In this new tour de force, Norman Fairclough deals with yet another broad and significant issue and topic, language and globalization; and as with the topics of his other books, he uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a method. What is especially new about this book is that he combines CDA with a political-economic perspective.
In spite of all the evident merits and interesting points of the volume, I would like in this commentary to take issue with some of its basic assumptions and general claims, which concern epistemology, theory, and practical analysis in the study of language and globalization. I choose to organize the review in this way because the issues I raise are not individual or accidental but may characterize CDA, and perhaps even more broadly social science, as a globalized discourse. It is hoped that a cross-cultural critique is initiated here.
As in Fairclough’s other international publications, descriptions and explanations, whether of language or of society or of the world, are presented at least implicitly as if they were culturally unbiased and therefore universal. For one thing, on such a big topic as language and globalization no possible culturally different intellectual traditions on these issues are referred to or hinted at. For another, the same theoretical framework of CDA and political economy is applied to different contexts ranging from the U.S. government’s discourse to the Romanian government’s discourse, and it is not questioned or discussed how it may be applicable to different communities and cultures. (But of course, at the very end of the book, on p. 172, the author mentions, “‘Globalization and language’ is a very big topic and it could be approached in many ways. I have in no sense exhausted the topic.”)
Is the model offered for studying globalization and language indeed universal, then? Globalization, for instance, is presented as if it were an even, free, and neutral flow of different ideas, and the action and distribution of different forms of power (3, 34–35) and it is not indicated that, for example, Western capitalism plays a dominant role in the international processes of politics, economy, media, education, (social) science, and so on. Instead, the author states:
Globalization should not be conceived as a process of homogenization, a gradual dissemination of (essentially Western) social practices, as well as economic and political structures, across the globe. As Jessop suggests, globalization can be conceived of as changes in scales and relations between scales, and socio-spatial entities such as nation-states are subject to processes of “re-scaling” in which the global scale may be “an ultimate horizon for action”. (34–35)
But from a Third World perspective, understanding of and experience with globalization are not so aloof and abstract (see also Bauman Reference Bauman1998):
This phenomenon called GLOBALIZATION has its winners and losers. … Africa for one has been among the losers as it has been increasingly marginalized. There are universities in the United States which have more computers than the computers available in an African country of twenty million people.
(Mazrui Reference Mazrui2002)Similarly, while different disciplines and perspectives are combined in the offer, which are mostly of Western origin and orientation anyway (12) , it is not questioned whether there may be other cultural traditions and intellectual legacies that might help in understanding, say, the Eastern European/Romanian situation (see chapter 4).
The same goes for the epistemological stance taken in the book. That is, as with the author’s other books and CDA more generally, a strong binary approach to knowledge and understanding is adopted (despite the repeated use of the word “dialectic,” see below). Thus, for example, Fairclough posits the social world as distinguished into discourse and social structure (21) and, with special reference to the topic of this book, into language and globalization (4), and time and again he stresses that they are different kinds of things and that one cannot be reduced to the other, by repeatedly emphasizing the latter as “real,” “actual,” “non-discursive,” “material,” and “independent” of discursive representation (4). Further, as is characteristic of a binary approach that tends to seek to make the two opposites cohere, the author posits a mechanical – ”causal” (10, 12, 17, 28, 33, 34) – relation between the two divided categories (despite the repeated use of the word “dialectic,” see below). A Chinese yin-yang dialectic approach, however, would approach discourse and social structure, or indeed language and globalization, as a unity of two (or more) interconnected, interpenetrating, and interchanging parts, where change (yi) is the only reality (Shi-xu Reference Shi-xu2005).
In a book on language and globalization, one would expect discussions of the languages and experiences of globalization of the majority of the peoples on this globe – in Asia, Africa and Latin America – whose mother tongues are neither English nor other European languages. One could expect that Asian, African, and Latin American intellectual positions on language and globalization would be represented, too. Language and globalization surely cannot be understood without proper attention to their perspectives and voices. But, unfortunately, the author sees it otherwise: “… as befits a book on globalization representing various countries and trans-national agencies: the European Union, the United Nations, the USA, Britain, Romania, Hungary, Malaysia, Austria and Denmark” (8).
As in his previous writings, Fairclough continues in this book to insist on both a binary notion of language and a “dialectic” notion of language at the same time. And there is a further contradiction between his concept of “the real world” and his analysis of it. But let us first hear how the author himself tries to sort out the contradictions:
I have argued that we need to distinguish actual processes of globalization from discourses of globalization, but then argued that discourses contribute to creating and shaping actual processes of globalization. Notice also that as soon as we start discussing the latter, we inevitably represent them in particular ways, drawing upon particular discourses. So I would seem to be saying two contradictory things: we need to make the distinction between actual processes and discourses – but we can’t actually separate them. Actually my position is rather that (a) there are real processes of (e.g. economic) globalization, independently of whether people recognize them or not, and of how they represent them; (b) but as soon as we begin to reflect upon and discuss these real processes, we have to represent them, and the ways in which we represent them inevitably draw upon certain discourses rather than others. (4–5)
At the same time, painstaking efforts are made to insist that his view of language is “dialectic” (see also 9, 10, 17, 28, 30, 33, 34):
Ontologically, I adopt a version of critical realism (Fairclough et al. 2004) which claims that social relations and “objects” (e.g. economic systems, states, practices of management or governance) have a materiality which is not conditional upon the fact or the nature of human knowledge of them, but that they are nevertheless socially constructed, that social objects and social subjects are co-constructed, and that discourse contributes to their construction. Epistemologically, I reject equally positivist accounts of economic and social facts which exclude their social and discursive construction, and voluntarist forms of discourse analysis which fail to recognize that the socially constructive effects of discourse are subject to certain non-discursive conditions, in favour of an approach to research which emphasizes the dialectical character of relations between different elements of the social including discourse. (12–13)
Similarly, the author asserts, but with a lot of metaphors:
I regard discourse as one element or “moment” of the social process which is dialectically related to other moments (“moment” is used precisely for elements whose relations are dialectical). To say that the relation between moments is dialectical means that although they are different from one another and one cannot be reduced to anther, they are not discrete, i.e. the boundaries between them are fluid – they “flow into” each other. (30)
The relation between discourse and the non-discursive is also described as causal (see also 17–18, 19), for example here:
Social changes are not mono-causal; they involve complex interactions between diverse causal factors and forces. And the effects of discourses as causal forces in social change are contingent upon various factors … whether certain economic, political and cultural preconditions exist
(Fairclough et al. 2004). (34)A number of contradictions exist. First, he distinguishes the world as independent of human knowledge and language, and yet forgets that the independent world thus posited is irrelevant to our human consciousness and action, and/or that he is already also using certain knowledge and language to render that world present and in a certain way (it is already also a representation, and a Buddhist monk may not agree). Or else how does he know? A further but related contradiction to this notion of the non-discursive world is an analytic one: Having posited such an independent “non-discursive” world, he does not have, and so cannot use, a non-discursive means to describe or analyze it. My suggestion is that, because globalization or indeed “the real world” has always to be represented and interpreted, there is no need to distinguish the former from language at the level of representation and action: They should both be seen as one universe of perception, interpretation, and interaction, and then the contradiction is resolved.
Second, he calls his view of discourse “dialectic” (and the relation between discourse and the non-discursive “dialectical”) but talks of the relation between discourse and the non-discursive only as mechanical and causal: Discourse can, under certain conditions, shape and create the non-discursive. Since he has already presumed an independent, irreducible, non-discursive world, as we saw above, his use of the term “dialectic” is either contradictory to that presumption or meaningless.
Consistent perhaps with the above confusions is the definitional inadequacy regarding “discourse.” As the focus of analysis of the book, discourse is defined as (a) “the semiotic” of “the social” (11) and as (b) “a particular way of representing some part or aspect of the world” (3, 31). A first question that may be asked regarding (a) is: If discourse, as world representations, is semiotic, what is not semiotic of “the social”? This is strange, because it is difficult to find anything else of “the social” that is not semiotic. Other questions concerning (b) may be: Where is context, including culture and history; what about action, interpretation and interaction? For, without studying these latter aspects, representations cannot be understood, but this narrow definition perhaps precisely reflects the tendency in discourse studies to neglect context, cultural and historical.
To reiterate, the problems explored above may not all be the work of individual scholars or their oeuvres. They lie much deeper and wider in our international cultural and intellectual system of communication, and therefore need to be addressed from a broader perspective. Especially with regard to the issue of unbalanced international scholarship, which affects us all and everywhere, it may be suggested that scholars and students of the underdeveloped and developing countries and regions have a special responsibility to make their culturally distinct voices heard and their intellectual works known, because, more than anyone else, they have the experiences, capacities, and resources, however restricted, to achieve that goal.
