Course Code

AS6025

Course Title

INTRODUCTION TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, WITH A SPECIAL

EMPHASIS ON RELIGIO-POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Academic Year / Trimester

AY2015-16 / Trimester 3

Lecturers Name

Assoc Prof Badrol Hisham Bin Ahmad Noor

Email

[email protected]

Class Day / Time / Venue

Thursday / 6.30pm-9.30pm
Sypnosis:

The aim of the course is 1. to give students an introduction to Discourse Analysis as a

tool/methodology of research, and 2. to help students use Discourse Analysis as a analytical tool
in their own work, particularly for those students who are engaged in writing their respective
theses/dissertations for other courses undertaken at RSIS.
This course is divided into two parts, the first of which involves extensive reading of background
material and the second of which applies the methodology learned in their own work.
Assessment:
Students will be assessed by: 1. a mid-semester paper, 2. one book/literature review, 3. a final
examination and 4. class performance.

I. Summary of aims and objectives:

1. What is discourse analysis and what is this course about?
Before we go any further, let me point out that discourse analysis is NOT a discipline in itself, per
se: Rather the term discourse analysis was coined by a number of contemporary theorists of
linguistics, philosophy of language and political theory to refer to a mode of analysis, or an
analytical tool, that draws heavily from the theories and praxis of philosophy (particularly
philosophy of language), linguistics, hermeneutics, semantics, semiotics and political theory. It
can best be described as applied philosophy, in this case applied philosophy of language, that
has/is being used to understand the workings of political discourse by political analysts who have
some background understanding of philosophy and linguistics.
Discourse analysis has been put to work by theorists like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Bobby
Sayyid et al in their attempts to understand the discursive dimension of contemporary political
developments worldwide, in areas as diverse as the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the new
conservative party of the 1980s in Britain to the rise of radical Islamism as a counter-hegemonic
political movement in countries like Iran. In all these cases (and we shall be reading these texts

closely later in the course) discourse analysis attempts to explain and understand the workings of
discourse and how political discourses shape the social and political realities around us. It
remains therefore a tool of analysis and is not a methodology or discipline in its own right, but
rather a combination of different philosophical and linguistic tools that are applied to social
phenomena with the intention of understanding that phenomena better.
Also note that discourse analysis emerged as a result of the failure of classical materialist and
structuralist theories to explain exactly how and why some political systems/societies developed
the way they did, and in particular the failure for materialist theories (ie. Standard political
economy theories) to explain how and why certain modes of cultural politics have come to
dominate in some societies even when in terms of political economy analyses these developments
do not make sense or cannot be fully explained. (Such as the rise of far-right cultural and
religious politics in some developing countries, despite their record of spectacular
economic/material development.)
This does NOT, however, imply that discourse analysis confers epistemic claims or truths that
override or supersede the observations made by other theoretical approaches; and we should not
fall into the trap of thinking that discourse analysis offers us higher truths compared to
materialist political-economy analysis, for instance. One should therefore take discourse analysis
as a complementary tool that can, at times, help us better understand the social/cultural/discursive
developments of particular societies.

2. Course outline:
The course will be divided between two parts: The first 7-8 weeks will involve rigorous reading
of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, beginning with a quick and cursory overview of
the central question that has bedevilled philosophers from Socrates and Plato to Ayer, Russell and
Wittgenstein: What is knowledge, how does one know anything, and how do we make any
epistemic claims?
First part of the course:
Weeks 1-2:
Weeks 1-2 will involve a cursory reading of the classics leading us to the respective theories of
knowledge and language-use formulated by Rene Descartes, John Locke, Berkeley and Thomas
Hobbes.
The main text that you will need to accompany you along your reading will be Bertrand Russells
A History of Western Philosophy where Russell has presented us with perhaps the most
accessible introduction to the major ideas and theories of the abovementioned philosophers. If
there is one text that you may want to get for yourselves for this part of the course (weeks 1-7), I
would suggest this one. Look for: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and
Unwin, first edition 1946 but reprinted many times over and easily available in most bookshops
and on-line as well.)
From Platos idealism we will move to the perennial questions of knowledge, to know and the
basis of truth claims as further developed by Descartes and Berkeley, Locke and Hobbes.

Among the themes that we need to cover are: How does one make an epistemic/truth claim? What
is truth?; Does truth have to be founded on any essentialist basis?; Understanding the Platonic
notion of the ideal; from Platonism to the philosophy of the moderns: Theories of truth and
knowledge, language and language-use in the works of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hobbes.
Reading material:
Primary text: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1946). For
those who manage to get their hands on this, read the following:
Chapter XI, Socrates (pp. 101-112),
Chapter XIV, Platos Utopia (pp. 125-134),
Chapter XV, The Theory of Ideas (pp. 135-147),
Book 3,
Chapter VIII, Hobbess Leviathan (pp. 531-541),
Chapter IX, Descartes (pp. 542-551),
Chapter XIII, Lockes Theory of Knowledge (584-595),
Chapter XVI, Berkeley (pp. 623-633).
Other related reading material:
Rene Descartes, The Meditations. (Penguin paperback, easily available in numerous editions.)
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), various Penguin editions.

Michael R. Ayers, Locke. Epistemology & Ontology Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1991.
Books 3 and 4 of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, Penguin, London (many current editions.)
William E. Connolly,, Hobbes: The Politics of Divine Containment, in Political Theory and
Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
A. Biletzki, Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of
Language, Springer press, 1997.

Week 3:
By weeks 3 we will be looking at the debates over language and language-use that were recurrent
among philosophers of the 17th to 18th centuries, in particular looking at the respective theories of
Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
The theme/s that need to be discussed include: Language and its uses; the debate over private and
public language; meaning and signification; and how language affords truth value.
Primary text: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1946).

Again, we will need to fall back on Russells History of Western Philosophy. The relevant
chapters are:
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1946).
Book 3,
Chapter VIII, Hobbess Leviathan (pp. 531-541),
Chapter IX, Descartes (pp. 542-551),
Chapter XIII, Lockes Theory of Knowledge (584-595),
Chapter XVI, Berkeley (pp. 623-633).

Week 4:
Week 4 will focus on contemporary theories of linguistics and language use, covering the debate
over verification and meaning that were dominant particularly among the Oxbridge scholars at
the turn of the 20th century. Here we will touch on the theories of A. J. Ayer, Gottlob Frege, the
early Russell and the early Wittgenstein and counterpose them to Nietzsches conception of truth
as (amoral) fiction and language as an expression of will, agency and intent.
This week we shall address the concerns of the philosophers who were known as the Positivist
school, and their critique of linguistic free-play and the truth claims made by artists and the
defenders of aesthetics.
Related to this would be a short exposition on the ideas of the late Romanticist Friedrich
Nietzsche whose own theory of language-use and meaning was deeply influenced by the ideas of
Schopenhauer and in particular Schopenhauers claim that knowledge and truth-claims were an
expression of will and the will to power.
Among the themes to be addressed include: The debate between scientific and mathematical
language and the language of the arts/literature; the question of whether art and aesthetics have
truth value; Can there be truth in literature, and if so what is its epistemic status?
Reading list:
The relevant texts for this week include:
A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. Pelican Press/Penguin books, Oxford/London, 1st ed 1936
(many subsequent editions).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1974.
Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen
Denkens. Halle a. S.: Louis Nebert. Translation: Concept Script, a formal language of
pure thought modelled upon that of arithmetic, by S. Bauer-Mengelberg in Jean Van
Heijenoort, ed., 1967. From Frege to Gdel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic,
18791931. Harvard University Press.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense (ber Wahrheit und Lge im
auermoralischen Sinn, 1873). (Found in numerous edited collections of the works of
Nietzsche, but a copy will be distributed by the lecturer.)

Weeks 5-6:
Weeks 5-6 will involve a close reading of the late Wittgenstein and in particular draw heavily
from Wittgensteins theory of language-use and language-games as a social phenomenon that is
rule-driven and normative.
From this point we begin to enter into the realm of modern contemporary philosophy of language
and we will trace the development of Wittgensteins ideas leading us up to Saussure and the
foundations of Linguistics, Semantics and Semiotics. The three key theorists we shall be focusing
on will be Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes.
Among the themes to be addressed are: Language and meaning, from the early verificationist
theory of the early Wittgenstein to his later theory of language as social construct and the theory
of language-games and family resemblances; language-games as discursive economies; what is
a discursive economy? Defining the meaning of discourse as opposed to language.
With reference to the foundational theories of Saussure and Barthes, we will address the
following key themes: Sign, signifiers and signification; the meaning of signs and how they work;
signification and its variables slippage in signification, polysemia, diachrony and
overdetermination of signs.
Primary texts:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1974.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, (first ed. 1953,
latest ed. 1992, paperback)
Robert Fogelin, Wittgenstein. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Oxford, The arguments of the
philosophers series, ed. Ted Honderich. 2nd ed. 1987.
David Pears, The False Prison: A study of the development of Wittgensteins Philosophy, Vols. 1
and 2, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charler Bally and Albert
Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, translated by Wade Baskin, New
York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966.
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text. Fontana Press, London, 1977. Re: the chapter The Death of
the Author, pp. 142-149.

Weeks 7-8:
Weeks 7-8 will focus on Discourse Analysis and how it was developed by the so-called Essex
school that was deeply influences by post-Marxist theories of language-use in the creation of
political/ideological discursive economies.
The main works that will be read closely will include the writings of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal
Mouffe and Bobby Sayyid. This marks the end of the first part of the course.
Another important political theorist whose work we will be reading closely is William Connolly,
whose study of the political uses of terms in political/ideological discourse will be relevant to our
concerns.
Two case studies will be looked at closely:
Firstly we will look at how Laclau and Mouffe applied discourse analysis in their study of the
new populist discourse of the new Conservative party in Britain during the rise of Margaret
Thatcher; with special reference to their critique of the primacy of place that the old traditional
Left had given to the abstract notion of the working class as the vanguard of the revolution.
Laclau and Mouffes critique of the traditional Left in Britain will be read in conjunction with
their call for a re-thinking of the notion of a revolutionary vanguard and a reassessment of the
ideology of class struggle.
Secondly we will look closely at the work of Bobby Sayyid who applied the ideas of the Essex
school of discourse analysis to his own study of the Iranian revolution and the logic of religiopolitics; with special reference to his treatment of Islamism as a counter-hegemonic idea/political
system that strung together a new chain of equivalences in the framing of a new political/social
order that necessitated, rationalised and justified such religious revolutionary politics.

Reading list:
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso Press, London,
1985.
Bobby Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London: Zed
Books, 1997.
William E. Connolly,, Hobbes: The Politics of Divine Containment, in Political Theory and
Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, Ideas series, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1988.
William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 3rd edition,
1993.

Second part of the course: Weeks 9-14

The last 6-7 weeks of the course will involve the application of the theories we have learned to
research material that many of you are working on. Hence the applied philosophy dimension to
this course.
This course is important and relevant to those of you who are and have done fieldwork and whose
work/theses/dissertations involve the understanding and explanation of the workings of the
respective political/ideological discourses in your respect research areas.
As such, CLASS PARTICIPATION and presentation of your work/research is vital. The last 6
weeks will involve me leading some of you as you present your research/fieldwork to the class,
and it allows some of you (particularly those who wish to use discourse analysis in your own
research/writing) to apply what we have learned to your respective areas of research.
By the middle of the course a roster will be set up to identify who will be giving presentations
during the upcoming lectures and the relevant reading/resource material to be used. Those who
are already in the middle of field research and those who are already writing theses/dissertations
that employ the tools of discourse analysis will be expected to volunteer to give presentations of
their work to the class.

Week 9:
The first model of discourse analysis will be led by me. (Refer to reading list below).
We will look at chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan
Malaysian Islamic Party 1951-2003, and look at how the contestation between the ruling
nationalist UMNO party and the Pan Malaysian Islamic party PAS led to what has been labelled
as the Islamisation race in Malaysia, and how the UMNO-led government, in its attempt to
bolster its own Islamic credentials, used the discourse of Islam as a discourse of legitimation and
the basis of the Islamic-inspired developmental model of the 1980s-1990s.
In the process of doing so, several things happened in/to Malaysia, including the inflation of
Islamic symbols and markers in the public political domain; the creation of two oppositional
chains of equivalences, both of which equated Islam with other ideas and values ranging from
modernity, development, piety, justice, transparency and accountability; and how this effectively
moved the centre of Malaysian politics from a secular-democratic to an Islamist
communitarian/sectarian register.
Reading list:
Farish A. Noor, Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic
Party PAS: 1951-2003. (Two Volumes), Malaysian Sociological Research Institute
(MSRI), Kuala Lumpur, 2004.
Farish A. Noor, Jihad Revisited? Shifting Dynamics of Radical Movements in Indonesia Today.
Institute for Strategic and International Studies (ISIS)-Malaysia, ISIS Working Papers
Series, Kuala Lumpur, 2007.

Farish A. Noor, Blood, Sweat and Jihad: The Radicalisation of the Discourse of the PanMalaysian Islamic Party (PAS) from the 1980s to the Present. In the Journal of the Centre
for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEA), Singapore, Vol. 25. no. 2, August 2003. (pp. 200232)
Farish A. Noor, The localization of Islamist Discourse in the Tafsir of Tuan Guru Nik Aziz Nik
Mat, Murshidul Am of PAS, in Virginia Hooker and Noraini Othman (Eds.), Malaysia:
Islam, Society and Politics Essays in Honour of Clive S. Kessler, Institute for Southeast
Asian Studies (ISEAS), National University of Singapore (NUS), 2003. (pp. 195-235)
Bobby Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London: Zed
Books, 1997.
William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, Ideas series, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1988.
William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 3rd edition,
1993.

[*Note: Think of this course as a driving course. In the first half, I, the driving instructor, will
teach you what a car is, how it works and what it can/cannot do. After teaching you how to drive,
in the second half of the course I will let you do the driving and I will assess your ability to
use/apply the skills/tools I have taught you.]