Dilemmas and Opportunities
There are a number of challenges for critical discourse analysis that arise from considering the phenomenon of inter-media world-franchises.
First, we find their discourses and the ideological system of those discourses distributed among not just many texts, but among many semiotic media: speech and written language, typography, visual images, graphic presentations, 3D spaces, hyperlinked databases, animations, full-motion video, sound effects and music, interactive displays and computer programs, manipulable objects, etc. Not only do we not have adequate models of semiotic effects and inter-discursivity for each of these media individually, but many of the discursive and ideological effects of interest in inter-media franchises depend on inter-relations among presentations in coordinated, multiple semiotic media.
How do we determine whether a text and an image are presenting the same discourse or somewhat different and even potentially contradictory discourses?
How do we define what the ideological effects are of a particular text and image taken in combination, when these go beyond the separately analyzable effects of the text or the image in isolation?
Moreover, by definition, the discourses and the ideological components of their systems of inter-discursivity for inter-media world-franchises are distributed across products which come from different producers (under license), combine semiotic media in different ways (e.g. in films, videogames, or toys) in different genres, may appeal to different consumer submarkets and be used in different ways by differently socially positioned consumers.
I believe it is now well-established that artifacts, including texts, do not have inherent discursive content or ideological functions. Meaning is produced with these artifacts by the practices of users, and different users may construct different meanings, evaluations, and feelings for the same text/artifact. Moreover, they may each produce multiple meanings, and only the probability distribution of the relative salience of these different alternatives differ consistently and systematically from group to group; cf. van Helden’s notion of polyvalence (van Helden, 2004). From the texts/artifacts themselves, we can at most identify a meaning potential (Halliday, 1978) or range of meaning probabilities relative to various user communities and their cultural practices of interpretation and use.
Accordingly, we need a fairly sophisticated sociological theory, such as that in Pierre Bourdieu’s classic Distinction (Bourdieu, 1979) in order to connect the effective or most probable discursive content and ideological effects relative to one user/consumer group vs. another.
Accordingly, the precise subdivisions of the market for, say, films and those for videogames or fantasy novels may well not be the same. In fact, part of my thesis here is that through the work of the franchises capital is trying to make them become the same. What I expect will be seen in an empirical analysis is the construction, in franchise products and across franchise products, of various imposed principles for categorization, such as those defined in Bernstein’s more abstract view of classification systems (Bernstein, 1981), playing upon and seeking to reinforce those which are already naturalized from the prior history of Western capitalist cultures. In all these cases, I expect to see an interplay between efforts to homogenize the market by conflating categories or principles of classification and efforts to maintain or reformulate the differentiation and hierarchization of the market/culture.