No abstract

This article introduces the special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics on ‘Discourse Theory: Ways forward for theory development and research practice.’ In this introduction we discuss the rationale behind the special issue and the structure of the special issue.

This article assesses the current state of play of the poststructuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory associated with Laclau and Mouffe and the ‘Essex school’, and identifies ways forward at the level of theory development, research practice and critique. The article starts by disentangling the different meanings of the notion of ‘discourse’ in ‘discourse theory’, clarifying the specificities of discourse theory as a theoretical and analytical framework and situating discourse theory in, but also beyond, critical discourse studies. It then moves to an assessment of the current state of discourse theory, its main contributions, and the identification of shortcomings and ways forward. This discussion is organized around five topics: methodology and the theory-analysis dialectic; the logics approach; the discursive-material relation; the role of fantasy and other psychoanalytical categories; and populism.

In the wake of a series of late-2019 identitarian conflicts, public discourse in the Belgian region of Flanders was marked by references to the 1930s and 1940s as well as debates about the political appropriateness and significance of such historical allusions. Moving beyond a description of how historical references are condensed in digital political communication, the present article investigates a corpus of tweets sent from accounts of Flemish MPs in order to open up interdisciplinary perspectives on, among others, the dynamics of implicit and explicit accusations of fascism, and the complex, contested fields of speech in which the 1930s and 1940s are evoked on social media. It is thereby argued that (1) on Twitter, terminology associated with the 1930s and 1940s blurs boundaries between present and past, (2) that this conceptual flexibility allows these terms to be deployed in support of a range of political strategies, and (3) that these strategies share prominent accusatory aspects. The paper thus makes an evidence-based contribution to our understanding of how the memory and imagery of the 1930s and the Second World War strategically figure in digital political communication. These findings on online conflict and debate dynamics are supplemented with a methodological reflection on the gains of adopting a localized approach to the analysis of social media texts.