Ah, discourse. You slippery bugger. You elude definition and capture. Or, rather, you inspire a whole mess of varying definitions -- most of which serve only to make you even more mysterious, more elusive.

Ruth Wodak, in her Approaches to Media Texts, repeats Van Leeuwen's description of two ways of approaching discourse:

Van Leeuwen (1993) distinguishes two kinds of relations between discourses and social practices: discourse itself [as] social practice, discourse as a form of action, as something people do to or for or with each other. And there is discourse in the Foucauldian sense, discourse as a way of representing social practice(s), as a form of knowledge, as the things people say about social practice(s). (p. 193) Critical discourse analysis, according to van Leeuwen, is or should be concerned with both these aspects: with discourse as the instrument of power and control as well as with discourse as the instrument of the social construction of reality? (van Leeuwen, 1993, p. 193).

Norman Fairclough, editor of Media Discourse (1995), writes that "Discourse figures in three main ways in social practices: discourses (ways of representing, eg political discourses), genres (ways of (inter)acting, eg lecturing, interviewing), styles (ways of being – identities, eg styles of management) (Fairclough 2000a, 2000b; quoted in "Discourse in New Processes..."). Okay, I don't think that cleared things up.

Maybe Warren Hedges, an English professor from Southern Oregon University, can help us out. He explains how Foucault links discourse to power and knowledge: Discourse: an authoritative way of describing. Discourses are propagated by specific institutions and divide up the world in specific ways. For example, we can talk of medical, legal, and psychological discourses. Literary criticism is also a discourse, as is the terminology associated with grading. Power/Knowledge: a term Foucault uses to highlight the fact that every description also regulates what it describes. It is not only that every description is somewhat "biased, " but also that the very terms used to describe something reflect power relations. Discourses promote specific kinds of power relations, usually favoring the "neutral" person or professional using the discourse (the lawyer, psychiatrist, professor, doctor, etc.). In other words, to know is to participate in complicated webs of power. The identities, feelings, and dilemmas we read about and take for granted have histories, and these histories are related to specific discourses. Because novels and poetry occur in relation to the discourses of their time, they participate in this process of defining and regulating. Or, to be more precise, regulating by defining. For example, if a novel describes a character who is mad, it will further refine and regulate the culture's definition of madness. It is no coincidence, for instance, that many nineteenth Century novels have a "madwoman in the attic." Other examples would be the increasing importance of lyric poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lyric poetry describes an individual's interior feelings. A Foucauldian would point out that this also made the individual's feelings available for surveillance by others, and even made the feelings available to be had. "You can't feel what you can't describe," the argument might run, "and you can't describe feelings without being influenced by the terms that various discourses make available to you. We cannot escape coming to understand ourselves under the influence of various discourses, but we can come to understand their histories. Foucault called this process of researching discourse or idea's history genealogy. Take, for instance, the idea that understanding yourself is valuable and important. If we wanted to do a genealogy of this idea, we might start with the notion of self-esteem promoted by psychologists in the 1960s. Then we could look into ways that the notion of self-esteem was related to the increased sense of an individual's importance that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as capitalism developed and individual consumers became more important, especially the notion that people differentiate themselves by the things that they buy. Looking back further, we might notice the increased emphasis on the individual's salvation that Protestantism encouraged. (Note how this is different than Marxism. What counts are institutions and discourses, not simply economic structures). (Foucault: Key Concepts)

[[See also James Joseph Scheurich and Kathryn Bell McKenzie, “Foucault’s Methodologies: Archaeology and Genealogy” In Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3^rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage): 841 – 868.]]

And of course we can extend that claim to include mediamakers.

So, if that's discourse, then what's discourse analysis? How could we possibly analyze something so vast and amorphous? Rose identifies two kinds of discourse analysis, which parallel van Leeuwen's two definitions of discourse. As you'll remember, van Leeuwen distinguished between "discourse itself [as] social practice, discourse as a form of action, as something people do to or for or with each other" -- and "discourse in the Foucauldian sense, discourse as a way of representing social practice(s), as a form of knowledge, as the things people say about social practice(s)" (p. 193). "Critical discourse analysis, according to van Leeuwen, is or should be concerned with both these aspects: with discourse as the instrument of power and control as well as with discourse as the instrument of the social construction of reality?" Now, in light of Rose's two models, van Leeuwen's definition might make more sense.

The two schools of discourse analysis are these: Discourse Analysis I: "tends to pay rather more attention to the notion of discourse as articulated through various kinds of images and verbal texts than it does to the practices entailed by specific discourses. As Rosalind Gill (1996: 141) says, it uses 'discourse' to 'refer to all forms of talk and texts.' It is most concerned with discourse, discursive formations and their productivity" (Rose 140). Thus, D.A.1 is concerned with van Leeuwen's second kind of discourse: "discourse as a way of representing social practice, as a form of knowledge." Discourse Analysis II: "tends to pay more attention to the practices of institutions than it does to the visual images and verbal texts. Its methodology is usually left implicit. It tends to be more explicitly concerned with issues of power, regimes of truth (the particular grounds on which truth is claimed), institutions and technologies" (Rose 140). This is van Leeuwen's first kind of discourse.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS I

We could say that discourse analysis is concerned with language and/or visuality -- but, really, it's looking at how people use words and images and objects, etc., to "construct accounts of the social world" (Rose 140). It's rather difficult to "methodologize" something like that. Dr. Ruth Palmquist at UT Austin provides the following discussion of discourse analysis as the non-method methodology:

It is difficult to give a single definition of Critical or Discourse Analysis as a research method. Indeed, rather than providing a particular method, Discourse Analysis can be characterized as a way of approaching and thinking about a problem. In this sense, Discourse Analysis is neither a qualitative nor a quantitative research method, but a manner of questioning the basic assumptions of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Discourse Analysis does not provide a tangible answer to problems based on scientific research, but it enables access to the ontological and epistemological assumptions behind a project, a statement, a method of research, or - to provide an example from the field of Library and Information Science - a system of classification. In other words, Discourse Analysis will enable to reveal the hidden motivations behind a text or behind the choice of a particular method of research to interpret that text. Expressed in today's more trendy vocabulary, Critical or Discourse Analysis is nothing more than a deconstructive reading and interpretation of a problem or text (while keeping in mind that postmodern theories conceive of every interpretation of reality and, therefore, of reality itself as a text. Every text is conditioned and inscribes itself within a given discourse, thus the term Discourse Analysis). Discourse Analysis will, thus, not provide absolute answers to a specific problem, but enable us to understand the conditions behind a specific "problem" and make us realize that the essence of that "problem", and its resolution, lie in its assumptions; the very assumptions that enable the existence of that "problem". By enabling us to make these assumption explicit, Discourse Analysis aims at allowing us to view the "problem" from a higher stance and to gain a comprehensive view of the "problem" and ourselves in relation to that "problem". Discourse Analysis is meant to provide a higher awareness of the hidden motivations in others and ourselves and, therefore, enable us to solve concrete problems - not by providing unequivocal answers, but by making us ask ontological and epistemological questions.

Rose seems to corroborate this view; she quotes Gill ("Discourse Analysis: Practical Implementation," 1996): "the analysis of discourse and rhetoric requires the careful reading and interpretation of texts, rigorous scholarship rather than adherence to formal procedures" (158).

Some examples of D.A.1 include Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, Michel Foucault's genealogy, Fredric Jameson's Marxist analysis of postmodernism, and Helene Cixous' or Julia Kristeva's Feminist interpretations of social practices. See also Peter Krapp's (poor guy) page with resources on Derrida, Foucault, Kittler, Lacan -- including bibliographies, texts, audio, video, and news -- a great resource! And here, Mackenzie Wark does a "discourse-ish" analysis of "security."

Mark Poster, in his entry on Foucault in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, discusses the evolution of Foucault's work throughout his life, which reflects an evolving conception of "discourse" -- and an evolving method and purpose of discourse analysis. Poster writes: His writing embraced several distinct positions in the course of his career, and the implications of his theoretical work for literary criticism [or discourse analysis!] vary considerably depending upon which period of his writings the critic considers primary. Attention to Madness and Civilization leads to a reading of texts for silences and exclusions; The Order of Things suggests a search for épistèmes--unconscious, regulating structures that limit what can be written in any epoch; Discipline and Punish encourages a more political reading, one that stresses the power effects of discourse; volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality sensitize the critic to the textual problematic of self-constitution. Given this diversity of interpretive strategies, it is nonetheless fair to say that the major theoretical tendency of Foucault's work is to regard the literary text as part of a larger framework of texts, institutions, and practices. The two most important examples of criticism associated with Foucault's ideas, those of Edward W. Said (Orientalism) and Stephen Greenblatt, are stunning examples of this kind of reading. Like other poststructuralists, Foucault urges the critic to complicate the interpretation, to reject the turn to the author's intention as the court of last resort, to look in the text for articulated hierarchies of value and meaning, above all to trace filiations of inter- and extratextuality, to draw connections between the given text and others, between the text and the intellectual and material context. Foucauldian readings are sensitive to the political impact of the text and the political unconscious behind the text, informing its statements and shaping its lines of enunciation.... Foucault offers two methodological innovations: archaeology and genealogy (Poster): Archaeology is a synchronic analysis of what Foucault calls the statements or enunciations in any discourse. Every discourse contains "rules of formation" that limit and shape what may be said. These rules of formation are not at the disposal of the author but come into play as the text is composed, out of phase with the consciousness of the writer. Archaeological analysis may be thought of as an elaboration of the figure of the épistème, which Foucault employed so effectively in The Order of Things. It may also be thought of as a sort of structuralist analysis, one that uncovers complexities within texts. The archaeological method, after all, was developed before Foucault turned to the problems of practice and power. Genealogy is a diachronic method [across time], one that attempts to reconstruct the origins and development of discourses by showing their rootedness in a field of forces. Genealogy is a Nietzschean effort to develop a critical method that undermines all absolute grounds, that demonstrates the origins of things only in relation to and in contest with other things. Genealogy disallows pure beginnings, those historical formations that deny their historicity by naturalizing themselves [should remind you or Barthes' "myth"], absolutizing themselves, grounding themselves in some transcendent principle. From the vantage point of those who hold to absolute principles, genealogy appears as nihilist, relativist, amoral. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow argue more convincingly that together with archaeology, genealogy constitutes "an analytic of finitude," one that undercuts metaphysical pretensions, overblown notions of reason's ability to ground discourse, but not ethical action in the best sense of the term. The archaeological-genealogical method is best designed to explore the interplay between discourse and practice. As an interpretive strategy it is far less purely textual than Semiotics or Deconstruction. Unlike the work of Derrida and Barthes, Foucault's work is difficult for writers inured to New Criticism. Deconstruction and semiotics, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, are formalist enterprises, ones carried out comfortably without ever investigating the context. Foucault, on the contrary, rejects the haven of the text, literary or otherwise, on the grounds that the disciplines that have developed in the course of the past two centuries around such texts are themselves part of the problem that needs to be analyzed. For Foucault, disciplines such as language are not neutral tools or containers serving the pursuit of truth without interference. A major issue for interpretation is precisely the way disciplines constitute "rules of formation" for the regulation of discourse. And with regard to the disciplines of literary criticism, the first "move" has been to denigrate or place into obscurity the role of the discipline as context of discourse. In this sense New Criticism and deconstruction constitute a continuous line of development: in the one case, a disciplinary strategy of formalism and aestheticism; in the other case, a movement of subversion of hierarchies. Yet in both cases the traditional apparatus of textuality is affirmed and the sanctity of the kinds of things done under the rubric of literary criticism is reinforced. Foucauldian criticism looks different from earlier forms of criticism. For better or worse, literary and nonliterary texts are placed on the same plane, subjected to the same analytic tools, and interrogated in relation to the same contextual landscapes. However, to give the impression of a monolithic Foucauldian strategy with regard to literary texts would seriously distort the picture. In This Is Not a Pipe (1973), Raymond Roussel (1963), and other essays, Foucault reveals another side to his treatment of the literary text and the theoretical issues that derive from the question of aesthetics (Carroll)....

So what does this mean for you? How do even begin to "perform" an archaeological or genealogical analysis of a discourse?

1) We begin by finding our sources. We've already discussed this -- both in our lesson on identifying topics and beginning the literature review, and in our lesson on historical research. It should be obvious that investigating the "genealogy" of a discourse will require that you dig into its history -- so some of the strategies and resources we discussed in our lesson on historical research will prove useful. Since, as Poster tells us, Foucault's work regards the literary text as part of a larger framework of texts, institutions, and practices, and since literary and nonliterary texts are placed on the same plane, literary and nonliterary texts and "artifacts" of practices and institutions should be among our sources, too. 2) We then analyze the structure of the discursive statements. "How, precisely, is a particular discourse structured, and how then does it produce a particular kind of knowledge?" How does the discourse describe things (and, in describing them, produce them, just as it produces its subjects) -- and what are the things that it describes; what are its key themes? How does it construct blame and responsibility, stake and accountability, value, ethics? How does it categorize? How does it construct social difference? What are the connections between and among the key words and images and objects? What are the communicative capabilities of the different media among your sources? How is the discourse constructed differently or similarly within photographs and written texts, within newspaper articles and diary entries, within photographs and illustrations, etc? What might explain these differences, aside from the obvious material differences between the media? Recall Rose's account of representations of the morally degenerate "cockney" in newspapers, novels, and poems; and disparate representations of the "different but lovable" cockney in music hall songs and literature (157). Ultimately, how does the discourse work to produce its "effects of truth"? And when are the moments of dissent, and how is conflict dealt with? Look for complexity and contradiction within the discourses? Rose's Steps for Exploring the Rhetorical Organization of Discourse (158): Looking at your sources with fresh eyes. Immersing yourself in your sources. Identifying key themes in your sources. Examining their effects of truth. Paying attention to their complexity and contradictions. Looking for the invisible as well as the visible. Paying attention to details. (158) 3) We then turn to analysis of the "social context of those discursive statements: who is saying them, in what circumstances" (Rose 149) What are the social circumstances in which the discourse takes place? What is the social site from which statements are made, and what is the speaker's position of social authority? What is the institutional location of the discourse? Who is the audience assumed by the various components of this discourse? 4) Finally, we need to practice methodological reflexivity. Since discourse analyses aim to reveal the "constructedness" of things like truth and knowledge, it would be "inconsistent to contend that the analyst's own discourse was itself wholly objective, factual, or generally true" (Tonkiss in Rose 160). We must therefore practice a certain "modesty in our analytical claims" (Tonkiss in Rose).

Limitations: Two primary limitations of D.A.1 are, first, that it's often difficult to know where and when to stop making intertextual connections (How do you know when you're "stretching it" to make evidence support your argument?), and, second, that some discourse analysts refuse or are reluctant to ascribe causality; they're so concerned with describing the web of relationships between the texts and practices and institutions that they fail to clearly define the relationships between these things.

Other Resources:

The University of Amsterdam's Teun A. van Dijk's Resources for Discourse Studies, including bibliographies of discourse studies in a variety of fields, websites and discussion lists, journals, research institutes, and conferences.
The World of Michael Foucault
Foucault.info
Theory.org's Foucault resources
The journal Discourse Analysis is available online

And since rhetorical analysis is often folded into discourse analysis, we'll look at that methodology before we move on to Discourse Analysis II.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS II

This second type of discourse analysis often works with the same materials as does D.A.1, but "is much more concerned with their production by, and their reiteration of, particular institutions and their practices, and their production of particular human subjects" (Rose 164). [Image Credit: Bentham's Panipticon: [ctrl]space]

Think of something as seemingly value-free, innocuous, a-ideological as the archive. Think again, buster. Allan Sekula reminds us that archives are far from neutral; "they embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection and hoarding as well as that power in inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of a language" ("Reading an Archive" in Photography/Politics: 155). Other "institutions" worth investigation are the panopticon, surveillance, the school, the church, Hollywood. Here, Foucault talks about repression in high schools with high school students themselves!

Rose discusses the distinction between institutional apparatuses (or apparatae), which are "the forms of power/knowledge which constitute the institutions," including their regulations, laws, morals, architecture, etc.; and institutional technologies, which are "the practical techniques used to practice that power/knowledge" (166-7). Photography, for instance, is only a technology, and it can work in the service of a variety of institutions depending on the power relations that invest it. "Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work" (Tagg in Rose 167). Sekula presents photography as only one of many parts -- and not even the most important part -- of a "bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of intelligence"; the filing cabinet, he says, was a much more important technology in that institution.

Rose demonstrates D.A.2 on two institutions: the museum and the art gallery. RP: What media institutions might we examine through this methodology?

In my own dissertation and book on public library buildings, I look at architecture as an institutional technology functioning in the service of multiple institutions: the library itself, the city, capitalism, etc. I've referred you to this document in a previous lesson -- but I recommend that you again refer to the introduction and "methodology" section of my dissertation. But first, I'd like to warn you to sit down -- and, if a rope is available, tie yourself to your chair. This is exciting stuff, and I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.

Ready? Here's a brief, edge-of-your-seat, mouth-agape excerpt:

I conducted a discourse analysis of all forms of communication in which the architect or architectural critics articulate their ideas about Koolhaas’s library and mediacenter design projects, paying particular attention to the SPL design.  Norman Fairclough (1995a), in Critical Discourse Analysis, defines discourse as “the use of language seen as a form of social practice” and discourse analysis as “analysis of how texts work within sociocultural practice” (p. 6).  Such analysis, ”he continues, “requires attention to textual form, structure and organization at all levels; phonological, grammatical, lexical (vocabulary) and higher levels of textual organization in terms of exchange systems…structures of argumentation, and generic structures” (p. 6).  Although discourse analysis has traditionally been regarded as a type of linguistic study, Fairclough (1995b), Fowler (1987, 1991), Altheide and Michalowski (1999), and many other scholars have applied discourse analysis to media texts.  In this study, I have used the term discourse to refer to all forms of communication—from interpersonal to organizational communication, from written texts to blueprints, from news reports to videotapes—in which people articulate or convey their ideas about the Seattle Public Library design project.  My analysis therefore encompasses all of these texts and how they work “within sociocultural practice. 

My sources included human beings -- librarians, architects, civic officials, patrons -- blueprints, architectural models, newspaper clippings, scholarly journals and books, photographs, historical records, meeting minutes, in-house memos, emails and letters from patrons, videotapes of meetings and public presentations -- and even old furniture. All of this is "discourse."

And hold onto your hats for the mind-blowing conclusion:

The discourse analyses conducted to answer [my first three research questions] illumined the architect’s, library officials’, public’s, and project manager’s desires for the library, their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with various elements of the design, their demands for changes in the design, etc.  A review of successive versions of Koolhaas’s plans for the library revealed changes in the plan.  I attempted to associate particular acts of communication—by any of the parties involved in the design process—with particular changes in the library design as it evolved throughout the two-year-long negotiation and design revision process. 

I applied to the final plans the same subordinate questions listed in Research Question 1.  I then attempted to link the various ideas communicated by the architect, the library officials, and the public about the design project to various architectural elements and the overall program employed in the final library plans.  Ultimately, I identified what ideologies of place, ideologies of public, and ideologies of library—and whose ideologies—are embodied in the final design.    

There you go. That's what a D.A.2 can do for you. Awesome, right?

IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

As we saw above, a semiotic analysis can take us to the ideological level of coding. A discourse analysis can reveal ideologies underlying a particular institution. A medium theory approach to analysis can reveal ideologies built into media forms. Studies of genre can reveal ideology. Ideological analysis can stand on its own or be blended with another critical approaches.

Mimi White, in her essay "Ideological Analysis and Television" in Allen's Channels of Discourse, writes the following:

Ideological criticism has its origins in Marxist theories of culture. It is concerned with the ways in which cultural practices and artifacts...produce particular knowledges and positions for their users.... These knowledges and positions link viewers (readers/listeners/etc.) with and allow reception of the economic and class interests of the [industry that created the particular cultural product that is being consumed], which is itself part of a broader culture industry.... Ideological analysis is based on the assumption that cultural artifacts -- literature, film, television, and so forth -- are produced in specific historical contexts, by and for specific social groups. It aims to understand culture as a form of social expression.... [It] aims to understand how a cultural text specifically embodies and enacts particular ranges of values, beliefs, and ideas" (163). [Image Credit: Revolution]

You'll learn, or hopefully have learned, a lot about ideological analysis in Foundations of Media Theory -- but, for now, here's a handout on political economy that I created for my FMT class. And here are some other resources:

• Mr. Chandler's "Marxist Media Theory," including discussions of base/superstructure, ideology, subjectivity, the Frankfurt School, Althusser, Gramsci & hegemony, Stuart Hall, etc.
• Media and Communications Site's links to resources on ideological analysis
• John Lye's "Ideology: A Brief Guide"

PSYCHOANALYSIS

I'll allow John Lye to introduce you to some of the key concepts in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. See also:

• Sandy Flitterman-Lewis's "Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television"
• Modules on Lacan, created a Purdue University
• Swirl Theory's discussion of Freud, Lacan, psychoanalytic feminism, French feminism, Julia Kristeva, and Deleuze & Guattari

I also recommend that you flip through Chapter 5 in Rose's Visual Methodologies. See if you can identify the terms in the margins: scopophilia, subjectivity, unconscious, castration complex, phallus, voyeurism, the gaze [<== hey, look over there], mirror stage, the Imaginary, masquerade, desire, queer looks, etc.

We can combine psychoanalytic criticism with nearly any of the aforementioned approaches. Victor Burgin, inspired by Laura Mulvey's theory of the "gaze," for instance, looks at photography simultaneously through psychoanalytical and formalist lenses. He says that “…we may identify four basic types of look in the photograph: the look of the camera as it photographs the ‘pro-photographic’ event; the look of the viewer as he or she looks at the photograph; the ‘intra-diegetic’ looks exchanged between people (actors) depicted in the photograph (and/or looks from actors towards objects); and the look the actor may direct to the camera” (Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs” In Burgin, Ed., Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982): 148).

See also feminist and queer methodologies:

• Virginia Olesen, “Early Millennial Feminist Qualitative Research: Challenges and Contours” In Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3^rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage): 235-278;
• Gloria Ladson-Billings & Jamel Donnor, “The Moral Activist Role of a Critical Race Theory Scholarship” In Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3^rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage): 279-302;
• Kem Plummer, “Critical Humanism and Queer Theory: Living With the Tensions” In Norman K. Denzin & Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3^rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage): 357-374