ABSTRACT
There is no single meaning to the word discourse, even if one takes it in a technical sense. Of course, a ‘discourse’ can mean simply a dialogue between speakers; but it has also come, within linguistics for instance, to mean the way in which linguistic elements are conjoined so as to constitute a structure of meaning larger than the sum of its parts. A variant on this sense is also, however, present within conceptions of discourse important to cultural studies. Of the various theories that have been put forward, the conceptions of discourse present within the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard are relevant to cultural theory. On Foucault’s view, various social practices and institutions (for
example, those of education and politics, religion and the law) are both constituted by and situated within forms of discourse (that is, ways of speaking about the world of social experience). A discourse, on this view, is a means of both producing and organising meaning within a social context. Language is thus a key notion within this view, for it is language which embodies discourses. As such, a discourse constitutes a ‘discursive formation’, i.e. discourses are conceived of as signifying ways of systematically organising human experience of the social world in language and thereby constituting modes of knowledge. A key function of a discursive formation, on this view, is not merely its inclusive role but also its exclusive role: discursive formations provide rules of justification for what counts as (for example) knowledge within a particular context, and at the same time stipulate what does not count as knowledge in that context. On Foucault’s account, it follows that the realm of discourse can have a repressive function. Accompanying this notion of discourse is the contention that such concepts as subjectivity cannot be understood as they have generally been within, say, the political tradition of liberalism. Whereas, for a liberal, a subject is a more or less unproblematic political entity, from the viewpoint of Foucaultean discourse analysis, subjectivity itself must be constituted by discourse, and hence language. It should be added that if this is the case, then it seems strange to seek to characterise any form of discourse as being ‘repressive’, for if there is no subject that is not constituted by discourse, then one is entitled to ask about who or what is being ‘repressed’. Lyotard’s notion of ‘genres of discourse’ (see The Differend: Phrases
in Dispute (1983)) has some similarities with Foucault’s conception of
discursive formations. However, Lyotard came to propound his views in the light of reading a range of texts from the tradition of analytic philosophy (e.g. late as well as early Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke) as well as writers from the tradition of continental philosophy. Lyotard’s notion represents a cross-fertilisation between these two traditions. From the analytics he takes such notions as that of ‘rigid designation’, which is a term used to describe the function of proper names (this is derived from Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1980). Thus Kripke argues that a proper name-note that in his view, even ‘gold’ counts as a proper name in this sensehas as its function the role of fixing and thereby stipulating the same entity in any number of possible worlds, achieved through an act of ‘initial baptism’; in analytic philosophy this has led to the adoption by some of a posteriori essentialism), and Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘language games’. From the continental tradition, Lyotard takes some of the basic postulates of post-structuralism (for instance, the view that the meaning of a term like subjectivity is constituted with language). A (genre of) discourse, on Lyotard’s account, is a way of organising reality according to a particular set of rules. These rules tell us how to link together the basic units of language (‘phrases’). On this view, genres of discourse have the following distinguishing features: (i) as already mentioned, providing the rules of justification whereby phrases can be linked; and (ii) the stipulation of purposesi.e. one only links phrases with a view to some particular goal or other. A Lyotardean view, therefore, takes discourse as being fundamental in organising meaning, although the basic linguistic units of language are not of themselves ‘discursive’ in nature (a phrase must be ‘seized’ by a genre of discourse in order to be codified and thus given a particular meaning). What is common to conceptions of discourse in the work of fig-
ures like Foucault and Lyotard is the notion that language, understood as discourse, is primary when it comes to the issue of how we are to understand questions of culture and society. Moreover, a rational account of social structures is held to be problematised by this approach. Thus, on a Lyotardean view, the plurality of genres of discourse functions to prevent the assertion of any single genre’s primacy with regard to establishing what ought to count as truesince all genres are organised according to particular purposes and there are a multiplicity of purposes, it follows that no single genre could be said to be adequate to the task of establishing a meta-narrative for this purpose. Forms of this attitude have been criticised by Ju¨rgen Habermas, whose approach is markedly different. For Habermas,
discourse can be interpreted in terms of its possibility to take on the form of a regulative ideal (an ‘ideal speech situation’), which would serve to preserve a critical space for thought which is not subject to the contextualised pressures of particularised interests or power.
