to historical semantics (broadly defined) and critical discourse analysis.2
In selecting approaches to language, discourse or semiosis we check whether they are commensurable with critical realism, the SRA approach and an evolutionary perspective. These criteria are important if CPE is to avoid a chaotic bricolage of methods without regard to their overall consistency with its basic premises. Thus we exclude forms of semiotic analysis that are:
1. universalist and/or trans-historical in character, seeking to develop universal laws of language and language use;
2. structuralist in their denial of authorship, agency or subjectivity;
3. methodologically individualist in their explanation of language development; and
4. reductionist in seeking to reduce the world to language or semiosis.
While these criteria provide grounds for excluding some approaches from the purview of CPE, we aim to include work that explores how selection, retention, recontextualization and restabilization of ‘texts’, ‘intertexts’,
‘supratexts’ and interdiscursivity operate in broader contexts. Moreover, because diachrony is more important than synchrony for our concerns, we are more interested in schools and currents that privilege the former without neglecting the latter.
GENERAL THEORY VERSUS GRAND THEORIES OF SEMIOSIS
These themes are addressed in several ‘grand theories’. This term does not denote here the kind of abstract systematic general theory that seeks to integrate and explain everything about humankind and society in a
Semiotics for cultural political economy 99 universal, trans- historical manner via the logical unfolding of concepts –
the sense in which C. Wright Mills (1959) criticized the structural- functionalism that dominated American sociology in the 1950s. Efforts to construct such a general theory do not fit CPE’s meta- theoretical premises (see Introduction). Nor do we fully endorse, to quote W.G. Runciman, that, ‘[i]f not frankly pejorative, the term [grand theory] is at best ironic, implying a loftiness of tone, an inflation of aim, and a pretentiousness of content which no serious academic author could possibly want to be charged with’ (1985: 18). In exploring some grand theories and proposing our own approach, we aim to avoid giving such an impression.
Rather, we use the notion of grand theories diacritically, that is, to establish both a negative and a positive heuristic. On the one hand, our usage rejects aspirations to develop a unified, trans- historical ‘natural- science’ model of explanation and also disavows the fetishism of fact- gathering as the royal road to cumulative scientific development. On the other hand, our usage is associated with a positive heuristic. For us, grand theories aim to develop:
1. a preliminary set of basic and sensitizing concepts and positive guide-lines (that is, not a closed system) that are
2. relevant to historical description, hermeneutic interpretation and causal explanation;
3. scalable, that is, applicable to different scales of analysis without seeking to unify the micro- , meso- and macro- levels (however defined) within a single system, whether this attempt is made through upward or downward reduction that ignores emergent properties or through a simple conflation that denies the specificity of different ‘levels’; and 4. recognize the importance of evolutionary mechanisms and
contin-gent effects without assuming they are always progressive and/or irreversible.
Our meta- theoretical approach affirms the legitimacy of competing grand theories and, indeed, encourages combining at least some of them in a playful spirit during research discovery phases and more systematically and consistently when presenting results. This is an important part of the spiral process of research. This is possible because such grand theories (1) typically offer alternative entry- points into describing, making sense of and seeking to explain the dynamics of social order; but (2) do not seek to explain social order as a closed totality but simply provide the tools for understanding past and present attempts at totalization and their limits.
The political theorist Quentin Skinner introduced an essay collection on The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (in the 1970s and
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1980s) by noting that grand theorists refuse to treat the human sciences like natural sciences. They favour a hermeneutic approach that ‘will do justice to the claim that the explanation of human action must always include – and perhaps even take the form of – an attempt to recover and interpret the meanings of social actions from the point of view of the agents performing them’ (1985: 6). The theorists considered in the collection shared
a willingness to emphasise the importance of the local and the contingent, a desire to underline the extent to which our own concepts and attitudes have been shaped by particular historical circumstance, and a correspondingly strong dislike – amounting almost to hatred in the case of Wittgenstein – of all overarching theories and singular schemes of explanation. (Ibid.: 12)
Yet these iconoclasts, almost in spite of themselves, have made major contributions on a grand scale across many disciplines. This is why they are similar to the grand theories of the past. They also operate in a pre- disciplinary spirit, destabilize disciplinary boundaries and have major implications for the conduct of trans- disciplinary work. Furthermore, provided that they operate with critical- realist, strategic- relational assumptions, they can also be combined, following appropriate concep-tual labours, to produce more comprehensive analyses – especially when they are sensitive, as our CPE approach requires, to both semiosis and structuration.
Several grand theories are relevant to the overall CPE project. Three that we find useful for the study of semiosis and structuration are: ver-nacular materialism, historical semantics, and Foucauldian archaeology and genealogy.
● Vernacular materialism is adumbrated in Ives’s account of Antonio Gramsci’s distinctive version of historical materialism, based on his studies in historical linguistics and its relevance to under-standing everyday life, hegemony and patterns of social domina-tion. Moreover, in contrast to historical semantics (see below), it also emphasizes structural contradictions, social antagonisms and unstable equilibria of compromise (Ives 2004a).
● Historical semantics is interpreted broadly here to refer to a ‘grand theory’ developed by the German semantic conceptual history school and, even more significantly, by Niklas Luhmann and his followers, in order to study the co- evolution of semantics and social structure (see Koselleck 1981; Luhmann 1980, 2008; Richter 1990).
It also finds parallels and echoes in other work in historical linguis-tics and historical genre analysis, which includes the evolution of scientific, professional, commercial and corporate genres.
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● Foucault’s archaeology of discourse and discursive formations, covering the ‘general system of the formation and transformation of statements’ (1972: 130), has implications for construal and construc-tion, veridiction and truth regimes, power–knowledge relations, and the writing of ‘critical and effective histories’ (1970, 1972, 1977, 1979, 1980). It becomes even more powerful when combined with his work on dispositives (1977, 1979, 2008a, 2008b).
These approaches are interesting because they focus, respectively, on the linguistically mediated meaningfulness of everyday life and its implications for the critique of ideology and domination; on the evolutionary mecha-nisms that lead to the co- constitution of basic concepts and semantics, and the transformation of social structures from the viewpoint of the longue durée and periods of transition; and on the history of discursive forma-tions and their role in constituting objects and subjects of governmentality and shaping discursive selectivities and semantic fields, and their link to dispositives. Albeit rather differently, then, they treat language/semantics/
discourse as historically instituted, relational phenomena that change (but not in a symmetrical, one- to- one manner) with structural changes and, more importantly, they treat them as phenomena that interact with and may co- determine structural change.
We introduce these approaches below and identify their strengths and weaknesses for the CPE project. They do not exist in neatly pre- packaged, clearly bounded, mutually exclusive theoretical and methodological bundles, however; therefore we also comment on other accounts that overlap them, are often confused with them, or can be used to supplement them. This explains the order of presentation below.
In addition to these ‘grand theories’, which can help to shape broad- brush analyses with wide- ranging spatio- temporal implications, we will also draw on more tightly focused approaches and their associated ana-lytical methods. The most important of these is critical discourse analy-sis (hereafter CDA) and similar analytical heuristics. These paradigms not only offer a set of methodological guidelines and useful techniques to explore text–intertext–context relations but also, to quote van Dijk (2013), reflect a critical ‘attitude of mind’. Indeed, given our interest in the critique of ideology and domination, this makes CDA especially attractive. Scholars in this relatively new tradition have developed their analytical toolkit with a view to critique rather than simple technical- cum- instrumental analysis. This does not obviate the need for rigorous applica-tion of discourse- analytical methods, but we take cautious comfort from the honing of this toolkit by scholars who want to link texts to context and to consider their social reception and societal effects.
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