The "boomerang" effect of the radicalism in discourse analysis

The subject's role in a radical "contingentism" perspective.
It may be asked what may be the role - in a perspective or radical "congentism" - of
the individual: that of acting entity (namely an actor of the discourse, producer of
meaning, a "discourse producer" or at least a "discourse-user") or that of an acted-upon
entity (a "by-discourse-used, an entity defined by the discourse, which only the analysts
can reveal)? In order to reply several points must be considered.
One of the main aspects of the RDA is to deny the existence of an internal guide of
cognitive type that orients the social individual's behaviour (Potter and Wetherell, 1987;
Potter, 1996; Potter and Edwards, 1999). To a typically cognitivist conception, the RDA
opposes the assumption that the same cognition may be a characteristic of the social action
(Potter and Edwards, 1999).
“DP rejects perceptual-cognitivism in favour of a systematic reformulation of cognition as a feature of
participants’ practices.”
(Potter & Edwards, 1999, p. 449)
The idea that "cognitive facts" are an action (and more precisely a "performative"
activity of discursive type) is moreover closely linked to the assumption of the variability.
On varying the contexts the social practices vary also.
“We merely have to deal with a socially occasioned variability from one time to another.”
(Middleton & Edwards, 1990, p. 43)
According to this assumption the behaviours, the beliefs and the representations
change as a function of the "performative" activity of the discourse and, consequently, of
the contingent aims linked to a particular context. However, the discourse (with its
emerging properties, namely the cognition) are not considered only as a contingent product
linked to a specific interactive situation, it reproduces the existence of more ample
discourses circulating in the social sphere (the "interpretative repertoires")
Through the interpretative repertoires, the RDA binds the individual to the social. In
pursuing his aims (consciously or unconsciously) the individual uses the rhetorically
proven and coherent discursive structures which are reified in the language and which are,
in certain way, suggested by the micro-context of the interpersonal relation.
This conception, although extremely articulated, seems to raise a problem.
Paradoxically, in criticising the cognitivist ontology, the RDA ends up by creating a
new ontology, this time of contestualist type, based on two complementary assumptions:
all is a social practice, all is relative and variable.
What placing has the subject within this new ontology? In our opinion, in the RDA the
subject:
(a) is transformed, from constructor of reality, into construction of reality;
(b) from speaking subject, it transformed into subject constantly spoken to by
contextuallly variable micro-discourses.
The individual's role, which in the constructivist approach was intended to be actor
and protagonist intentionally active in the scenario of the social life, becomes in the RDA
problematical. On the one hand the individual seems to be conceived as a rhetorical
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