Discourse Perspectives in the Wake of Foucault

This chapter deals with theoretical and empirical developments in discourse research after Foucault. In detail, I first discuss Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which, against the background of linguistics, strived to bring discourse research closer to the detailed and critical empirical investigation of discursive events. To this end, CDA links linguistic based discourse analysis with the traditions of social theory and discourse theory. I will then take up the post-Marxist discourse theory formulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—maybe the approach with the strongest aspiration for ‘theory’ in discourse research. Laclau and Mouffe understand society as an ongoing signification process and deal with how discourses constitute social identities, which forms of articulation can be attributed to social actors, and how a situation of hegemony is achieved. Finally, I will explain the discourse perspective of cultural studies. This is certainly the most sociological proposal in the theory-oriented discourse tradition. In cultural studies, a model of knowledge circulation as a ‘circuit of culture’ was introduced, which very decisively links considerations of Foucault’s discourse theory with actor- and action-theoretical perspectives of the social sciences.