Narrating the Political Self

Narrating the Political Self

Introduction

The aim of discourse analysis is to reveal the ontological and epistemological premises that are embedded in language and that allow a statement to be understood as rational or interpreted as meaningful. Discourse analysis investigates whether—in statements or texts—it is possible to establish any regularity in not only the objects that are discussed, the subjects designated as actors, and the causal relations claimed to exist between objects and subjects but also the expected outcome of subjects trying to influence objects, the goal of their action, and finally the time dimension by which these relations are framed. Discourses thus comprise the underlying conditions for a statement to be interpreted as meaningful and rational. At the same time, discourse analysis is the study of rationality and how it is expressed in a particular historical context. There is no mainstream definition of discourse within the social sciences. Neither is there any generally accepted understanding of what discourse analysis is or which method(s) its practitioners should use. Consequently, it is difficult to give a precise description of what characterizes discourse analysis. This entry reviews several forms of discourse analysis and their application to politics.

Varieties of Discourse Analysis

Analyses of discourse have been carried out within a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, international relations, communication studies, and political science. Although the concept of political discourse has been used for centuries to describe political debate or for deliberation in political theory and philosophy, it is only during the past 40 years or so that there has been a theoretical and methodological interest in how to study the relationship between language and political action. This started in the 1960s in Europe as part of a philosophical renewal of the humanities (including the social sciences), later to be known as structuralism and poststructuralism or in more general terms as the linguistic turn. In the 1970s, it spread to the United States with studies of how political concepts and political news play a role in the construction of social problems.

Today, there are several approaches on how to understand the role of language in politics. Among these are conceptual historiography, the history of political ideas, and the theory of narration. They all differ from discourse analysis by the fact that their object of study is concepts, narration, and ideas and not discourses. The most important difference among discourse analytical approaches is between those that seek to understand discourse as a contingent form of knowledge and use discourse analysis to see how knowledge and the production of knowledge have changed over time and those that take for granted that “the world” is a product of how we categorize it through our statements and therefore look on discourse as a universal type of social action and use discourse analysis to establish a general theory of discourse. Although discourse analytic approaches emphasize the connection between discourse and power, they differ in how they attach the concept of discourse to other concepts ...