Poststructuralist discourse theory

Jan Zienkowski
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Table of contents

The label ‘discourse theory’ can be used in at least three ways. First, it may designate theories of discourse that render assumptions about what discourses are and/or should be explicit. This means that the term could refer to ‘discourse theories’ of authors as varied as Saussure, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Lacan, Benveniste, Ducrot, Goffman, Wodak, Fairclough, Foucault, Habermas, Laclau, Butler, or Žižek (see Angermuller, Maingueneau, and Wodak 2014b). Second, the field of discourse studies can be conceptualized as a transdisciplinary meeting ground for ‘discourse theorists’ interested in the way discourse relates to power, subjectivity, and truth on the one hand, and ‘discourse analysts’ with a more linguistic or textual orientation who aim to understand how language, identity, and context conspire to generate meaning on the other hand (Angermuller, Maingueneau, and Wodak 2014a). While this may be a useful schematic distinction, the boundaries between discourse theory and analysis have proven to be rather soft and porous. Self-identified discourse theorists venture regularly into empirical analyses of (multimodal) texts and communicative phenomena (e.g. Phelan and Dahlberg 2011; Van Brussel, Carpentier, and De Cleen 2019), social practices (e.g. Marttila 2016), socio-political and historical change (e.g. Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000), organisations, and institutions (e.g. Marttila 2019). Moreover, discourse theorists have set out to develop heuristic principles or methodological reflections to counter the so-called methodological deficit of poststructuralist discourse theory (Glynos et al. 2021; Torfing 2005; Howarth 2005). In many ways, the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘analysis’ is misleading because the sensitizing concepts of discourse theory serve as tools for social and political analysis. At the same time discourse analysts — especially those who put a critical spin on their work — frequently venture into the domains of political philosophy and social theory to engage with questions of power, (in)equality and/or (in)justice (Zienkowski 2019; Flowerdew and Richardson 2020).

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