Reading 5 - Discourse & Power

This week’s lecture and set reading focusses on discourse and power. Throughout the lecture we covered topics based on discourse, discourse analysis and poststructuralism. The lecture and key reading from Paul Long and Tim Wall described discourse as a whole as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault: Long & Wall (2012) p.363). As for discourse analysis, which involves a close examination of text, the visual imagery and the sound and also the written language. It considers both the form of the text and its “social context, its construction, distribution and reception. It aims to understand and elucidate the meanings and social significance of text.” (Smith and Bell (2007) p.78)

The lecture and key reading both discuss Michel Foucault’s idea of discourse as he considers that discourse might be a way of controlling society. As stated above Foucaults theory of discourse is described as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault: Long & Wall (2012). There are a variety of different ways to understand discourse, these two ways are Narrow and Wide. Narrow is described as the written, spoken and visual elements i.e. text and wide is considered to be described as a social practice. Photography’s, art, video, or even games are all visual elements where we can use a visual discourse as all these elements project some meaning to its audience. With every visual element having a meaning behind them, they can be broken down and discuss the meanings behind them, one method of doing this is through Fairclough’s (2004) model (http://eltvoices.in/EVI25/EVI_25_12.pdf p.187).  Faircloughs method contains three levels of analysis, the text itself, the discursive practice and the sociocultural practice surrounding the text. The first element is text and therefore this means that in this framework, one needs to pick a piece of text to discuss. The second piece of the framework discusses the discursive practice, this talks about an analysis of the production, consumption and reproduction of a text, this is concerned by the way in which people interpret a text and possible reproduce this. The final part of the framework is the sociocultural practice, this explores the issue of power surrounding a text. It explores the way in which discourse operates in “various different domains of socity” (http://eltvoices.in/EVI25/EVI_25_12.pdf p.188).

The majority of text have at least one discourse within it and therefore making it valid to almost all subjects. Discourses allows one to further analyse a text however it would not provide us with a definitive answer, more so an observation.

Reference:

Smith, Phillip and Bell, Alan (2007) Unravelling the Web of Discourse Analysis in Devereux, Eoin (.ed) Media Studies Key Issues and Debates. London: Sage

P.Long & T.Wall (2012). Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge. 

http://eltvoices.in/EVI25/EVI_25_12.pdf