Page 89 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

DISCOURSE

Once taken up by structuralism, largely through the writings of
Michel Foucault (see power), the concept of discourse proved useful
to represent both a very general theoretical notion and numbers of
specific discourses.
The general theoretical notion is that while meaning can be
generated only from the langue or abstract system of language, and
while we can apprehend the world only through language systems, the
fact remains that the resources of language-in-general are and always
have been subject to the historical developments and conflicts of social
relations in general. In short, although langue may be abstract,
meaning never is. Discourses are the product of social, historical and
institutional formations, and meanings are produced by these
institutionalised discourses. It follows that the potentially infinite
senses any language system is capable of producing are always limited
and fixed by the structure of social relations which prevails in a given
time and place, and which is itself represented through various
discourses.
Thus individuals don’t simply learn languages as abstract skills. On
the contrary, everyone is predated by established discourses in which
various subjectivities are represented already – for instance, those of
class, gender, nation, ethnicity, age, family and individuality. We
establish and experience our own individuality by ‘inhabiting’
numbers of such discursive subjectivities (some of which confirm
each other; others, however, coexist far from peacefully). The theory
of discourse proposes that individuality itself is the site, as it were, on
which socially produced and historically established discourses are
reproduced and regulated.
Once the general theoretical notion of discourse has been achieved,
attention turns to specific discourses in which socially established sense is
encountered and contested. These range from media discourses such as
television and news, to institutionalised discourses such as medicine,
literature and science. Discourses are structured and inter-related;
some are more prestigious, legitimated and hence ‘more obvious’ than
others, while there are discourses that have an uphill struggle to win
any recognition at all. Thus discourses are power relations. It follows
that much of the social sense-making we are subjected to – in the
media, at school, in conversation – is the working through of an
ideological struggle between discourses: a good contemporary
example is that between the discourses of (legitimated, naturalised)
patriarchy and (emergent, marginalised) feminism. Textual analysis can
be employed to followthe moves in this struggle, by showing how

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