Discourse

1. Discourse

2. Other senses of ‘discourse’ • Descartes: Discourse on Method; Rousseau: Discourse on the Origins of Inequality; Hume: Discourse on Natural Religion • story/discourse (histoire/discours, fabula/sjuzet) • ‘discourse’ in linguistics (Discourse Analysis, DA)

3. Michel Foucault (1926-84) The Archeology of Knowledge; The Order of Things; The History of Sexuality Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Clinic Madness and Civilisation

4. Discourse in and after Foucault Language: • - set of elements and their connections • - system of communication • - semiotic system • Language as discourse (or as sg implicated in discourses)

5. Language as discourse • Linked to the ‘cultural turn’ in criticism and theory • Sociocultural activity • discourse – discourses

6. Language as discourse • statement – utterance (enunciation) • “A statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust.”

7. Language as discourse • Not simply ‘what’ is said: • The system that makes things sayable and unsayable • (a régime of language use) • Situated in the configuration of TRUTH, POWER and KNOWLEDGE

8. Truth, power, knowledge (1) truth: not adequation, correspondence, but a discursive effect (2) power: capillary • not just repressive/prohibitive but productive; • subjection (3) knowledge: effect of power

9. TRUTH • Truth as adequation/correspondance; truth as revelation • Truth as a discursive effect • (e.g. ‘hard sciences’) • ‘history’ as ‘true’ (Herodotus) • ‘news’ in the 17th century

10. POWER • (1) Capillary (dispersed; a wide range of practices) • (2) not just ‘repressive’ (a set of ‘Don’t’s, ‘No’s) but productive • (it produces the subject)

11. KNOWLEDGE • ‘knowledge is power’ • Effect of power: knowledge produced as its objects are constituted • (e.g. tons of knowledge on women, nothing on men)

12. Discourse: “a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements”, a régime • Hayden White: discourse constitutes “the ground whereon to decide what shall count as a fact in the matters under consideration and to determine what mode of comprehension is best suited to the understanding of the facts thus constituted”

13. Constituting objects of knowledge • ʻHow is it that a particular object of knowledge appears (rather than other objects)?’ • speaker’s intention – speaker’s position • Discourse: “practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak”

14. Discursive objects • mental illness • sexuality • madness • the East (the Orient) • the child • literature • popular culture • history • These objects have no unchanging, hidden content which is then described

15. Emergence of a discursive object • E.g. psychiatry in late 19th century • Contexts: discourses of family, sexuality, criminality, medicine, gender

16. Edward Said: Orientalism • Discourse: includes texts, images, narratives, practices, technologies, institutions • Scholarly books, travelogues, painting, fiction, legislation, tourist guidebooks, photography, films • Not ‘referential’ • Delimitation of the field • Discourse ≠ theory

17. Orientalism as (a) discourse (Said): 1. “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience”; --- 2. “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” --- 3. “a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restucturing, and having authority over the Orient”

18. Said: “Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it”

19. Gêrome: Turkish Bath or Moorish Bath (1870)

20. Henry Siddons Mowbray: The Harem

21. Louis Comfort Tiffany: Market Day Outside the Walls of Tangier, 1873

22. Maurice Vidal Portman: „Burko”

23. ‘literature’ as discourse Literature as an object of discourse – literature as discursive practice (not a ‘natural’ category of texts) Texts designated, separated, enshrined • circulation (commentary, academic discipline)

24. ‘literature’ as discourse The discursive field of literature (lit. studies) produces objects: - the genre • the book • the oeuvre (proper name) • Coherent expression of an individual imagination (letters, diaries etc) - the author (author function)

25. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) • Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics • The Dialogic Imagination • Rabelais and His World • Speech Genres

26. slovo (‘word’) • Sy’s word(s), • sy’s speech, • a mode of speech, • a genre Language in its concrete, living totality (unique, unrepeatable utterances, verbal acts)

27. Dialogicity „the word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object” • Vocative (vocativus) – language always addressed to sy • No ‘neutral’ words: shot through with others’ intentions; others speak through us

28. Heteroglossia (raznorećie) • „Every word gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular man, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the contexts in which it has lived its intense social life; all words and all forms are inhabited by intentions” (intertextuality) • Centripetal and centrifugal forces in language • Shared coding system – multiplicity of ‘languages’, idioms • In every utterance: tension between the two

29. E.g. discourse ‘about’ other discourse • (quotation, paraphrase, reference)

30. Bakhtin’s interest: literature that is aware of all this: the NOVEL • (first theoretical system of literature based on the novel – rather than poetry or drama or epic) • The novel thrives on heteroglossia and dialogicity • Poetry: monological

31. The poliphonic novel • The word represents and is the object of representation • the novel offers ‘an image of language’

32. Poliphonic novel • „a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” Three kinds of ‘slovo’ (1) Voices of characters, (2) non-literary discourses, (3) Literary discourses

33. “Indeed I have little doubt,” said Flora, running on with astonishing speed, and pointing her conversation with nothing but commas, and very few of them, “that you are married to some Chinese lady, being in China so long and being in business and naturally desirous to settle and extend your connexion nothing was more likely than that you should propose to a Chinese lady and nothing was more natural I am sure than that the Chinese lady should accept you and think herself very well off too, I only hope she is not a Pagodian dissenter.” (Little Dorrit, Book I, Ch. 13)

34. “The major characteristics discoverable by the stranger in Mr. F’s Aunt, were extreme severity and grim taciturnity; sometimes interrupted by a propensity to offer remarks, in a deep warning voice, which, being totally uncalled for by anything said by anybody, and traceable to no association of ideas, confounded and terrified the mind. Mr. F’s Aunt may have thrown in these observations on some system of her own, and it may have been ingenious, or even subtle; but the key to it was wanted.” (Little Dorrit)

35. (2) non-literary genres: diary, newspaper • „it seems as if the novel is denied any primary means for verbally appropriating reality, that it has no approach of its own, and therefore requires the help of other genres to re-process reality; the novel has the appearance of being merely a secondary syncretic unification of other seemingly primary verbal genres

36. Poliphonic novel (3) Literary discourses parody, pastiche, stylisation etc. „Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel” (Shklovsky)

37. Representations of the other’s voice: • stylisation, • skaz, • parody; • hybridisation