Page 63 - Šolsko polje, XXIX, 2018, no. 1-2: The Language of Neoliberal Education, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 63
m. a. peters ■ neoliberalism as political discourse ...
where discourse was practiced and learned by the public speakers in
Athenian democracy according to logic principles. While its origins goes
back to antiquity and specifically to the problem of truth and rhetoric
in democracy the concept emerges in the medieval era as type and genre
with early works by Ockham, Godefroy and Causanus and in Latin writ-
ings in Europe, for example, Discursus Politicus de Societatis Civilis Primis
Elementis by Johannes Gotthard von Böckel (1677), that provide the fol-
lowing typology of modern times:
Discursus Politicus - Political Discourse - Deliberation
Discursus Academicus – Academic Discourse - Education
Discursus -Panegyricus - Panegyrical Discourse - Entertainment
Discursus Iudicialis - Legal Discourse – Law
(From Haase, 2007: p. 6)
Haase (2007) provides a potted history of discourse – ‘European
Reception of the Concept “Discourse” and the Literature on Discourse in
the 15th to 19th Century’ starting with Hobbes and working through to
Hume, and Locke. Descartes, he suggests, was the first to write about rea-
son and discourse in his Discourse On the Method of Rightly Conducting
the Reason. In the 19th century discourse was rendered as rhetoric by the
likes of Theodore W. Hunt who wrote The Principles of Written Discourse.
Haase’s (2007) brief history mentions Wittgenstein on the limits of dis-
course as well as the dominant theorists of Saussure and Foucault. Haase’s
(2007) paper is insightful but inconsistent and risks losing its focus – the
link between Saussure (misspelt) and Foucault is tenuous and left unex-
plained. One of the problems is that he uses secondary texts to explain dif-
ferent theorists including Foucault.
There is no doubt of Foucault’s importance as one of the thinkers
who encouraged the development of discourse theory and in particular
political discourse theory. One has to go no further than Foucault in-
augural lecture at the College de France when he was elected to the col-
lege in 1970. ‘The Order of Discourse’, a classic text by Foucault in every
sense – bold, complex, historically detailed, shadowing the early concept
of power/knowledge – was an inaugural lecture at the Collège de France,
given on Dec. 2, 1970, and published in French as L’Ordre du Discours
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970). He begins self-referentially by commenting on
the context of his own lecture and commenting “that in every society the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and re-
distributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off
its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade
61
where discourse was practiced and learned by the public speakers in
Athenian democracy according to logic principles. While its origins goes
back to antiquity and specifically to the problem of truth and rhetoric
in democracy the concept emerges in the medieval era as type and genre
with early works by Ockham, Godefroy and Causanus and in Latin writ-
ings in Europe, for example, Discursus Politicus de Societatis Civilis Primis
Elementis by Johannes Gotthard von Böckel (1677), that provide the fol-
lowing typology of modern times:
Discursus Politicus - Political Discourse - Deliberation
Discursus Academicus – Academic Discourse - Education
Discursus -Panegyricus - Panegyrical Discourse - Entertainment
Discursus Iudicialis - Legal Discourse – Law
(From Haase, 2007: p. 6)
Haase (2007) provides a potted history of discourse – ‘European
Reception of the Concept “Discourse” and the Literature on Discourse in
the 15th to 19th Century’ starting with Hobbes and working through to
Hume, and Locke. Descartes, he suggests, was the first to write about rea-
son and discourse in his Discourse On the Method of Rightly Conducting
the Reason. In the 19th century discourse was rendered as rhetoric by the
likes of Theodore W. Hunt who wrote The Principles of Written Discourse.
Haase’s (2007) brief history mentions Wittgenstein on the limits of dis-
course as well as the dominant theorists of Saussure and Foucault. Haase’s
(2007) paper is insightful but inconsistent and risks losing its focus – the
link between Saussure (misspelt) and Foucault is tenuous and left unex-
plained. One of the problems is that he uses secondary texts to explain dif-
ferent theorists including Foucault.
There is no doubt of Foucault’s importance as one of the thinkers
who encouraged the development of discourse theory and in particular
political discourse theory. One has to go no further than Foucault in-
augural lecture at the College de France when he was elected to the col-
lege in 1970. ‘The Order of Discourse’, a classic text by Foucault in every
sense – bold, complex, historically detailed, shadowing the early concept
of power/knowledge – was an inaugural lecture at the Collège de France,
given on Dec. 2, 1970, and published in French as L’Ordre du Discours
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970). He begins self-referentially by commenting on
the context of his own lecture and commenting “that in every society the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and re-
distributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off
its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade
61
