Introduction of the Concept

The theory of discourse became a possibility as a result of the so-called ‘linguistic’ (Rorty 1967) or ‘pragmatic turn’ (Apel 1963, 10; Böhler et al. 1986) in twentieth-century philosophy and the philosophy of the sciences which also affected the human and social sciences. This change took hold of the major French, German and Anglo-American traditions on the basis of the contributions of Saussure, of Hamann, Von Humboldt and Dilthey, and of Peirce respectively. In its initial phase, it was most decisively carried out by Claude Lévi-Strauss in France, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in Germany, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in England, and by Charles Morris in the United States. These developments made available two major points of departure for the elaboration of the theory of discourse, one French and the other German.

It was the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss who first introduced the relatively widely used French substantive discours into the social scientific context and thus provided the starting point for the development of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory of discourse. In his book Structural Anthropology (1977, 209–10, 229), he made a case for the use of the concept for the purposes of the structural analysis of myths. Myth he conceived of as a second-level linguistic order or an order of the second degree occupying a third or intermediate position between what his predecessor Saussure called the language system (langue) and speech (parole). Rather than being made up of timeless structures or particular events, therefore, this second-level order consisted of complex linguistic units which are accessible as discourse. It came to form the basis of the structuralist programme to which Roland Barthes (1967; Frank 1990a, 413–14) gave the name linguistique du discours. But it was Michel Foucault whose name became internationally famous as a result of the transposition of the French word discours into the central concept of an ambitious theoretical programme.