Discourse analysis and its predicaments: On aspects of imaginary totality/omniscience in contemporary sociological thoughts

The enormous success of the term "discourse" in contemporary sociology and neighboring areas is very much due to the impact of Michael Foucault's Discourse Analysis, which aimed at a critical deconstruction of modernity through the concrete descriptions of strategically vital historical figures and their transformations. However, its speedy popularization is in itself a symptom that the notion of "discourse," whose critical force lay in its resistance to conceptuality and the conceptual impulse toward total perspective, has been hammered down to an inert flatness. This powerful drive for flattening subversion ( or rather flattening it out into a conceptual "subversion") - which also lurked in Foucault's own thought - indicates how difficult it is for us in contemporary society to discharge our own imagination for a transcendent viewpoint, whose omniscience is assumed to ensure the observation of society in its totality. By sketching out the present state of totality/omniscience in our sociological imagination, this essay seeks for a course to revive Discourse Analysis' potential capabilities - i.e., multiple dismantlings of the very assumption for totality/omniscience.