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One of the fundamental claims of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is that texts play a constitutive role in social structuration. In this chapter I will develop a theoretical perspective that tries to understand this claim in both a material and a semiotic sense. Recent research on complex systems shows that typically they are organized on and across multiple timescales. In the particular case of social-ecological systems, technologies of social organization are mediated by semiotically significant material artifacts, which persist or are functionally reproduced in long-timescale processes but are created and used on the much shorter timescales of human semiotic activity. Texts, as instances of such material-semiotic artifacts, play a key role in the organization of social systems across timescales and in the widest extension of social networks. I will argue here that this role for texts of all kinds (including those written in the grammars of architecture and bodily habitus) makes them uniquely valuable as indices of historically changing modes of social control. Extrapolating from contemporary developments in textuality (for example, hypertexts and web-surfing), I try to identify emerging forms of social control in the era of globalization. Postmodern texts and social practices already exist; they mediate new forms of social control in new ways.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230514560_7

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