Discourse’ means language grasped as utterance, as involving speaking and writing subjects and therfore also, at least potentially, readers or listeners. This is not simply a return to the prestructuralist days when we thought that language belonged to us individually as our eyebrows did; it does not revert to the classical ‘contractual’ model of language, according to which language is just a sort of instrument essentially isolated individuals use to exchange their pre-linguistic experiences



