Poststructuralist theories: making space for a linguistic analysis of political discourse

This chapter demarcates constitutive elements of a poststructuralist social science and delineates, against this background, the contours of a poststructuralist discourse theory. Within this theory, discourse serves as the horizon for the symbolic constitution of society, and the diffusion of meaning through discourse is taken as the constituent of social change. Discourse rests on the concept of difference and opposition through the combination of series of signifiers, and it makes social identification possible through the articulation of chains of equivalence on the basis of the so-called empty signifiers. In this way, discourse makes certain social formations possible, and eliminates others as illegitimate. While the processes of legitimation and delegitimation can be studied in a variety of ways, the chapter argues for methods that combine poststructuralist social theorizing with corpus linguistic techniques, allowing for a scrutiny of variation, repetition, and regularity in enormous text corpora, with the aim of drawing a statistical picture of societal meanings.