Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Law as Social Discourse I

A Topology of Discourse

  • Chapter
Legal Discourse

Part of the book series: Language, Discourse, Society ((LDS))

  • 47 Accesses

Abstract

The project of delineating and presenting a concept of legal discourse or materialist rhetoric of law, as an alternative form, or political instrument for the analysis of legal relations, raises a series of problems. Not least the concept of discourse itself, and the various contemporary interdisciplinary uses of a method of discourse analysis as the appropriate tool of critical theory have lent the term a certain fashionable if diffuse currency. The invocation of, or recourse to, the terminology of discourse or of discourse analysis, however, is unfortunately considerably more frequent than any systematic or indeed coherent examination of the requisite methodology or critical limitation of the concept itself. In the broadest and loosest of terms, the concept of discourse can be applied to any sequence of utterances at the level of the sentence or above.1 In potential it thus ranges in scope from the seemingly universal problems of the structural features of culture, communication and ideology as the intrinsic problems of the theory of discourse, right the way down to the minute questions of the syntactic and semantic analysis of the specific, historically singular, text or utterance, studied in discourse analysis.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 49.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes and References

  1. For a broad and highly stimulating account, there is the incomparable work of M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) passim.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Specifically on writing and power, cf. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) part I

    Google Scholar 

  3. W. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  4. G. Gillan, From Sign to Symbol (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982) chapters 2 and 4

    Google Scholar 

  5. V. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Academic Press, 1973) pp. 65–82

    Google Scholar 

  6. J. Derrida, ‘Scribble (writing-power)’ (1979) 58, Yale French Studies, 116; and finally

    Google Scholar 

  7. J. Kristeva, in S. Heath and C. Prendergast (eds), Signs of the Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)

    Google Scholar 

  8. It is the truth value of the text that makes the written word sacred and removed as the ultimate justification of political will from Plato, [Collected Works (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963) Republic, VI, 493 et seq.,] onwards.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Cf. ante chapter 3–5, or for a synoptic account P. Goodrich, ‘Linguistics and Legal Analysis’ (1984) 47, Modern Law Review, 523.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. For a useful discussion of conceptions of methodology, cf. P. McHugh et al. (eds), On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) pp. 21–47.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Comparable arguments may be found in T. Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983) pp. 194–217

    Google Scholar 

  12. J. Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) chapter 1

    Google Scholar 

  13. See also M. Riffaterre (ed.), Languages of Knowledge and of Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

    Google Scholar 

  14. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishing, 1964) pp. 541–2.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Such I take to be one of the few points well made in D. Silverman and B. Torode, The Material Word (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) pp. 6–8.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cf. D. McBarnet, ‘Legal Form and Legal Mystification’ (1982) 10, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 409, p. 415; a similar point is made in terms of the ‘inadequacy’ of the categories of judicial justificatory argument in

    Google Scholar 

  17. W. T. Murphy and R. W. Rawlings, ‘After the Ancien Regime’ (1981) 44, Modern Law Review, 617, pp. 617–623, and

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. (1982) 45, Modern Law Review, 34, pp. 57–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Aside from general characterisations such as J. G. Griffith, The Politics of the Judiciary, 3rd edn (London: Fontana, 1985) chapter 1 and passim, or

    Google Scholar 

  20. F. Burton and P. Carlen, Official Discourse (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) chapter 3, the most interesting work is historical.

    Google Scholar 

  21. The classic study is D. Hay et al. (eds), Albion’s Fatal Tree (London: Allen Lane, 1978).

    Google Scholar 

  22. See also T. Mathieson, Law, Society and Political Action (London: Academic Press, 1980)

    Google Scholar 

  23. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) or, for a recent study, summarising a considerable amount of empirical work

    Google Scholar 

  24. P. Cameron, and T. S. Midgley, ‘Contract, the Rule of Law and the Liberal-Democratic State’ (1982) 10, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 239

    Google Scholar 

  25. R. M. Unger, ‘The Critical Legal Studies Movement’ (1983) 96, Harvard Law Review, 561, p. 587.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. W. Benjamin, One Way Street (London: New Left Books, 1979) pp. 349–61.

    Google Scholar 

  27. See for example, M. C. Beardsley, ‘Metaphor’ in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) 5, p. 284

    Google Scholar 

  28. M. Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962) or

    Google Scholar 

  29. P. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  30. Cf. for example, R. Barthes, S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975)

    Google Scholar 

  31. J. Lacan, Ecrits (London: Tavistock, 1977)

    Google Scholar 

  32. C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  33. See generally, the remarks made in P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) pp. 66 et seq.

    Google Scholar 

  34. E. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971).

    Google Scholar 

  35. Cf. particularly, M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1982) pp. 5–7, 37–8, 174–5.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Cf. also J. Derrida, Positions (London: Athlone Press, 1981) chapter 2, as well as the earlier discussion and references in chapter 2.

    Google Scholar 

  37. For a fuller discussion of such a theme and its implications, see J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981) chapter 8.

    Google Scholar 

  38. See also U. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984).

    Google Scholar 

  39. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 104.

    Google Scholar 

  40. The most notable later work being E. Benveniste, ‘La forme et le sens dans le langage’, in Le Langage (Paris: Neuchatel, 1967) pp. 27–40, where he develops the useful distinction between ‘semiotics’ as the science of signs, and ‘semantics’, as the analysis of discourse as an independent unity.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 111.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Cf. ‘La forme’, p. 37, and

    Google Scholar 

  43. R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956) pp. 72–7

    Google Scholar 

  44. R. Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ in R. and F. de George, The Structuralists (New York: Anchor, 1972) p. 89

    Google Scholar 

  45. R. Barthes, Elements of Semiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Cf. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 110, where he depicts the three modalities of which the sentence is capable — assertive, interrogative, imperative propositional.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ pp. 85–96, provides a more complex chart of the two axes of language and their corresponding vertical and horizontal functions.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Jakobson, Linguistics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970) p. 458.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Cf. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 10, 58–60

    Google Scholar 

  50. V. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, pp. 17–25

    Google Scholar 

  51. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 262–4

    Google Scholar 

  52. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 112.

    Google Scholar 

  53. A point made dramatistically by L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971) p. 24, ‘Why does philosophy fight over words? The realities of the class struggle are “represented” by “ideas” which are “represented” by words. In scientific and philosophical reasoning, words (concepts, categories) are “instruments” of knowledge. But in political, ideological and philosophical struggle, the words are also weapons, the explosives or tranquilisers and poisons.’

    Google Scholar 

  54. See also Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985).

    Google Scholar 

  55. Cf. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, vol 1, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) parts I and II

    Google Scholar 

  56. P. Gigliopoli, Language and Social Context (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)

    Google Scholar 

  57. M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic (London: Arnold, 1978)

    Google Scholar 

  58. R. Fowler, et al. (eds), Language and Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)

    Google Scholar 

  59. R. Fowler, Literature as Social Discourse (London: Batsford, 1981)

    Google Scholar 

  60. M. Gurevitch et al. (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (London: Methuen, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  61. D. Morley, The Nationwide Audience (London: British Film Institute, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  62. H. Davis and P. Walton, Language, Image, Media (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983)

    Google Scholar 

  63. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 258–442

    Google Scholar 

  64. It is something of a mystery why Pecheux should resolutely ignore all previous attempts to formulate a materialist semantics, cf. P. Goodrich, ‘Materialism and Linguistics’ (1982) 32, Radical Philosophy, 34.

    Google Scholar 

  65. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 259.

    Google Scholar 

  66. V. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 23.

    Google Scholar 

  67. E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977) p. 99, usefully emphasises, ‘ideological “elements” taken in isolation have no necessary class connotation, … that connotation is only the result of the articulation of these elements in a concrete ideological discourse. This means that the precondition for analysing the class nature of an ideology is to conduct the inquiry through that which constitutes the distinctive unity of an ideological discourse.’

    Google Scholar 

  68. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 270.

    Google Scholar 

  69. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 20.

    Google Scholar 

  70. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972)

    Google Scholar 

  71. G. Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980)

    Google Scholar 

  72. D. Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology (London: New Left Books, 1972) pp. 187–214

    Google Scholar 

  73. J. Kristeva, La Revolution du Langage Poetique (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1974)

    Google Scholar 

  74. V. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language p 21.

    Google Scholar 

  75. ‘It is as though each text has entered a secret pact with the social institution in whose name it speaks’, J. Lenoble et F. Ost, Droit, Mythe et Raison (Bruxelles: Facultes Universitaire Saint-Louis, 1980) p. 83.

    Google Scholar 

  76. M. Pecheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 111.

    Google Scholar 

  77. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 50–1.

    Google Scholar 

  78. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, pp. 78–80

    Google Scholar 

  79. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 23–7.

    Google Scholar 

  80. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 116.

    Google Scholar 

  81. R. Fowler, Literature as Social Discourse, chapter 4, especially pp. 64–76.

    Google Scholar 

  82. T. A. van Dijk, Some Aspects of Text Grammar (The Hague: Mouton, 1972) pp. 1–12, 26–33.

    Google Scholar 

  83. Additionally, cf. R. Hasson, Grammatical Cohesion in Spoken English (London: Longmans, 1968); and more generally

    Google Scholar 

  84. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, pp. 117–18.

    Google Scholar 

  85. Cf. O. Ducrot, and T. Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981) pp. 281–5

    Google Scholar 

  86. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, pp. 38–40,116–20.

    Google Scholar 

  87. R. Fowler, Literature as Social Discourse, p. 67.

    Google Scholar 

  88. See the synoptic account and bibliography in R. Coward and J. Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) chapters 6 and 7.

    Google Scholar 

  89. The distinction between discursive and referential axes is taken from C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, pp. 183–91.

    Google Scholar 

  90. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 83.

    Google Scholar 

  91. See M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, pp. 50–1, 57–8.

    Google Scholar 

  92. Cf. G. Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, pp. 81–7

    Google Scholar 

  93. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 113.

    Google Scholar 

  94. G. Rose, Hegel contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981) p. 32.

    Google Scholar 

  95. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 276

    Google Scholar 

  96. T. Eagleton, ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’ (1982) 135, New Left Review, 64

    Google Scholar 

  97. To the works already cited I would add reference to F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981) and to

    Google Scholar 

  98. J. Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) chapter 3 and bibliography

    Google Scholar 

  99. The relevant texts on this point are L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 121–73

    Google Scholar 

  100. L. Althusser, Essays in Self Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976) pp. 33–9; to which may be added the useful discussions in

    Google Scholar 

  101. J. Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979) pp. 154–64 and passim.

    Google Scholar 

  102. L. Althusser, Essays in Self Criticism, p. 95.

    Google Scholar 

  103. M. Pecheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 114.

    Google Scholar 

  104. Cf. J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1977) p. 188.

    Google Scholar 

  105. For a comparable discussion, cf. J. Derrida, Positions, pp. 17–36.

    Google Scholar 

  106. Cf. J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) and the various later elaborations within the philosophy of language do of course distinguish the phases of intention and reception (for instance, utterer’s meaning, meaning of the ‘uttering’ and utterance meaning) but the distinctions are analytic and certainly yield no ground to any concept of the historicity of the utterance.

    Google Scholar 

  107. See particularly P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 174–85

    Google Scholar 

  108. C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, pp. 174–93.

    Google Scholar 

  109. Cf. particularly V. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, pp. 23–5, 77–83

    Google Scholar 

  110. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 271–3, 288, 305–7,367

    Google Scholar 

  111. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, pp. 110–29

    Google Scholar 

  112. For a general overview, cf. M. Gurevitch et al. (eds), Culture, Society and the Media, chapter 3, especially pp. 69–88.

    Google Scholar 

  113. V. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 23.

    Google Scholar 

  114. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 278ff.

    Google Scholar 

  115. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 279–80.

    Google Scholar 

  116. M. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, p. 121.

    Google Scholar 

  117. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 401.

    Google Scholar 

  118. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980) p. 131.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    Peter Goodrich (Lecturer in Law)

Authors
  1. Peter Goodrich
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 1987 Peter Goodrich

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Goodrich, P. (1987). Law as Social Discourse I. In: Legal Discourse. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11283-8_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation