Page 88 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

DISCOURSE

DISCOURSE

A term nowquite widely used in a number of different disciplines and
schools of thought, often with different purposes. Most uncontrover-
sially, it is used in linguistics to refer to verbal utterances of greater
magnitude than the sentence. Discourse analysis is concerned not only
with complex utterances by one speaker, but more frequently with the
turn-taking interaction between two or more, and with the linguistic
rules and conventions that are taken to be in play and governing such
discourses in their given context.
However, the concept of discourse has also developed, separately,
out of post-structuralism and semiotics. Here it really represents an
attempt to fix, within one term, some of the theoretical ground gained
in the early days of the structuralist enterprise. To grasp its significance
you have to remember that in this early period structuralism/semiotics
was above all an oppositional intellectual force, whose proponents
were attempting to criticise and transform the inherited habits of
thought and analysis about the question of where meaning comes
from. Traditionally, and even nowmost ‘obviously’, meaning was
ascribed to objects ‘out there’ in the world, and to the inner essences
and feelings of individuals. Structuralism took issue with these ideas,
insisting that meaning is an effect of signification, and that signification
is a property not of the world out there nor of individual people, but of
language. It follows that both the world out there and individual
consciousness are themselves comprehensible only as products, not
sources, of language/signification. But the problem with this conclusion
is that it is too free-floating and abstract; it gives the impression that –
not only in principle but also in practice – the world and the word can
mean whatever we like.
Life isn’t so simple. The abstract concept of ‘language’ proved
inadequate to account for the historical, political and cultural ‘fixing’
of certain meanings, and their constant reproduction and circulation
via established kinds of speech, forms of representation, and in
particular institutional settings. This is the point at which the concept
of discourse began to supplant the nowimprecise notion of ‘language’.
Unlike ‘language’, the term discourse itself is both a noun and a verb.
Thus it is easier to retain the sense of discourse as an act, where the
noun ‘language’ often seems to refer to a thing. In its established
usages, discourse referred both to the interactive process and the end
result of thought and communication. Discourse is the social process
of making and reproducing sense(s).

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