Martin & Rose (2007: 315, 333n):
Research which concentrates on describing coding orientations is of course complementary to action research projects which aim to redistribute access to meaning. You can’t redistribute what you don’t understand, and intervention is what motivates a research interest in language and ideology in the first place. Where CDA has tended to concentrate on the analysis of discourse which sustains inequalities, SFL is equally concerned with redressing inequality. And we think this means looking at the texts through which people make the world a better place alongside those which naturalise power relations we don’t accept. It’s partly for this reason that we were drawn to the writing of leaders such as Tutu and Mandela who enact reconciliation — who make peace not war. One way of putting this would be to argue that we need to balance critique with Positive Discourse Analysis (or ‘PDA’), so that our interventions have good news to learn from as well as bad news to overthrow (Martin 2002, 2003, 2004a, b, 2006; Martin and Stenglin 2006).
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is misleading, because it is manifestly untrue. On the one hand, a text on Quantum Mechanics can be redistributed by people whether they understand it or not. On the other hand, as this blog demonstrates, Martin & Rose have shown that they can "redistribute" SFL Theory, despite being unable to understand its fundamental architecture.
[2] This is misleading, because it falsely implies that CDA is not "equally concerned with redressing inequality".
[3] To be clear, consistent with the authors' advice, this blog looks at one text, Working With Discourse, which attempts to "naturalise power relations we do not accept". See, for example:
[4] To be clear, one function of using texts of Tutu and Mandela is that doing so garners the admiration of readers who are naïve to the authors' motives. By bathing in reflected glory, Martin & Rose frame any critique of their theorising as opposing the values espoused by Tutu and Mandela.
[5] To be clear, consistent with the authors' advice, this blog "balances critique with PDA" in as much as its "interventions have good news to learn from" (explications of SFL Theory) "as well as bad news to overthrow" (misunderstandings of SFL Theory).
∞
To free a person from error is to give,
and not to take away.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
To kill an error is as good a service as,
and sometimes even better than,
the establishing of a new truth or fact.
— Charles Darwin
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