Between positivism and relativism: A critical realist approach to the analysis of multimodal texts

Roy Bhaskar centred his Critical Realism philosophy around a crucial philosophical conundrum, that is “reconciling the relativity of scientific knowledge as a social process with realism about its objects” (Hartwig, 2008, p. ix). The aim of this paper is to explore how such an epistemology can be applied to the analysis of multimodal texts, whilst also considering the potential cognitive effects on an audience.

The paper will begin with a summary of the main theoretical tenets of Critical Realism and will sketch a methodological and analytical framework derived from it, which sees our world as organised across and interpreted through three interconnected planes, the real, the basic social reality and the constructed discursive reality. An overview will also be offered of approaches within Critical Discourse Studies that have attempted to integrate Critical Realism (e.g. Fairclough 2010) by showing how the process of semiosis aligns with the ontology of this philosophy (Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer, 2002).

The second part of the paper will put the methodological and analytical framework introduced in the previous part to the test. For this purpose, examples from an on-going research project on the representation of Ukrainian Displaced People on British television will be used. The multimodal analysis relies on constructs borrowed from social semiotics (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1999; Machin and Mayr, 2012) and recently applied to the genre of travel and cultural documentaries (Castaldi, 2021, 2024). The purpose will be to show how the semiotic, multimodal representations can be analysed across the three planes of reality.

The paper will end with a discussion around the applicability of the methodological approach introduced and of what the cognitive effects could be for the audiences of the television programmes analysed.