Real Things: Discourse, Context and Practice

Abstract

Discourse (language organized into sets of texts) and discourses (systems of statements within and through those sets) have a power. To say this is not to attribute agency to a system, but simply to acknowledge constraining and productive forces. There are forces of institutional disadvantage and division, for example, which do not flow from individual intentions, and the phenomena of power and ideology need not be traced to conspiratorial machinations. It would be dangerous to attempt to do so, and the unpleasant consequences particularly difficult to challenge if such investigation proceeded under cover of objective science. Discourse analysis unravels the conceptual elisions and confusions by which language enjoys its power. It is implicit ideology-critique. But there is more than language, and discourse analysis needs attend to the conditions which make the meanings of texts, and the research project which takes them seriously, possible.