Johannes Angermuller

Heterogeneous knowledge: Trends in German discourse analysis against an international background

This contribution maps the complex field of discourse analysis in Germany by situating its major currents and putting them in historical perspective. In a first step, it presents the major intellectual sources, such as (post-)structuralism, pragmatism/interactionism as well as hermeneutics, which have served as a backdrop for the establishment of discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary field since the 1980s. In a second step, it takes a closer look at the intellectual conjunctures in the social sciences such as Critical Theory and systems theory before turning to the discourse analytical tendencies that have emerged since the 1980s in the light of Foucaults reception in Germany. Finally, it discusses the features of heterogeneous knowledge discourses. As against top-down studies of political discourse in France and bottom-up investigations of everyday discourse in the US, many discourse analysts in Germany focus on knowledge production as a multi-leveled process involving texts and contexts. Therefore, discourse is seen as a heterogeneous object constructed in the interplay of language, praxis and knowledge.Abstract This contribution maps the complex field of discourse analysis in Germany by situating its major currents and putting them in historical perspective. In a first step, it presents the major intellectual sources, such as (post-)structuralism, pragmatism/interactionism as well as hermeneutics, which have served as a backdrop for the establishment of discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary field since the 1980s. In a second step, it takes a closer look at the intellectual conjunctures in the social sciences such as Critical Theory and systems theory before turning to the discourse analytical tendencies that have emerged since the 1980s in the light of Foucaults reception in Germany. Finally, it discusses the features of heterogeneous knowledge discourses. As against top-down studies of political discourse in France and bottom-up investigations of everyday discourse in the US, many discourse analysts in Germany focus on knowledge production as a multi-leveled process involving texts and contexts. Therefore, discourse is seen as a heterogeneous object constructed in the interplay of language, praxis and knowledge.

Poststrukturalismus und Postkolonialismus: Jacques Derridas »Grammatologie« sowie Gilles Deleuzes und Félix Guattaris »Tausend Plateaus«

Die »Grammatologie« von Jacques Derrida und die »Tausend Plateaus« von Gilles Deleuze und Felix Guattari gelten als zwei Hauptwerke des Poststrukturalismus – eine insbesondere auserhalb des franzosischen Raums gelaufige Sammelbezeichnung fur Theoretiker wie Derrida und Deleuze/Guattari aber auch Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan und Roland Barthes und ihrer anglo-amerikanischen KommentatorInnen wie Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Paul de Man oder Gayatri C. Spivak. Zu den Grundkonstanten poststrukturalistischer Theoriebildung gehoren die Dezentrierung des sprechenden und handelnden Subjekts sowie die Kritik an geschlossenen Strukturen, deterministischen Codes oder grammatischen Regelsystemen, wobei den Dilemmata der ›Reprasentation‹ – verstanden im doppelten Sinne als kulturelle Darstellung und politische Vertretung – besondere reflexive Aufmerksamkeit zukommt.

Truth after post-truth: for a Strong Programme in Discourse Studies

Contemporary post-truth discourses put the constructivist foundations of Discourse Studies to a test. According to critical observers, discourse analysts have been playing into the hands of Trump, Brexit and right-wing populists by politicising scientific knowledge and undermining the idea of scientific truth. In order to respond to these concerns, this article outlines a Strong Programme in Discourse Studies. While the Strong Programme insists on truths as discursive constructions, in no way does it claim that all ideas have the same truth value or that an idea can become true because somebody wants it to be true. The Strong Programme makes the case for discourse research that is constructivist (it asks how truths are constructed practically) without being relativist (all ideas do not have the same normative quality). Taking inspiration from debates in Science and Technology Studies of the 1970s, the Strong Programme formulates principles for discourse researchers dealing with conflicting truth claims. Discourse analytical explanations of truths of first-order participants and of second-order observers should be symmetrical, heterogeneous, multi-perspectival and reflexive. The Strong Programme discourse research is grounded in the founding traditions of “French” and “Critical” Discourse Studies, which have struggled over questions of truth and reality since the beginning. While critically interrogating the structuralist heritage of these strands, the Strong Programme insists on the practices of making and unmaking ideas through language use no matter whether they appear as true or false to participants and observers. Discourse Studies are encouraged to critically reflect on how hierarchies between knowledges are not only represented but, through their representation, also constituted through discursive practices.

La grande course des universités

Book review of La grande course des universites, by Christine Musselin, Paris, Sciences Po, 2017, ISBN 2-7246-2055-0

Semantische und kommunikative Dimensionen diskursiven Wandels. Ein integrativer Ansatz zur Analyse der Makro- und Mikrostrukturen am Beispiel des Bologna-Diskurses

„Die unternehmerische Universitat“ - dieses Motto findet sich im Kopfbalken der Homepage der Technischen Universitat Munchen.

Accumulating discursive capital, valuating subject positions : from Marx to Foucault

ABSTRACT Whenever people use language, they participate in valuation practices, i.e. they give value to themselves as well as to others. To account for the construction of social inequality through discursive valuation practices, discourse theorists need Marxist theory and Marxists need discourse theory. By going from the early Marx to the late Foucault, I will revisit Marx’s value theory in light of practice-oriented approaches to social inequality. I will discuss examples from two distinct arenas, the monopolization of attention by populist leaders and the academic star system, both of which are accounted for in terms of the accumulation of discursive capital. This perspective asks how the value of subject positions is constructed and hierarchies between them are established in discursive practices. Investigating the construction of valuable subject positions in discourse communities, this perspective attempts to overcome the traditional division between language, the economic and the social. Discourse not only represents value and the social order but, through representation, it also contributes to constituting the social as a hierarchical world of more or less valued subject positions.

La sociologie du langage. Perspectives d’un champ émergent

En affirmant l’interet d’une « sociologie du langage », nous souhaitons interroger l’identite propre, les problematiques et les frontieres de ce champ. Trois objectifs traversent donc cette contribution : passer en revue differentes tentatives de fondation, definir les defis et problematiques de ce champ aujourd’hui et finalement donner une idee de possibles cadrages de l’analyse a travers deux exemples de terrains, auxquels est applique ce programme de recherche. Si notre cartographie commence par discuter les approches macro et micro aux Etats-Unis, au Royaume-Uni, en Allemagne et en France (premiere partie), elle ne manquera pas de constater les limites d’une vision binaire qui oppose les niveaux macro et microsociologiques et montrera comment il convient d’aller au-dela, en mettant l’accent sur les pratiques langagieres (deuxieme partie). Nous illustrons cette proposition en presentant deux exemples de recherches sociologiques dans la troisieme partie : le premier touchant aux pratiques d’accompagnement des demandeurs d’emploi comme pratiques de production de nouvelles formes d’individuation contemporaines (Glady), le second portant sur la recherche academique comme une pratique discursive de positionnement des chercheurs (Angermuller). Dans ces travaux, nous partons de l’idee que le social se realise a travers les pratiques langagieres et que les pratiques langagieres sont des pratiques sociales. Nous demarquant des linguistes formalistes, nous nous passons de la notion de « langue » comme un systeme abstrait de regles et de possibilites grammaticales. Nous adoptons l’idee que le langage est une activite humaine qui puise dans un stock de ressources linguistiques pour realiser les pratiques sociales.

Analyzing Intellectual Discourse: Variations on the Critique of Humanism

The ‘corpus’ of the following analyses consists of five textual snippets deriving from leading representatives of the intellectual generation of structuralism: Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Sollers, who occupy points on a broad spectrum of differing positions in the intellectual discourse. They differ first of all, in terms of their political orientation (on the left: Althusser; periodically on the left: Foucault, Sollers; moderately leftist: Derrida; ‘non-leftist’: Lacan); second, in terms of the social networks associated with them (founders of schools: Lacan, Althusser; academic maverick: Foucault, Derrida; essayist in the public sphere: Sollers); third, in terms of their contrasting disciplinary fields (philosophy: Althusser, Derrida; sciences humaines: Foucault; transdisciplinary: Lacan); with respect to their different educational pathways (the elite philosophers from Ecole normale: Foucault, Althusser, Derrida; autodidacts: Lacan, Sollers); and, finally, in terms of their various institutional anchorings (professorship: Foucault; lower-level academic positions: Althusser, Derrida; free scholars: Lacan, Sollers).

A History of Discourse Analysis in France

The field of discourse analysis comprises a variety of traditions and approaches. As their smallest common denominator, we can consider the assumption that signs, sentences, and texts do not have any inherent meaning, but that meaning presupposes a context and that linguistic activity is not limited to the level of signs and sentences. In the Anglo-American debate, influenced by pragmatism and analytical philosophy, discourse is in many cases understood as organized turn taking, for example as conversations and interactions. By contrast, the tradition that has emerged since the 1960s in France tends to associate discours with written texts circulating in larger social communities (Maingueneau 1987; Detrie et al. 2001; Charaudeau and Maingueneau 2002; Maziere 2005; Munchow 2010).

Introduction: Poststructuralism and Enunciative Pragmatics

The controversy over structuralism reached its peak around 1966–7, when a new generation of French theorists, including Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, came onto the intellectual scene. Inspired by Marxism and psychoanalysis, these intellectuals are today known for their critical epistemologies that point to the symbolic constitution of the subject and insist on the constitutive role of language in society. Yet while these theorists have been greeted as representatives of the linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities, the linguistic and semiotic traditions themselves, which have so decisively stimulated the imagination of the interdisciplinary theoretical debate, are hardly known outside a rather restricted circle of specialists. Not surprisingly, these thinkers have often been perceived as sweeping theorists of language in society, but of rather limited help when it comes to analyzing linguistic and semiotic texts.