Discursive Technologies and the Social Organization of Meaning

Abstract

That texts play a constitutive role in social structuration is one of the fundamental claims of critical discourse analysis. This article develops a theoretical perspective to understand this claim in a material as well as a semiotic sense. Recent research on complex systems shows that they are typically organized on and across multiple timescales. Texts, as material-semiotic artifacts, play a key role in the organization of social systems across timescales and in the widest extension of social networks. I propose that contemporary changes in the organization of society, such as globalization, are associated with significant shifts in the dominance of particular discursive technologies, and that hypertext and other forms of meaning making organized around traversals across traditional institutional and genre boundaries index emergent new forms of social organization and control.

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