Generally, the theoretical approaches in discourse analysis can be located within a view of social reality known as social constructionism. We need to go further in this context in order to understand fully the development of practise. Most histories of discourse analysis focus on three major influences: structural linguistic, speech act theory and ethnomethodology. In addition, some strands of discourse analysis are strongly influenced by post-structuralism. The generic name for knowledge that is (nothing but) language is discourse. Discourse expresses and is, the inherently transgressive quality of poststructuralist intellectual politics, as one can see in Hayden white’s definition : ‘A discourse moves “to and fro“ between received encodations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuses incorporation into conventionalised notions of “reality,“ “truth,” or
“possibility.”…Discourse, in a word, is quintessentially a mediatise enterprise. As such it is both interpretive and preinterpretive; it is always about the nature of interpretation itself as it is about the subject matter which is the manifest occasion of its own elaboration.’ As such a postmodern social theory, whether avowedly sociological or not, is discursive in this sense of transgressing the subject-matter it interprets by constantly reflecting on the necessary and nature of interpretation itself.
3.1.1 RENAISSANCE
Conceptions of analysis in the medieval and renaissance periods were largely influenced by ancient
Greek conceptions. But knowledge of these conceptions was often second-hand, filtered through a variety of commentaries and not always reliable text. Medieval and renaissance methodologies tended to be uneasy mixtures of Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Galenic, and neo-Platonic elements, many of them claiming to have some root in the geometrical conception of analysis and synthesis.
However, in the late medieval period, clearer and more original forms of analysis started to take shape where we can trace the development of a conception of interpretive analysis.
The scientific revolution in the 17 th century brought with in new forms of analysis. The newest of these emerged through the development of more sophisticated mathematical techniques, but even these still had their roots in earlier conceptions of analysis. Bu the end of the early modern period, decomposition analysis had become dominant, but this too took different form, and the relationships between the various conceptions of analysis were often far from clear.

3.1.2 ENLIGHTENMENT
The basic ideas of the approaches during the period of enlightenment are roughly as below:
1.
There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal—no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.
2.
This self knows itself and the world through reason or rationally, posited as the highest form of mental functioning and the only subjective form.
3.
The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is “science,” which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.
4.
The knowledge produced by the science is “truth” and is eternal.
5.
The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institution and practise can be analysed by science (reason/objectively) and improved.
6.
Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good
(what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedient to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.
7.
In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).
8.
Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful form of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientist, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason and not be motivated by other concern (such as money and power).
9.
Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to present the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to the name them (between signifier and signified).

3.1.3 MODERNISM
Modernism is generally defined is the period of the time from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century to the end of World War 2. Modernists attempted to “make it new,” or find ways to convey the experience of the modern world. It attempts to create a unified vision of the external world, and often works to unify the works form with its material. Modernity focuses on questions of epistemology or knowledge—how do we know?—versus postmodernity’s questions of ontology or ways of being—what constitutes identity? Modernism has two facets or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.
The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labelled
“modernism.” This movement is associated with twentieth century Western ideas about art
(through traces of it in emergent forms can be found I the nineteenth century as well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made consumed and what it should mean. The main characteristics of modernism include:
1.
An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.
2.
A movement away from the apparent objectivity provide by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner’s multiplynarrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.
3.
A blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentaries and prose seems more poetic.
4.
An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.
5.
A tendency toward reflectivity, or self0consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in particular ways.
6.
A rejection of elaborates formal aesthetics in favour of minimalist designs and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favour of spontaneity and discovery in creation.
7.
A rejection of the distinction between “high” and “low” or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.

Post modernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communication, fashion, and technology. It’s hard to locate t temporally or historically, because it’s not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.
Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which post modernism seems to grow or emerge. Postmodernism, like modernism, follow most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinction, emphasising pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness.
Postmodernism art (and though) favours reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanised subject.
3.2.1 JACQUES DERRIDA-DECONSTRUCTION
Derrida’s essay begins with the word “perhaps,” which signifies that in deconstruction, everything is provisional; you can’t make positive/definitive statements. Nevertheless, we’ll proceed as of you can. This is another key to deconstruction-even as you come to understand that nothing is stable, that meaning is always contingent and ambiguous, you continue to act as of nothing’s wrong.
Derrida then introduces the ideas that some “event” has occurred. This “event” is some sort
“rupture” or break.
What he’s talking about is what he sees it as a major shift or break in the fundamental structure of western philosophy (the episteme). This break is a moment where the whole way philosophy though about itself shifted. That shift, or rupture, was when it became possible to think about “the structuralism of structure.” In the other words, this is the moment when structuralism pointed out that language was indeed a structure, when it became possible to think (abstractly) about the idea of structure itself and how every system-whether language, or philosophy itself—had a structure.
An analogy might be (to paraphrase Plato) to think about being in a room-say, your dorm room. At first, you think about how to decorate that room: what posters to put up on the walls, what pictures, where the bed and desk and dresser go, etc. then one day you might think about the room, not as your room, but as one room in a whole building, as part of a structure; then you might think about the “roominess” of your room, the qualities that (apart from your specific decorations) make it a room, and then about how it relates to other rooms in the structures (my room is my room because it’s not room next door). Anyway, the movement when you start thinking about the roominess of your room is the moment or the “event”. Derrida is talking about-the moment when philosophers began to see their philosophical system, not as absolute truth, but as system, as construct, as structure.

Unlike Saussure, who just looked at structure as linear, Derrida insists that all structures have some sort of centre. He’s talking mostly about philosophical systems or structure, but the idea applies to almost any structure. There’s something that all the elements in the structure refer to, connect to, something that makes the structure holds its shape, keeps all the parts together. (You should note, though, that his model DOESN’T work so well for language—or not for Saussure’s idea of language— where it’s difficult to locate or name what “centre” might hold the whole structure together).
The centre, while it holds the whole structure together, limits the movements of the elements in the structure—this movement is what Derrida calls “play.” Think again of a building. A central shaft may hold all the wings and floor of a building together, limiting how much the structure as a whole, and any single element, can move –say, in a tornado or hurricane. In a building, this lack of “play” is good. In a philosophical or signifying system, Derrida says, it’s not so good.
A less concrete example of a system with a centre would be a philosophical or belief system say, the
Puritan mind-set. In the Puritan system of belief, GOD was the centre of everything—anything that happened in the world (i.e. any event, or “unit”, of the system) could be referred back to God as the central cause of that event. And nothing in the system was the equivalent of God.—nothing could replace God at the centre as the cause of all things. Refer this back to Saussure’s idea that value comes from the difference’ that idea is based on the exchangeability between units (verbs are not nouns, but both are words, and it could be exchange for each other). The centre of a system is something that has no equivalent value, nothing can replace it or be exchanged for it, is the cause and ultimate referent for everything in the system.
The next important thing is “play”. Stability—fixity caused by the centre—is what Derrida calls
“presence.” Something is fully present when it’s stable and fixed, not provisional and mobile. Play is the disruption of presence.
There can be two attitudes toward the idea of play as disruption of system/structure nostalgia and disapproval or approval. You can be nostalgic for fixed systems and long for a return to simple beliefs
(say, in God) and can mourn the loss of fixity of meaning. Or you can play along, rejoice in multiplicity and affirm the provisional nature of all meaning. This letter attitude doesn’t look for full presence, which would be rest and stability, but revels in flux, in impermanence, in play. Think of the kindergarten teacher who either weeps in frustration because her kids won’t behave or who gets down on the floor and starts playing with them. Obviously, Derrida thinks enjoying play is better.

3.2.2 GENEOLOGY AND SOCIAL CRITISM-MICHEL FOUCAULT, JULIA
KRISTIVA
Michel Foucault is not a Freudian, a structuralism, a phenomenologist, a sociologist, or a historian, but his work draws on ideas and assumptions and methods from all these areas or discipline. Rather, think of Foucault, like Derrida and like Freud, as the founder of his own “school” of though. He is a post-structuralism thinker, with affinities to most all the other theories we’ve read so far, but he is enough unlike them that we should think of him in a category all of his own. Foucault starts off this essays, “what is an author?,” by discussing criticisms of a previous book, The Order of Things. In this book Foucault had started an investigation into the condition of possibility under which human being become the object of knowledge in certain discipline (what we might call the “human science,“ or the “social science”. He was working to discover and explain the rules and laws of formation of system of tough in the human sciences which emerged in nineteenth century. His main method for looking at these discipline, and how they constitute the objects of their study, was through examining “discourse,” or “discursive practise.”
For Foucault, a “discourse” is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology, and/or a set of common term and ideas; the idea of discourse thus allows Foucault to talk about a wide variety of texts, from different countries an different historical periods and different disciplines and different genres. For example, the
“discourse” on blindness would include writings by school for the blind, writings by the doctors who work with vision and blindness, novels with blind characters and autobiographies of blind people, as well as writing about blindness from other disciplines.
Foucault makes a list (on p.139a) of some questions about authorship which he will not address directly. Rather, he wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text and the manner in which the text point to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who precedes the text
(and creates it). Eventually, Foucault will talk about the author as a Derridean “centre” of the text, the place which originates the text yet remains outside it. (Then, of course, he will “deconstruct” that centre/author).
There are four features of texts or books which have authors—or, in Foucault’s terms, texts which create the author function.
1.
Such texts are objects of appropriation, forms of property. Speeches and books were assigned to real author, Foucault argues, only when authors became subjected to punishments for what the speech or book said. When the writing/speech said something transgressive, something that broke rules, then systems of authority had to find some locus from which the transgressive speech came; the cops and courts had to find someone to punish. Foucault’s example is that of heresy: when heresy was uttered, there had to be a heretic behind the utterance, since you can’t punish words or ideas, but only the people who “author” those words or ideas. From this idea of locating authorship in some one held responsible for writing or speech came also the idea of ownership of works, and the idea of copyright rules associated with ownership.

2.
The “author function” is not a universal feature of every text. Some texts don’t require, or create, an “author.” myths, fairy tales, folk stories, legends, jokes, etc. it used to be that literary texts could be anonymous, whereas scientific texts had to be attached to a name, to an “author function,” because the credibility of the scientific text came from the name of the author associated with it: Pliny says, Aristotle says, Hippocrates says, etc. in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, Foucault says, this situation was reserved; scientific texts began to speak for themselves, to be objective thus to be judged on the basic of the arguments presented (and the reproducibility of the result) and not on the authority of an individual author’s name.
Literary works, in this era, began to be evaluated on the basis of the notion of the author.— hence the emergence of the idea of “Shakespeare” as :author function,” not just as some guy who hung out in London theatres in the Elizabethan era. In contemporary society, we see this illustrated in the idea of an anonymous literary work, like Primary Colour, where the goal is to find the out who REALLY wrote it—to be able to associate the text with an “author function.”
3.
The author function is not formed spontaneously, through some simple attribution if a discourse to an individual. Rather, it results from various cultural constructions, in which we choose certain attributes of an individual as “authorial” attributes and dismiss other. Thus, in creating “ Melville” as an author function, it is important to his status as “author” that he actually did go on a whaling voyage; it is irrelevant to his status as author that he worked in a bowling alley in Hawaii (although both are historically true).
Foucault says that philosophers and poets are not constructed as author in the same way, but that there are some trans-historical constants in how authors are culturally constructed.
He looks to these constants by examining how several texts are attributes to a single author was follows: a) Texts are eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author if they are markedly superior or inferior to other texts on the list; hence the “author function” is a label of a certain standard level of quality. (This would keep the grocery list from being part of T.S.
Eliot’s work.”i.e. a text which generates an “author function,” because the grocery list is not as good as “the wasteland.”) b) A text is eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author when the ideas in that text contradict or conflict with the ideas presented in the other texts; thus the “author function” denotes a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence. c) A text is eliminated from belonging to a particular author when the style is different from that of the other texts belonging to that author, when it uses words and phrase not found in the other texts. Hence “author function” requires stylistic uniformity. d) Texts are eliminated which refer to event after the death of the author. Hence “author function” means a definite historical figure in which a series of event converge. Foucault reiterates these ideas (on p. 144a) and modified them only slightly. The author’s biography explains the presence of certain events in the text; the author is a principle of unity; the author neutralise contradiction; the author is a particular source of expression manifested well in texts, letters, fragments, grocery lists, etc.

4.
The text always bears signs that refer to the author, or create the “author function.” The most easily recognisable of these signs is a pronoun, “I,” though we know better than to assume that the “I” of a narrator is identical to the “I” of an author. Foucault suggests that the author function arises out of the difference and separation, between the “author function” and the writer signified in the texts. This is most easily seen in narrative fiction, but is true of any form of discourse, according to Foucault.
5.
At the end of this article, Foucault talks about the idea of trans-discursive position, people who are initiators of the discursive practise, not just individual texts. Such figures as Marx and Freud (and Foucault) radically shift an entire mode of thinking; the discourse they initiate make them more than just “authors” or “author functions” in the ways we’ve been talking about. I won’t go into the details of Foucault’s arguments about this here; it takes us further into Foucault’s own position as the initiator of analysis of discourse.
3.2.3 JULIA KRISTEVA
Although Kristeva does not refer to her own writing as feminist, many feminists turn to her work in order to expand and develop various discussion and debates in feminist theory and criticism. Three elements of Kristeva’s though have been particular important for feminist theory in Anglo-America contexts: a) HER ATTEPMT TO BRING THE BODY BACK INTO DISCOURSE IN THE HUMAN SCIENCE
Theory of the body are particularly important for feminist because historically (in the humanities) the body has been associated with the feminine, the female oar woman are and denigrated as weak, immoral, unclean, or decaying. Throughout her writing over the last three decades, Kristeva theorised the connection between mind and body, culture and nature, psyche and soma, matter and representation, by insisting both that bodily drives are discharged in representation and that the logic of signification is already operating in material of body.

b) HER FOCUS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MATERNAL AND PREOEDIPAL IN THE
CONSTITUTION OF SUBJECTIVITY.
Kristeva emphasises the maternal function and its importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language. While Freud and Lacan maintain that the child enters the social by virtue of the paternal function, specifically paternal threat of castration, Kristeva asks why, if our only motivation for entering the social is fear, more of us aren’t psychotic? In tales of loves, she questions the Freudian-Lacanian notion that paternal threats causes the child to leave the save haven of material body. Why leave this save heaven if all you have to look forward to is fear or threats? Kristeva is interested in the earliest development of subjectivity, prior to Freud’s oedipal situation or Lacan mirror stage.
Kristeva argues that maternal regulation is the law before the Law, before Paternal Law (see
Tales of Love). She calls for a new discourse of maternity that acknowledges the importance of the maternal function in the development of subjectivity and in culture. c) HER NOTION OF ABJECTION AS AB EXPLANATION FOR OPPRESSION AND
DISCRIMINANTION
Kristeva develops a notion of abjection that has been very useful in diagnosing the dynamic of oppression she describes abjection as an operation of the psyche trough which subjective and group identity are constituted by excluding anything that threats one’s own (or one’s group) borders. The main threat to the fledgling subject is his or her dependence upon the maternal body. There for, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal function. As
Kristeva claims in Black Sun, matricide is our vital necessity because in order to become subjects (within a patriarchal culture) we must abject the maternal body. But, because women cannot abject the maternal body with which they also identify as women, they develop what Kristeva calls a depressive sexuality (see Black Sun). Kristeva’s analysis in Black
Sun suggests that we need not only a new discourse of maternity but also a discourse of the relation between mother and daughters, a discourse that does not prohibit the lesbian love between women through which female subjectivity is born.

Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds certain objectivity, a scientific objectivity, to the realms of literary studies (which have often been criticised as purely subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating “parole” to
“language; “actual usage is abandoned in favour of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus structuralism reading ignore the specificity of actual texts ant treat them as if they were like the patterns produced by iron fillings moved by magnetic force—the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort.
In structuralism, the in individuality of the text disappears in favour of looking at the patters, systems and structures. Some structuralisms (and a related school of critics, called the Russian
Formalists) propose that all narratives can be charted variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns.
In this way of looking at narratives, author is cancels out, since the text is a function of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic Humanist model holds that the author is the origin of the text, its creator and hence is the starting point of progenitor of the text. Structuralism argues that any piece of writing or any signifying system, has no origin and that author merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make any particular sentence (or story)- any parole. This forwarded the idea that “language speak us,” rather than that we speak language. We don’t originate the language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we (miss) perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system.
Hence every text and every sentence we speak or write is made up of the “already written.”
By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralism cancels out history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that the structures are universal, there for timeless. Structuralism can’t account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text’s production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it.
In erasing the author, the individual text the reader and history Structuralism represented a major challenge to what we now call the “liberal humanist” tradition in literary criticism.

THE HUMANIST MODEL PRESUPPOSED: a) That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds. b) That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting that real world. c) That language is a product of the individual writer’s mind or free will, meaning that we determine what we say and what we mean when we say it; language thus expresses the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an essential unique individual “self”). d) The self also known as the “subject,” since that’s how we represent the idea of a self in language, by saying I, which the subject of a sentence or the individual (or the mind or the free will) is the centre of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and truth is what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own individual experiences and need for individual expression.
THE STURTURALIST MODEL ARGUES: a) That the structure of language itself produces “reality” that we can think only through language and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by determined by the structure of language. b) That the language speaks us; that the source of meaning is not an individual experience or being, but sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language. Meaning doesn’t come from individuals, but from the system that governs what any individual can do with it. c) Rather than seeing the individual as the centre of meaning, structuralism places the structure of the centre—it’s the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Language in particular is the centre of self and meaning; I can only say “I” because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by the first personal pronoun hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I occupy.
This is also where deconstruction starts to come in. the leading figure in deconstruction, Jacques
Derrida, looks at philosophy (western metaphysics) to see that any system necessarily posits a centre, a point from which everything comes, and to which everything refers or returns. Sometimes it’s God, sometimes it’s the human self, the mind, sometime it’s the unconscious, depending on what philosophical system (or set or beliefs) one is talking about.
There are two key points to the idea of deconstruction. First is that we’re still going to look at system or structures, rather than at individual concrete practise, and that all systems or structures have a centre, the point of origin, the thing that created the system in the first place. Second is that all systems or structures are created of binary pairs or oppositions, of two terms placed in some sort of relation to the other.

Derrida says that such system are always built of the basic units structuralism analyses the binary opposition or pair, and that within these systems one part of that binary pair is always more important than the other, that one term is “marked” as positive and the other as negative. Hence in the binary pair good/evil, good is what Western Philosophy values and evil is subordinated to good.
Derrida argues that all binary pairs work this way: light/dark, masculine/feminine, right/left; in
Western culture, the first term is always valued over the second.
In his most famous work, of Grammatology, Derrida looks particularly at the opposition speech/writing, saying that speech is always seen as more important than writing. This may not be as self-evident as the example of good/evil, but it’s true in term of linguistic theories, where speech is posited as the first or primary form of language, and writing is just the transcription of speech.
Derrida says speech gets privileged because speech is associated with presence—for there to be spoken language, somebody has to be there to be speaking.
No. he doesn’t take into account tape recording and things like that. Remember s, a lot of what these guys are talking about has roots I philosophic and linguistic traditions that predate modern technology so that Derrida is responding to an opposition (speech/writing) that Plato set up, long before there were tape recorded. Just like poor old Levi-Strauss talks about how, in order to map all the dimension of a myth. He’d have to have “punch cards and an IBM machine,” when all he’d need now is a home computer.
Anyway, the idea is that the spoken word guarantees the existence of some body doing the speaking—thus it reinforces all those great humanist ideas, like that there’s a real self that is the origin of what’s being said. Derrida calls this idea of the self that has to be there to speak part part of metaphysics of presence; the idea of being, or presence, is central to all systems of Western philosophy, from Plato through Descartes (up to Derrida himself). Presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always favoured over absence. Speech gets associated with presence, and both are favoured over writing and absence; this privileging of speech and presence is what Derrida calls LOGOCENTRISM.
You might think here about the biblical phrase “let there be light” as an example. The statement insures that there is a God (the things doing the speaking), and that God is presence (because speech=presence); the present God is the origin of all things (because with light/dark). You might also think about other binary oppositions or pairs, including being/nothingness, reason/madness, word/silence, culture/nature, mind /body. Each term has meaning only in reference to the other
(light is what is not dark, and vice-versa), just as, in Saussure’s view signifiers only have meaning or negative value in relation to other signifiers. These binary pairs are the “structure,” or fundamental opposing ideas, that Derrida is concerned with in Western philosophy.
Because of the favouring of presence over absence, speech is favoured over writing (and, as we’ll see with Freud, masculine is favoured over feminine because the penis is defined as a presence, whereas the female genitals are defined as absence).
It is because of this favouring of presence over absence that every system (I’m referring here mostly to philosophical systems, but the idea works for signifying systems as well) posits a centre, a place from which whole system comes, and which guarantees its meaning—this centre guarantees being are presence. Think of your entire self as kind of system—everything you do, think, feel, etc. is part

of that system. At the core of centre of your mental and physical life is a notion of self, of an “I”, of an identity that is stable and unified and coherent, the part of you that knows who you mean when you say “I”. This core self or “I” is thus the centre of the “system”, the “langue” of your being, and every other part of you (each individual act) is part of the “parole”. The “I” is the origin of all you say and do, and it guarantees the idea of your presence, your being.
Western though has a whole bunch of terms that serve as centres to systems being, essence, substance, truth, form, consciousness, man, god, etc. what Derrida tells us is that each of these terms designating the centre of a system serves two purpose: a) It’s the thing that created the system, that originated it and guarantees that all the parts of the system interrelate and b) It’s also something beyond the system, not governed by the rules of the system.
What Derrida does is to look at how a binary opposition—the fundamental unit of the structures or systems we’ve been looking at, and of the philosophical systems he refers to function within a system. He points out that a binary opposition is algebraic (a=~B, a equals not- b), and that two terms can’t exist without reference to the other—light (as presence) is defined as the absence of the darkness, goodness the absence of evil, etc. he doesn’t seek to reverse the hierarchies implied in binary pairs—to make evil favoured over good, unconscious over consciousness, feminine over masculine. Rather, deconstruction wants to erase the boundaries (the slash) between opposition, hence to show that the values and order implied by the opposition are also not rigid.
Here’s the basic method of deconstruction: find a binary opposition. Show how each term, rather than being polar opposite of its paired term, is actually part of it. Then the structure or opposition which kept them apart collapses, as we see with the terms nature and culture in Derrida’s essay.
Ultimately, you can’t tell which is which, and the idea of binary opposites loses meaning, or is put into “play” (more on this in the next lecture). This method is called “deconstruction” because it is a combination of construction/destruction—the idea is that you don’t simply construct new system of binaries, with the previously subordinated term on top, nor do you destroy the old system—rather, you deconstruct the old system by showing how its basic units of structuration (binary pairs and the rules for their combination) contradict their own logic.
In sum, the theoretical approaches in discourse analysis can be located within a view of social reality known as social constructionism. Most histories of discourse analysis focus on three major influences: structural linguistic, speech act theory and ethnomethodology. The structuralism reading ignore the specificity of actual texts and treat them as if they were like the pattern produced by iron fillings moved by magnetic force as the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort. However, some strands of discourse analysis are strongly influenced by POST-
STRUCTURALIST. The generic name for knowledge that is (nothing but) language is discourse.
Postmodernism, like modernism, follow most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low form of art, rejecting rigid genre distinction, emphasising pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness.

ABJECTION— An abjection denotes a situation or a quality which is not positive or something bad.
CASTRATION— Castration means to remove something from its original parts.
ENLIGHTENMENTS—The term characterizes a reliance on reasons and experience rather dogma and tradition.
EPISTEME—Having to do with knowledge or act knowing.
EPISTEMOLOGY—to understand, to believe in something.
HERESY—heresy is belief or action that most people think is wrong because it disagree with beliefe that are generally accepted.
LANGUE—language is the knowledge of a language that are possesses.
MANIFEST—if you say something is manifest you mean that it is clearly true and that nobody would disagree with it if they saw it or considered it.
MEDIATISE—if something mediatise a particular process or event, it allows that process or event to happen and influences the way in which it happen.
MODERNISM—modernism was a movement in the arts in the first half of twentieth century that rejected traditional values and technique and emphasized the importance of individual experience.
NOSTALGIA—nostalgia is an affection feeling one has for the past especially for a particular happy or memorable time.
PAROLE—parole is the actual production of the language that one delivers and made understood by the listener.
POSTMODERN—postmodernism is a movement in the arts that exist preceding the modernism period.
PSYCHOTIC—having the nature of something, that is, possessing a major mental disorder in which
personality is seriously disorganized and contact with reality us usually impaired.
RENAISSANCE—a period of revival in the art, literature and learning.

TEST 1
DO YOU THINK THERE IS SOME KIND OF A ‘RENAISSANCE’ IN THE NATIONAL NATURE AMONG THE
VARIOUS ETHNIC GROUPS IN MALAYSIA? WHAT AREA SPECIFICALLY DO YOU BELIEVE IT HAPPEN? IT
IS GOOD FOR THE GROUP? WHAT ALTERNATIVE DO THEY HAVE?
TEST 2
HOW DO YOU DISTINGUISH MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE IN BAHASA
MELAYU OR IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?