“They were also concerned with ‘scientificity’;
in other words, a description meant ‘objective investigation’.
Also:
“observation done in a scientific manner
has the status of value-free facts.”
On the upside we do seem to be getting into
slightly more practical territory here, it just all still seems so very
wooly. I also think the ‘tendency to
read off text in a fairly unsophisticated manner’ is a crucial point. If we
follow the Death of the Author line of thought then CDA stands as only (?) the analyst’s
understanding of the text, and those of other (potential) readers are no more
or less privileged. Thus we come back to the recursive nature of the social
sciences: Identity is a social construct, people perform their identities
according to the groups they wish to gain access to (and thus implicitly
downgrade or ignore those to which they don’t), and so we end up with the
Academy with its bias to middle-class white men standing as the
privileged voice in the construction of meaning because its members are better able to
name-check dead Frenchmen.
This stuff does make you tend towards the
cynical, doesn’t it? It’s not like I needed much help in that regard anyway…
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