ABSTRACT
During the 1980s a pervasive new intellectual tide ran through the humanities and social science disciplines. Closely related linguistic and cultural ‘turns’ drawing inspiration from trends in European and analytical philosophy as well as literary criticism called into question basic assumptions of the prevailing materialist and realist traditions in sociology and political science in particular. Where these traditions researched large-scale and long-term social processes, critically exploring relations of power and inequality, the implications of the new discursive approaches were at their most challenging. Radical critiques of the existing order of things appeared to claim objectivity, both for their research findings and for their underlying ethical standpoint. How could this ‘privileging’ be justified? Where was the Archimedean point from which to decide between rival accounts of a supposed ‘reality’ external to discourse. Were not all accounts simply that – accounts, narratives, discursive constructs? Lacking direct or authoritative access to ‘the real’, analysis of discursive constructs must take its place. The world, including the social world, is relegated to the status of an unknowable noumenal realm, or, in more provocative rhetorics, disappears entirely into its discursive ‘representations’.
