Part of my somewhat muddled argument in the paper was the idea that the narratives and practices of the people and the platform and functionalities of the net cooperate to create a specific discourse about what death means to these people and what it does to their selves as subjects.
But today I stumbled across a Terra Nova post by John Bilodeau that speaks of discourse communities. He describes them as:
Both practices and vocabularies are shared within particular social groups.
I find it most interesting that he lumps actual practice in with the notion of discourse. This is one of those areas that I find to be somewhat gray - where does sociological notions of interaction, sociality and self management butt up or overlap with the linguistic and semiotic notions of language and discourse theory? Or perhaps a more pertinent question, why does it?
If discourse is now being widened out to take into account not just a larger ensemble of what people say and believe as a result of a circulating concept, but is also now including all kinds of action and practice in it... what does this do to various concepts of self management, identity practice and power/knowledge within the social sciences? Is this a turf war or just another example of interdisciplinary muddling together of concepts? Another idea of the postmodern doing violence to the originary textual meaning?
1 comment:
hm, interesting perspective - as I read your post, I am brought back to my last contemporary theory class where we discussed Foucault's history of sexuality. I know that this is on your reading list, so although I cannot specifically address your final question, I can lend how discourse was deconstructed for me in that particular sociology class.
Seems in HoS, there at least two levels of discourse around sexuality; the crafted bourgeois expectations - which kept taboos firmly in place, the practices of the underbelly which was defined by the actions and not the ideas per se.
I was taught (and I saw taught only to express that it is not my words specifically) that there was always two levels of discourse - conceptual (based on ideas, ideologies, morals etc) and actions - often considered the "true" discourse of the moment..
Does this bring us any closer to your question of how it impacts identity and self-management, no - but it does address the issue of disciplinary boundaries that you outline.
**Sorry this was such a ramble... off the cuff and squinting to remember coursework usually does that to me ;)
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