Diskurse – Medien – Dispositive oder Die Situationen des Diskurses. Anmerkungen zur postfoucaultschen Diskussion um die Medialität von Diskurse

Abstract

This paper turns Post-Foucauldian discourse linguistics upside down to explore the situatedness of discourses as their material possibility condition. In order to do so I firstly clarify Foucault's notion of discourse oscillating between the poles of macro (knowledge order) and micro (material event). In a second step recent media discourse analysis is discussed as an attempt to understand "la matérialité de l'énoncé" (Foucault 1969: 135) as a possibility condition of discourses. In a third step I propose an approach that conceptualizes the possibility conditions of communicational acting systematically between media technologies and communicative genres. The media linguistic notion of Forms of Communication (cf. Domke 2010a; Holly 2011a; Meiler 2013a) promisingly conceptualizes these conditions as enabling communication, hence discourse in situ. Following this, in a fourth step three generic examples are analyzed from the related position of semiological pragmatics (cf. Jäger 2008; Rehbein 2001). By these three examples (taken from a corpus of communication in public space) the paper demonstrates how different Forms of Communication shape specific possibilities to communicate different types of discursive knowledge (and vice versa): verified, temporarily relevant, and contested knowledge. It is also worked out in which way the production conditions of each Form of Communication determine how accessible a discourse is. In this respect, public space and mass media appear to be remarkably opposed to one another.