«Discourse analysis as critique»

Martin Nonhoff
«Discourse analysis as critique»
Palgrave Communications, volume 3, Article number: 17074 (2017)

Palgrave Communications (@PalCommsOA) | Palgrave Macmillan | Londres | REINO UNIDO


Extracto de apartado resumen y conclusiones en páginas 1 y 9-10 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«This paper intervenes in the discussion about the relationship between discourse analysis and critique. It argues that this relationship can be understood either as an external or as an integrated relationship. In an external relationship, there is first social criticism that is then braced by discourse analysis, that is, the latter aims at giving empirical credence to the critique. However, such an external relationship cannot give us any insight concerning the critical potential that is specific to discourse analysis, precisely because in this case critique exists before and independent of discourse analysis.

»If, however, critique emanates from discourse analysis itself, we would speak of an integrated relationship and would no longer speak of discourse analysis and critique, but of discourse analysis as critique. It is argued that such an integrated relationship becomes visible once we think of discourse analysis as being itself a discursive formation and ask what unsettling effects this formation has on research objects, on subject formations and on the academic production context in which they are conducted.

»Conclusion

»In this article, I argued that we can read the relationship between discourse analysis and critique in two ways: On the one hand, a critique of certain societal conditions is already in place and can then be transferred into a discourse analysis. The critical potential will then essentially depend on the critical attitude of the discourse analyst. Because critique precedes the analysis, it forms an external relationship with discourse analysis. I thus called this relationship one of “discourse analysis and critique”.

»I argued further that if we conceive of the relationship of discourse analysis and critique in this way, we will fall short of understanding the specific critical potential of discourse analysis, precisely because the critique exists independently of the discourse analysis. In contrast, discourse analysis functions as critique in so far as it is itself a discursive formation that produces critical effects which re-arrange the regime of sayability.

»This shows, for instance, in one decisive statement of this discursive formation, namely the statement that academic work is always interventionist. I then traced the interventionist character of discourse analysis in regard to its subject matters, in regard to the subject relations concerned (the self-relation among others), and in regard to its academic production context. In the latter, the professed heterogeneity and discrepancy of theoretical and methodological approaches of discourse analysis is crucial because it is one important origin of irritation with which discourse analysis is met by mainstream (social) science. Due to this irritation, it becomes possible to re-open and newly debate the scope of what is permitted, possible and useful in academic work.

»Because it neither simply accepts the empirically nor the methodologically given, but rather enquires about its genealogy, discourse analysis can generate what we may call “unwieldy knowledge”, in regard to its research object as well as in regard to the methodology it uses. And hence, discourse analysis has the potential to produce the new, the different, the alternative—to be critical.»