Materialism, discourse and semiosis. The Frankfurt School and Critical Discourse Analysis in Dialogue

LEANDRO PAOLICCHI

Valencia

Congreso; DNC5ALED: Discourses and their impacts on a world of multiple crises; 2023

Asociación Internacional para los Estudios del Discurso DiscourseNet

The current known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is still a relevant tradition today. Like few other approaches, it has placed at the center of its research the broader semiotic process that constitutes the social and that interacts with the textual and verbal varieties analyzed. In this sense, it represents an advance with respect to the ways in which the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer, specifically) considered linguistic praxis. However, some of their precisions concerning the scope of semiosis also seem to commit them to a problematic social ontology in order to describe precisely the constitutive capacity of discourses. This problem will be the focus of attention in this paper, as it affects the conception of linguisticity that they seem to hold, to the point of not fully accounting for the capacity of language to configure the macro structural level of society, social ties in the meso structural axis or, finally, subjectivity in the realm of micro agency. The social theory that serves as a background for the whole analysis of CDA is critical realism, which is problematic for reconstructing the real scope of semiosis and performativity of speech. However, this limited and depotentiated conception of these practices can be improved by taking up some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School with respect to materialism, but in a semiotic key. Only by questioning this social ontology and replacing it with another more in line with current approaches in terms of speech performativity is it possible to overcome its limitations.