магистрант Муратбекова И.Н.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

To the Theory of Discourse Practices

It is the relationship of words (or signs) and the way we distinguish one from another that is an important and constitutive element of the social construction of meaning. This process comes rather natural in our everyday lives as we are trained to pick up meanings this way, decode them, internalize them and even reuse them later ourselves. Similarly, if we do not know a word for a particular thing we try to find it out by asking questions and describing it using its features and likeness to other things we are familiar with.

Perhaps to make the world around us easier to understand, many words come in pairs of opposing meanings, but those binary oppositions like for instance good/evil, developed/third world or freedom/oppression carry a lot of meanings and connotations, legitimize some practices while discouraging others and establish the distribution of power in the system by establishing their hierarchy and linking them with existing sets of ideas. Those oppositions define words and concepts not only as what they are but they also provide an important distinction of what they are not.

While this process of encoding and decoding of meanings is natural to us - or likely because of that - we often struggle while trying to identify patterns and untangle the net of meanings to see through those complex constructs. Yet it is vital to decode language properly to see the relationship and distribution of power in society and international system.

De Saussure is credited with proposing a dualistic notion of signs, where our internal understanding of the signified is related to us through a signifier (e.g. a word we hear, or a photo we see). Continuing the semiotics project, Barthes developed another level of analysis of the relationship between the signifier and the signified through his critique of bourgeois society of mid-20^th century France. He proposed a second order of semiological analysis where he distinguished connotations and myths, which give signs an individual and social dimension. Myth here is not intended to mean legend or something negative or unreal, but a culturally shared and constructed narrative. Thanks to those shared ideas and stories about otherwise quite complex constructs, we keep a common understanding of social reality those concepts, generally from linguistics, combined with social constructionism paved the way for poststructuralist thinking and discourse analysis. This is sometimes referred to as the Linguistic turn in social sciences. Postmodernists Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida loosely built on this tradition in establishing discourse analysis and the role of ideology and hegemony in construction of meaning. For Foucault it is discourse, rather than language, that is the preferred system of representation. Discourse is a set of statements representing knowledge about a particular topic at some point in time.

Poststructuralist like Derrida also extended binary oppositions to not only define a word as what it is not (as did de Saussure and his followers) but to claim that the Western tradition of thought has been entirely structured and based in binary oppositions, creating order and hierarchy - the second term in each pair is considered undesirable, negative or deviant. [Zehfuss 2002, 197-198] In this sense we can consider democracy/autocracy or even democracy/tyranny as binary oppositions. As we can see, even the choice of the second word in each pair makes for a different reading and both help us shape our understanding of what democracy is (by virtue of what it is not).

Those are the foundational concepts reflected to some degree in various approaches (and there are many) of constructivist theory and discourse analysis. However I'm going to turn now to another outgrowth of this tradition, to discourse theory conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and their later work. I find this theory particularly interesting because for Laclau and Mouffe it is politics which plays the most important part in the way we act, think and organize in a society, therefore building a unique bridge between poststructuralist thinking and politics. Their theory is very political indeed - in fact it is not as much a guidebook on discourse analysis as it is a radical democracy theory - and goes into much detail about identity (and collective identity) construction, which will be particularly useful.

Discourse, here, is understood in a poststructuralist way as any organized system of meaning - a system of mediation between social and physical reality. Signs acquire meaning within discourse, and fixation of meaning inside it is a process of constant struggle and renegotiation. Although the meaning can never be totally fixed, all discourses are formed around what Laclau and Mouffe [2001, 112-113] call a nodal point. Those central points carry very little meaning on their own but provide some sort of stability and structure to the discourse allowing us to inquire into it. To continue our example, democracy can be considered a nodal point of political discourse in the West with other signs ordered around it. [Jorgensen and Phillips 2002, 26]

So discourses are organized around those nodal points but they themselves are subjects of contestation by different discourses in the struggle for hegemony, or in other words, the struggle to become the dominant system of explaining some domain of social reality. In discourse theory they are called floating - or traditionally empty - signifiers, despite the fact that they are far from empty of signified in a literal sense. ttey obtain meaning only by placement in the discourse.

To address frequent ontological objection about discourse analysis, that there sure is an objective reality outside of discourse, and hence not everything can possibly be discourse, I turn to Laclau a Mouffe and their clarification of what they mean by the term. They argue - quite in line with poststructuralist tradition - that objects exist, but they do not posses meaning in themselves, for meaning is something we embed in them though discourse. They illustrate the case on an example of a stone which exists independently of any social structures, but can be a projectile or an object of art based solely on a particular discourse setting. [Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 82] Consequently, it is not the reality outside of the discourse that is the subject of this study, but rather how we articulate it though language and how those articulations reproduce and transform discourses.

Another important aspect of discourse theory especially significant for this thesis deals with the construction of identity and representation. As Weldes contends, the construction of state draws from a wide array of already formed cultural and linguistic frames. Authorized speakers populate the discourse with objects, including identities of both self and others. In other words, the process of the construction of state identity is one, where officials draw from familiar frames and assert characteristics. Similarly to discourse, identities are contingent and constituted for groups with some identifications included and some not, with meaning never totally fixed. Similar observations led Campbell [1998, 12] to assert that states are never finished as entities because their identity can never be fixed, hence they are in constant need of reproduction.

This contingency, or exclusion of other possibilities, is the basis of every kind of social order and it is a context in which hegemony of a particular discourse is achieved. Every order is thus a temporary manifestation of contingent practices. The domination is not naturalized merely by means of power or political violence but by production of meaning as a key instrument of stabilization of power relations. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, hegemony is not “the majestic unfolding of an identity but the response to a crisis.” It is the crisis that gives way to renegotiation of identity and allows other discourses to become hegemonic thus changing the metanarratives that organize society. [Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 7] It is exactly this process of the establishment of a hegemonic discourse in response to crisis and accompanying discursive practices which is the focus of our scientific study.

Bibliography:

1. Zehfuss, M. 2002. 83 Constructivism in international relations: the politics of reality. Cambridge University Press

2. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. Verso Books.

3. Jorgensen, M., and L. J. Phillips. 2002. Discourse analysis as theory and method. Sage Publications Ltd.

4. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1987. “Post-Marxism without apologies.” New Left Review 166(11-12): 79-106.

5. Campbell, D. 1998. Writing security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity. University Of Minnesota Press.