Discourse

Discourse, a term associated with the linguistic turn in social theory, has come into use as a way of rethinking method and measurement in the social sciences. Discourse, however, should not be confused with ordinary language use in speech, writing, or conversation. Discourse properly refers to the practical use of language (broadly conceived) for the purposes of examining or otherwise criticizing the normal course of actions. Here, actions would include, of course, the action of writing or speaking, as well as political, economic, and social actions. The English language term, discourse, derives from a now obsolete Latin word, [Page 204]discursus, which included among its meanings “running to-and-fro.” When used in social theory, discourse, thereby, might best be restricted to practices of language that run “to-and-fro” with the social actions under consideration; that is, a discursive practice goes forward-and-back over the subjects of social theoretical work.

The classic source of discourse theory is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussure's distinction between speech (la parole) and the whole of language itself (la langue) was of particular importance to later theories of the social semiotics of meanings in all forms of human communication. The basic Saussurian principle is that speech is the practical work whereby the speaker adduces the semantic elements (words and meaningful sounds) from his or her general knowledge of a language (e.g., English) according to applicable grammatical rules. Thus, an utterance is produced by a largely unconscious process of selecting elements from a storehouse of a language's rules and contents.

“I saw a cow.” The utterance communicates because the speaker uses the first-person pronoun, I (while not using some other pronoun, such as the third-person he). The communication process works when those addressed share enough of the socially arbitrary mastery of the English language (la langue) to be able to decode the utterance (la parole) by recognizing the difference between the meaning produced by the firstperson singular, I, linked in the speech chain to a certain pasttense verb, saw, for which the predicate is an arbitrary but common name (or noun) for a reasonably well-known object, cow. The discursive feature of even so simple an utterance is in the practical ability of the speaker and the one addressed to know enough of the rules of speech to make and receive sense. Here, Saussure would seem to have been influenced by Émile Durkheim, in that the social or moral contract of the speech community is fundamental. In this, Saussure's linguistics differs from Noam Chomsky's, where the emphasis is on an innate, deep structural grammar. For Saussure, therefore, discursive competence is fungible in that the communication can work well enough even when the rules are misapplied, as when a child overgeneralizes the rule for regular past tenses, while using an irregular name for the predicate: “Daddy, I see-d a moo-moo.”

The discursive aspect of communication is itself important to critical social theory in that it is always possible for speakers to master the vocabularies and grammars to such a degree that they can talk about and refer to the rules themselves in order to reformulate the language for special (including politically radical) situations, as in a metaphoric denunciation: “The President of the Republic is a fat cow.” Such an utterance “to's-and-fro's” with ordinary language in potentially powerful or dangerous ways. The metaphoric cow might be relieved of his power. The metaphor maker (literally, “the poet”) might land in jail, or worse.

...