Discourse
Other senses of ‘discourse’
• Descartes: Discourse on Method; Rousseau:
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality; Hume:
Discourse on Natural Religion
• story/discourse (histoire/discours,
fabula/sjuzet)
• ‘discourse’ in linguistics (Discourse Analysis,
DA)
Michel Foucault (1926-84)
The Archeology of
Knowledge;
The Order of Things;
The History of Sexuality
Discipline and Punish
The Birth of the Clinic
Madness and Civilisation
Discourse in and after Foucault
Language:
• - set of elements and their connections
• - system of communication
• - semiotic system
• Language as discourse (or as sg implicated in
discourses)
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Language as discourse
• Linked to the ‘cultural turn’ in criticism and
theory
• Sociocultural activity
• discourse – discourses
Language as discourse
• statement – utterance (enunciation)
• “A statement is always an event that neither
the language (langue) nor the meaning can
quite exhaust.”
Language as discourse
• Not simply ‘what’ is said:
• The system that makes things sayable and
unsayable
• (a régime of language use)
• Situated in the configuration of TRUTH,
POWER and KNOWLEDGE
Truth, power, knowledge
(1) truth: not adequation, correspondence, but
a discursive effect
(2) power: capillary
- not just repressive/prohibitive but productive;
- subjection
(3) knowledge: effect of power
TRUTH
• Truth as adequation/correspondance; truth as
revelation
• Truth as a discursive effect
• (e.g. ‘hard sciences’)
• ‘history’ as ‘true’ (Herodotus)
• ‘news’ in the 17th century
POWER
• (1) Capillary (dispersed; a wide range of
practices)
• (2) not just ‘repressive’ (a set of ‘Don’t’s,
‘No’s) but productive
• (it produces the subject)
KNOWLEDGE
• ‘knowledge is power’
• Effect of power: knowledge produced as its
objects are constituted
• (e.g. tons of knowledge on women, nothing
on men)
• Discourse: “a regulated practice that accounts for a
number of statements”, a régime
• Hayden White: discourse constitutes “the ground
whereon to decide what shall count as a fact in the
matters under consideration and to determine what
mode of comprehension is best suited to the
understanding of the facts thus constituted”
Constituting objects of knowledge
• ʻHow is it that a particular object of
knowledge appears (rather than other
objects)?’
• speaker’s intention – speaker’s position
• Discourse: “practices which systematically
form the objects of which they speak”
Discursive objects
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mental illness
sexuality
madness
the East (the Orient)
the child
literature
popular culture
history
• These objects have no
unchanging, hidden
content which is then
described
Emergence of a discursive object
• E.g. psychiatry in late 19th century
• Contexts: discourses of family, sexuality,
criminality, medicine, gender
Edward Said: Orientalism
• Discourse: includes texts, images, narratives,
practices, technologies, institutions
• Scholarly books, travelogues, painting, fiction,
legislation, tourist guidebooks, photography,
films
• Not ‘referential’
• Delimitation of the field
• Discourse ≠ theory
• Orientalism as (a) discourse (Said): 1. “a way of coming to
terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special
place in European Western experience”; --- 2. “a style of
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time)
‘the Occident’” --- 3. “a corporate institution for dealing with
the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it,
ruling over it; in short, orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restucturing, and having authority over the
Orient”
• Said: “Orientalism responded more to the
culture that produced it than to its putative
object, which was also produced by the West.
Thus the history of Orientalism has both an
internal consistency and a highly articulated
set of relationships to the dominant culture
surrounding it”
Gêrome:
Turkish
Bath or
Moorish
Bath
(1870)
Henry Siddons Mowbray: The Harem
Louis Comfort Tiffany: Market Day
Outside the Walls of Tangier, 1873
Maurice
Vidal
Portman:
„Burko”
‘literature’ as discourse
Literature as an object of discourse – literature
as discursive practice
(not a ‘natural’ category of texts)
Texts designated, separated, enshrined
• circulation (commentary, academic discipline)
‘literature’ as discourse
The discursive field of literature (lit. studies)
produces objects:
- the genre
- the book
- the oeuvre (proper name)
- Coherent expression of an individual
imagination (letters, diaries etc)
- the author (author function)
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)
• Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics
• The Dialogic
Imagination
• Rabelais and His World
• Speech Genres
slovo (‘word’)
• Sy’s word(s),
• sy’s speech,
• a mode of speech,
• a genre
Language in its concrete, living totality
(unique, unrepeatable utterances, verbal acts)
Dialogicity
„the word is born in a dialogue as a living
rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in
dialogic interaction with an alien word that is
already in the object”
• Vocative (vocativus) – language always
addressed to sy
• No ‘neutral’ words: shot through with others’
intentions; others speak through us
Heteroglossia (raznorećie)
• „Every word gives off the scent of a profession, a
genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a
particular man, a generation, an era, a day, and an
hour. Every word smells of the contexts in which it
has lived its intense social life; all words and all forms
are inhabited by intentions” (intertextuality)
• Centripetal and centrifugal forces in language
• Shared coding system – multiplicity of ‘languages’,
idioms
• In every utterance: tension between the two
• E.g. discourse ‘about’ other discourse
• (quotation, paraphrase, reference)
• Bakhtin’s interest: literature that is aware of
all this: the NOVEL
• (first theoretical system of literature based on
the novel – rather than poetry or drama or
epic)
• The novel thrives on heteroglossia and
dialogicity
• Poetry: monological
The poliphonic novel
• The word represents and is the object of
representation
• the novel offers ‘an image of language’
Poliphonic novel
• „a plurality of independent and unmerged
voices and consciousnesses, a genuine
polyphony of fully valid voices”
Three kinds of ‘slovo’
(1) Voices of characters,
(2) non-literary discourses,
(3) Literary discourses
• “Indeed I have little doubt,” said Flora, running on
with astonishing speed, and pointing her
conversation with nothing but commas, and very few
of them, “that you are married to some Chinese lady,
being in China so long and being in business and
naturally desirous to settle and extend your
connexion nothing was more likely than that you
should propose to a Chinese lady and nothing was
more natural I am sure than that the Chinese lady
should accept you and think herself very well off too,
I only hope she is not a Pagodian dissenter.” (Little
Dorrit, Book I, Ch. 13)
• “The major characteristics discoverable by the
stranger in Mr. F’s Aunt, were extreme severity
and grim taciturnity; sometimes interrupted by
a propensity to offer remarks, in a deep
warning voice, which, being totally uncalled for
by anything said by anybody, and traceable to
no association of ideas, confounded and
terrified the mind. Mr. F’s Aunt may have
thrown in these observations on some system
of her own, and it may have been ingenious, or
even subtle; but the key to it was wanted.”
(Little Dorrit)
• (2) non-literary genres: diary, newspaper
• „it seems as if the novel is denied any primary
means for verbally appropriating reality, that it
has no approach of its own, and therefore
requires the help of other genres to re-process
reality; the novel has the appearance of being
merely a secondary syncretic unification of
other seemingly primary verbal genres
Poliphonic novel
(3) Literary discourses
parody, pastiche, stylisation etc.
„Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel”
(Shklovsky)
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Representations of the other’s voice:
stylisation,
skaz,
parody;
hybridisation