Discourse Analysis : PCP position of?

?Chapter 2 is an account of a kind that is much rarer in CDA. On language, identity and cultural politics, it reviews and introduces a wide range of complex theories of the subject from Foucault and Lacan to Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Laclau. It covers feminist work on the body, questions of culture and biology and performativity. But again there are antidotes provided to the perceived failure of poststructuralist theories of the subject to provide a theory of agency or to account for the way in which social change might actually happen: personal construct psychology, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Giddens. This is a complex chapter which ends with a discussion of the cultural politics of language and identity (2001: 56 ff.) and the argument that these things are best studied 'not in terms of philosophic argument', 'or as the signs of dead texts alone' but by exploring the ways in which 'identity claims are achieved in day to day linguistic encounters' (2001: 61). The chapter is, like the first, very dependent on the poststructuralist work it attempts to rewrite as a pragmatics for linguistic work. However the poststructuralist influence also changes fairly radically what CDA looks like in this book, at least in terms of the ways in which the linguistic tools in chapter three are framed. This becomes a CDA that is much more in tune with the issues current in contemporary cultural studies and one which explicitly addresses the issue of the need for new theories for new realities discussed above.

review of
Barker, Chris/Galasinski, Dariusz (2001) Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis: A Dialogue on Language and Identity. London

in

Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures

Terry Threadgold (Cardiff)