Discourse as language and politics: An introduction to the philology of political culture in Australia

Abstract

Despite a number of different attempts to identify a mutual body of ‘research interests’, ‘methods’, ‘materials’ and ‘levels of analysis’ by Van Dijk (1985) and others (e.g., Brown and Yule (1983) Stubbs (1983) Coulthard (1985)) what counts as discourse analysis remains problematic. This is complicated by a further consideration of the broader distinction between these and other Anglo-American approaches and continental European approaches to discourse (Lecourt (1975) Macdonell (1986)) a distinction which has a number of interesting parallels with that between the two forms of semiotics associated with the two sides of the Atlantic. In the Anglo-American tradition there have been urgent attempts to search out a sub-disciplinary identity and unity for discourse analysis, its “common core” (Stalpers (1988: 88)). Foundational figures have been recognised; key moments in the history of the sub-discipline have been named; texts have been selected for the canon. Yet, on this side of things, questions about whether and how a “new (sub)discipline” has “come into existence” (Stalpers (1988: 87)) about “disciplinary maturity” ~ like many efforts in other disciplines to explicate a common core of theory, object and method ~ begin from particular unproblematicised assumptions about discourse and its analysis. Moreover, these assumptions quite often include the idea that discourse analysis should ‘naturally’ exist in some particularly close relation to linguistics, as though the latter itself were not fraught with rifts as to its proper object and method (Stalpers (I 988: 88-89)). Methodological reflection on discourse analysis, in such cases, is in danger of becoming nothing more or less than a subset of methodological reflection on linguistics. Along with the contributors to the present volume, we see severe problems with such an attempt to establish disciplinary unity and singularity in the field. Our purpose