An overview of discourse

Having (hopefully) done a useful survey of democracy and suggested the importance of democratic culture, I'll now turn to a different set of concepts that I think are a useful and powerful toolkit: post-structuralism and discourses. Once again my aim is not to provide a comprehensive survey but to focus on the things that I find useful.

A very useful reason to engage with the idea of discourses is because discourses deal with power, just like democracy does. In fact, the power of discourse might be a power that isn't talked about sufficiently in theories of democracy. If the people are to have the power, I think looking into power and discourses is going to be essential.

What is a discourse?

A discourse is a way of talking about the world, or some of the things we perceive in the world. The way we talk about the world frames the way that we see the world, and especially the way that we see the following two things: what is possible, and what is justifiable. So we can think of a discourse as a way of talking about the world, or a story we tell about the world, that tells us what is possible and what is justifiable.

Everything we interact with, we interact with through a discourse. We might say that we "inhabit" or "engage with" a discourse. We don't really have a way of engaging with the world without using a discourse of some sort. If I want to talk to a person, it depends on what I mean by "talk" and what I mean by "person". Perhaps by "talk" I mean to use spoken words, or perhaps I mean to exchange written messages. And by "person" perhaps I mean a human being, or perhaps I mean something with "personhood", which some might ascribe to their beloved pets. And there isn't really a way that I can go through life without making such conceptual categories (whether I actually put words to them or not - what is a "word", after all?).

The point is that these conceptual categories are made up. They are imagined things. So, in some sense, "talking" isn't real and "people" aren't real. "Talking" is a conceptual category that I put a whole lump of things into, but I might not put the same things into this category that you do (perhaps I think you can "talk" via written message and you don't), and I might not be completely consistent all the time, depending on what I find convenient (maybe at some point I want to say that I didn't talk to someone, and so I exclude written messages). You can see children, and lawyers, and politicians play with the categories all the time.

When we create a conceptual category in a discourse, I'm going to say we "construct" that thing. So if we want to come up with a discourse on democracy that creates a conceptual category of who "the people" are, we would say that the discourse "constructs" the people.

Discourses and power

The way we speak about things (or, I guess, think about things) suggests what is possible and what is justifiable. Let's start with justifiable. If I were to show you a wooden chair, you might think it's okay to sit down in it. But I tell you the wooden chair is "a piece of art", you might suddenly think that it is wrong to sit down on it. In either case, it is the same material thing, but what is justifiable in relation to it changes because of what category it is in.

The same goes for a lot of more significant things, like people. Earlier I wrote that democracy is about "the people" having the power, but then I noted that it is often questioned who "the people" are in any particular case. Just men? Landowners? Nationals? And depending on how we define this word in this context, we can justify including them in the political process or excluding them. Discourses put things into conceptual categories, and tell us that we are justified in treating things in those categories differently.

What about the possible? We could take the case of a person who has done something harmful to someone else. If we call them "damaged", we might think it's possible to fix them. If we call them "unwell" we might think it is possible to heal them. But if we call them "evil" we might think that neither possibility applies. By picking different words, we suggest that different things are possible.

Because discourses tell us what is possible and what is justifiable, they have a lot of power. Think of teaching a child. If you teach a child some things are impossible and some things are wrong, you will have fundamentally affected how that child will go about their life, and what they will do and what they won't do. For example, you can teach them not to do things that are unsafe. But maybe you teach them that certain types of medicine are unsafe, like vaccines, or you teach them that certain types of people are unsafe, or that dressing a certain way is unsafe. Every discourse holds power over what people can and will do.

Some of the more dangerous discourses include things like justifying that it is okay to hurt certain types of people, that it is impossible for them to feel pain, or that certain people cannot feel real love, and that it is okay to take away their rights or exclude them from society.

Knowledge-power

So, discourses inform us what is possible and justifiable, which is a lot of power. And because this power comes from informing, discourses are a type of knowledge. Discourses, then, are a knowledge that is used as a power.

Some discourses also tell us what is "true". This is true because it was written in a certain book, or that is true because we investigated a certain way. So discourses are a power that is used to define what is knowledge.

This means that discourses are neither just power or just knowledge, they are "knowledge-power". They are things that consist of power and knowledge and make power and knowledge. And because of this, they can perpetuate themselves. Someone who learns a particular discourse also learns what "truth" is and learns that the discourse is true.

Moreover, people inhabit a lot of discourses without even knowing it. They act according to the possibilities and justifications of the conceptual categories of the discourse, without always questioning what those categories are, why they are the way they are, or even knowing that this is the line between categories that they are using.

The Self and the Other

A lot of discourses draw a line between two main categories, called the "Self" and the "Other". This is a sort of us-and-them situation in many cases, and putting things into only two categories like this is called a "binary".

The Self is a category for things that are natural, normal, moral, and maybe even superior. It's also a category where these things are taken for granted. It's just the way it is. The Other, in contrast, is a category for things that are unnatural, abnormal, amoral or immoral, and maybe even inferior. This category is often shrouded in mystery but, at the same time, the subject of a lot of examination and scrutiny.

For the Self, usually lots of things are possible. For the Other, they are often not. And the Self is often justified in acting on the Other. Take the traditional concepts of men and women, for example. Men were seen as rational, powerful, capable, dominating their surroundings. Women were seen as emotional, submissive, weak. This meant that men had a lot of possibilities - they could work almost any job, they could be leaders, they could be innovators. Women, on the other hand, had less possibilities, staying at home, raising children, unable to get bank accounts or vote. In this discourse, the men were the Self and the women were the Other, and it often justified men using power over women. There are a lot of other traditional examples: white and black, civilised and uncivilised, democratic and despotic, and so on. And a lot of these examples have had some scrutiny placed on them, so they are good examples to show that the discourse was just a story and not some objective reality.

It's no surprise, then, that post-structuralists are pretty suspicious of things that fall into binaries, or universal claims about categories. They are usually discourses that structure power, and structure it so that one group has power over another.

Genealogy and the Event

But discourses don't just pop into existence. They come from somewhere. And tracking down where discourses come from is called "genealogy". Usually this means looking into the context of the past, and especially back to something called an "Event".

Here's one way to think of it: there's a discourse that is completely embedded into society (or some part of it). It defines what is possible and what is justifiable, and informs people's behaviour. People take it for granted. They don't question it. But then something happens - either all at once or over a long time - that disrupts the discourse. The discourse doesn't make any sense anymore. Maybe it's been shown to be blatantly untrue, or it's no longer relevant. And now people stop believing it and start to question it. This is the Event.

Here are some examples of events:

• On 9/11 terrorists flew two planes into skyscrapers in New York, and demonstrated that a world superpower was vulnerable to a few ill-equipped individuals. The discourse about what could threaten the US, and how powerful it was, was suddenly thrown into question.
• In 2008 there was a global financial crisis, leading to economic instability around the world. The discourse about the prosperity of globally interconnected and largely free markets was thrown into doubt, and people started looking for alternatives.

So the Event is, roughly, when an old discourse dies. And this gives potential new discourses a chance to take over, like warring heirs attempting to claim the throne. For example, after 2008 there were two competing economic discourses, that of nationalism and that of social democracy, that faced off against each other. In the US, nationalism has largely won, and the UK left the EU under a similar discourse.

But genealogy is not just about when and why, but who. Not just anyone can make a discourse likely to win. People compete to have their discourse win, and they do it using knowledge-power - that is, they leverage the power that they have to put their discourse front and centre and make it the most compelling, and they also use the discourse to convince people that they have power.

It may not be very surprising to learn that the people who occupy the Self category are often the people who made the discourse in the first place. Whether consciously or not, these people see themselves as normal, natural, moral and superior, and they build conceptual categories that reinforce or construct their own power.

So, that is a brief overview of discourses, and next I'll use it to question the idea of human nature.