Phil Graham
Introduction
The perceived need to transcend disciplinary boundaries in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a contemporary imperative throughout most social sci-ences ( Jessop and Sum, 2001). As such, it highlights the fragmenting trajec-tory social science has taken, most noticeably over the last 150 years. Critical scholarship has its raison d’être in that fragmentation because the first imper-ative of any critical social science is to develop an historically grounded, comprehensive theory of social change – a ‘critical philosophy’ which sees humanity as an unbroken, historically embedded whole (Marx, 1843 [1972], p. 10). Prior to the emergence of social science disciplines in the mid-nineteenth century, social theory ‘was an integral part of philosophy’ which had underpinned ‘the pattern of all particular theories of social change’
throughout history (Marcuse and Neumann, 1942 [1998], p. 95). Conse-quently, from a critical perspective, ‘social change cannot be interpreted within a particular social science, but must be understood within the social and natural totality of human life’ (ibid.). Accordingly, the contemporary trend towards interdisciplinary, ‘transdisciplinary’ (Fairclough, 2000), or
‘post-disciplinary’ ( Jessop and Sum, 2001) approaches to social analysis is, by definition, a critical turn.
My approach to the problem of disciplinary boundaries, which I explain more fully below, is synonymous with that of Jessop and Sum – it is ‘pre-disciplinary in its historical inspiration and … post-‘pre-disciplinary in its current intellectual implications’ (ibid., p. 89). In essence, it is a refusal to acknowl-edge the dictates of contemporary disciplinary boundaries, and thus cannot be termed ‘interdisciplinary’ in the usual sense of the word: that is, selecting and combining approaches (or practitioners) from within well-defined disci-plines and subdiscidisci-plines of social science in order to forge problem-specific solutions (which is not to say that such approaches are either invalid or
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fruitless). It is an approach that assumes disciplinary boundaries are noth-ing more than institutional and discoursal consequences of historical power struggles amongst vested interests, the political economic forces in which such interests are embedded, and the intellectual proponents and oppo-nents thereof. Disciplinary boundaries are therefore ‘discourse-historical’
phenomena (Wodak, 2000). Their emergence mirrors the increasingly spe-cialized nature of work in industrialized societies, and is quite literally an industrial phenomena (Innis, 1942). In forging a critical approach to CDA, I draw most heavily on ‘pre-disciplinary’ political economy of Marx (cf. Marx, 1844 [1975], 1973; Jessop and Sum, 2001).
The central argument of this chapter is that what we call ‘disciplines’ in social science are historically constituted practices of evaluating the social world in different ways, and it is precisely these different ways of evaluating social phenomena that define disciplinary boundaries. However, in the for-mation of disciplines, it is particular ways of evaluating that get evaluated and re-‘ordered’ (Fairclough, 1992), specifically by propagating the Signifi-cance of particular modes of evaluating. Taking the broadest historical perspective, we can trace the evaluative fractures of disciplinarity to two paradoxical, closely associated histories: a historical reordering of power from the institutions of the Church and Crown to the institutions of Reason during the ‘Enlightenment’; the second is a reordering of discourses pro-pounding a static, Natural Order view of our social universe in the eigh-teenth century to the more dynamic, Darwinian view characteristic of the late nineteenth century (Ware, 1931).
In ‘Western’ scholarship, the historical shift in legitimacy from the insti-tutions of Divinity (Church and Crown) to the instiinsti-tutions of Truth (Science and Reason) is obfuscatory upon close inspection, largely because of the lack of difference in the stated scope of the systems’ authority (both have sought to explain and regulate the totality of human affairs), and because of their common heritage in the Church. It was Church scholastics who developed what has become known as ‘the’ ‘scientific method’, a mode of enquiry based on the ‘careful analysis of experience’ which left the Church ‘with a refinement and precision … which the seventeenth century scientists who used it did not surpass in all their careful investigation of method’ (Randall, 1940, p. 178). The similar scope and common heritage of the institutions of Reason and Divinity – institutions with ostensibly opposed value systems – are evident when political economy first emerges as a distinct discipline (of which more below).
Outlines of a ‘post-disciplinary’ theoretical and analytical approach
The primary theoretical assumption of my approach is explicitly ‘autopoi-etic’: that is, human social systems are living, sociocognitive systems, the
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organization and reproduction of which is ultimately coordinated in the domain of language (Graham, 1999; Graham and McKenna, 2000; cf. also Maturana and Varela, 1980; Luhmann, 1995). However, to be understood as such, social systems must be understood to ‘live’, ‘think’ and ‘act’ at different magnitudes of time and space, and in qualitatively different ways, than their human constituents, both in terms of time and scale (cf. Lemke, 1995, forth-coming; Luhmann, 1995). They have a different order of existence than the individuals whose interactions constitute them. That is to say, social systems have a different ontology from the people who create, inhabit and reproduce them, even though social systems and the individuals that constitute them are interdependent (Lemke, 1995). The relationship between social systems and individuals is analogous – though in no way qualitatively identical – to the relationship between an organism and the cells that constitute it. An organism’s cells die and reproduce while the organism lives far beyond the life of any cell, just as our most powerful social systems live beyond the lives of any individual person. A social system is no more an organism than a cell is an organism.
Such a view has a number of implications for analysis. The first of these is that analysis must deal with identifiable social units, which I define here as
‘discourse communities’ (after Lemke, ibid., p. 42). The boundaries of human social systems are, at least by the definition I am using here, characterized by the ways in which members of particular social systems comprehend, repre-sent and reproduce their worlds (ibid.; cf. also Graham and McKenna, 2000).
The second implication is that no comprehensive analysis can be valid from such a perspective without taking the dimension of time into account: that is, whilst having a distinct identity over a given time scale (Lemke, forth-coming), living systems have characteristics that change over time, just as people are born, grow and die while, ‘like all living things, having the power to change out of all recognition’, while remaining somehow ‘the same’
(Orwell, 1941 [1957]). Hence any critical social analysis will be historically contingent and historically grounded (Wodak, 2000). A third implication for analysis is that the genesis and maturation of social systems, their ontogenesis, brings environment, or context, into account, thereby orienting analysis towards a co-ontogenetic perspective (Maturana and Varela, 1980;
Luhmann, 1995, p. 119; Graham and McKenna, 2000). Consequently analy-sis becomes relational as well as historical, and must therefore take into account that relationships between social systems, their constituents, and their shared histories, are intrinsic to, if not definitive of, their character;
their character ‘depends primarily on connectivity’ (Luhmann, 1995, p. 119), or intersystemic ‘mediations’ (Silverstone, 1999, p. 13).
Seen from this perspective, the study of social phenomena differs from the study of non-living phenomena, such as the objects of many branches of physics, engineering, and chemistry. However, ‘[h]uman communities are ecosystems. Ecosystems are biological, chemical and physical systems’
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(Lemke, 1995, p. 159). Consequently, the differences that are generally used to distinguish between the objects of ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘social’ science are probably better described as differences between living and non-living phenomena. The theoretical and analytical differences between these are first (and quite literally) a matter of time. At least as far as we know, the prin-ciples governing non-living phenomena are timeless. For instance, based on current knowledge we must assume that the laws of gravity will be the same tomorrow as they are today, and that they were ever thus. Similarly, we must assume that the principles of particle physics and, for example, thermody-namics will be, and always were, the same, even if our understanding of them changes. Living systems, while not exempt from the ahistorical prin-ciples of ‘non-living’ dynamics, change over time, and the changes they undergo become more complex in proportion to the connections between them and other living systems, their constituent parts and their environ-ments. Further, the higher-order principles of living systems change as the systems themselves change (a human embryo is neither comparable to an adolescent nor to a person in old age, except at the most trivial level).
From such an understanding flows ‘a view of hierarchically related levels of organization’ and at ‘any particular level of [analytical] interest, we can see it being sustained both from below, by the actions of subsystems, and from above by its participation in a still larger system’ (ibid., p. 165).
Evaluative meaning can be seen to ‘work’ in precisely the same way (Graham, 2002a).
Evaluative meaning and the formation of disciplines
An imperative to analyse evaluative meaning flows directly from the autopoietic position I have briefly outlined above. Maturana and Varela’s (1980) is a theory ‘biology of cognition’. They define living systems as those entities able to make a distinction between themselves and their surround-ings by means of observation (1980, p. xix; cf. also Luhmann, 1995). As far as humans are concerned, ‘the act of observing is the act of evaluation and to separate them is to force a distinction on human practice that does not in reality exist’ (Harvey, 1973, p. 15). Therefore the fracturing of human social systems, as in the formation of disciplines, is essentially an evaluative phenomenon. The false distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences, which in the English tradition can be traced to the formation of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge (Huxley, 1893, pp. 21–3).
The social, intellectual and environmental damage associated with the dis-sociation of human phenomena from the rest of nature should not be under-estimated: when humans see themselves as other-than-natural, a false view of humanity as being supernatural, along with a perverse anthropocentrism, follows – a point not lost on Marx, who sees the dissociation of humanity from nature as the basis of alienation in all its forms (for example, 1844
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[1975], pp. 326–8). What we call disciplinarity is alienation exemplified: it is the conscious production of ‘otherness’ for specific ways of thinking about our universe. Disciplinarity is therefore an historical process of ‘reordering’
intellectual discourses, an institutional, ‘textual’ and ‘political’ valorizing of particular modes of understanding which necessarily devalues others (cf. Fairclough, 1992; Lemke, 1995).
My approach to analysing evaluative meanings in texts, which I have called
‘predication and propagation’, is a synthesis of methods developed by Lemke (1998) and Martin (2000), among others (Graham, 2002a). I argue that eval-uative meanings can be seen to happen on at least four levels of abstraction as they propagate throughout texts (Graham, 2002a):
1. The broadest and most abstract semantic levels of propagated value are Desirability and Importance/Significance, which are mutually mediating in the process of evaluative propagation.
2. At an almost equally abstract level are Warrantability/Probability;
Comprehensibility/Obviousness, Usuality/Expectability, Utility/Usefulness (pro-posals only), Difficulty/Ability (pro(pro-posals only), Normativity/Appropriateness, all of which can mediate, support and propagate the semantic categories of evaluation in (1). Which of these dimensions get foregrounded in the prop-agation of the categories in (1) is genre-specific.
3. Intermediate categories, again, may either be predicated of textual elements or propagated across long stretches of text. However, they can-not typically be deployed to evaluate propositions or proposals, and are
‘parts’ of the broader semantic dimensions in (1) and (2). As predicates of elements in language, they can also propagate the evaluative semantics of (1) and (2). The (ineffable) definitions for these labels are drawn from Lasswell (1941), Perry (1916) and/or Martin (2000). Whether as part of attributive or identifying clauses, or as parts of propositions, or otherwise embedded (intertextually or implicitly) in nominal elements or relations in the text, evaluations at this level can themselves be evaluated in terms of the categories in (1) and (2) above. They include Power, Respect, Freedom, Efficiency; Morality, Trust(worthiness), Legality, Virtuousness; Beauty, Intelli-gence, Wealth, Excellence (Quality), Consistency, Balance, Happiness, Stability, Complexity, Sophistication, Coherence, Restrictiveness; Quantity, Magnitude (Scope and Dimensionality), Expense, Dependency, Innovativeness, Novelty, and so on.
4. Lexical resources that explicitly inscribe an evaluation for an element in the text, literally a predicate. These are most conveniently organized by Martin under the headings Affect, Judgement and Appreciation (once again emphasizing the ultimate impossibility of separating ‘fact’ from ‘value’).
These resources for ‘appraisal’ are directly inscribed in the text and directly affected by the resources of ‘amplification’ and ‘engagement’ (Martin, 2000, p. 145). They are directly predicated of elements in the text, even
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though they may be seen as intertextually ‘evoked’ or ‘inscribed’ (ibid., p. 154). Seen relationally, they are in ‘hierarchical’, or constitutive, rela-tionships with the broader, less specific categories in (1),(2) and (3), which may also appear as predicates of textual elements (Graham, 2002a).
When grammaticalized across longer stretches of text, more and less explicit appraisals take part in ‘syntaxes’ of evaluation that propagate other values, the most abstract and exhaustive of which are Desirability and Significance.
Specific evaluative syntaxes are mediated by the historically and institu-tionally specific axiologies of any social context.1 Propagated values are those realized beyond the level of the elements in the text. These appear to be hierarchically organized, syllogistic, multidimensional, and fall under the broad categories identified in Lemke (1998) (Graham, 2002a). These last are listed in Table 6.1.
The means by which evaluations propagate depends on the grammatical status of the evaluative resources being deployed (are they nominals or part of a nominal group?); the elements being evaluated (are they construed as outcomes of Processes or as attributes of substances?); the temporal aspect of the elements involved (what are the tense and modality systems doing?;
do the nominals ‘contain’ implied aspects of time?); and the grammatical
Table 6.1 Evaluative resources for proposals and propositions
Evaluative dimension Positive degree Negative degree
[D] Desirability/Inclination It is wonderful that John It is horrible that John is
is coming coming
[W] Warrantability/ It is certain that John It is unlikely that John
Probability is coming will come
[N] Normativity/ It is essential that John It is inappropriate that
Appropriateness comes John comes
[U] Usuality/Expectability It is normal that John It is unusual that John is
is coming coming
[I] Importance/Significance It is important that John It is irrelevant whether
comes John comes
[C] Comprehensibility/ It is obvious that John It is mysterious that John
Obviousness is coming is coming
[H] Humorousness/ It is hilarious that John It is serious that John is
Seriousness is coming coming
[A] Ability/Difficulty It is easy for John It is difficult for John to
[proposals] to come come
[Ut] Utility/Usefulness It is useful for John It is useless for John to
[proposals] to come come
Source: Adapted from Lemke (1998, p. 37).
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relationships (or apparent lack thereof) between textual elements (cf. Lemke, 1998; Graham, 2001, 2002a). To make matters more complex, evaluative meanings can get nominalized and appraised, as can relationships between elements, as can whole value systems (axiologies), as in the perjorative use of the term ‘ideology’ (Graham, 2002a).
Further complexities arise in the analysis of evaluations when we take into account the historical processes of ‘mediation’ – literally, the means by which community-specific axiologies are produced, reproduced and inculcated across social spaces and through time (Silverstone, 1999, ch. 1). Therefore, if we are to make ‘sense’ of evaluative propagation and its social force, we must share some considerable degree of knowledge about often submerged axi-ologies peculiar to discourse communities. Notions of ‘heteroglossia’, ‘dis-course formations’, ‘intertextuality’, ‘inculcation’ and ‘evaluative patterns’ all refer to the historical and normative work that has gone into building eval-uative ‘logics’ over time, space and throughout institutions in society (Firth, 1953; cf. Fairclough, 1992, pp. 12–135, 2000; Lemke, 1995, pp. 22–36, 1998, pp. 34–5; Graham, 2002a). Therefore we would expect to see an historical lay-ering, hybridizing and textual ‘chaining’ of axiological traditions in any given instance (Graham, 2002a).
Genre-specific values and the formation of disciplines
In most respects, my approach to the analysis of how disciplinarity happened is ‘discourse-historical’ because it ‘attempts to integrate much available knowl-edge about the historical sources and the background of the social and polit-ical fields in which discursive “events” are embedded’ and ‘analyzes the historical dimension of discursive actions by exploring the ways in which par-ticular genres of discourse are subject to diachronic change’ (Wodak, 2000).
The analysis I present here focuses on the genre of academic journal articles that mark formal disjunctions central to the formation of various disciplines in social science. Time and space do not permit fine-grained analyses of explicit or implicit evaluations in the texts that follow. I have presented approaches to doing so elsewhere in far greater detail than is possible here (Graham, 2001, 2002a). I define the perceived value of any particular phe-nomenon as the ‘ecosocially’ constructed Desirability of that phephe-nomenon (cf. Lasswell, 1927; Lemke, 1998; Graham, 2002b). Further, I assume that the perceived Desirability of anything is socially, linguistically, ecologically and technologically mediated (Graham, 2002b). Within the discourse communi-ties of scientific enquiry, the two broadest evaluative dimensions that propa-gate and support the Desirability of any given body of disciplinary knowledge are Significance and Warrantability: the most Desirable scientific knowledge will be both true and important within a given field.
At the outset of disciplinarity, I presuppose an already broken philosophy in which the broad evaluative domains of the True (Logic), the Good (Ethics),
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and the Beautiful (Aesthetics) have been actively held apart in philosophy for centuries (Hegel, 1816 [1995], p. 407; Russell, 1946 [1991], pp. 54–5; Lemke, 1995, pp. 178–9). I further assume that any change or reordering of axiolo-gies is intimately ‘connected with a change in the social system’ (Russell, 1946 [1991], p. 53). My analysis thus foregrounds the historical ‘hybridiza-tion’ and reordering (or ‘restructuring of the order’) of values along inter-institutional lines (cf. Fairclough, 1992, p. 222; Lemke, 1995, pp. 178–80).
In what follows, I provide examples from the disciplines of economics, political science, psychology and ethics. Where possible, I have used editorial introductions to first issues of journals for newly emerging disciplines to focus on the intertextual separation of new disciplines from their ‘parents’.
By ‘intertextual’, I mean the ‘actual utterances’ of ‘distinct social voices’
which arise from and constitute the formal and institutional ‘stratification of language in actual use’ (Lemke, 1995, p. 24). These stratifications are evident in ‘professional jargons’ of academic and professional groups (Bakhtin, 1935, cited in Lemke, 1995, p. 24). From the late nineteenth century onwards, intertextual separations within academia becomes a social function of new academic journals.
The journals I have chosen have been influential in the formation and main-tenance of their respective disciplines. All continue to be published up to the present day. All are in English, although foundational scholars from non-English-speaking backgrounds in each of the disciplines I discuss here have published in the journals. While I expect the Englishness of the journals to have some associated idiosyncrasies, I have no reason to suspect that the fundamental dynamic is any different, at least in other ‘Western’ contexts.
I ground my investigation of disciplinarity in ‘pre-disciplinary’ political economy because it is the first discipline to be formally defined in
I ground my investigation of disciplinarity in ‘pre-disciplinary’ political economy because it is the first discipline to be formally defined in