Discourse

Social Justice Usage

Source: Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, p. 48.

Language is not a neutral transmitter of a universal reality. Rather, language is the way we construct reality, the framework we use to give meaning to our experiences and perceptions within a given society. Language is of course cultural, so it is dependent on the historical and social context in which it is used (e.g., color-blindness as a means to end racism is a discourse that would not have made sense before the civil rights movement). Furthermore, language is not just words; it includes all of the ways we communicate with others. Discourses include not only what we say, but also what we don’t say (how we learn what lies under the surface of the iceberg). The scholarly term for language in all of its dimensions is discourse.

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Source: Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, p. 48.

Discourse: The academic term for meaning that is communicated through language, in all of its forms. Discourses include myths, narratives, explanations, words, concepts, and ideology. Discourses are not universally shared among humans; they represent a particular cultural worldview and are shared among members of a given culture. Discourse is different from ideology because it refers to all of the ways in which we communicate ideology, including verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication, symbols, and representations.

New Discourses Commentary

“Discourse” means at its simplest, “written or spoken communication.” However, it more specifically means “ways of talking about things” or, more accurately, “ways that things can be talked about.” That is, discourses are, in some sense, the linguistic systems that are created by our boundaries on acceptable and unacceptable uses of language.

For example, the phrase “legal discourse” indicates written or spoken communication that uses legal terminology and phrasing that is different or used differently than common language (or discourse), i.e., “legalese” and, roughly, “how lawyers would talk about law.” “Discourse,” as it is understood by critical theories, is used in this sense of “ways of talking about things,” but, as with everything to do with critical theories, it is specifically interested in how these ways of talking construct and perpetuate power imbalances between groups (e.g., economic groups in Marxism and identity groups in Social Justice—see also, post-Marxism, Marxian, neo-Marxism, and cultural Marxism).

Language is given a very important role in postmodern Theory and in the Critical Social Justice scholarship that stems from it. Language is seen as the constructor of reality. Prior to postmodernism, and for most people even now, language was seen as straightforwardly connected to objects and actions in the world. The word “dog” refers to a species of canine. Once you have learned that word, you can use it to identify something as a dog, and you can do so correctly or incorrectly. Not so in postmodern thought. The confusing paragraph about Derrida (in the examples below) describes how he rejected this idea and said that language refers only to itself using a system of differences (see also, differance). A dog is not so much recognized as indicating the animal that is a dog as it is recognized by not being a wolf or a cat. The word “dog” takes its place in a framework of interrelated terms that we use to differentiate things from each other in a way that, if not entirely arbitrary, is uncertain and imperfect. Therefore, meaning is always constructed from differences and is also never fully arrived at. It is approximated. Discourse, to Derrida, is how we do this. Discourse is the web of terms we learn and choose from to describe things (imperfectly), and Derrida believed power is baked into that web, with terms gaining most of their (relational) meaning in hierarchical binary pairs, where one term is seen as better or more default than the other (see also, phallogocentrism).

Foucault’s idea of discourse, thankfully, is simpler to understand and, maybe not so thankfully, also much more influential. For Foucault, too, we are always choosing from terminology and concepts we have inherited, and our society provides us with right and wrong ways to do this. We learn to speak in discourses that have been legitimated by powerful forces in society and are accepted as true. These discourses change over time and place according to the influence of the powerful, so there are different ranges of things that can be accepted as true (see also, episteme, biopower, knowledge(s), and power-knowledge).

For example, under the power of Christian discourses, homosexuality was accepted as a sin, sometimes venial and sometimes mortal. Under the power of late 19th century scientific discourses, homosexuality was accepted as a psychiatric disorder. In a liberal contemporary society, homosexuality is a morally neutral minority (or, in Critical Social Justice, “minoritized”) sexuality. While a liberal view will see this changing understanding of homosexuality as progress away from an erroneous and unethical view toward a more accurate and ethical one, owing largely to the developments of science and liberalism, Foucauldian scholars will see it as evidence that powerful discourses have always determined what we see as true and presumably still do.

Thus, thinkers following Foucault in this way (including Critical Social Justice scholars and activists) conclude that knowledge is impossible to obtain, and that which we call “truth” is a provincial, if not quaint, concept that is extraordinarily limited to one particular culture in one particular time and likely to be blind to its own biases. The solution to this problem is to engage in critical methodologies, including problematizing, disruption, subversion, dismantling, and deconstructing (this one drawing specifically from Derrida), especially at the level of discourses.

Critical Social Justice scholarship today draws heavily on the Foucauldian understanding of discourses, especially its pronounced suspicion of scientific discourses. The discourses underlying society today and governing how we think and speak and what we accept as true are understood to be white, white supremacist, patriarchal, Eurocentric, Western-centric, misogynistic, colonialist, imperialist, heterocentrist, cisnormative, ableist, fatphobic, and more. These all must be unmade and replaced, if possible, by means of cultural or social revolution.

The recommended tool within Critical Social Justice for working on these problematics is often “discourse analysis,” which looks at cultural artifacts and interactions to uncover the harmful influences of the (often hidden) power-laden discourses that are assumed to be present (see also, close reading and critical consciousness). This can often lead to tortuous and unfalsifiable interpretations that would be problematic to question. Among the most alarming and extreme manifestations of the belief that knowledge itself is a construct of dominant and oppressive discourses (which is common to all of Critical Social Justice—see also lived experience and ways of knowing) are those to be found in disability studies and fat studies, where it is argued that we only believe disability and obesity to be problems to be treated where possible due to systemic prejudice against the disabled and obese.

In practice, the Theory of Critical Social Justice, discourses provide a kind of metaphysical framework through which the world must be understood. The discourses affect the “structures” of society in terms of how people think, know, and behave; they outline the pathways of dominance and oppression and all other expressions of political (thus social) power; they are the infrastructure in which all meaning exists; they delineate what can be known, how anything can be expressed, and what people will accept as true or valid; and they shape the norms, expectations, and “lived realities” of human experience. In that regard, because Critical Social Justice Theory holds discourses and the meaning contained within them as wholly socially constructed and intrinsically imbued with the politics of whoever authenticated or authenticates them, discourses take on a metaphysical status that defines the contours of “lived reality” in an intrinsically political experience, typically of identity. This feature of Critical Social Justice Theory might best be described as a “Metaphysics of Discourses” and would serve as the relevant backbone for the religious faith of the Critical Social Justice ideology.

Related Terms

Ableism; Bias; Binary; Biopower; Cisnormativity; Close reading; Colonialism; Critical; Critical consciousness; Critical Theory; Deconstruction; Derridean; Differance; Disability studies; Discourse analysis; Dismantle; Disrupt; Dominance; Episteme; Eurocentric; Fat studies; Fatphobia; Foucauldian; Heterocentrism; Identity; Ideology; Imperialism; Knowledge(s); Legitimate; Liberalism; Lived experience; Marxian; Marxism; Minoritize; Misogyny; Narrative; Neo-Marxism; Oppression; Patriarchy; Phallogocentrism; Post-Marxism; Postmodern; Poststructrualism; Power (systemic); Power-knowledge; Problematic; Problematize; Progress; Revolution; Science; Sexuality; Social construction; Social constructivism; Social Justice; Structuralism; Subversion; Theory; Truth; Ways of knowing; Western-centric; White; White supremacy

Additional Examples

Source: Felluga, Dino Franco. Critical Theory: The Key Concepts. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition, pp. 84–86

According to Jacques Derrida, discourse marks the moment when we eschew the myth of a center that grounds the play of signification: “This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences” (1978: 280). This sense of discourse is commensurate with the “linguistic turn” in critical theory that follows the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics in 1916, and refers to the “system of differences” by which any language is constructed according to a set of semiotic rules (see signifier and signified)….

Many theorists, however, use “discourse” in the sense established by Michel Foucault, who throughout his work examines the conjunction of knowledge and power in anyone’s use of language in a given context. He too concerns himself with semiotic rules but makes his focus all rules and exclusions by which we determine what can be said in a given situation. In other words, rather than be concerned with discourse as a general linguistic “system of differences,” Foucault explores the many “discourse-formations” that structure our negotiation of knowledge and power in a given society at a given time…

“Discourse” may well have originally meant simply conversation or speech but Foucault argues that any speech is in fact shot through with various assumptions, rules, and principles of exclusion: “In appearance,” he explains, “speech may well be of little account, but the prohibitions surrounding it soon reveal its links with desire and power” (149). For Foucault, then, discourse is “a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them” (158).

To understand the functioning and emergence of various discourses, Foucault seeks to examine at once (1) “the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse” (1971: 162) that exist in any given time period; and (2) the processes by which new discursive formations come into being through a discontinuous process of emergence… . His major works explore the way that a specific “discourse,” a particular system of rules and exclusions, evolves and then is structured into a discipline, from the legal and juridical (Discipline and Punish) to the medical (Birth of the Clinic) and the psychological (Madness and Civilization). In each of these works, Foucault examines a general change in the understanding of discourse itself, where the emphasis moves from the event of speaking (enunciation), which was held as particularly important in pre-literate society, to the meaning or truth of what is said (the enunciated), which is held as most important in post-Enlightenment culture. This more general historical change in the understanding of discourse allowed individual disciplines, each with their own unique genealogy, to disavow the will to power that, according to Foucault, is in fact inextricably bound up in the post-Enlightenment “will to truth.”

Foucault’s approach to discourse has influenced a number of disparate critics who can be loosely brought together under the banner of “discourse analysis” or “discourse studies.”

Revision date: 7/13/20

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James Lindsay