Discourse - Sara Mills

"Dialogue is the primary condition of discourse; all speech and writing is social." - Macdonnell in Mills (9)

"Ideological struggle is at the heart of discourse." - Pecheux in Mills (12)

Mills, Sara. Discourse: the New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Mills traces the variety of approaches different disciplines have taken toward discourse over time, especially in terms of definitions and the affordances these provide.  She pays particular attention to the contributions of Michel Foucault and makes a distinction between discourse theory and discourse analysis.  She particularly notes approaches from cultural/critical theory, linguistics, and social psychology (which she presents as a fusion of the first two).  From my own synthesis of her collected information, discourse(s) shape our sense of reality, is/are multiple, relate to language in context and dispersed agency, and are authorized by and result in unequal power structures.

She shows ways that discourse and ideological approaches can inform each other as well as underlying conflicts between the two (ideological approaches like Marxism having a utopian trajectory while discourse is more about tracing) and uses this to identify discourse's contributions to both feminist and colonialist/post-colonialist ideologies.  For feminism, discourse allows for individual agency other than simply a victim position for women under a vague patriarchal power discrepancy although it could move feminists away from a preoccupation with subjectivity and subjection.  For post-colonialism, discourse helps to highlight the "systematic nature of representations," and post-colonial theory also critiques a homogenous view of colonial texts to acknowledge different interpretations and resistance to these texts.

episteme: the sets of discursive structures as a whole within which a culture formulates its ideas (51)

#Discourse #Empire #Critical