Discourse and Society: on the Verbal Making of Culture (and its Aesthetic Display)

Abstract

The thesis I want to pursue is that society is produced by discourse. Far from merely mirroring what already seems to exist, discourse, I propose, is a central agency in the verbal construction and institution of social structures which we make and in which we then live. For this, I first discuss the relation between our imaginary and society, attempting to describe society as a ‘habitat’ artificially made by us and at the same time paradoxically defining and determining us as cultural beings. I then try to embed this in the sociological and philosophical discussion on constructivism, establishing what we call ‘society’ and/or ‘culture’ and/or ‘reality’ as the result of semantic processes of verbalization which we then optimistically tend to ‘reify’ into existing ‘facts’. That this is possible seems to lie anthropologically in the human faculty of cognitively understanding, and creating, arbitrary signs, which finds its first expression in the exteriorizing discovery of the self in the mirror and then serves as the main matrix of infinitely building and modifying, but also of continuously maintaining and stabilizing, our ‘world’. The emerging world-like ‘semiosphere’ is thus fabricated out of words/lexemes, texts – and, I argue, first and foremost discourses, understood as semantic ‘systems of thinking and arguing’ that, through incessant dialogic translation and re-translation, negotiatingly build a specific universe of discourse that we have made and in which we (more or less) feel at home. This is briefly demonstrated with regard to the workings of political discourse in action in order to (metonymically) illustrate that the social world is of our own making, and that it is, above all, text-generated discourses that are its main media. A last point complementarily, if not supplementarily, discusses the ‘aesthetic’ as the free and open site of what could be called an ‘adiscursive’ or ‘metadiscursive’ play, and display, of discourses in action, which is the site of ‘literature’.