Discussion Of Theory Research Articles

Neophenomenological strategies in techno-images. Towards the post-metaphysical ontology

The article deals with the deconstruction of “metaphysics of presence”, based on the subject-object duality, in a postsecular/mystical approach. Post-metaphysical ontology, that is described here as negative ontology, needs a neophenomenological tool to be revealed. Characterized by a “wave” structure, beyond the “hard presence”, it can’t be defined as “being” or “non-being”. It is rather a kind of perpetual motion, determined by the trajectory of “photons of light”. This recognition seems to find an appropriate manifestation in a contemporary techno-culture. In the field of media technology (analog film or digital new media art), the negative ontology may be experienced by strategies of neophenomenology, in which “sus- pension” (epoché) gesture would concerns first the “ground” itself, then the aesthetics and narration, constituted by the cognitive/rational act of counsciousness. In other words, the visuality of the techno-image may be a tool of liberation of the perception from a cognitive/rational paradigm, which is closed to experience of what is the Other / the apophatic, wave Reality as it is. What should be underlined, in this proposal neophenomenology is not only the epistemology; the virtual image is directly related to negative ontology. An intuitive, mystical transformation of vision, proposed here, that denudes the discourse of representation, allows us to immerse into pure/“naked” Seeing and pure/“naked” Being. Exemplary materials to the outlined issues are films by Béla Tarr and video installations by Bill Viola.

Back to the future: re-examining John Mearsheimer’s idea of hypernationalism in the context of the Russian–Ukrainian war

ABSTRACT Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is an opportunity for readdressing a crucial theoretical question: How to understand the role of hypernationalism in the run-up to war? Given the participation of Ukrainian ultranationalist militias and Russia’s goal of de-Nazifying Ukraine, a need emerges to provide a greater understanding of hypernationalism and its relation to this war’s origins. By going back to John Mearsheimer’s 1990 article ‘Back to the future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, this article examines Mearsheimer’s idea of hypernationalism and the problem of how states can signify other nations most negatively in the run-up to war. Drawing on a problem-driven strategy, it tackles this problem by applying ‘Essex School’ poststructuralist discourse theory. It argues that Ukrainian hypernationalism played a vital role in the genesis of this war, although not as a stable set of principles that possess a causal force but as a political subjectivity that the Russian government signified as a threat to its national identity. I use this distinction to theorise the role of hypernationalism by examining Russian official statements about Ukrainian neo-Nazism.

Care as pluriversal strategy? Caring in counter-hegemonic struggles in the degrowth and environmental justice movements

ABSTRACT Overcoming the destructive power of the capitalist world system requires bringing relevant alternatives together in a way that respects their diversity. In this article, we investigate the significance of care – in its ethical, practical, and affective dimensions – in the task of uniting the pluriverse alternatives at moments and sites of counter-hegemonic struggle. Our analysis focuses on the degrowth movement and environmental justice movements. Adopting a post-Marxist discourse theory lens, we argue that care can mobilize and coalesce these pluriverse alternatives into temporarily united counter-hegemonic coalitions. For effectively disrupting the hegemony of the capitalist world system, we suggest that the pluriverse should meet the following three conditions: (1) the symbolic construction of the world system as an enemy to mobilize against, (2) a vision recognizing the foundational nature of care-based relations for pluriversal futures, and (3) practices of care fitting together with the parallel understandings and visions of the pluriverse.

Analisis Podcast Close The Door Tentang Pelanggaran Etika Episode Catheez

The purpose of this research is to conduct an analysis of possible ethical violations contained in the episode "CRAZY KAYA GINI TURNS OME TV⁉️ - CATHEEZ - WHERE IS THE BOCIL OME TV!?" from the "Close the Door" podcast narrated by Catheez. This research uses a qualitative approach to identify and evaluate ethical aspects that appear in the conversations and narratives in the podcast. This research also integrates feminist discourse theory with Vand DJik which is divided into 3 structures, namely macro structure, super structure and micro structure to explore the influence of this episode on gender construction and social norms in the context of conversation. The results of the research identified several forms of ethical violations which were emphasized in the episode including gender stereotyping, verbal harassment, as well as the use of derogatory language. With a feminist discourse perspective, this research also reveals the ways in which these episodes may strengthen or undermine gender norms in society. The results of this research provide important insights regarding the influence of podcasts on understanding ethics and social norms, taking into account gender and feminist perspectives. This research makes an important contribution to understanding the ethical issues that arise in the world of podcasts and also how feminist discourse theory can be applied to analyze the impact of audio media such as podcasts in the social and cultural realm.

The Representation of Female Biblical Figures in Major Israeli Discourses

Israeli girls’ names that remained prevalent over lengthy periods were examined with the aim of determining their representation in social discourses as defined by Foucault (2002). Rare names occurring three to ten times per year from 1948 to 2015 were examined as well. Foucault defined four dichotomous axes that distinguish social discourses, with each axis characterized by social normativity at one end and original creativity at the other. The four dichotomous axes of discourse according to Foucault are ‘discursive event opposed to creation’, ‘discursive series opposed to unity’, ‘discursive regularity opposed to originality’ and, ‘condition of possibility opposed to signification’. The most prevalent girls’ names were considered as representation of the social normativity, while the rare names were considered as representations of social discourse contains original creativity. 19 prevalent names were found, 12 of which stayed on the most-popular-names list for 68 years, and seven of which appeared on the list for at least 40 years. Fifteen of these 19 names are the names of female figures from the Old Testament. Eight of the names are those of the most important women in the Bible – women who also have enjoyed the greatest degree of favor in Jewish tradition. Four other names are those of assertive women whose actions were viewed unfavorably in Jewish tradition. An analysis of these names in Foucauldian terms indicated that the most-popular-names list for girls constitutes part of three simultaneous social discourses in Israeli society across its component subgroups. These three discourses are: traditional Jewish discourse, Zionist discourse, and Israeli discourse. The latter discourse has not only featured names that appeared for many years on the popular-names list; it has also featured, in more than half the cases, names belonging to the rare-names lists – a phenomenon consistent with creativity, in Foucauldian terms.

Demands as the black box of discourse theory: the German integration debate, demanding a ‘leading culture’ and the mainstreaming of the far-right

ABSTRACT The recent rise of the far-right ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD) in Germany has puzzled researchers. How did demands around cultural homogeneity and the need to be protected from ‘dangerous’ immigrants become acceptable in the mainstream when previously they were not? Crucially, understanding political change is paramount for discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau, who considers ‘demands’ as pivotal for the construction of political identities. Yet, the notion is underdeveloped in his writings. I discuss the aporias in Laclau’s understanding of demands and probe how far we can take Laclau in theoretically accounting for the emergence of demands. The concepts of horizon and dislocation are most helpful in this regard. I then utilise those concepts to analyse demand emergence in the ‘Leitkultur’ (leading culture) debate. I show how the horizon on which these demands are inscripted changed over the years, with a culturalistic discourse becoming dominant. There, following a dislocatory public debate of a non-fiction bestseller by career bureaucrat Thilo Sarrazin, integration was increasingly framed as problematic and foreigners needing to shed unintegratable parts of their own culture to assimilate to a German Leitkultur. I argue that acts of mainstreaming like these allowed the AfD to make their formerly radical demands seem credible.

Syntax, Technology and Politics: Analyzing Political Facebook Posts

This study used Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory to analyze syntactic complexity in digital communication. Thirty Facebook posts made between August and December 2023 by John Dramani Mahama, a Ghanaian former president, were analyzed in this study. A textual analysis was conducted on the data. The findings affirmed that grammatical categories are functional. There was a deliberate linguistic strategy marked by a prevalence of declarative sentences and a notable dominance of complex structures in this genre of digital writing. The strategic use of non-finite clauses contributes to the complexity of the discourse. The genre of writing is also characterized by information ranking and integration. The linguistic choices align with the formal expectations of political and digital communication – precision, depth, and engagement. These observations challenge and enrich existing theories of political discourse and communication strategies in the digital era. Keywords: Syntactic Complexity, Digital Communication, Facebook, Sentence Types, SFL

In the business of gendered violence: the private shelter discourse in Sweden

For-profit companies have begun competing with women’s shelters for ‘clients’ trying to escape violence. Using discourse theory, this study examines how 20 private shelters describe their business. The analysis shows that private shelters describe themselves as: (1) having a broad expertise and target group: (2) being able to tend to the individual needs of any client; and (3) being highly available and flexible. We understand this as an expression of a neoliberal market discourse and as a way to differentiate themselves from women’s shelters. This may put pressure on women’s shelters to provide similar ‘inclusion’, availability and flexibility. Furthermore: (4) private shelters contribute to shaping a desirable neoliberal subject, that is, a self-reliant woman; and (5), by articulating needs as individual and inherently mundane, they lean more towards ‘providing accommodation’ than addressing the particularities of (gendered) violence.

An Exploration of the Cinematic Adaptation of Manto’s Short Stories in the Light of Foucault’s Discourse Theory

This paper explores the cinematic adaptation ‘Mantostaan’, which is a compilation of the four short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto: ‘The Last Salute’, ‘Open It’, ‘The Assignment’, and ‘Colder than Ice’ in the light of Foucault’s Discourse theory. These works are the English translations of Manto’s Urdu works and are taken resort to for deeply observing the visual content of the film adaptation. For Foucault (1977), it is through discourse (through knowledge) that we are created; and that discourse joins power and knowledge, and its power follows from our casual acceptance of the “reality with which we are presented”. The discourse theory is applied on the dialogues exchanged by the characters of the film in the background of the horror during the partition of India occurred in 1947. It also discovers how various kinds of situations, in the turmoil of communal riots, led the characters holding the power position and thus dominating the discourse. The characters of the film thus, driven by their knowledge, create or participate in the discourse. These discourses shape out the situations, consequences of which are faced by the people. Thus, the paper taking into account the partition fracas, focuses upon the situations created by the discourse throughout the time of communal animosity and upon its bewildering aftermaths affecting people’s lives.

Lifelong (mind) representationalism in dynamic semantics

AbstractOur point of departure is László Kálmán's system of radical anti-mainstream argumentations about such central but dubious, or at least debated, constituents and concepts of dynamic semantics as discourse representation, information state, compositionality between semantics and syntax, bridging, deferred information, and ambiguity/vagueness. We strive for pointing out that Kálmán's observations and stances concerning these fundamental, ultimate problems of pragmasemantics are worth relying upon the formal theory that is to realize the desirable purpose of creating a version of formal pragmasemantics simultaneously capable of meeting the criteria and requirements appearing in different non-logics-based/informal areas of the description of human communication and – what is behind it – thinking.

Populist orality in 21st Century latin american socialism: an analysis of political discourse

This article offers a review and reflection on the new forms of orality and transmission of speeches in the context of 21st Century Socialism. It is highlighted that politicians use language daily through speeches in order to convince the recipient of their point of view, which has generated new forms of political organization in South American countries. The analysis focuses on the importance of political language in creating meanings and in the main political maneuvers, as well as the competition of political actors for the favors of the people in the civic scene. The relevance of discourse theory in understanding social relations and their transformation is highlighted, as well as the influence of populism on society's perception of media systems and their relationship with the "powers that be”. Additionally, the use of political marketing, its impact on the persuasion and manipulation of public opinion, and the influence of ancient rhetoric on contemporary politics are addressed. The technological-cultural struggle between alternative ways of perceiving and arguing reality is mentioned, highlighting the importance of understanding discourse in its textual, situational, and social practice dimensions. The article offers a comprehensive vision of populist orality in the context of 21st Century Socialism, highlighting its influence on politics, society, and the perception of reality in Latin America.

Outsider Art and Psychiatry in the Late Soviet Period

This article examines the discourse surrounding the Soviet Outsider Art of the 1970s–1980s. The author analyses the characteristics of scientific and scholarly approaches to, and definitions of, Soviet Оutsider Аrt, and the relationship of this phenomena to the contemporary political situation. The research methodology relies on the theory of discourse and discourse analysis, which makes it possible to examine texts and events from highly different fields as parts of an interconnected system. The innovative character of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, the author considers the discourse of Soviet Оutsider Аrt from the perspective of Soviet policy and international affairs. The lack of specialized works that study Soviet Оutsider Аrt makes the article relevant and innovative. Researchers have not previously considered the connection between Soviet foreign policy, ideology, punitive psychiatry, and the discourse surrounding Outsider Art. In the 1970s, the creative process of the mentally ill became a topic of interest for Soviet psychiatry. The drawings of psychiatric patients were treated as vehicles of their creative impulses and utilized in psychiatric research for diagnostic purposes. Soviet psychiatrists compared the creative abilities of the mentally ill with various artistic movements, primarily surrealism; however, their vocabulary and analytic approach remained strictly psychiatric in nature. The 1980s gave rise to significant interest in this topic by a larger audience, in connection with a rethinking of artistic languages and the creative process. There was a dual attempt to dispel the reputation of “punitive psychiatry” and a growing understanding of the importance of “otherness” in art. Orienting to the discourse of key texts, this article reveals a gradual shift from the language of psychiatry to art in academic and journalistic texts devoted to Outsider Art in the 1970s–1980s.

COMMENTARY AS A TYPE OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

The present paper deals with the problem of a commentary as a secondary communicative action. The aim of the article is to describe several discourse types of commentary (a commentary in everyday oral communication, a scientific discourse, a commentary in a legal communication, a commentary in a religious discourse) and define its current discursive features. As a result of the study, it was found that a commentary in everyday oral communication mostly expresses specification of the previous phrase and personal standpoint of interlocutors. In a scientific discourse a commentary is used to ground the author’s approach to the problem and to express a critical evaluation of the problems, usually in a regardful mode. A commentary in a legal communication is given to define and specify certain relevant notions in the sphere of law. A commentary in a religious discourse is used to interpret the basic sentences. A network discourse commentary expresses a personal evaluative attitude to the information published, and responses to it make a polemic dialogue. The scientific novelty of the study is that the definite features of the four types of the commentary are revealed. The study of commentary contributes to the development of theory of speech genres, theory of text and discourse, and pragmalinguistics.

SFDRS as a metalanguage for ‘foodscaping’: adding a formal dimension to an interdisciplinary, multimodal approach to food

‘Foodscaping’ seeks to understand how meaning is made through humans’ interaction with food in particular environments through a multimodal and interdisciplinary analytical lens. As part of a foodscaping project, researchers often interpret food environments to which they are not intimately ‘local’. This presents cross-cultural limitations in the production of analysis. Most pertinently, how can personal interpretation be divorced from locally salient and meaningful discourses? This paper presents the findings of a pilot foodscaping analysis using the box notation style of Kim’s Korean Segmented Film Discourse Representation Structures (K-SFDRS). K-SFDRS notation, developed to provide both coarser- and finer-grained formal transcription for South Korean multimodal film discourse analysis, is tested as an analytic tool for an authentic South Korean foodscaping experience. This paper aims to ascertain whether the formal nature of K-SFDRS transcription is a useful aid to the analysis of a foodscape, which otherwise risks relying heavily on personal interpretation. This pilot study presents an introduction to both foodscaping and (K-)SFDRS, outlines the potentials of (K-)SFDRS notation within a foodscaping context, offers a step-by-step outline for constructing K-SFDRS box notation using an exemplar South Korean foodscape, and finally demonstrates how this box notation may be used in the support of foodscaping analysis in various interdisciplinary channels. During this pilot study, the authors make a novel methodological development in the form of what they term ‘cluster structures’, which overcome the problems presented by the lack of cinematic narrative editing in spontaneous discourse, segmenting meaning into logical forms within which structures of meaning are hierarchised without requiring the discourse relations to structure the logical forms themselves in narrative discourse following the original K-SFDRS methodology. The paper concludes that K-SFDRS, alongside the aforementioned methodological development, has potential to help foodscaping researchers constrain interpretation to salient discourses and direct foodscaping analysis down meaningful avenues. Through its culinary scope, this chapter adds a new disciplinary dimension to discussions of metalanguage and makes an innovative contribution to the current corpus of multimodal research.

Інтерпретація авторського «Я» крізь призму епістолярного дискурсу Ольги Кобилянської

The paper highlights the postulates of personal discourse theories (egotext) designed for the aspectual clarification of Olha Kobylianska’s epistolary discourse originality. The strokes of the writer’s biography are analyzed via the prism of her self-awareness concerning individual preferences, passions, and aspirations, in particular with an indication of the incomplete life potential realization (loneliness is critically evaluated), the presentation of the philosopher’s key worldviews, primarily feminist (gender) beliefs, and the understanding of her own creative potential national-genetic basics. It is demonstrated how O. Kobylianska expresses her views on the environment, religion, mysticism, psychology, and shows her love for learning and mastering Polish and German as foreign languages; her artistic writing in general, the tendency to intuitive prediction reflections, and her interest in music and theater are also discussed in the piece of research. The artist sincerely admits that her emotions are not always controlled during the creative process, as well as in real-life situations. In the writer’s epistolary thesaurus, one can trace the vocabulary and phraseology frequency to indicate certain psychological states and emotions, which proves that in O. Kobylianska’s nature are high sensuality, emotionality, and expressiveness. The artist’s epistolary behavior features (politeness,self-irony, humorous tone, benevolence and emotionality) display her epistolary idiostyle originality, indicating a distinct soul sensitivity. The lexeme soul has a high frequency in the text of the considered letters and presents powerful semantic and pragmatic content. O. Kobylianska’s letters analysis makes it possible to claim that she is a talented writer, an introverted type of thinking individual, a born psychologist, as well as a connoisseur of Ukrainian and other linguistic cultures.

How does pornography change desires? A pragmatic account

Abstract Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argue that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people's desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West's discourse-theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments in discourse theory, we propose that pornography issues implicit directives, and thereby introduces bouletic components into the discourse.

A RIGOROUS METHODOLOGY FOR AN ETHICAL AGENDA OF THE ACT:

In this paper, we are concerned with the tension of a dialogical ontology with a structuralist episteme on the Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis model, the Social Theory of Discourse (1992; 2003). Our approach considers that, on the one hand, its origins in the Systemic Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY, 2004) maintain a "top-down" structuralist residuality, which remains in textual and linguistic analysis. However, on the other hand, we recognize that the Bakhtinian dialogism assumption (BAKHTIN, 1993; 1986) functions as a "bottom-up" dialogical eventicity that forms the ethical basis of the critical perspective. This methodological treatment of the relationship among events, practices and texts by their description and interpretation is what allows the transition from a static ethical agenda to an empowering ethical agenda. The real empowerment, embedded in the “critical purpose”, needs the consideration of the responsible and responsive integrality of the act (COSTA, 2013; 2012)

Discourse Theory, Nodal Points, and Stereoscopic Optics on Justice

ABSTRACT Specific domains of modern life—social, ecological, legal—involve distinct issues of justice that often lead to a single-focused political-philosophical engagement with justice. Such engagements, argues Marianna Papastephanou, risk turning issues of justice that lie beyond the adopted perspective into discursive injustices (i.e. of silencing the Other’s voice) and condemning them to invisibility. To address this risk, Papastephanou proposes a stereoscopic approach that better illuminates the many facets of justice and, concomitantly, the many instances of injustice that escape the dominant political-philosophical perspectives on justice. In the present article, I discuss Papastephanou’s theory of a stereoscopic approach to justice along with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory and notion of “nodal points.” I suggest that the synergy between the two approaches enhances their efficacy: Papastephanou’s theorization concretizes the implications of establishing nodal points, which, in turn, reveal how the reduction of justice to one of its facets occurs at the discursive level. Enriched by Papastephanou’s theorization, discourse theory makes more visible how a stereoscopic approach to justice can unveil discursive injustices of selective and partial outlooks on (in)justice.

Discourses on religion in research that focuses on students’ perspectives

In this article, the aim is twofold: firstly, to explore, through a systematic literature review, what discourses on religion may be identified in previous research that focuses on students’ perspectives, and secondly, to discuss this in relation to research concerning challenges and opportunities in Scandinavian religious education (RE) and classroom negotiations, which is presented as a background to and scientific landscape for the study. Seven discourses relating to students’ understanding of religion have been identified in the text sample from the systematic review, religion as: threatening, a relic, needing to be tolerated, truth claims, plastic, a source of existential curiosity, and security and comfort. The findings show how these discourses together constitute a broader repertoire of discourses on religion than can be found in the Scandinavian RE classroom research presented as a frame for the study, especially when taking into account current orders of discourse and dominance structures. As stressed by discourse theory and sociocultural perspectives on learning, having access to broad repertoires of discourses on religion provides a basis for more nuanced ways of thinking about religion. It is vital that teachers are aware of this and can challenge dominant discourses and broaden existing repertoires. An important step in such a direction is an awareness of discourses on religion, such as the seven presented here, which may potentially be present in the classroom, even in practices other than the ones these discourses emanated from.

Mediapolitical Discourse: Concepts and Framework

Introduction. The article presents the results of the review of scientific works on discourse theory, reflecting the stages of evolution of media-political discourse in Russian linguistics. The aim of the article is to summarize, systematize and analyze approaches to the study of media-political discourse and concepts of its comprehension. Such concepts as media discourse, media text, media linguistics, and political discourse are considered.Methodology and sources. The article is prepared in the context of the cognitive-discursive paradigm, functional approach to discourse analysis, and media linguistics. In accordance with the postulates of critical discourse analysis, media-political discourse is considered as a constitutive of social practice. The main research method is an analytical scientific review of works on discourse theory.Results and discussion. In the course of the review of works on media and political discourse the main approaches to the understanding and research of media-political discourse are highlighted. The boundaries of this type of discourse as one of the areas of modern discourse theory are outlined. The concepts of scientific cognition that conditioned the formation of media-political discourse are identified. A review of works on related types of discourse at the previous stages of scientific thought is given. Internet discourse is viewed as an alternative source of political information. The article emphasizes the elements of language of enmity and the binary opposition “us/them” in the media-political discourse.Conclusion. The paper reveals a tendency to merge media discourse and political discourse within the framework of media-political discourse in modern linguistics. Among the key approaches to the study of media-political discourse the following approaches are identified: cratological, structural-communicative and media-technological ones; when analyzing the blogosphere it is advisable to refer to critical discourse analysis, structuralfunctional and comparative approaches. The most promising areas of the research include the identification of the essential characteristics of media-political discourse, and the development of genre stratification of this type of discourse.