, reflecting
what we see and do in words, nor it is merely a private process through which we record
and reflect on individual experience. Rather, language is a dynamic, collective, and social
phenomenon that acts on and constructs the world around us. It is a social force as or
more powerful than willpower, class, or politics.
Language is not a private thing once it is spoken or written, but enters into the bricks and
mortar of our relationships, organizations, politics and culture. In passing from our private
thoughts into a social and historical context, language becomes discourse. While written
texts can be considered discourse, the term more typically refers to spoken language, and
includes interpersonal conversation, speech broadcast on radio and television, and
increasingly, speech mediated electronically through SMS messaging devices, e-mail, and
cell phones. Life in this sense can be seen as an accumulation of discourses, e.g., the
discourse of politics, the discourse of education, the discourse of gender, which provide a
context for as well as inform how we talk about things.
b. discourse and power
In using the term discourse, we are acknowledging that language has a weight and a
presence in the world, and that traces of our utterances can and do survive after we speak
them. These traces are registered in the changes to ourselves and our reality that
discourse achieves. Discourses tend to organize around specific themes a英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】nd topics. That
is, there are deeply structured and historical ways of talking about politics, education,
gender, feelings, etc. that pre-exist us as individuals, and that alternately constrain and
empower us as we articulate our views. The power/knowledge problem discussed in the
Orientalism section above is a particular view of how discourse and power relate, in that it demonstrates how the form in which we produce words and images about the “East” then
shapes how we act on them.
Discourse has a brutal fact of power identified with it: those who control discourse also
determine the shape of reality. Yet, we fail to see that reality is essentially “discursive” in
nature because (i) we believe language reflects, rather than constructs the real and (ii) the
power to construct reality has been with elites so long that we don’t see an alternative. If
we consider the armies of public relations officers, corporate communicators, advertising
and marketing specialists, and political spindoctors as a whole, we can appreciate that a
vast apparatus exists to manufacture reality through discourse. Words and pictures are
more than just representations of the real: they are the real.
There is a complicated relationship between ideology and discourse, and a number of
schools of thought concerning their relationship. Some identify the concept of ideology
with those scholars favouring a modern theoretical outlook, and discourse with those from
a post
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