Critical-realist analyses do not call for an ‘anything- goes’ approach to sci-entific investigation but nor do they provide an automatic warrant for the set of disciplines that happen to prevail in a specific stretch of time- space.
Indeed, through its interest in the distinctive properties of the intransi-tive and transiintransi-tive worlds and their coupling in scientific inquiry, critical realism indicates the importance of studying the history of disciplines and resisting the fetishization of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries.
While these certainly have instrumental value in the development of scientific inquiry, this benefit should not be emphasized at the expense of critical reflection on the histories of disciplines, their articulation and the epistemological selectivities involved in defining disciplines in one way or another. After all, scientific practice is another field amenable to strategic- relational analysis that also contains its own ideological elements and plays its own roles in maintaining different forms of domination. Our approach to CPE draws, faute de mieux, on concepts, theoretical argu-ments and empirical studies written from existing disciplines. It is just as impossible to start with a tabula rasa in the scientific field as it is in any other. But we describe our approach as pre- disciplinary in inspiration and post- disciplinary in aspiration. It addresses specific problems in the critique of political economy and many others have followed similar paths in their own fields. The contingency of the concepts, assumptions and methods developed in CPE precludes that it become another discipline.
Like many other critical approaches, it is bound to exist in a limbo at the intersection of disciplinary, multi- disciplinary and trans- disciplinary practice.
In this light, let us bring a provisional end to this beginning by repeating
Introduction 29 that we are not so much concerned to ‘bring culture back in’ for the
pur-poses of economic or political analysis as to make the cultural concerns of recent contributions to critical political economy more explicit and to highlight their compatibility (indeed, compossibility) with the more self- conscious concern with semiosis found in some versions of critical discourse analysis. We emphasize that the cultural and social construction of boundaries between the economic and political has major implications for the forms and effectiveness of the articulation of market forces and state intervention in the ‘reproduction–régulation’ of capitalism. And, in offering an alternative interpretation of this insight, we combine argu-ments from the regulation approach, neo- Gramscian state theory, histori-cal semantics, and some key theoretihistori-cal and methodologihistori-cal insights from Foucauldian analysis to highlight the contingency of social imaginaries, the contingency of structuration, and the contingency of their translation into social practices and institutions.
NOTES
1. While semiosis initially refers to the inter- subjective production of sense and meaning, it is also an important element/moment of social practice (and hence ‘the social’) more generally. It also involves more than spoken or written language, including, for example, forms of ‘visual imagery’.
2. Note that reality ‘exists in the way that it does, only in so far as it is assigned meaning by people, who are themselves entangled into and constituted by discourses’ (Jäger and Maier 2009: 44).
3. Meaning systems are shaped in various ways, with different theories identifying dif-ferent mechanisms. Cognitive linguistics emphasizes neural and cognitive frames and includes conceptual metaphor theory, which argues that language is inherently, not contingently, metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Other approaches emphasize social interaction, meaning- making technologies and strategically selective opportuni-ties for reflection and learning (e.g. Nord and Olsson 2013).
4. Core linguistics (Kress 2001) comprises the main subdisciplines (e.g. phonetics, phonol-ogy, morpholphonol-ogy, syntax, semantics); to this can be added ‘non- core’ linguistics, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.
5. ‘In using the metaphor of construction it is vital to distinguish participants (construc-tors) from spectators (construers) and acknowledge that constructions succeed or fail according to how they use the properties of the materials – physical and ideational – involved in the construction process’ (Sayer 2006: 468).
6. See, for example, Ferguson and Schularick (2007, 2011).
7. Affordance is an important concept in critical realism and the strategic- relational approach. For introductions, see Gibson (1979) and Grint and Woolgar (1997);
Hutchby (2001) uses this concept in treating technologies as texts.
8. Post- structuralism is a broad intellectual and academic reaction to an equally ill- defined structuralist tradition. Its proponents reject the latter’s claims about the feasibility of
‘scientific objectivity’ and universal truths. It denies that there are firm grounds for knowledge (hence its description as ‘anti- foundationalist’) and it highlights the plurality of meanings and difference. It also foregrounds the role of discourse and knowledge not only in construing but also in constructing reality.
30 Towards a cultural political economy
9. This remark concerns the overall tendencies in the organization of scientific practices.
It is not a comment on the scope for particular individuals or schools, through years of reskilling, to adopt the attitudes and practices of the pre- disciplinary age. But this would involve the reinvention of a pre- disciplinary tradition in specific circumstances – not a return to an age of pre- disciplinary ‘innocence’.
10. For a good survey of seven turns (interpretive, performative, reflexive or literary, post- colonial, translational, spatial and iconic), see Bachmann- Medick (2006). For an accessible introduction to the tools of cultural studies, see Thwaites et al. (1994). And, for introductions to different kinds of critical discourse analysis, see Fairclough (2003);
Lakoff and Johnson (1980); Hodge and Kress (1993); Kress (2001); van Dijk (1977);
van Leeuwen (2008); Wodak and Mayer (2009); and Chapter 3.