Discourse theory merely relocates contradiction from structure to the unconscious.

Evidence

The second difficulty is that the processes of contradiction and struggle—lodged by early structuralism wholly at the level of “the structure”—are now, by one of those persistent mirror-inversions, lodged exclusively at the level of the unconscious processes of the subject. It may be, as culturalism often argues, that the “subjective” is a necessary moment of any such analysis. But this is a very different proposition from dismantling the whole of the social processes of particular modes of production and social formations, and reconstituting them exclusively at the level of unconscious psychoanalytic processes. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Shares the reflexive structure with the Frankfurt School critique that each displaced theoretical move merely re-centers rather than resolves Marx’s materialist demands.