Digital discourse analysis and the mist language

Abstract

In this article, we discuss, in the light of Materialist Discourse Analysis (Gadet and Pêcheux [1981], 2010), how the notions of language and subject are affected by the conditions of production shaped by digital discourse. Drawing on theoretical perspectives that are contiguous and, at times, overlapping, we examine how the neoliberal capitalist social formation produces effects in the consolidation of knowledges related to productivity and ephemerality, made possible by the emergence of social networks and by the relations established between the subject and the production of language within/by the machine (Paveau, 2023). Moreover, we investigate how the effects produced under these conditions generate, in the space of social media, other forms of language that rupture the imaginary of a homogeneous, authoritarian, and controlling language. Considering a corpus assembled from an archive in construction—whose reading unfolds in parallel with the ongoing transformations of a world traversed by the effects of the digital — we analyse contents related to trends of word-cutting that “go viral” on the social network TikTok, as well as the content guidelines governing the circulation of language on video platforms such as YouTube. As possible conclusions, we venture to think of the possibilities of saying that, when inscribed alongside other forms of language, delineate a mist language— one that both obscures discourse and, at the same time, enables the subject to inscribe themselves in language, in any way whatsoever.