discourse (adjective = discursive) * A term now quite widely used in a number of different disciplines and schools of thought, often with different purposes. Most uncontroversially, it is used in linguistics to refer to verbal utterances of greater magnitude than the sentence. * Discourse analysis is concerned not only with complex utterances by one speaker, but more frequently with the turn-taking interaction between two or more, and with the linguistic rules and conventions that are taken to be in play and governing such discourses in their given context.

However, the concept of discourse has also developed, separately, out of post-structuralism and semiotics. Here it really represents an attempt to fix, within one term, some of the theoretical ground gained in the early days of the structuralist enterprise. To grasp its significance you have to remember that in this early period structuralism/semiotics was above all an oppositional intellectual force, whose proponents were attempting to criticize and transform the inherited habits of thought and analysis about the question of where meaning comes from. Traditionally, and even now most ‘obviously’, meaning was ascribed to objects ‘out there’ in the world, and to the inner essences and feelings of individuals. Structuralism took issue with these ideas, insisting that meaning is an effect of signification, and that signification is a property not of the world out there nor of individual people, but of language. It

follows that both the world out there and individual consciousness are themselves comprehensible only as products, not sources, of language/signification. We are what we say, and the world is what we say it is. But the problem with this conclusion is that it is too free-floating and abstract; it gives the impression that – not only in principle but also in practice – the world and the word can mean whatever we like.

Life isn’t so simple. The abstract concept of ‘language’ proved inadequate to account for the historical, political and cultural ‘fixing’ of certain meanings, and their constant reproduction and circulation via established kinds of speech, forms of representation, and in particular institutional

settings. This is the point at which the concept of discourse began to supplant the now flabby and imprecise notion of ‘language’. Unlike ‘language’, the term discourse itself is both a noun and a verb. So it is easier to retain the sense of discourse as an act, where the noun ‘language’ often seems to

refer to a thing. In its established usages, discourse referred both to the interactive process and the end result of thought and communication. Discourse is the social process of making and reproducing sense(s).

Once taken up by structuralism, largely through the writings of Michel Foucault, the concept of discourse proved useful to represent both a very general theoretical notion and numbers of specific discourses.

The general theoretical notion is that while meaning can be generated only from the langue or abstract system of language, and while we can apprehend the world only through language systems, the fact remains that the resources of language-in-general are and always have been subjected to the historical developments and conflicts of social relations in general. In short, although langue may be abstract, meaning never is. Discourses are the product of social, historical and institutional formations, and meanings are produced by these institutionalized discourses. It follows that the potentially infinite senses any language system is capable of producing are always limited and fixed by the structure of social relations which prevails in a given time and place, and which is itself represented through various discourses.

Thus individuals don’t simply learn languages as abstract skills. On the contrary, everyone is predated by established discourses in which various subjectivities are represented already – for instance, those of class, gender, nation, ethnicity, age, family and individuality. We establish and experience our own individuality by ‘inhabiting’ numbers of such discursive subjectivities (some of which confirm each other; others however coexist far from peacefully). The theory of discourse proposes that individuality itself is the site, as it were, on which socially produced and historically established discourses are reproduced and regulated.

Once the general theoretical notion of discourse has been achieved, attention turns to specific discourses in which socially established sense is encountered and contested. These range from media discourses like television and news, to institutionalized discourses like medicine, literature and science. Discourses are structured and interrelated; some are more prestigious, legitimated and hence ‘more obvious’ than others, while there are discourses that have an uphill struggle to win any recognition at all. Thus discourses are power relations. It follows that much of the social sense-making

we’re subjected to – in the media, at school, in conversation –is the working through of ideological struggle between discourses: a good contemporary example is that between the discourses of (legitimated, naturalized) patriarchy and (emergent, marginalized) feminism. Textual analysis can be employed to follow the moves in this struggle, by showing how particular texts take up elements of different discourses and articulate them (that is, ‘knit them together’).

However, though discourses may be traced in texts, and though texts may be the means by which discursive knowledges are circulated, established or suppressed, discourses are not themselves textual.

Further reading For discourse analysis in linguistics see Coulthard and Montgomery (eds) (1981)

看来，对discourse的探讨，可以涉及到社会文化维度的分析。

Fowler把话语视为个人有意识进入意识形态、经验和社会组织的语言工具。

（待续）