Week4: Illustration of Discourse Process

Hello,


While I was reading this week papers, especially Jorgensen and

Phillips chapter, I tried to illustrate discourse process with all the

parts and constructs. I will share with you all below. However, I

first want to what I have learned from this week readings.

•  Structuralism is "the theory that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure."
• Marxism is "a worldview and method of societal analysis that focuses on class relations and societal conflicts."

Laclau and Mouffe developed their discourse theory in regard to combination and modification of those two "theoretical traditions." Actually, I am wondering whether or not "Marxism"  is a theory. I mean that what is the relationship between worldview and theory? It is also interesting to me that someone who has political theorist background are interested in discourse theory. I am wondering if we can discuss this issue. Also, in what fields is discourse analysis is more popular? Furthermore, Laclau and Mouffe are interested in Marxism. How is Marxism related to Discourse Theory? I think this week class will help me to understand these issues. It was really interesting to me the issue of fixation for different signs. It really makes sense to me that we usually intend to fix the meaning of signs trying to relate them to other signs. This point is important because according to discourse theory, we cannot ultimately fix the meanings, where the discourse analysis start appearing. Now, I would like to share my illustration of constructs in regard to discourse analysis.

 

 

According to the picture above, everything in discourse is signs (moments) that acquire their meanings from the nodal points around discourse since we try to relate the signs to other nodal points. Therefore, I indicated the nodal points around discourse as "yellow circles". If we try to fix the meaning of a sign but we do not succeed, and if we are not sure where to put a sign (i.e. into medical treatment or alternative treatment), the construct is called as "floating signifiers", which are triangles with red color. Those floating signifiers are also nodal points. Therefore, our purpose is to make a relationship between those nodal points. This attempt is called as "articulation" which is shown as two ways green arrow in the picture. On the other hand, if we are sure that the meaning of a sign is not related to any nodal points in discourse that means if the discourse excludes any signs, those signs are called as "elements" within the category of "the field of discursivity". I think this is my understanding, but I really would like to hear from you all and discuss in the class on Wednesday. Maybe, I am wrong, or we need to change the picture.

 

Finally, I have some questions:

 

1. Can we say that if we are doing discourse analysis, we are going to have only one meaning for a sign, and the other possible meanings can be categorized into the field of discursivity?

 

2. Also, I am not sure what does "the discourse can never be so completely fixed" (pg. 28) mean? What I understood is that in order to be able to call a sign as "discourse", we first have to fixed the meaning.

 

Thanks,