CONCEPT OF DISCOURSE

How useful is the concept of 'discourse' to understanding aspects of selfhood and identity?

How useful is the concept of 'discourse' to understanding aspects of selfhood and identity?

Concept of Discourse

A discourse is a term now moderately widely used in a number of different disciplines and schools of thought, frequently 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 merely with complex utterances by one speaker, but more regularly with the turn-taking interaction between pair or more, and with the linguistic governs and conventions that are removed to be in play and governing such discourses in their given context.

Life isn't so simple. The summary idea of 'language' proved inadequate to account for the historical, political and cultural 'fixing' of certain meanings, and their constant reproduction and distribution by mechanism of deployed sorts of speech, models of representation, and in specified institutional settings. This is the point at which the idea of discourse originated to supplant the now flabby and imprecise concept of 'language'. Unlike 'language', the term discourse itself is both a noun and a verb. So it is simpler to retain the sense of discourse as an behave, where the noun 'language' frequently appears to refer to a thing. In its deployed usages, discourse referred both to the interactive process and the end effect of thought and communication. Discourse is the social process of earning and reproducing sense(s). (Stevens 1996)

Once adopted via structuralism, largely through the writings of Michel Foucault, the idea of discourse proved useful to pose both a very overall theoretical concept and figures of particular discourses.

The overall theoretical concept is that whereas meaning can be spawned merely from the langue or summary system of vocabulary, and whereas we can arrest the world merely through vocabulary networks, the observation waits that the resources of language-in overall are and invariably have been subjected to the historical developments and wars of social relatives in general. In brief, however langue may be summary, meaning never is. Discourses are the commodity of social, historical and institutional formations, and meanings are resulted via these institutionalized discourses. It chases that the potentially infinite senses any vocabulary system is capable of making are invariably limited and predetermined via the framework of social relatives which prevails in a given time and position, and which is itself represented through various discourses. (Stevens 1996)

Thus persons don't crudely learn languages as summary skills. On the negatively, everybody is predated via deployed discourses in which various subjectivities are represented already - for instance, those of category, gender, nation, ethnicity, age, family and individuality. We deploy and experience our possess individuality via 'inhabiting' figures of such discursive subjectivities (some of which make sure each other; others however coexist far from peacefully). The theory of discourse intends that individuality itself is the site, as it were, on which socially resulted and historically deployed discourses are reproduced and ...