Page 60 - Šolsko polje, XXIX, 2018, no. 1-2: The Language of Neoliberal Education, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 60
šolsko polje, letnik xxix, številka 1–2
Tropics of Discourse strongly influenced by Foucault, and van Dijk (1984)
who edited an early handbook from the perspective of social linguistics.
At the beginning of the 1990s there were a spate of new texts in-
cluding van Burman and Parker (1993); Dijk (1997); Potter and Wetherell
(1987) as well as new journals such as Discourse and Society, Discourse
Studies, and Discourse Processes and new textbooks (Macdonnell, 1986;
Mills, 1997; Williams, (1999).1 This disciplinary formation indicated that
the early interests of Foucault and Barthes in the 1970s, themselves a prod-
uct of developments in structural linguistics, literary analytics and the
‘linguistic turn’ more generally, were developed as standard methodolo-
gies in the late 1980s and 1990s and the became the new common-sense
procedures in the social sciences in opposition to empiricist and positiv-
ist research. Discourse analysis and political discourse analysis had ar-
rive truly arrived and become academically institutionalised as a, perhaps
the, major theoretical and methodological approach of the late twentieth
century.
Part of the appeal and promise of these new discourse approaches
and methodologies is that they provided relatively easy access to policy as
discourse and to new theoretical understandings of the old Marxist ques-
tion of ideology and power. Certainly, one of the major questions facing
us as social scientists is how the ideology of the market finds its way into
ordinary language in advanced liberal democracies that were once welfare
states, to become so much public common-sense and part of our every-
day reality? Today discourse theory and approach are routinely adopted
as methodologies to explain the behaviour of people and events as well as
the formation of public policy. How does discourse analysis become sec-
ond nature? How does the discourse become the preferred form of polit-
ical conversation and analysis in a fundamental movement from a mor-
al vocabulary of social democracy to a language of rational choice and
marketspeak?
We can be certain that this is not just a shift of discourse but rather a
more profound shift in the underlying philosophy of language and polit-
ical reality that guides the historical transition from liberalism to neolib-
eralism – let’s say the shift of governmentalities reflected in the emergence
of neoliberal discourses (in the plural): philosophical discourses in the
form of doctrines, treatises, and scholarly works in related disciplines of
political philosophy and political economy; statements, party manifestoes
and political advertising; conferences presentations and the development
1 I based my brief survey here on the useful footnote (fn. 1) by David Howarth and Yannis
Stavrakakis (2000) ‘Introducing Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’ in Howarth;
Norval & Stavrakaki (2000).
58
Tropics of Discourse strongly influenced by Foucault, and van Dijk (1984)
who edited an early handbook from the perspective of social linguistics.
At the beginning of the 1990s there were a spate of new texts in-
cluding van Burman and Parker (1993); Dijk (1997); Potter and Wetherell
(1987) as well as new journals such as Discourse and Society, Discourse
Studies, and Discourse Processes and new textbooks (Macdonnell, 1986;
Mills, 1997; Williams, (1999).1 This disciplinary formation indicated that
the early interests of Foucault and Barthes in the 1970s, themselves a prod-
uct of developments in structural linguistics, literary analytics and the
‘linguistic turn’ more generally, were developed as standard methodolo-
gies in the late 1980s and 1990s and the became the new common-sense
procedures in the social sciences in opposition to empiricist and positiv-
ist research. Discourse analysis and political discourse analysis had ar-
rive truly arrived and become academically institutionalised as a, perhaps
the, major theoretical and methodological approach of the late twentieth
century.
Part of the appeal and promise of these new discourse approaches
and methodologies is that they provided relatively easy access to policy as
discourse and to new theoretical understandings of the old Marxist ques-
tion of ideology and power. Certainly, one of the major questions facing
us as social scientists is how the ideology of the market finds its way into
ordinary language in advanced liberal democracies that were once welfare
states, to become so much public common-sense and part of our every-
day reality? Today discourse theory and approach are routinely adopted
as methodologies to explain the behaviour of people and events as well as
the formation of public policy. How does discourse analysis become sec-
ond nature? How does the discourse become the preferred form of polit-
ical conversation and analysis in a fundamental movement from a mor-
al vocabulary of social democracy to a language of rational choice and
marketspeak?
We can be certain that this is not just a shift of discourse but rather a
more profound shift in the underlying philosophy of language and polit-
ical reality that guides the historical transition from liberalism to neolib-
eralism – let’s say the shift of governmentalities reflected in the emergence
of neoliberal discourses (in the plural): philosophical discourses in the
form of doctrines, treatises, and scholarly works in related disciplines of
political philosophy and political economy; statements, party manifestoes
and political advertising; conferences presentations and the development
1 I based my brief survey here on the useful footnote (fn. 1) by David Howarth and Yannis
Stavrakakis (2000) ‘Introducing Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’ in Howarth;
Norval & Stavrakaki (2000).
58
