Page 61 - Šolsko polje, XXIX, 2018, no. 1-2: The Language of Neoliberal Education, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 61
m. a. peters ■ neoliberalism as political discourse ...
methodologies, academic articles and books, and not least policies that
aim at implementing and giving concrete expression and application to a
range of related ideas to reconstruct society as economy.
One of the most enduring revolutionary make-overs of the human-
ities and the social sciences came with the turn to language. In the early
twentieth century under the influence of a variety of formalisms, language
entered into a structuralist mode of understanding that quickly became
a scientific and systematic orientation to poetics and to language, consid-
ered as a system through semiotic means. This was not one tendency and
was open to various technical developments: Russian, Czech and Polish
Formalisms (Shklovsky, Jacobson, Levý) in literary theory that became
the basis for Prague and French structuralism (e.g., Levi-Strauss, Barthes,
Foucault), aided by Saussurian insights from structuralist linguistics that
became the predominant approach to cultural phenomena such as myths,
rituals, and kinship relations. This movement in language philosophy and
linguistics was also supported by different moments in analytical philoso-
phy that took the form of verificationism and later, ordinary language anal-
ysis, after Wittgenstein and Austin. Nor should we forget the growing in-
fluence of the powerful paradigm in semiotics developed by Peirce as the
philosophical study of signs, based on the triadic relations of sign, its object,
and its interpretant; or, Bakhtin’s dialogism maintaining that all language
and thought is dialogical, meaning that all language is dynamic, relational,
and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world. Ideal lan-
guage philosophy promised to develop a language based on symbolic log-
ic free from all ambiguity to create a picture of reality. Ordinary language
philosophy saw language as the key to both the content and method proper
to philosophy fostering the view that philosophical problems are linguistic
problems that can be resolve through linguistic analysis. Continental struc-
turalism a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of culture, cog-
nition and behaviour analysable through the relational aspects of language
as a system. Poststructuralism defined itself by opposition to the critique of
structuralism, decentring the centrality of structures in culture, conscious-
ness and language with an approach to the text and textual analysis that fo-
cused less on the author and more on the reader, a fictional view of the self
as a unitary autonomous subject, and the text as a result of multi-faceted in-
terpretations interrupted by power and social relations.
If there is one word that emerged from this divergent configura-
tion it was the concept of discourse, now so commonplace and taken for
granted that it is ever barely mentioned accept in a methodological sense.
Discourse modelled on coded conversation became the window to the so-
cial world of practices and policy directed to the analysis of statements.
59
methodologies, academic articles and books, and not least policies that
aim at implementing and giving concrete expression and application to a
range of related ideas to reconstruct society as economy.
One of the most enduring revolutionary make-overs of the human-
ities and the social sciences came with the turn to language. In the early
twentieth century under the influence of a variety of formalisms, language
entered into a structuralist mode of understanding that quickly became
a scientific and systematic orientation to poetics and to language, consid-
ered as a system through semiotic means. This was not one tendency and
was open to various technical developments: Russian, Czech and Polish
Formalisms (Shklovsky, Jacobson, Levý) in literary theory that became
the basis for Prague and French structuralism (e.g., Levi-Strauss, Barthes,
Foucault), aided by Saussurian insights from structuralist linguistics that
became the predominant approach to cultural phenomena such as myths,
rituals, and kinship relations. This movement in language philosophy and
linguistics was also supported by different moments in analytical philoso-
phy that took the form of verificationism and later, ordinary language anal-
ysis, after Wittgenstein and Austin. Nor should we forget the growing in-
fluence of the powerful paradigm in semiotics developed by Peirce as the
philosophical study of signs, based on the triadic relations of sign, its object,
and its interpretant; or, Bakhtin’s dialogism maintaining that all language
and thought is dialogical, meaning that all language is dynamic, relational,
and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world. Ideal lan-
guage philosophy promised to develop a language based on symbolic log-
ic free from all ambiguity to create a picture of reality. Ordinary language
philosophy saw language as the key to both the content and method proper
to philosophy fostering the view that philosophical problems are linguistic
problems that can be resolve through linguistic analysis. Continental struc-
turalism a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of culture, cog-
nition and behaviour analysable through the relational aspects of language
as a system. Poststructuralism defined itself by opposition to the critique of
structuralism, decentring the centrality of structures in culture, conscious-
ness and language with an approach to the text and textual analysis that fo-
cused less on the author and more on the reader, a fictional view of the self
as a unitary autonomous subject, and the text as a result of multi-faceted in-
terpretations interrupted by power and social relations.
If there is one word that emerged from this divergent configura-
tion it was the concept of discourse, now so commonplace and taken for
granted that it is ever barely mentioned accept in a methodological sense.
Discourse modelled on coded conversation became the window to the so-
cial world of practices and policy directed to the analysis of statements.
59
