Assignment 3: Discourse Analysis

Gillian Rose (2001) focuses her concept on discourse analysis on a larger context: Visual Methodologies, as she runs through the different methodologies available to approach visual image analyses. She begins chapter 6 (Discourse Analysis I) with a comparison to psychoanalytic approaches, and mentions its three shortcomings, which are the loopholes that discourse analysis will cover.

• Psychoanalysis does not consider much about forms of social difference
• It concentrates too much on psychic and visual construction of difference, forgoing social construction and consequences of difference.
• It pays little attention to ways of seeing, or to the institutions and practices through which images are made and displayed.

The notion of discourse in the first place is central to Foucault’s theoretical arguments and methodologies, and is defined by Rose (2001) as “a particular knowledge about the world which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it”.

Naturally, discourse produces subjects, a patient of a doctor is a subject, a consumer of a brand is a subject, a student is a subject of the teacher, since discourse commonly involves imparting of knowledge or information from one to another, even knowledge is a form of discourse involving unequal power relations. According to Foucault quoted in Rose (2001), “Discourse disciplines subjects into certain ways of thinking and acting, … it does not impose rules for thought and behavior on a pre-existing human agent”. In my opinion, the meaning of every object, individual, relation, is created through discourse, or rather “there is no meaning without discourse” as Stuart Hall would mention. For example we would not know that a table is a table, until someone of certain higher power relation tells us that the piece of furniture is in fact a table.

Foucault also suggested that the dominance of certain discourses could occur because their discourses claimed absolute truth, while the subjects of the discourse willfully trust the “fact” that they received. The “Regime of truth” as Foucault called, explains that most discourses that are extremely effective socially depend on assumptions and claims that their knowledge is true.

Discourse analysis I (Rose, 2001) thus focuses on the notion of discourse through both visual and verbal, and is most concerned with discourse, the formation of it and their productivity”. As mentioned above, it looks at the social construction of difference and authority and how these power relations are formed through discourse.

Rose (2001) draws similarities from iconography with discourse analysis. The method is developed by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, which is a “branch of history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form”. Which is also an intertextual method, in which intertextuality has an importance on discourse as there is a large diversity of forms through which a discourse can be articulated. Intertextuality suggests that “meanings of any one discursive image or text depend also on the meanings carried by other images and texts, not only itself.”

One theme of discourse analysis is the organization of discourse itself, i.e. how it is structured, how it describes things, how it constructs blame and responsibility etc. Therefore someone conducting a discourse analysis has to try to forget all preconceptions about the materials he is working with, while trying to disturb the tranquility that is socially accepted. The rigor is discourse analysis is thus as such, the struggle for the researcher to pick out and display what do not come about by themselves, but are a result of social construction. However the method is much more flexible than content analysis for example, where the rigor is in quantitative counting, and when issues arise, the entire analysis might have to be restarted.

In Elliot’s (2001) discourse analysis of Starbucks, she fulfills many elements of discourse analysis I (Rose, 2001). The first telling sign is in her abstract, where she narrows down to the construction of the coffee bean into something symbolically exciting. What comes up most certainly is how Starbucks’ discourse claims truth about the origins of the coffee, with global exotic places in mind that would excite and entice the majority of Americans. Elliot (2001) mentions that the “unsuspecting consumers must choose from beans from countries that college graduates cannot find on a map”, such as Yemen, which is just a borderless, generic geographical area instead of a country. Its misleading names of coffee bean origins certainly cloud the truth, while its claims still hold true for its discourse remains powerful and effective.

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