Discourse

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A sentence is a systematic arrangement of words. A discourse is a systematic arrangement of sentences. The domain of discourse includes various genres—such as narrative, epic, journalistic, or poetic—and thematic fields, from the actuarial to the zoological. It includes register—high and low, technical and vernacular, polite, allegorical and literal, and so on—and modes, from the written to the oral, and from monological to conversational. It also includes the dimension of style, as well as diverse functional orders, including referential, heuristic, imperative, and connotative.

So encompassing a category might seem to be of dubious analytical rigor. But perhaps precisely because it is such a hodgepodge, discourse confronts the analyst not merely with the formal dimensions of language, but also with the diverse conditions of its production and use. It serves as a sociocultural tool kit, whose astonishing multiplicity of instruments can be deployed to characterize the world, from one context to another, and to realize a great variety of other ends. An analytical engagement with discourse has come to define sociolinguistics (see Goffman 1981; Romaine 2000; Trudgill 1974), the ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1986; Saville-Troike 1982) and more specialized pursuits such as ethnopoetics (Sammons and Sherzer 2000) and metaprag-matics (Lucy 1993). The chief philosophical predecessors of this engagement were Ludwig Wittgenstein’s treatment of “language games” in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and John Austin’s treatment of speech acts, or “performatives,” such as promising or pronouncing a couple to be wed in How to Do Things with Words (1962).

Since the later 1960s, however, the analysis of discourse has ceased to be the province of linguists and linguistic anthropologists alone. It has instead emerged as one of the leading preoccupations of social thought, and of cultural studies more broadly (see Howarth 2000; Mills 2004). That it has done so is closely related to the increasing contemporary saliency of two other topics that are often regarded as hallmarks of the post-structuralist turn in social and cultural critique. One of these centers on the variable historicity of the many collective systems in which human beings take part, or of which they are a part (Attridge, Bennington, and Young 1987). The other centers on the ways in which, and the extent to which, such systems are implicated in the reproduction of economic and political domination. Well before the post-structuralist turn, however, the Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) set an influential, if partial, precedent in conceiving of the trajectory of the dynamics of language, history, and power as unfolding in the contest between the prevailing or “hegemonic” ideologies of a ruling class and the counterhegemonic ideologies of the class destined to succeed them. Several decades later, the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser (1918–1990) supplemented Gramsci’s schema with the still-current postulate that bourgeois ideology is, at base, a discursive apparatus through which persons of authority “interpellate” and, in so doing, subject other persons to authority (Althusser 1971, p. 170–178).

At once post-structuralist and post-Marxist, Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) oeuvre is the source of the conception of discourse most widespread today. For Foucault, discourse is always contestable, always “tactically polyvalent,” though by no means is it always the tactical weapon of one or another economically defined class. Discourse bears authority by definition. Its domain is not equivalent to that of opinion in general. Nor does its authority necessarily rest on the hegemony of the material interests that it may serve. The proper measure of discursive authority is, for Foucault, the always somewhat conventional measure of what constitutes knowledge. Knowledge is not, per se, a kind of power. Discourse approached without reference to the material practices it serves and informs can yield no more than a purely speculative analysis of domination. Just so, Foucault’s research into the establishment of the mental asylum, the prison, and sexology reveals that those discourses of life, labor, and language that, since the early nineteenth century, have been recognized as “human sciences” have provided the rationale for the imposition of entirely material apparatuses of anthropological classification, compartmentalization, and confinement. Yet Foucault’s diagnosis of such discourses of “subjectivation” affords no hope of radical liberation (Foucault 1998, pp. 459–460). As Althusser seems also to have believed, human beings have nothing else to be but discursively articulated and discursively “interpellated” subjects. They might still strive to render the terms of their subjectivation more accommodating and less absolute.

SEE ALSO Althusser, Louis; Foucault, Michel

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books.

Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds. 1987. Post-structuralism and the Question of History. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock.

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. An Introduction. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1985. The Use of Pleasure. Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 1998. Foucalt. In Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, pp. 459–63. New York: The New Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Ed., trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. (Orig. pub. 1929–1935).

Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds. 1986. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Blackwell.

Howarth, David. 2000. Discourse. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Lucy, John A., ed. 1993. Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, Sara. 1997. Discourse. London: Routledge.

Romaine, Suzanne. 2000. Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sammons, Kay, and Joel Sherzer, eds. 2000. Translating Native Latin American Verbal Art: Ethnopoetics and the Ethnography of Speaking. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

Saville-Troike, Muriel. 1982. The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Trudgill, Peter. 1974. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. London: Basil Blackwell and Mott.

James D. Faubion

discourse, discourse analysis The study of language, its structure, functions, and patterns in use. For Ferdinand de Saussure, language in use (or parole) could not serve as the object of study for linguistics, since as compared to langue (the underlying system of rules), it was individualized, contingent, and therefore intangible. Eventually, however, some of Saussure's successors in linguistics as well as in the wider structuralist tradition did turn their attention to parole, in the hope of discovering, behind it, additional structures to those of langue; structures which, in other words, would facilitate the completion of the analysis of meaning, and so allow semantics to take account of the connotative (secondary or implied) as well as the denotative (intended or explicitly signified) dimension of language.

In the event, the reversal of the privilege accorded by Saussure to the denotative over the connotative became one of the distinguishing characteristics of post-structuralism, and it is the sense given to the term discourse within this body of thought (rather than within linguistics) that has come to exercise a powerful influence in sociology. For this reason, then, discourse analysis in sociology has been more concerned to uncover the large patterning of thought that structures whole texts, rather than the finer patterning that structures sentences, and which concerns linguists.

As Roland Barthes pointed out in the conclusion to his Mythologies (1957), what one is confronted with in parole is a chain of ‘signifiers’ rather than one of ‘signs’. What is more, these signifiers often appear to mean more than is suggested by dictionary definitions. Barthes's suggestion was that, in order to discover what this might be, one has to be able to reconstruct the additional sets of underlying relations that determine the actual use of signifiers in particular contexts. Barthes himself termed these additional sets of relations ‘myths’—a term he and others later rejected because of its negative and economic-reductionist connotations.

It was Michel Foucault who eventually provided a conception of the additional structures that determine language use (and, indeed, although this is far less often acknowledged, of the sociological constraints upon them), which sits happily alongside the positive and non-reductionist conception of the ideological realm that commands wide support today. According to Foucault in his methodological text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), these additional structures are made possible by historically produced, loosely structured combinations of concerns, concepts, themes, and types of statement, which he terms ‘discursive formations’. Although such formations are far more loosely structured than the discourses they make possible, they are sufficiently determining to allow the differentiation of connotative structures from one another, for example, of sociology from racism and from the law.

What gives these formations their structuring quality are the particular conditions which made and still make them possible. These ‘rules of formation of a discursive formation’ include, so far as the objects they allow to be addressed are concerned, each of the following: the social or institutional contexts wherein they emerge, most often as the loci or sources of concern of some kind; the social identities of those who have or gain authority to pronounce on such problems and their causes; and the ‘grids of specification’, the intellectual templates so to speak, which are used to separate off the particular objects of concern from the many others with which each is intertwined in reality.

In order to indicate that the discourses produced in such ways add meaning to langue, Foucault describes their joint product not as a sentence, but as ‘statement’. He then defines this as a series of signs which, first, assumes the particular subject position given by the relevant discursive formation; second, projects a certain dynamic on to the set of signifiers that constitute it; and, finally, possesses a definite materialism by virtue of being recognizably different from other statements. A discourse is thus ‘a group of statements insofar as they are made possible by the same discursive formation’.

Despite the formidable nature of the intellectual underpinning made necessary by the counter-intuitive nature of nonrepresentationalist conceptions of social phenomena, and (ironically) its own somewhat opaque language (some idea of which can be gained from the terminology introduced in this entry), discourse analysis is not a horrendously difficult exercise, as Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell make clear in the excellent discussion of its methodology contained in their Discourse and Social Psychology (1987). For an example of an empirical study see David Silverman 's Discourses of Counselling (1997
), a study of the conversations between HIV counsellors and their clients, which draws on the sociological traditions of interactionism, conversation analysis, and ethnomethodology. See also CONNOTATIVE VERSUS DENOTATIVE MEANING; SEMIOLOGY.

discourse, a linguistic or rhetorical term with a multitude of senses, ranging from a single extended speech to the whole realm of language in practical use. In linguistics, ‘discourse analysis’ is a formal study of the ways in which sentences are connected into larger units of speech or writing. In modern literary and cultural analysis, especially in the post-structuralist mode inaugurated by Foucault, a particular discourse is understood to be a field of linguistic power in which certain authorities (e.g. judges or priests) define an object of expertise and a special vocabulary for discussing it, along with rules governing what is appropriate for each party to say in certain exchanges (e.g. sentencing, confession). Use of the term often indicates a desire to study specific contexts of linguistic and literary usage, rather than the abstract codes of ‘language’ in general.

dis·course • n. / ˈdisˌkôrs/ written or spoken communication or debate: the language of political discourse | an imagined discourse between two people traveling in France. ∎  a formal discussion of a topic in speech or writing: a discourse on critical theory. ∎  Linguistics a connected series of utterances; a text or conversation. • v. / disˈkôrs/ [intr.] speak or write authoritatively about a topic: she could discourse at great length on the history of Europe. ∎  engage in conversation: he spent an hour discoursing with his supporters in the courtroom.

DISCOURSE.
1. A general, often formal term for a talk, conversation, dialogue, lecture, sermon, or treatise, such as John Dryden's Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693).

2. An occasional term for LANGUAGE and USAGE generally: all human discourse; philosophical discourse.

3. In LINGUISTICS, a unit or piece of connected speech or writing that is longer than a conventional sentence. The analytical study of such sketches of language is known as discourse analysis. See PRAGMATICS, RHETORIC, TEXT.

discourse †reasoning XIV; conversation, talk; treatment of a subject; †course XVI. — L. discursus running to and fro, (late) intercourse, (med.) argument, f. discurs-, pp. stem of discurrere run to and fro, (late) speak at length, f. DIS- 1 + currere run; assim. in form to COURSE.
Hence discourse vb. XVI.