5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

museum. All these expressions are mediated by different kinds of social agents,
be it a curator, an educator or a security guard. Therefore, the analysis in the
interpretation stage is always oscillating between the relationship of the text and
social practice as well as its relationship with its social agent, who actually
articulates the text. But how can one analyse how people produce and interpret
certain pieces of text? It is, of course, impossible to gain access to people’s
heads. Fairclough says that what the analyst can gain access to is people’s
cognitive processes. Hence, it is the cognitive processes of producing and
consuming texts that the interpretation stage is concerned with; and Fairclough
provides a set of questions that can be asked of a text to analyse how producers
and interpreters arrive at establishing the situational and the intertextual contexts.
Drawing upon them, the interpretation stage will reveal how the text is part of
webs of other texts. The objective of the interpretation stage is therefore not the
identification of ‘the hidden meaning’ of the text, or the authors ‘true’ intentions.
Rather, what the interpretation is aiming at is to find out how a specific
situational context shapes the text itself. This process will uncover, for instance,
the assumptions on which the text is based; that is, assumptions made by the
speaker who the audience is, and how it might best be addressed. This in turn
will reveal something about the relationship of the text to museum practice, and
this will ultimately answer the question of this section, namely, whether the text
represents continuity or change in traditional museum practice.
Explanation
The objective of the interpretation stage was to analyse the text in relation to
museum practice. Or in other words, to analyse the traces of other discourses that
are found in the text. “The objective of the stage of explanation,” in Fairclough’s
terms “is to portray a discourse as part of a social process, as a social practice,
showing how it is determined by social structures, and what reproductive effects
discourses can cumulatively have on those structures, sustaining them or
changing them.” 41
41 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, p.135.
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