Discourse and/as Social Practice – the Analysis of the Problem of Resistance and Hegemony

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss how approaches to discourse can face the charges for discursive idealism, and to show it empirically through the analysis of gender discourse in the mapping and reception of the life and work of Marija Juri? Zagorka, the first Croatian woman journalist, proto-feminist and the writer of popular fiction. The method is critical discourse analysis, which follows Foucault’s concept of discourse, but attempts to overcome the criticism Foucault received for overemphasizing the potential of discourse to manipulate people. This is the reason motivating many revisions of Foucault's method mainly by attempting to introduce a theory of action in order to make a socially active subject link discourse and reality. CDA authored by Norman Fairclough introduces a three-dimensional concept of discourse (as text, discursive practice and social practice) and uses the Gramscian concept of hegemony (rather than ideology) to strategically try and surpass the charge for discourse determinism. Seeing discourse as social practice enables us to combine the perspectives of structure and action, because practice is at the same time determined by its position in the structured network of practices and a lived performance, a domain of social action and interaction that both reproduces structures and has the potential to transform them. Gramsci's concept of hegemony sees cultural production as a tool that maintains domination by securing the spontaneous consent of the subordinated. The results suggest a possible (subversive) intervention into the sphere of discursive practices (hegemonic struggle of different voices for supremacy in the order of discourse defining the reception of Zagorka) and indicate that detailed empirical research on discursive effects in a series of domains is a method of research on political investment of the order of discourse into social change.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n22p155