Jacob Torfing, “Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges” in Discourse Theory in European Politics. David Howarth, Jacob Torfing (eds). Palgrave, 2005. pp. 1-32.
As against Hume, it was Kant who argued that “perception and experience of empirical phenomena are made possible by some pregiven categories in the human mind.” Discourse theory agrees that we should focus on the conditions of possibility of our perceptions, utterances, and actions, rather than on the factual immediacy or hidden meaning of the social world.” (10)
There have been many attempts in the history of Western thought to explain the course of history, the structure of society, and the identities of subjects and objects by reference to an underlying essence which is given in a full presence and plenitude and not implicated in any historical processes of structuration. God, Reason, Humanity, Nature, and the Iron Laws of Capitalism are some of the celebrated candidates for this transcendental determining centre … Discourse theory aims to draw out the consequences of giving up the idea of a transcendental centre. The result is not total chaos and flux, but playful determination of social meaning and identities within a relational system which is provisionally anchored in nodal points that are capable of partially fixing a series of floating signifiers. (13).
Two differences between the classical transcendentalism of Kant and poststructuralist discourse theory:
1. The conditions of possibility are not invariable and ahistorical as Kant suggest, but subject to political struggles and historical transformation. As such, discourse theory adopts a quasi-transcendental view of the conditions of possibility.
2. Discourse theory does not see the conditions of possibility as an inherent feature of the human mind, but takes them to be a structural feature of contingently constructed discourses. Discourse theory focuses neither on observable facts nor on deep meanings, but on the historical formation of the discursive conditions of social being.
on the subject
When it comes to the theory of the subject, post-structuralism has retained a rather structuralist view that threatens to reduce the subject to an objective location within the discursive structure, or, as Louis Althusser phrased it: to a ‘mere bearer of the structure’. The idea that the subject simultaneously occupies the position of being a worker, a woman, an environmentalist, and so on, might help us to combat class reductionism, but provides an inadequate understanding of the processes that lead to the formation of multiple selves.