A confession (also, Harry Potter!)

I first heard (or noticed) the word "discourse" my senior year of undergrad in a graduate level Literary Theory course.  It was a terrible class, and I had no business being there.  I was far too much of an activist to sit around 'deconstructing texts' and be told week after week that our words are merely utterances that hinge on no reality.  Every time my cold, aloof professor uttered "discourse" or "discursive," he didn't seem to hinge on any reality, either.  To be honest, I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

It's been several years since that horrible class, and I have moved into the social sciences where 'discourse' is used only slightly differently than the humanities.  But my growing familiarity with academic lingo means I have heard "discourse" used thousands of times since then and, out of context clues or just habitual use, am more comfortable with coexisting with it.  Once in a while I even catch myself using it, and I see people nodding their heads, so I must have caught on sometime ago.

Here is my confession: I'm still not convinced I know what "discourse" means, or why the hell we use it.  (My cordial apologies to Foucault).  I realize this is a dangerous confession.  Years from now, someone will find this blog, send it to the news outlets, and the Chronicle of Higher Education will trot out a story about how "academic admits to being an ignoramous!," and any semblance of an academic career I might have will be destroyed.

I am only half joking.

I do believe that "discourse" is one of those words academics all pretend they understand when they really don't, as indicated by Bacchi's (2005) "Discourse, Discourse Everywhere."  In this article, Bacchi notes the many scholars who mistake discourse theory for framework theory, or conflate discourse use with being constituted through discourse, or who use discourse indiscriminately to refer to wide and varying phenomena.  I've probably done all three.  I'm not saying "discourse" isn't an awesome idea (if it is what I think it is), but that I'm just gonna go ahead and say I am not interested in being one of the academics who pretends she understands what it really means anymore. 

The irony of me suggesting that discourse "really means" something is not lost on me.  The irony that the attempt to secure a "'correct' definition of discourse" is an inevitable failure because "the whole idea of discourse is that definitions play an important part in delineating knowledge" is not lost on me, either.  Leave it to an academic to come up with a term that resists definition.

The elusiveness of the word is perhaps one of the reasons I literally cannot fully grasp it.  It also is a word that smacks of the jargonese that makes some folks feel like theory is not their domain.  I am further suspicious of "discourse" because, in my experience, it leads to us spending a whole lot of time talking about agency, and very little talking about power.  Or if we do talk about power, we end up talking about agency in response to power.  Either way, discourse is like the horcruxes of Voldemort...they are everywhere, but you don't know exactly where they are or what they look like until they start to burn a hole in your skin or erupt from an old woman's body.  And then you have to go out and find all of them but really you're just like, arghh, I just want to kill Voldemort already!  But the horcruxes are Voldemort, see?  Just as he's a horcrux user, he's also, like, totally constituted by the horcruxes.

I realize I just made an extended Harry Potter metaphor.  That hypothetical Chronicle of Ed story keeps getting better and better!

All of this is to say that I agree with Bacchi's conclusions in favor of "reflexive framing," and "discourse" will still pop out of my mouth from time to time, and will likely also make it into my dissertation as an obligatory reference.  There may be a time when I look back at this post with shame and embarrassment for ever suggesting that I didn't know what I was talking about.

And that's just the point - perhaps we should examine not only how we use discourse indiscriminately, but why we do.  We should always be intentional about the jargon we chose to privilege, and for a moment, let's entertain the possibility that "discourse" may have achieved hegemony within academic work.  And if anyone would like to deconstruct that, I say have at it.