The "boomerang" effect of the radicalism in discourse analysis

The "totalising" and "reifying" role of discourse-action.
Insofar as it is beyond question that cognition is manifest in the action, to totally
identify the cognition of the action seems to be an operation no less criticable that the
contrary one, namely to lead back, tout court, the action to an underlying cognitive process.
Potter and Edwards (1999) explain this passage, demarcating one again the conceptual
territorial that separates the DP from the SRT.
“In SRT, representations are primarily cognitve phenomena (...) which enable people to make
sense of the world (...). In DP, representations are discursive objects which people construct in talk
and texts.”
(Potter & Edwards, 1999, p. 449)
“Cognition is a feature of participants’ practices (...). The sense-making role of representation is not
excluded in principle”
(Potter and Edwards, 1999, p. 448-449)
These statement deserve a reflection. The operation of "putting" a representation into
"shape", of translating and articulating it in a discourse or in another textual modality,
exerts an influence on the representation itself, transforming it. It is, accordingly,
reasonable to uphold that the representation may be also a characteristic of an act of
construction. It is equally obvious that in a socio-constructionist perspective this cannot
occur as a mere exchange of information in the neural networks, but as exchange of
meanings symbolically connotated in a social scenario. However, the representation is not
only a product of action. It guides also the action, determines the choice of the objectives
and of the means, builds the inter-action context, steers the contents of the discourse. And
it is, above all, this capacity to steer and guide the individual more or less, that makes the
action something more than, and diverse from, the elementary construct of behaviour (see
Amerio, 1991, 1996, Amerio & Ghiglione, 1986; von Cranach, 1992; Wagner, 1993,
1998).
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