16/05/2023, 20:13 Discourse Theory – Literary Theory and Criticism

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Discourse Theory
BY NASR U L L AH MAMBRO L on NOVE M B E R 21, 2020 • ( 0 )

Discourse theorists take discourse, rather than language, as their

domain in part because of difficulties with the latter term. The standard
definition of “language” in linguistics (a set of units and the rules for
combining them to make well-formed sentences) treats language as
invariant over domains, occasions, speakers, and purposes; other
traditional uses of language do specify for some particulars (the
language of the courtroom, insurance policies, advertising, Satan in
book I of Paradise Lost, this document), but even these uses share with
linguistics a tendency to analyze texts (or transcriptions of speech) in
terms of patterns of choices, to objectivize in terms of words and
structures. Discourse, for discourse theory, is not sets of formally
identified structures but a type of social action. Discourse theory
criticizes theories of speech acts for their focus on the acts of
individual agents speaking without social determination or constraint.

Because of this orientation toward social action, discourse theory also

distinguishes itself sharply from philosophical concerns with the truth
of statements and the validity of arguments, substituting a concern for
conditions under which one can be judged to have made a serious,
sound, true, important, authoritative statement. This program is clearly
sketched by Michel Foucault in The Archaelogy of Knowledge and very
concisely in his lecture to the Collège de France (“The Discourse of
Language”) appended to the Archaelogy. Foucault speaks of “rules” of
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discourse, but it is widely agreed that the conditions under which one
can make serious, authoritative statements include material and social
institutions and practices. A theory of discourse therefore implies a
theory of society, most particularly a theory of power, legitimacy, and
authority. Moreover, since society can to a very large extent be viewed
as the sum of discourses, there is a tendency in discourse theory,
particularly in its French varieties, for discourse to merge into praxis,
undermining the commonsense (“Anglo-Saxon”) distinction between
talking and doing.

Broadly construed, discourse theory draws insights and support from

three intellectual traditions: hermeneutics, social construction and
ethnography, and the analysis of power of the political Left. The
tradition of hermeneutics as transmitted by Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Jürgen Habermas (and Thomas S. Kuhn) emphasizes that every
discourse takes place within a shared horizon of preunderstanding (or
“lifeworld”) that cannot be fully or explicitly formulated. No discourse
can be completely self-grounded, and the ability to function as a
participant cannot be acquired wholly from a book, but arises from
initiation and experience. Relevant concepts here include the notions of
discourse community and “culture” (in one sense) (see CULTURAL
STUDIES).

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Pierre Bourdieu/Remy De La Mauviniere AP

A second major source for discourse theory is the vein of ethnography

and social theory that is concerned with the offering and validating of
accounts of cultural practices, including the writings of Clifford Geertz,
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Erving Goffman, and a host of others supporting the general program of

symbolic interaction or social construction. These approaches typically
seek to “make strange” or denaturalize or make visible rules and
practices underlying various institutions and transactions. They share
with hermeneutics a sense of the rootedness of discourse in particular
social forms and practices and tend to foreground the uncertain status
of the analyst as an outsider and the potential artificiality of accounts of
insider understanding. Pierre Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of
Practice emphasizes that practical knowledge and action are rooted in a
habitus that resists theorizing or systematization in terms of abstract,
“underlying” principles, including those of economic interest. Though
Bourdieu is perhaps best known as a social theorist and researcher, one
of his research sites is academic discourse, upon the French version of
which he has much of interest to say in Reproduction in Education,
Society, and Culture and Homo Academicus. He speaks, for example, of
acquiring not only language but socially constituted attitudes toward
language and so can refer to “bourgeois language,” which, nota bene, is
acquired as a habitus by growing up bourgeois, not by explicit, schooled
instruction.

Discourse Analysis
For many years, discourse analysis was less an explicit “theory” than a practical and
empirical approach for supporting field work on relatively little-recorded languages
and cultures (see, e.g., Grimes, Longacre, Malinowski, Pike). One domain of early
work that attracted notice … Continue reading
Literary Theory and Criticism 0

Discourse as a mode of power, which in late capitalist societies means

the enactment and legitimation of inequality, is the special emphasis of
Marxists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Pêcheux, and Fredric Jameson .
These Marxist writers have stimulated new interest in V. N. Voloshinov’s
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) and the more general
view of discourse as embodying the conflicting values and stances of
different groups found in M. M. Bakhtin‘s “Discourse in the Novel.”
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Discourse as a mode of concealing and perpetuating inequality and of

regulating behavior is a theme also of such non-Marxist advocates of
resistance to discursive regulation as Foucault and feminists focusing
on the silencing and marginalizing effects of hegemonic discourses.
Since theorizing itself is an activity not untinged by hegemonic
aspirations, feminists such as Hélène Cixous adopt the devices of myth,
contradiction, and hyperbole and could be said to refuse to do theory at
all.

In addition, most of the very large amount of work on language in

institutional settings (medical, legal, educational, media) explores the
intertwining of discourse and historical-material fact, either through
the shaping and maintaining of the “client” (pupil) role or through the
management and manipulation of mass audiences.

So much of discourse theory is oriented toward unmasking, debunking,

and raising our consciousness about the ways current discourses serve
power that one sympathizes with Foucault’s suggestion that it reflects
intellectuals’ uneasiness, embarrassment, or fear of power, which has as
much a creative, positive aspect as it does an exclusionary, silencing
one. That observation, made late in his life, remains to be fully
assimilated into discourse theory.

Bibliography
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (trans. Ben
Brewster, 1971); M. Μ. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays (ed. Michael Holquist, 1981); Pierre Bourdieu,
Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études
d’ethnologie kabyle (1972, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans.
Richard Nice, 1977), Homo Academicus (1984, Homo Academicus, trans.
Peter Collier, 1988); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, La
Reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement
(1970, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Richard
Nice, 1977); Hélène Cixous, “Le Rire de la Méduse” (1975, “The Laugh of
the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 [1976]);
Michel Foucault, L’Archéology du savoir (1969, The Archaeology of

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Knowledge, trans. A. Μ. Sheridan Smith, 1972) , “Truth and Power,”

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
(ed. and trans. Colin Gordon, 1980); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit
und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (i960,5th
ed., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, ed. J. C. B. Mohr, 1986, Truth and
Method, ed. and trans. Garrett Burden and John Cumming, 1975, 2d ed.,
trans, rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 1989); Jurgen
Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 1,
Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung (1981, The
Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization
of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 1983); Fredric Jameson, The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981);
Michel Pêcheux, Les Vérités de la Palice (1975, Language, Semantics,
and Ideology, trans. Harbans Nagpal, 1982); V. N. Voloshinov, Marksizm
i filosofiia iazyka (1929, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans.
Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, 1973) . Deborah Cameron, Feminism
and Linguistic Theory (1985); Diane Macdonnell, Theories of Discourse:
An Introduction (1986); Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist
Literary Theory (1985).
Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins
Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994.

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