Foucault!

My soul rejoiced at finally seeing someone quoting Foucault, Baudrillard and Eco repeatedly. It was a tad sad that Manning and Cullum-Swan never said that the computer-based textual analysis is just an easier and less in-depth way of looking for what Foucault called elements of cohesion. On the other hand, I was happy to see that they addressed the issue of “context” (p. 248): what happens with metatext and hypertext?
Their explanation of semiotics (p. 252) is pretty short and to the point. If there’s something I’ve seen in academia almost always is the confusion that “signs” brings. Also, the discussions that arise from the idea that there is no “real world” but only a plethora of interpretants that are hyperlinked to one another (p. 252) is a beautiful thing.
The authors even brought into the discussion that fact that the rigid, tautological nature of structuralism (p. 254) is “dehumanizing” and, in a sense, negates evolution.
The MacDonald’s example was great. Similar “signs about signs” that draw instant images in our minds (the Nike logo, Apple’s bitten apple, Heineken’s particular green, etc.) are so powerful that some people need only a fraction of the sign to conjure up the whole significant. Keeping this in mind, can we now understand the importance of giving the “mass audience” a singular voice to explain the MacDonald’s experience?
I was not as stoked about running into van Dijk again. His constant rehashing of the propositions, macro-propositions and micro-propositions model still sounds to me like a very mathematical approach. On this article, however, he treated “local coherence” (p. 112) and “global coherence” (p. 113) in such a way that it sounded a lot more like a cohesive element approach a la Foucault. In any case, van Dijk still proposes and analysis that, in my humble opinion, can only be aided by a computer.
The Makus piece was interesting… and dense. Hall’s ideology theory is, if I understood Makus correctly, the system by which the powerful control language (and thus meanings of production and, inevitably, the whole discourse?) in order to make their ideas seem like “science.” Isn’t science just the word we use to name the currently dominant ideology? Isn’t that what Hall is talking about in the quote that appears in page 506 and what Makus herself is criticizing in pages 507-508? The thing that I couldn’t really understand was this: when and how do we start creating ideological formulations? Also: are they truly an “unconscious” (p. 500) action on the speaker’s part? How can are we able to “contest” (p. 501) them? How much does culture impact ideology?
A few more questions: are we legitimizing something as soon as we discuss it or disagree over it? How are the connotations (p. 503-505) different from the hypertextuality of signs in semiotics? Last but not least (and I´m pretty sure we can blame word/length issues yet again), why was the discussion about the case study so short?
The Fursich reading should be read at the beginning of the course: that would allow folks to understand a bit more about why some method-related explanations are left “in the dark” (p. 239). The few nonchalantly-thrown punches at the “limitations of traditional quantitative content analysis” (p. 240) were quite enjoyable. “Textualization analysis” (p. 242) should be required for all research; how come I had never seen that name before?
The idea of a “reality” that’s created in people’s (p. 246) minds and that we have to get to brings up a lot of questions: how do we get to it? When and how does the disjunction between a desired decoding and the actual decoding takes place?