Silvia Sorrentino’s Reviews > Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language > Status Update

The mediatization of politics has entailed a shift from the media merely transmitting political events happening elsewhere whose nature was determined autonomously, to the media generating its own political events (interviewes, debates, programmes such as Midnight Special) and political events which happen elsewhere being reshaped to enhance their media worthiness.

I think that CDA ought in contemporary circumstances to focus its attention upon [..] changing discursive practices as wider processes of social and cultural change - because constant and often dramatic change is affecting many domains of social life is a fundamental characteristic of contemporary social experience, because these changes are often constituted by and through changes in discourse [..].

Focault's work in particular has popularized a different understanding of power as a ubiquitous property of the technologies which structure modern institutions, not possessed by or attached to any particular social class, stratum or group. My concern is that this sense of power has displaced the former, more traditional one, and more importantly has helped divert attention from the analysis of power asymmetries.

Critical theory and critical analysis are currently under attack from various theoretical quarters [..]. I see these developments in theory as linked to the defeats and retreats of the left in many countries over the past decade or more, and the emergence of a an aggressive "new right".