through observation, and the researcher may establish little contact with research subjects. The naturalistic system, in turn, is a scientific paradigm that considers reality as socially constructed, and both qualitative and quantitative methods can be included in the research. CER is regarded as a recent paradigm, one that covers several methodologies. The researcher is an active participant in it: they not only describe reality but also seek to change existing power relations.

For researchers who subscribe to CER, the aim is not only to study society but, first and foremost, to transform social structures of power. When entering a social context, an emancipatory investigator will remain for an extended period of time to identify existing social injustices and overcome obstacles. In this respect, CER ensures that structures, mechanisms, and events are effectively known, problematized, and mitigated, thus envisaging new horizons for socially disadvantaged groups and minorities. It is necessary to dig deeper into the strata of the Real, the Actual, and the Empirical² and discover the generative mechanisms of events that, in most cases, constrain and oppress.

Inspired by Bhaskar’s CR, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) developed an analytical model for the identification of social problems materialized in oral or written texts. This openness of transdisciplinary possibilities allowed CDA to circulate in critical social sciences, conferring on discourse analysts a broader understanding of social life that relates microsocial and macro-social elements.

The analytical model proposed by the two researchers is based on Bhaskar’s (1998) explanatory critique and encompasses five stages. These are presented here, along with a sixth stage (Barros 2015, 2018:147–162):

1. Highlight a social injustice.
2. Identify obstacles towards solving injustices.
3. Establish the practical function of a given problem.
4. Consider whether social injustice is a problem.
5. Reflect critically on analysis.
6. Define a new research problem.

Each of these stages will be summarized next.

Highlight a social injustice: according to Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), the critical discourse analyst needs to identify a problem that affects social life at some level (e.g. poverty, forms of inequality, racism, etc.). This first stage can be further divided in two:

1. From a transdisciplinary perspective, select an issue that points to a social injustice, focusing on the dialectical relations between semiotic and other moments.
2. Define the objects of research, whose themes identify topics that can be theorized in a transdisciplinary way.

Identify obstacles towards solving injustices: Chouliaraki and Fair-clough (1999) maintain that the ‘point of entry’ is textual analysis, one that addresses the dialectical relations between semiosis and other elements. During this stage, three steps should be considered:

1. Analyze dialectical relationships between semiotic and other moments of social practice.
2. Select texts and categories for their analysis.
3. Pursue interdiscursive and linguistic textual analysis and semiotic textual analysis.

Establish the practical function of a given problem: Chouliaraki and Fair-clough (1999) and Fairclough (2010) highlight the need for the researcher to focus on only an analytical aspect while attempting to solve a problem. By acknowledging, through critical analysis, that social injustice generates a series of problems, the researcher will strengthen the reasons for radical change.

Consider whether social injustice is a problem: scholars stress the need to focus on practices’ generative effects. This stage draws attention to the contradictions, gaps, and deficiencies of aspects regarded as dominant in social injustice – that is, cases of contradictions found in the different types of dominant interaction.

Reflect critically on analysis: Chouliaraki and Fairclough (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Critical emancipatory research
• Part II Inclusive education: a critical perspective
• Part III Critical discourse studies
• Index