Critical Discourse Analysis and Evaluative Meaning: Interdisciplinarity as a Critical Turn

Abstract

The perceived need to transcend disciplinary boundaries in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a contemporary imperative throughout most social sciences (Jessop and Sum, 2001). As such, it highlights the fragmenting trajectory social science has taken, most noticeably over the last 150 years. Critical scholarship has its raison d’être in that fragmentation because the first imperative of any critical social science is to develop an historically grounded, comprehensive theory of social change — a ‘critical philosophy’ which sees humanity as an unbroken, historically embedded whole (Marx, 1843 [1972], p. 10). Prior to the emergence of social science disciplines in the mid-nineteenth century, social theory ‘was an integral part of philosophy’ which had underpinned ‘the pattern of all particular theories of social change’ throughout history (Marcuse and Neumann, 1942 [1998], p. 95). Consequently, from a critical perspective, ‘social change cannot be interpreted within a particular social science, but must be understood within the social and natural totality of human life’ (ibid.). Accordingly, the contemporary trend towards interdisciplinary, ‘transdisciplinary’ (Fairclough, 2000), or ‘post-disciplinary’ (Jessop and Sum, 2001) approaches to social analysis is, by definition, a critical turn.