Discursive analysis of experience: Alterity, positioning, and tension

Abstract

We explore a dialogical conception of experience as experience of otherness, in order to suggest how to put together its socio-linguistic constitution and its phenomenologically non-reflexive nature. Through the analysis of a piece of conversation accounting for the flow of tension during verbal interaction, we argue that the felt and lived character of experience is attached to the positioning efforts among interlocutors within a discursive field. In contrast to attempts at conciliating a normative notion of social discourse with a phenomenological notion of immediate experience, we suggest that experience is discursive in itself insofar as it involves the lived or felt encounter with others, and that it can be accounted for using several, old and new, discourse analysis tools, for instance from Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis.