Discourses in Action: What Language Enables Us to Do 9780367404208, 9780429356032

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Discourses in Action

This interdisciplinary collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of discourse, conceptualising how discursive practices shape social, political, and even material realities today. Discourses in Action presents a wide range of essays that explore fundamental concerns for the social consequences of text, talk, and discursively informed actions and possibilities of discursive engagement. It opens new perspectives on what language does and the differences that scholarly and practical contributions can make. Chapters cover diverse topics, ranging from political struggles, climate change, social revolutions, ethnicity, violence, and other often unexpected patterns of discursive consequences. Its essays also explore the cultural contingencies that underlie discourse practices which are usually ignored when analysed from within a taken-for-granted culture. Providing a useful examination of current discourse studies, this interdisciplinary volume is ideal for students and researchers within media, communication, discourse analysis, linguistics, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge. Klaus Krippendorff (PhD, PhDhc) is the Gregory Bateson Professor for Language, Cybernetics, and Culture at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He pioneered work on communication theory, content analysis, and methods of design semantics. As a critical scholar he examines discursive constructions of realities and paths of liberation from oppression. Nour Halabi (PhD) is a Lecturer of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and the Vice-Chair of the MeCCSA Race Network. Her interdisciplinary research examines the interactions between mobility, social movements, and global media. She received her doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her Master’s from The London School of Economics.

Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies Series Editor: Barbie Zelizer

Dedicated to bringing to the foreground the central impulses by which we engage in inquiry, the Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies series attempts to make explicit the ways in which we craft our intellectual grasp of the world. The Changing Faces of Journalism Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness Edited by Barbie Zelizer The Politics of Reality Television Global Perspectives Edited by Marwan M. Kraidy and Katherine Sender Making the University Matter Edited by Barbie Zelizer Communication Matters Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks Edited by Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley Communication and Power in the Global Era Orders and Borders Edited by Marwan M. Kraidy Boundaries of Journalism Professionalism, Practices and Participation Edited by Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis Discourses in Action What Language Enables Us to Do Edited by Klaus Krippendorff and Nour Halabi For more information, visit: www.routledge.com/Shaping-Inquiry-in-CultureCommunication-and-Media-Studies/book-series/SICCM

Discourses in Action What Language Enables Us to Do

Edited by Klaus Krippendorff and Nour Halabi

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Klaus Krippendorff and Nour Halabi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Klaus Krippendorff and Nour Halabi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krippendorff, Klaus, editor. | Halabi, Nour, editor. Title: Discourses in action / edited by Klaus Krippendorff and Nour Halabi. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Shaping inquiry in culture, communication and media studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019044870 (print) | LCCN 2019044871 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Discourse analysis–Social aspects. | Discourse analysis–Political aspects. | Language and culture. Classification: LCC P302.84 .D575 2020 (print) | LCC P302.84 (ebook) | DDC 306.44–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044870 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044871 ISBN: 978-0-367-40420-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35603-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction: why discourses in action?

vii viii 1

KLAUS KRIPPENDORFF

PART I

Divergent approaches to discourse analyses

15

RACHEL STONECIPHER

1 Analysing the politics of denial: critical discourse studies and the discourse-historical approach

19

RUTH WODAK

2 Discourse as ventriloquy: a pragmatic/relational analysis of media as agents

37

FRANÇOIS COOREN

3 Discursive construction: a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis

51

REINER KELLER

4 Discursive psychology: a non-cognitivist approach to practices of knowing JONATHAN POTTER

71

vi Contents PART II

Three prototypical studies of discourses in action

87

NOUR HALABI

5 Re-contextualizing visual representations: the videos of and about police accountability in three competing discourses

89

MARY ANGELA BOCK

6 Discourses for transformation? climate change, power and pathways to the future

104

ANABELA CARVALHO

7 The circulation of constitutional discourse

120

GREG URBAN

PART III

Cultural contingencies of discursive practices

139

KATE ZAMBON

8 Dueling discourses of power and resistance: the cultural contexts of the shifting revolutionary rhetoric of three Egyptian political actors

143

SAHAR KHAMIS

9 One case, two verdicts: the vertical interplay of authoritative discourses in China

158

HAILONG TIAN

10 Discourses of dissent: the role of speech and action in Israeli grassroots activism

173

TAMAR KATRIEL

Index

187

Acknowledgements

This edited volume emerged from the final symposium of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania before it was transformed into the Center for Media at Risk. It followed several similar discursive events on a variety of issues. However, the essays made available here do not merely report the performance of scholarly discourse, they expose different approaches to studying the social roles and consequences of diverse discursive practices, the realities that discourse communities enact. They also demonstrate how scholarly discourse can affect society and the intellectual responsibilities this entails. To start, we want to thank Professor Barbie Zelizer, head of the Scholars Program, now the Center for Media at Risk, and a colleague at the Annenberg School. Her invitation to organise this symposium quickly evolved into a collective effort. Emily Plowman, the able coordinator of the Scholars Program, got us started, Kate Zambon continued throughout the planning process. A number of graduate students became animated by the possibility of shaping a cutting-edge symposium that would contextualise discourses in the actions they encourage. For this, we would like to thank Leah Ferentinos, Yilang Peng, Sandra Ristovska, Rachel Stonecipher, Yunning Helen Wang, and Natacha Yazbeck for lending their ingenuity, intellect, and time to this project, as well as Annenberg alumni Mariaelena Bartesaghi and Charles Goodwin for providing us with valuable leads. We are equally grateful to Rachel Stonecipher and Kate Zambon for writing introductions to two sections of this volume. Last but not least, it is the scholars of discourse who accepted our invitations that deserve most of our gratitude. They came from all over the world, presented their ideas, debated important issues, established new connections, and finally contributed their work to this volume. The enthusiasm that fueled this discursive event was truly inspiring and so is the diversity of contributions they left behind. Klaus Krippendorff The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania Nour Halabi School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

Contributors

Mary Angela Bock is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. She is a former journalist focused on the sociology of photographic practice and how visual messages shape our ideas about social justice. Bock is the author of Video Journalism: Beyond the One-Man Band. She has over 20 years of experience in broadcast, newspaper, and radio news and her research has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Communication, Journalism Practice, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Anabela Carvalho is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Minho, Portugal. Her research focuses on various forms of environment, science, and political communication with a particular emphasis on climate change and public engagement. She is editor, inter alia, of Communicating Climate Change: Discourses, Mediations and Perceptions (2008), Citizen Voices: Enacting Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication (with L. Phillips and J. Doyle; 2012), Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement (with T.R. Peterson; 2012). Carvalho has had leading roles at the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) and the Science and Environment Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). François Cooren (PhD) is a Professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada. His research focuses on organisational communication, language and social interaction, and communication theory. He is the author of three books and over 50 articles, The Organizing Property of Communication (2000), Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation, and Ventriloquism (2010), and Organizational Discourse: Communication and Constitution (2015), and the editor of five volumes for Polity, Oxford University Press, Routledge, John Benjamins, and Lawrence Erlbaum. He was the former President of the International Communication Association (2010–2011) and the current president of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA).

Contributors ix Nour Halabi is a Lecturer of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and the Vice-Chair of the MeCCSA Race Network. Her interdisciplinary research examines the interactions between mobility, social movements, and global media. Recent publications include “The Spatial Politics of the Syrian Revolution,” in Middle East Critique (2019), “If These Walls Could Speak: Borders and Walls as Communicative Devices,” in Interventions: Communication Research and Practice (Peter Lang, 2018), and “The Contingency of Meaning to the Party of God: Carnivalesque Humor in Revolutionary Times” in The International Journal of Communication (2017). She received her doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her Master’s from The London School of Economics. Tamar Katriel is a Professor (Emerita) in Communication and Education at the University of Haifa. She conducted ethnographic research on cultural patterns of communication in Israel and the USA. She is the author of Talking Straight (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Communal Webs (SUNY Press, 1991); Performing the Past (Erlbaum, 1997); Dialogic Moments (Wayne State University Press, 2004); a Hebrew collection, Key Words (University of Haifa Press, 1999). She recently co-edited a volume entitled Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles (Palgrave, 2015). Reiner Keller is a Professor of Sociology at Augsburg University. His research centres on knowledge and culture, discourse studies, sociological theory, pragmatist sociology, risk and environment, and French sociology. Recent publications include The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse: Investigating the Politics of Knowledge and Meaning-making (Routledge, 2018; co-edited with Anna Hornidge and Wolf Schünemann), Doing Discourse Research (Sage, 2013), as well as “The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse” in Human Studies (2011) and “Entering Discourses: A New Agenda for Qualitative Research and Sociology of Knowledge” in Qualitative Sociology Review (2012). Sahar Khamis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her area of expertise is Arab and Muslim media. She is the co-author of Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is the co-editor of Arab Women’s Activism and SocioPolitical Transformation: Unfinished Gendered Revolutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Klaus Krippendorff (PhD, PhDhc) is Professor Emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He is a Past President of ICA, elected fellow of ICA, AAAS, NIAS, IASCYS and several other academic institutions. His publications contribute to communication theory, discourse analysis, cybernetics, social scientific methodology, and the

x Contributors epistemology and practice of design. He has authored numerous articles and several books, among them Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology, On Communicating, Otherness, Meaning, and Information, and The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. His current scholarly work explores how realities emerge in discourse, through social interactions, and by design. He critically examines the truth claims of scientific discourses; the artifacts that discourse communities construct; the epistemology of reliable data; the nexus of power, agency, accountability, and strategies of emancipation from systems of burdensome reality constructions, ranging from institutionalised inequity to dictatorships. Jonathan Potter is the Dean and a Distinguished Professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He has published widely on issues of theory, meta-theory, application, and method, including building a distinctive approach to constructionism and a skeptical approach to interviewing. He has studied scientific argumentation; racism, sexism, heterosexism; lesbian adoption; attitudes and assessments; the language of riots; quantification rhetoric; the representation of political disputes; the operation of market research focus groups; relationship counseling discourse; directives, threats, and admonishments in family mealtimes; laughter particles; advice; experience; and descriptions. Rachel Stonecipher is a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She works at the nexus of gender and sexuality studies, discourse analysis, and historiography of sex and gender. Her primary research utilises corpus linguistics and textual analysis to map the intellectual history of lesbian politics in scholarship, 1970s–present. She has presented papers at meetings of the National Women’s Studies Association, International Communication Association, International Association for Media and Communication Research, MoPOP Pop Conference, American Anthropological Association, and Theorizing the Web Conference. In addition to work under review in the areas of critical cultural studies and feminist theory, her entry on the communication philosophy of Sara Ahmed is forthcoming in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Studies, and her cluster review on communicating lived experiences of race will appear in Feminist Theory. Hailong Tian (PhD) is Professor of Discourse Studies at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, and serves as Deputy Chair and General Secretary of the China Association of Discourse Studies. His research concentrates on sociolinguistics and (critical) discourse analysis, especially on interdisciplinary studies of discourses in relation to the current Chinese society. He has published books with John Benjamins and articles in several international journals. Tian is editor of Discourse Studies Forum, and editor-in-chief of the book series Nankai Discourse Studies (both published by Nankai University Press).

Contributors xi Greg Urban is the Arthur Hobson Quinn Professor of Anthropology and quondam Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in linguistic and cultural anthropology, Urban studies the processes of cultural motion, with a focus on the forces that impel that motion through space and time. Among his books are Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World, Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect, A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture, and, as editor, Corporations and Citizenship. Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Recent book publications include The Handbook of Language and Politics (with B. Forchtner, Routledge, 2017). The Politics of Fear. What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015); Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (with Majid Khosravinik and Brigitte Mral, Bloomsbury, 2013); The Discourse of Politics in Action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave, 2011) and The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (with Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill, Sage, 2010). Kate Zambon is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research in global media studies focuses on the politics of nationalism, migration, and cultural difference in the media, including international sporting events, news, and entertainment media. Her research has been published in Media, Culture & Society, the International Journal of Communication, and Popular Communication.

Introduction Why discourses in action? Klaus Krippendorff

Dictionaries define discourse as the use of text and talk – some add, beyond the level of linguistic concerns.1 When moving to issues of language use that exceed the morphology and phonology of words and their syntactical and semantic roles in sentences, one discovers a bewildering complexity of propositions, theories, and approaches promoted by separate disciplines. The humanities, the sociology of knowledge, cultural studies, hermeneutics, even big data statistics, all address different aspects of text and talk. Within communication research, several methods have been developed that shed light on the media in which the substance of discourses is disseminated; for example, conversation, content, rhetorical, discourse, and media analysis. Saussure’s ingenious proposal2 to limit linguistics to the study of syntax, phonology, and semiology of language (langue) gave linguistics a very productive but decontextualized object of study. Interestingly, Saussurean linguists could claim scientific success in terms of the objective truths of the generalizations they advocated, but succeeded largely through the unintended social and cultural consequences of publishing their abstractions. The institutionalization of what linguistics had to offer expanded literacy, standardized common national languages, facilitated universal education, assisted in the growth of bureaucracies that depended on reliable records, and most recently enabled word processing by computers and the Internet. However, abandoning the original meaning of language as speech (parole or langage) – the Latin lingua points to the tongue – for an analytically convenient abstraction, a small object constructed to be of manageable complexity, rendered linguistics blind to the larger picture of the coordination of text, talk, action, and the social construction of realities. The proposal to expand the micro perspective of structural linguistic theorizing to larger systems of text and talk has been attractive to many academic disciplines. Literary scholarship, for one, expanded its attention to larger bodies of texts by exploring intertextual connections, distinguishing genres, and tracing the origins, dominance, and disappearance of vocabularies, themes, and concerns in time. This is also the path that historians have taken, who, while focusing on events outside language, recognize that all historical facts are encoded in texts, images, and artifacts. They require authentication, dating, locating, and

2 Klaus Krippendorff interpreting them in their original contexts. In the writing of Foucault, who proposed rules and practices that govern the use of language in different historical eras, discourse has become an overarching system of representation.3,4 I suggest it to be a serious mistake to conceptualize discourse as a mere expansion of linguistic concerns into a larger domain, as this would preserve the linguistic preoccupation with creating rules that govern what amounts to scholarly abstractions and projecting them back to where they are presumed to live. A good example is Noam Chomsky’s conception of a universal grammar.5 He explored what all natural languages have in common and interpreted his generalization as the genetic endowment of being human. How this abstraction migrated into the biology of the human brain is worth a story that will have to be told elsewhere. The questions are who defines these abstractions, what are the conceptual entailments of such migrations, what counts as adequate explanations of how they work, who is willing to live with them, and, most important, who is accountable for the consequences of their articulations? Obviously, all scholars talk, read, write, and publish about particular subject matters. However, most academic disciplines have no clue or interest in exploring how their own discourse directs their attention to the particular objects they are constructing in the course of their inquiries. Psychologists theorize, experiment with, and measure individual human characteristics. The theories they pursue hardly explain what psychologists do. As already mentioned, that narrowly defined conception of language that structural linguists examine excludes not only the speech of ordinary folks but also how linguists talk and come to their conclusions. Similarly, theories of communication as the transmission of information, or as influence exerted on mass audiences, pursued by many communication researchers, cannot possibly explain how communication researchers collaborate in developing their theories based on interpretations of pertinent literature and observations. All of these examples imply scientific authority over the objects of their concerns. They assume scholars to possess superior conceptual, literary, and institutional abilities, unquestionable scientific authority, manifest in denials for being held accountable for the consequences of publishing their findings, and taking for granted the discourses in which they work. Our symposium tried to avoid such assumptions. It was guided by several propositions. —————————— ● —————————— Most obvious is the acknowledgement that texts, talk, and images are not just about something. They make a difference in the life of their authors and readers, whether as users, performers, creators, or actors. Our qualification of “discourses” as:

“in action,” is intended to divert attention from what a discourse is to what practicing it does.

Introduction 3 To start, discourse is a word, an abstraction for sure, but it cannot do anything without being taken up by a community of competent speakers and actors. Without them, a discourse has no observable reality. Discourses do not (causally) define the communities of their practitioners. Instead, discourse communities shape their discourses by working together, narrating their histories of accomplishments, defining their identities, and directing their future contributions. Acknowledging this obvious but often ignored reality, I suggest that:

Discourses are kept alive by the communities of their practitioners. Textual matters, including images and cultural artifacts, are the material manifestations of what discourse communities create, live with, and leave behind. Because the material base of written texts affords repeated and multiple readings, it tends to provide the only discernable clue to what discourses may have meant. Thus, I would say that:

Discourses become manifest in the discursive artifacts their practitioners generate. By manifest, I mean repeatedly observable, interpretable, and analyzable. While all physical matter is subject to decay, the survival of texts has no causal explanations, nor is it predictable by articulable laws. Texts evolve within the constraints of living discourse communities. They are selectively created, reproduced, preserved, and utilized by these communities and cannot be understood without reference to those who lived with them. It would be a mistake to read texts as if their original users had no choices and would not matter. It is important to be clear about the artifactual nature of what discourse communities produce. I know too well the objections to my claim that all discourses are manifest in discourse-specific artifacts. Physicists tend to speak of and are convinced that they are discovering the laws of nature by experiments and observations. To discover something presumes its existence prior to having found it. However, histories of science reveal scientific facts to evolve in processes of active engagements of scientific communities with their chosen subject matter and themselves.6 Positivist sciences take “facts” to be unquestionably true; yet fact, which is of Latin origin – factum – means something made. It shares its origin with factory, manufacture, and artifact. Laws do not grow on trees, nor can they be equated with software that runs the universe. Physical facts are the results of physicists declaring them as such. They originate in the discourse of physicists and are the objects of the language games7 that physicists play among themselves. As Heisenberg aptly suggested, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”8 The artifacts of physics are not limited to published theories. They include an arsenal of instruments designed to generate analyzable data, laboratories to perform experiments, platforms on which theoretical propositions can be

4 Klaus Krippendorff compared, and universities that give physicists a pool of students inspired by compelling narratives of the universe. However, even the theories of physics are far from being universally valid and superordinate to all other sciences, especially by excluding human beings from its discourse. The only thing that the natural and social sciences have in common is that their discourse-specific artifacts have been made and are continually tested and revised by their respective discourse communities. Natural scientists tend to disclaim control over their observations. Reading textual matter, however, is not that simple. All texts we read were generated by absent members of discourse communities. What we consider ancient texts, historical records, or anthropological artifacts were created by authors or artisans, and they lived in communities long gone and no longer available for consultations of what they meant. This condition applies to contemporary discursive artifacts as well. We have to realize that:

All texts are read at present. Their current interpretations can hardly ignore the absent contexts of their origins. Obviously, the origins of all texts precede their interpretations. Even personal journals can be said to have been created by past selves. Reading is unlike copying strings of characters from one medium onto another. What matters to current readers unavoidably becomes part of their present discourse. Analyzing given texts invokes at least three reflexive moves. The first calls for reconstructing the absent contexts of their origins and the discursive practices of the communities that generated presently available texts, to the extent possible. Sometimes, their authors and contexts of use are known. Most often, discourse analysts have to infer them from given texts. The second results from acknowledging the artificiality of texts. Although we know of algorithmically generated texts, texts that human beings write, read, respond to, and live with always imply some creativity. Texts may introduce distinctions not heard of before. They may be read variously. They introduce variations of what had been written before. Their interpretations are never fully determinable. The third consists of recognizing that whenever discourse analyses are published, read, and taken seriously outside their analysts’ community, they can make a difference in their readers’ lives. Whether that difference consists of adopting the analysts’ conceptions, opposing their claims, or applying them to problems, discourse analysts may well refuse but can never avoid being held accountable for what their scholarship does. It would follow that, limiting scholarly attention to finding valid descriptions of the object of their analyses is not enough. To be held accountable by potential stakeholders for what their scholarship informs, discourse analytical inquiries have to include what their scholarly work could do. Indeed:

Introduction 5

Scholars of discourse need to ensure that their own discourse brings the origins of the discourses they attend to into the discourses that their scholarship informs. These reflexive moves, I would argue, are implicated in all responsible discourse scholarship. They are ignored when analysts privilege their own interpretations of given texts over the practices that generated them and do not care for what their published results could do to their readers. Ignoring such reflexive moves effectively denies a place for the voices of those who practiced the analyzed discourses, provides no space for alternative readings, and favors theories that are socially irrelevant or have at best unintended consequences. Saussurean linguistics explicitly denies the relevance of their speaker’s interactions, while critical discourse studies are encouraging their acknowledgement. Admittedly, reconstructing the voices of absent others from their texts, analogue to what ethnographers are committed to do when talking with living subjects, is not easy, often hypothetical, and sometimes even misleading. However, ignoring the origins of analyzed texts for the sake of analytical convenience, for instance, when counting character strings or words, is incompatible with what discourse analysts aim to understand. It leads to socially irrelevant theories of texts which leads to monological and abstract-objectivist conceptions of language9 and mechanistic conceptions of communication. Natural scientific discourses, for example, are largely committed to producing linear causal explanations: A causes B causes C, etc. Social scientists who blindly adopt such conceptions of language are easily led to interpret arguments to have compelling powers, equate message contents with their effects, and attribute agency to matter.10 Indo-European languages offer ample grammatical forms for causal accounts of events, excessive use of which can nudge social theorists to extremes. For example, Foucault was led by such constructions to his conception of discourse as an inescapable regimen that determines what authors write and how readers read and live their lives. Bateson was quite right to criticize the attribution of agency to abstractions, calling it an epistemological pathology11 that imprisons those who believe it.12 Notwithstanding the widespread habit of attributing agency to dead matter, of personalizing social organizations, corporations, communities, and the public, I consider the use of causal and personification metaphors seriously misleading when referring to how we live within discourses. Discourses cannot speak, their practitioners do. Nor can discourses force anyone to do anything against their will. Natural languages make some forms easier to use than others, but discursive practices involve human actors dialogically, interactively, constructively, and reflexively, which defies causal explanations. Therefore, I suggest:

Discourse communities constitute their own discursive practices.

6 Klaus Krippendorff Natural language habits aside, as soon as members of discourse communities refer to themselves as such, identify themselves with particular practices and institutions, they begin to draw boundaries within which they organize themselves. For example, medical practitioners have developed discourse-specific vocabularies in terms of which they distinguish medical problems from those they do not solve. Competent use of the medical discourse is a condition for individuals to join the medical community as members. It also implies a commitment to adhere to the standards for good medical practices. I suggest that all discourse communities – academic, professional, and activist – talk their own concerns into being and act independently of other discourse communities. It follows that:

Discourse communities are (more or less) autonomous and self-organizing. Self-organizing communities draw their own boundaries within which they establish their own discursive practices, generate their own discourse-specific artifacts, and expect their members to conduct themselves according to shared rules of conduct. What happens outside their boundaries tends to be of little if any concern by their practitioners and is certainly not under their control. Yet, self-organizing communities may well be affected by perturbations from their environment, by the material and human resources needed to continue their discursive practices without which they may not be able to proceed. The “more or less” in the above proposition deserves examples. Mathematics is a discourse that explores proofs within well-defined formalisms, independent of what other discourse communities may do with them. Mathematics is a highly specialized and largely autonomous discourse. Yet, mathematicians need to be funded, housed, and have access to computing technologies. While medical, political, and economic issues are unlikely topics at conventions of mathematicians, they may well affect what mathematicians do but not in terms of the medical, political, or economic discourses. Public discourse, by contrast, is far more fluid. Its practitioners do not need to pass qualifying examinations. They engage each other in face-to-face conversations during which everyday experiences are expanded by news from the mass media. Widely shared concerns may lead to collective actions. Yet, in such conversations, the distinction between public and private realms is largely preserved. Violators of this distinction may well end up being shamed or held legally responsible. Professional, scientific, and highly specialized interests, like those of mathematicians, tend to be outside of public concerns. However, even public discourse has indigenous routines, typical meeting places, regularly appearing newspapers, informal rules of conduct, and conventional ways of expressing support or opposition to issues negotiated within its boundary. The latter is just one example of the general observation that:

All discourse communities institutionalize their recurring practices.

Introduction 7 Institutions emerge when discursive practices are repeated, routinely exercised, normalized, expected, and members of discourse communities hold each other accountable for complying with them. Knowledge of the origin of such practices tends to be forgotten in favor of enacting reciprocal expectations.13 Institutionalization of reading, writing, and acting, including how members of discourse communities are expected to coordinate their activities, stabilizes social interactions and allows communities to exist beyond the lifetime of their members. The grammars of natural language have been described as the hardened crust of literacy needed for reliable communication.14 Dictionaries, writing manuals, technical definitions, certifications, and laws are the analogues of grammars on the level of discourses. In scientific discourses, institutionalization begins with formal education as a path to membership. It continues in the form of handbooks, regularly appearing publications, standardized methodologies, entitlements of earned degrees, and specialized infrastructures. Institutionalization of recurrent practices greatly facilitates the coherence of a discourse. It also defines what it means to be productive, the spaces within which creativity can be exercised, and the kinds of contributions that will be rewarded. While discursive creativity is what keeps discourse communities alive in the long haul, it also makes it difficult to predict how discourse communities evolve, especially for outside observers, for nonparticipants, for social scientists, who are committed to provide monologic and abstractive objectivist accounts15 of their observations. This essential uncertainty of living discourse communities amounts to unsurmountable challenges. The coexistence of many discourse communities – their practice of organizing themselves in their own terms and creating their identity in contrast to what they are not – is the basis of their interdiscursive relationships.

Discourses are largely incommensurate relative to each other. It follows that whatever is obvious, natural, expected, and characteristic in any one discourse community may not be comprehensible from outside its boundaries. One manifestation of the incommensurability of discourses is the possibility of their nearly unnoticeable coexistence. For instance, therapeutic discourse is of no interest to mathematicians. Engineering discourse has no place for religion. Legal discourse does not care about how medical professionals define their concerns. These discourses coexist without any need to acknowledge each other. Incommensurability does not prevent competitive, cooperative, and exploitative relations to develop between them although all competitions take place over some resources, albeit unequally valued by competitors. For instance, the discourses of science are superficially incommensurate to those of religion. However, during the enlightenment, science developed in opposition to religion, and consequently, its discourses continue to share some elements of their historical opposition: They provide mutually exclusive visions of one world, the uni-verse, believed to afford only one correct interpretation. Modernist science and religion could be said to

8 Klaus Krippendorff compete for believers and create situations in which their discourse is to be practiced exclusively. Mutual support among discourses is quite common. The discourse of engineering relies on that of mathematics, and, at corporate board meetings, the discourses of economics, marketing, management, and communication may meet. However, in practice, cooperation among discourses is largely invisible or taken for granted like the air we breathe. It becomes evident mainly when it failed and in retrospect. For example, the US constitution defines three independent branches of government, practicing legislative, executive, and judiciary discourses, respectively, intended to balance their interests for the benefit of the country. Its framers took free speech as the currency of democracy. They knew of print, but could not imagine the development of communication technologies that, ostensively benefitting everyone, facilitated the growth of corporate structures, mass and social media, algorithmic institutions, and it curtailed public discourse, now seen as a problem. Also, it was unforeseeable that this new technology would facilitate the global expansion of commercialism at the expense of justice and caring for each other. The global acceptance of the discourse of economics was welcomed by discourse communities that had no conceptions of what enacting it does to them and the interdependencies were not noticeable before the emergence of several economic crises. Obviously, the complexity of interdiscursive relations defies easy explanations. In the absence of a common calculus of forces that meet either resistances or invite transformations, causality cannot provide valid explanations. Nor can efforts to overlook the incommensurate discursive diversities that general systems theorists propose, that economists assume when reducing everything to the flow of economic units of analysis, and that Foucault envisioned by considering discourse as a regime that governs everything within an epoch. To account for such interdiscursive relationships, I prefer to start from what keeps discourse communities alive. In order to maintain their indigenous organizational forms and continue producing their discourse-specific artifacts, all self-organizing communities import needed resources – human, informational, economic, material, and technological. For the importing-discourse communities, such imports become resources regardless of how they are conceived elsewhere. A corollary of the incommensurability of discourses is that:

Whatever enters a discourse takes on discourse-specific meanings and whatever leaves that discourse acquires meanings not under its control. For instance, individuals who enter a discourse community acquire roles that the host discourse has for them. The medical discourse reserves the category of a patient for individuals in search of treatments of a medical problem. The role that a medical patient occupies in other discourse communities has no currency

Introduction 9 in the medical discourse. Similarly, a person taken into police custody is confined by the legal discourse which governs law-enforcement practices. And in a restaurant, everyone is either a customer or an employee, regardless of what they do in other situations. What applies to individuals applies to the imported material artifacts as well. For example, the ceremonial artifacts of aboriginal people become different objects for anthropologists taking them home. Their meanings change in subsequent academic publications about them, and they become something altogether different when curators display them in a museum.16 Similarly, economists tend to see all phenomena in economic terms. However, when money enters the public sphere, it invariably introduces inequalities, corrupts democratic processes, and attracts media attention. Physicists claim to attend to the universe, conceived of as embracing everything there is. When their theories enter the discourse of engineering, they become coupled with conditions in terms of which engineers need to publicly justify their designs. Claims of the universality of the discourse of physics fail miserably whenever human beings actively participate in what theories seek to explain, especially where discourses are practiced. If discourse-specific meanings account for what discourse communities transact, how can one explain interdiscursive relations? Shared conceptions cannot serve as explanations as this would deny the fundamental incommensurability of distinct discourses. Instead, I am suggesting that interdiscursive relations are motivated precisely when discourses utilize unlike affordances of what is exchanged. The most obvious example is the sale of goods. Just as goods can change hands if and only if sellers and buyers have different uses for them, transactions between discourse communities presuppose that they afford different benefits. For instance, the funding agencies of scientific research pursue objectives unlike that of researchers who seek to advance their theories. Even conflicts between discourse communities can emerge from the same ground. The reality of laws ratified by a legislature becomes evident not only by obeying them but also by political activists seeking to undo their undesirable consequences. Interdiscursive relations are based not on shared but on complementary conceptions. Causal explanations are inapplicable precisely because interdiscursive relations involve language. I am suggesting that:

Interdiscursive relations are ecological in nature. They entail coexisting and mutual supportive, antagonistic, or competitive relationships. In an ecology of biological organisms, each species lives in its own world which includes indigenous responses to those species they come in contact with. Overall conceptions of an ecology are beyond the worlds of any one of its participating species. Ecologists who tend to model a particular ecosystem are not exempt from this generalization. I dare say that this applies to discourse communities as well – with some important qualifications.

10 Klaus Krippendorff The key difference between interdiscursive and interspecies relations is the role of language. Members of different discourse communities may well speak the same natural language without being able to understand each other’s discourse. However, human beings are capable of learning different languages and practicing different discourses. This enables them to participate in different discourse communities, moving from one to another. Moreover, and unlike biological organisms whose organs are in constant interactions, all discourse communities exist only intermittently. Their viability depends on being able to reconstitute themselves in time and at suitable occasions involving qualified members.17 It follows that qualified individuals have the option to move in and through different discourse communities. This can set in motion changes not observable in the ecologies of biological organisms:

While discourse communities rarely welcome the discourses of outsiders in their midst, the importation of human, informational, material, and technological matter, essential for a discourse to stay alive, may enhance a discourse but could also disable, subvert, and colonize it, in any case undermining a discourse from its unregulated ground. For instance, the use of online communication by a new generation of techsavvy individuals has effectively retired several professional discourses, rendered traditional business practices inefficient, and encouraged new entrepreneurial paradigms. Robots in social media are undermining public discourse. The scope of the discourse of psychology has shrunk as cognitive sciences have siphoned off creative researchers. Feminist reconceptions of human rights are making it difficult for political discourse to be practiced as in the past. The history of communication scholarship exemplifies how established grand sociological theories of knowledge became meaningless in the face of the social fluidity of new communication practices. And activist movements regarding global warming, gun violence, commercialization of politics, and social inequalities are seeking discursive homes. These examples suggest that the viability of communities depends largely on their discursive ability to accommodate novel characteristics of individuals they enroll as members and make use of unexpected affordances of what they import as resources from outside their discursive boundaries:

The dynamics of interdiscursive relations depend largely on the abilities of communities to accommodate unexpected perturbations that surreptitiously enter a discourse from its unregulated ground. Scholarly discourse cannot claim an exemption from these propositions. It inevitably changes when inviting new generations of scholars to participate in discursive events who introduce new perspectives into deliberations, when responding to critical receptions of publications, or when testing conceptions

Introduction 11 and evaluating them on the streets, at board meetings, and wherever work is performed. The above implies that:

Scholarly analyses and critiques of discourses contribute not only to academic literature; they can profoundly affect how other discourses evolve. —————————— ● —————————— Unquestionably, examining discourses in action is a fascinating scholarly endeavor. It opens new ways of experiencing the world but also presents many epistemological and ethical challenges which set apart the scholarship of discourses from other social sciences. Let me conclude the above by sketching some of these challenges. •

•

•

•

Obviously, by talking, reading, writing, and publishing, all scholars are practicing their own discourse. A commitment to create artifacts that comply with discourse-specific standards leads them to collectively expand their own scholarship. However, as scholars of discourse, we practice what we attend to. It follows that understanding how others live in the discursive worlds they construct applies to us as well. Recognizing this parallelism should make us act in the awareness that we do not merely describe what we analyze, we actively construct the very discursive world we are attending to. All scholars practice their own discourse. However, unlike disciplines that define their concerns as existing independent of how they are observed and theorized, our scholarly inquiries have to reflexively include our own discursive practices. Therefore, it is not enough to describe and critically examine the discursive artifacts that other communities have created and left behind. We have to account also for what readers can take away from our scholarship and what it does to the stakeholders of our publications. Our criteria for good scholarship cannot stop at truths. We have to be accountable for what it does. Inasmuch as discourse communities organize themselves within their own boundaries and in their own terms, we cannot possibly understand how other discourses are practiced unless we respect their possibly incommensurate constructions of reality. Nor will we be able to assume accountability for what our scholarly discourse does unless we are willing to enter the worlds of the stakeholders of our scholarship. This double self-reference is rarely considered elsewhere, certainly not in the natural sciences. As already mentioned, the discourse of the natural sciences thrives on constructing causal theories and assumes that their objects of analysis exist independent of being attended to. The temptation of applying the same language to social phenomena has led sociologists to describe communities in terms invariant: stable social institutions; normative practices; and reproductions of known facts, governed by powerful hierarchical structures. These

12 Klaus Krippendorff

•

•

stabilities justify – I prefer to say are the consequence of adopting – causal and computational metaphors in our explanations. However, acknowledging that discourse communities are viable when their practitioners construct, reconstruct, revise, and institute novel artifacts precludes causal explanations. Causality has no place for newness. Creativity is a defining dimension of living discourses; in fact, conversational uses of language are inherently nonrepetitive and unpredictable. All discourse communities have the ability to question their own histories and pursue novel paths. We should not deny those whose discourse we are examining the very creativity we rely on when accounting for what they do. In a similar vein, the use of causal and computational metaphors easily leads to conceptions of communities as prisons and of discourses as the algorithms that control their members’ behaviors. There indeed are communities that encourage their members to be possessed by the discourse they are practicing. Yet, unlike biological organisms whose organs are in constant interactions, communities are real only when members practice their discourses. The reality of communities depends on being able to reconstitute themselves in regular intervals or on appropriate occasions. Enrolling willing individuals into their missions is essential to their temporaneous reality.18 This obvious empirical fact entails the ability of individuals to sequentially participate in different communities and switch discourses when moving in and out of them. The ability to practice distinct discourses is evidence of human sociability. I am suggesting that we, scholars of discourse, should not allow ourselves to be possessed by our methods of analysis. Understanding discourses means crossing their boundaries without prejudices. Our scholarship has to be interdisciplinary. Admittedly, we share our preference for scholarly abstractions with most academic disciplines. I already mentioned that sociological theories characteristically abstract the creative nature of communication out of their constructions. This leads to strange misconceptions. I suggest that communities do not speak; their members do, including as members of their communities. Discourses have no agency. They cannot cause us to do anything we are unwilling to do. Being unwilling to consider alternative conceptions is a choice that invites the appearance of, and only that, of causalities. Also, discourse communities cannot communicate with one another. The often shallow awareness in one discourse community of another is limited to the willingness of their respective members to communicate across discourse boundaries. I am suggesting that we, as scholars of discourse, shy away from taking a God’s eye view of the world of discourses. If we are willing to practice what our inquiries teach us, we will have to see us as creative participants in what we are examining. I am suggesting to be humble and adopt ecological conceptions of the interdiscursive constructions of artifacts, conceptions that acknowledge our own limitations. —————————— ● ——————————

Introduction 13 This volume exemplifies many of these propositions. It intends to encourage scholars to dare crossing discursive boundaries, respect the inevitable differences they will encounter, and actively contribute to the construction of discursive worlds.

Notes 1 Klaus Krippendorff, “Discourse as systematically constrained conversation,” in his On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information, ed. F. Bermejo (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009): 217–234. 2 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, trans. R. Harris (Chicago, IL: Open Court House, 1972). 3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972). 4 Stuart Hall, “Foucault: Power, knowledge and discourse,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, eds. M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, and S. J. Yates (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001): 72–92. 5 Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use (New York, NY: Praeger, 1986). 6 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1958). 8 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958) Lectures delivered at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Winter 1955–56. 9 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 10 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005). 11 Gregory Bateson, “Pathologies of epistemologies,” in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000): 486–495. 12 Klaus Krippendorff, “Pathology, power and emancipation,” in his On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information, ed. F. Bermejo (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009): 131–155. 13 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). 14 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Op. cit.9 15 Ibid. 16 For example, Klaus Krippendorff, “The dialogical reality of meaning,” The American Journal of Semiotics 19, nos. 1–4 (2003): 17–34. http://repository.upenn.edu/ asc_papers/51. 17 Klaus Krippendorff, “Social organizations as reconstitutable networks of conversation,” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 15, no. 3–4 (2008): 149–161. http://repository.upenn. edu/asc_papers/135. 18 Ibid.

Part I

Divergent approaches to discourse analyses Rachel Stonecipher Taking up the gauntlet of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,1 discourse analysts productively disagree on what it means to treat discourse as an object of study. One of Foucault’s chief contributions was the concept of the “discursive formation”: a system of statements producing knowledge of its objects, through which the received “order of things” might be glimpsed and rethought. In this model, discursive regimes seem to carry ordering power according to their own internal rules; yet analysis of any social context reveals the role of human agency in organizing spheres of knowledge. Discourse analysis distinguishes itself from semiotics in its concern with how the social use of signs coalesces to produce a sense of a phenomenon (see the turn from analyzing texts toward analyzing “semiotic resources” across multimodal contexts).2 As Keller writes in this volume, “what an event ‘is’ is not part of the event itself, but of the discursive meaning-making that takes place around such an event.” Its attention to use-context makes discourse analysis more attentive than semiotics to potential transformations in meaning, and therefore, its practitioners here contend, to social transformation. The contributors to this part of the book, “Divergent approaches to discourse analyses,” focus unapologetically on the human dimension of discourse, even as they center other players in the communicative event. As François Cooren offers in his contribution to this volume, communication studies may generatively understand human beings as media to the extent that the existence of an idea “must be sustained by something or someone through which it expresses itself.” Whereas Foucault attributed agency to total discursive regimes, Cooren regards texts – statements disembodied from their speakers – as possessing a relational agency to which speakers, listeners, and writers may attach their embodiment as simultaneously puppets and puppeteers. Explicating his theory of communication as ventriloquism, Cooren provides several examples: for instance, when people “allow the facts to speak for themselves,” they make themselves vehicles for the spread and transformation of ideas. In treating social reality as fundamentally “communicational,” this theory provocatively relocates communicative agency within conceptual objects, arguing for the ontological relevance of communication studies while maintaining a certain freedom for the human “puppeteer” who may shift from the mouthpiece to the interventionist

16 Rachel Stonecipher of a discourse. Although all four of the contributors to this section engage the tension between necessarily representational methods of discourse research and the nonrepresentational aspects of communicative experience, Cooren showcases a means of considering the latter as unfolding interactionally with the more material, or materially signifying, “contours” of texts and their perhaps (functionally) detachable ideas. While Cooren’s conceptual objects take on agency from and within the discourse communities that imbue them with significance, Ruth Wodak’s work locates a different form of agency in the historical-discursive relationships that progressively narrow a discursive object’s meaning. If Foucaultian discourse analysis could be said to advocate a historical ontology,3 Wodak’s analysis holds historical context and material “thingness” in the same fruitful tension. Utilizing the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) she has pioneered within Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), Wodak queries how history limits (without determining) the possible meanings of statements. Her method, as she states, opts against a “macro-sociological” approach that would challenge the interactional basis of a shared reality, and targets the dialectical relationship between discourse and society that grants a certain discourse, such as “the discourse of immigration,” historicity, and therefore impact. Wodak summarizes the historicity at issue as a matter of the ongoing (discursive) competition over access to positions of power in discourse itself. As method, the DHA provides a road map through the “coded language” of ideology, linking three levels of analysis – topics, argumentative topoi, and argument-realization strategies – to study how discursive strategies represent agents and actions in ways that produce identification and disidentification. It operates from the premise that, over time, identifiable inequalities have developed in different groups’ power over the very production of discourse. DHA mines the history of a given discourse in context, such as anti-Semitism in Europe, to understand what ideas sustain notions such as anti-Jewish stereotypes; for instance, how racism or nationalism comes to play a role in “the discursive construction of … binary frames of belonging.” Via a case study, Wodak shows how the deployment of antiSemitic visual signs in a political cartoon aligns, elastically, with a number of far-right political agendas, while allowing space for its creator and distributors to deny their racism (“calculated ambivalence”). Contrasting his work with CDS, Reiner Keller asserts that the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) eschews a “hermeneutics of suspicion” aimed at undoing historical social constructions, in favor of analyzing the institutional dispositifs, “devices or infrastructures,” that enable specific moments of “discourse production and problem intervention.” As a social constructivist approach, SKAD addresses how power/knowledge becomes sedimented when discourse communities differentiate statements according to situational truth value. Making reference to Cooren’s ventriloquist as an example of a dispositif, Keller highlights the utility of showing how such devices (agents of “materialization,” in Cooren’s words) shape and sustain “the definition of the situation” of social problems and solutions. Those familiar with Foucault’s ethics4 will find

Divergent approaches to discourse analysis 17 “definition of the situation” a phrase befitting his pragmatic aspirations.5 In Foucaultian style, Keller’s politicization of the dispositif leads him, ultimately, to contest Bruno Latour’s argument that discursive structures are so recognizably contingent as to render critique redundant.6 His broader dispute is with Latourian actor-network theory’s magnification of the agency of materiality. Reading Keller, it becomes clear that what actor-network theory bypasses in its search for object-oriented objectivity are the indelibly social processes – enactment, embodiment, citation – that institutionalize, and thus situationally materialize, meaning. (See Krippendorff, this volume, for an elaboration of how practice makes meaning matter.) Considered together, Keller’s commitment to the contingency of social discourse and Wodak’s attention to its historical sedimentation capture the historiographical tensions – and necessarily experimental nature – of any Foucaultian effort “to show that realities could simply be different.” While no contributor views discourse as finally determining the material, Jonathan Potter’s discursive psychology provides a window onto conversation as a site for the production of a shared reality. Potter enhances conversation analysis by analyzing participants’ own “epistemic practices,” or in other words, conversational tactics that establish a foundation of shared knowledge. Although this is a method that focuses on ostensibly private interactional spheres, the production of this shared foundation leads outward to a network of social consequences of how stories are told, and what assumptions about others become tenable through discursive practice. In one example, Potter tracks the horizon of possible responses produced by the statement, “hadn’t I [already] asked?” A rejoinder to cognitivism, this method sets aside questions about participants’ actual psychological traits, offering in their place the study of “where inferences about intentions, thoughts, feelings, motives (and so on) are made available and countered in how events are told.” This approach analyzes how discursive practices manage the realm of the epistemic, without making cognitivist assumptions about participants. What each approach in this section makes plain is that discourse studies pursue critical epistemological and ontological questions about the social existence of phenomena. These contributions call our attention to how social actors assume positions of relative knowledge, materialize and mobilize ideas, and define issues as matters of concern – ultimately, destabilizing the established order of things in the interest of creating consciousness amid the fault lines.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1969). 2 Gunther R. Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2009). 3 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 4 Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1) (New York, NY: New Press, 1997).

18 Rachel Stonecipher Cressida Heyes, Self-transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5 James William Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994). 6 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

1

Analysing the politics of denial Critical discourse studies and the discourse-historical approach Ruth Wodak

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS, often also referred to as Critical Discourse Analysis or CDA) is, to put it in general terms, a problem-centred, trans- and interdisciplinary research programme. I myself prefer the term CDS, since the approaches in question are not merely text and discourse analyses but also genuinely theoretical approaches (see van Dijk1). CDS – as most scholars following this paradigm define this line of research – is therefore not interested in investigating a linguistic unit per se but in analysing, understanding and explaining social phenomena that are necessarily complex and thus require a multidisciplinary and multimethodical approach. The objects under investigation do not have to be related to negative or exceptionally “serious” social or political experiences or events: this is a frequent misunderstanding of the aims and goals of CDS and of the term “critical” which, of course, does not mean “negative” as in common sense usage. Any social phenomenon lends itself to critical investigation, to be challenged and not taken for granted. To quote Teun van Dijk (ibid.) in this respect: Contrary to popular belief and unfortunate claims of many papers submitted to discourse journals, CDA is not a method of critical discourse analysis. This may sound paradoxical, but I am afraid it isn’t. […] Being critical, first of all, is a state of mind, an attitude, a way of dissenting, and many more things, but not an explicit method for the description of the structures or strategies of text and talk. […] Methodologically, CDA is as diverse as DA in general, or indeed other directions in linguistics, psychology or the social sciences. […] A good method is a method that is able to give a satisfactory (reliable, relevant, etc.) answer to the questions of a research project. It depends on one’s aims, expertise, time and goals, and the kind of data that can or must be generated – that is, on the context of a research project. […] So, there is not “a” or “one” method of CDA, but many. Hence, I recommend to use the term Critical Discourse Studies for the theories, methods, analyses, applications and other practices of critical discourse analysts, and to forget about the confusing term “CDA”. So, please, no more “I am going to apply CDA” because it does not make sense. Do critical discourse analysis by formulating critical goals, and then explain by what specific explicit methods you want to realize it.2

20 Ruth Wodak Accordingly, CDS comprises several approaches, distinguished among others by their underlying theoretical positions, their definition of discourse, the selection of research objects as well as the methodologies and methods used (see Angermüller et al.3; Fairclough et al.4; Hart & Cap5; Keller et al.6; Wodak & Meyer7). Thus, we distinguish more cognitively oriented theories such as those of Teun van Dijk,8 Chris Hart9 or Piotr Cap,10 which draw on the foundations of socio-psychological models of perception; the dialectical-relational approach by Norman Fairclough,11 which builds on dialectical materialism and prefers the toolbox of System Functional Linguistics; the multimodal approach of Theo van Leeuwen, who together with Gunter Kress pioneered discourseanalytical work on visual communication12; the approach of Siegfried and Margarete Jäger, which traces back to Foucault13; and the discourse-historical approach, which I elaborate in more detail below. Furthermore, there are “hybrid” approaches, such as cognitive metaphor analysis developed by Andreas Musolff14 and the rather macro-sociological approach of Reiner Keller15 and Johannes Angermüller.16 Figure 1.1 provides a systematic overview of some relevant approaches, distinguished by their respective epistemological foundations (see Wodak & Meyer17). CDS shares the focus on analysis of “naturally occurring” language practices with other approaches in Discourse Studies, such as descriptive discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, psycho- and sociolinguistics or conversation

Figure 1.1 Relevant theoretical approaches in CDS and their epistemological foundations (see Wodak & Meyer 2016a, 18)

Analysing the politics of denial 21 analysis. Similarly, non-verbal aspects (semiotic, multimodal and visual aspects) are generally included in the analysis. Research into the social, cultural, situational and cognitive contexts of language use also plays an important – if often unsystematic – role. Nevertheless, all approaches in CDS are distinguished from the above-named approaches beyond their critical, problem-focused outlook – in some crucial respects: •

•

•

CDS aims to empirically and theoretically grasp – that is, to document and conceptualize – the dialectical relationship between discourse and society; this leads to an abductive approach whereas other approaches such as corpus linguistics or conversation analysis claim to be purely inductive (e.g., Angermüller et al.; Schegloff18). Context is categorised and analysed systematically whereas many other DS approaches neglect socio-political factors which – more or less directly – influence meaning-making, only emphasise situational dimensions or reduce social complexity via the correlation with allegedly distinct variables (such as age, gender, social class and so forth) (e.g., Clarke et al.19; Flowerdew20; Wodak21). Understanding, interpretation and explanation are always regarded as a hermeneutic circle in the sense of “the method of grasping and interpreting meanings” (Wodak & Meyer 2016a, 22).

1 Principles and underlying assumptions All approaches listed above are characterized by shared principles, for instance an understanding of the social role of language behaviour and discursive practices; in Anglo-American context, this is often referred to as “semiosis”, a term which encompasses all meaning-making practices. This may include written and spoken as well as visual signs. The relationship between language and society is defined as dialectical: on the one hand, social processes manifest themselves in discourse; on the other hand, discourse simultaneously represents these processes. Social change can thus be understood as discursive change, which in turn affects social processes. In the analysis of complex social phenomena, the multi-layered role of power and ideologies is deconstructed, thus acknowledging (the fact) that no social interaction is (completely) free from power relations or free from value judgements and norms. Moreover, the historicity of discourses is emphasized; discourses are always related to other earlier or co-existing communicative events – this is referred to as “intertextuality” or “interdiscursivity” (depending on the level of interconnectedness). Hence it follows that discourses can only be understood in their multi-layered contexts. A third important premise states that there can be different, indeed plausible and adequate interpretations of communicative events, but not the one and only correct one, since these – in terms of Bakhtin’s (1986) notion of the dialogic text – always depend on the interests, expectations and knowledge of

22 Ruth Wodak the recipients.22 This also applies to the necessarily plausible and transparent interpretations of researchers, which are undertaken from different research interests, different knowledge and different points of view. Researchers in CDS therefore commit to continuous reflection on their approach. After all, this research programme – as evidenced by the term “Critical Discourse Studies” – places great value on a differentiated notion of “critique” which is often misunderstood (Chilton et al.23; van Leeuwen24). In fact, this notion is not to be confused with the everyday usage of the word “to criticize” in the sense of an exclusively negative evaluation of the respective social phenomenon. It denotes the continual calling-into-question of seemingly natural assumptions, the continual questioning of the previously unquestioned. At this point, I want to briefly define the term “discourse” within CDS. Here, I refer to the definitions provided by the discourse-historical approach (see below: DHA; Reisigl & Wodak25; Rheindorf 26; Wodak27, 28, 29). Discourse is understood as the totality of all meaning-making events thematically related to a specific topic. This definition corresponds to the respective labelling or naming of discourses, e.g. “the discourse about far-right populism” or “the discourse about migration”. Other perspectives focus on specific features or characteristics of discourses and refer to (often misleadingly) a “racist discourse” or an “antisemitic discourse”. Yet others refer to a specific, socially determined frame of reference such as “media discourse” or “political discourse”, or to a social domain or institution – “the discourse in politics” – or the characteristics of an ideology, such as “left” or “far-right” discourse (Purvis & Hunt30). The latter type of definition, however, implies that there are clearly demarcated “languages” of racism, of migration or politics; our definition, in contrast, foregrounds that it is the specific connection of form and content in a specific context that defines a discourse, while drawing on generally available semiotic resources. Thus, a discourse on migration may indeed contain disparate ideological positions.

2 The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) The DHA (as one of many approaches in CDS) was developed in multiple projects since 1986. The point of departure was an interdisciplinary project which investigated post-war antisemitism in Austria in the context of the socalled “Waldheim affair” (Wodak et al.31; Reisigl32). The DHA as a research programme within CDS, thus with a critical outlook on language and society, allows analysing power relations and power shifts, the negotiation or stabilizing of social opportunities through the continuation or transformation of meanings. Not all people, for instance, have equal access to the same positions (of power) in discourse, hence there follow different possibilities to participate in discourse. Since power relations are often not merely asymmetrical but also obscured or veiled, work within the DHA aims to contribute to uncovering such power relations. The respective research interest thus always also encompasses the

Analysing the politics of denial 23 historical dimension of the respective discourse, i.e. their emergence and transformation over time – for it is precisely their transformation which reveals who successfully propagates which positions with which means – keeping in mind that the timeframe of interest may be defined in terms of hours, years or centuries. The DHA always views utterances in their context, distinguishing an internal co-text (links to other utterances within the same text), an intertextual context, the situative context in which communicative event is produced and received, and the broader socio-political and cultural context, which has a historical dimension as well (Wodak33; Rheindorf 34). Analytically, the DHA distinguishes three interconnected levels of analysis: 1) Content (topics) 2) Argumentative strategies and topoi 3) Linguistic and other forms of realisation While texts realise aspects or fragments of discourses, discourses cannot be reduced to a number of texts or corpora. Foucault linked this view of discourse as social practice to the key purpose of discourse analysis: To approach discourses not as the totality of signs but as practices that systematically represent their

Figure 1.2 Four-level context model (see Rheindorf 2017)

24 Ruth Wodak objects of reference, which, although these discourses comprise signs, use them for something beyond naming of their objects. This, in Foucault’s argument, puts discourses beyond speaking and beyond language in a narrow sense.35 On the one hand, discourse-historical research combines methods on its three levels of analysis, while on the other hand also combining quantitative and qualitative methods. In this frame, quantitative results may provide an overview of topics, make large text corpora accessible and guide more detailed qualitative analyses (see Rheindorf & Wodak36). Not all linguistic features potentially of interest can be discussed here (but see Reisigl & Wodak 2001, 201637). Work in the DHA often investigates issues of representation, i.e. the ways in which specific groups or individuals are presented by linguistic or other semiotic means: Are they individualised or collectivised, using names, functions, place of origin etc.? Are they characterized in terms of their age, gender, educational level, physical properties etc.? Work in the DHA also studies the representation of actions and processes: Are actions presented with or without actors; are the beneficiaries or recipients of actions represented or not; are actions represented as states or conditions? In studying the discursive construction of (local, regional, national, transnational or individual and collective) identities, for instance, which underlie processes of inclusion and exclusion, the DHA distinguishes the following strategies (e.g., Wodak et al.38): • • • • •

Referential strategies or nomination strategies Predicational strategies Argumentation strategies Strategies of perspectivation, framing or discourse representation Intensifying strategies and mitigation strategies

Referential strategies are linguistically realized primarily through nominalisations, although other forms of realization may also be relevant in specific languages, e.g. German (adjectives, prepositional phrases etc.). Predicational strategies can be realized through attributes, explicit comparisons, metaphors etc. Argumentation strategies serve to justify and legitimize the respective characterization of specific groups or individuals. Discourse representation relates, among other things, to whether utterances are quoted directly or indirectly and who they are attributed to. Finally, utterances may be mitigated by use of conjunctive, euphemisms, modal verbs etc., but they may also be intensified by use of superlatives, adverbs etc. In the following example analysis, I apply the methodology as well as relevant concepts and categories of the DHA defined above; moreover, due to the specific text and context under investigation, more categories and methods are briefly introduced in order to grasp post-war coded antisemitic meanings in Austria produced in a TV interview with the former far-right populist Vice Chancellor and former leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) HC Strache.39

Analysing the politics of denial 25

3 Example analysis: far-right populism and the “politics of denial” 3.1 Socio-political context

Far-right populism (or the populist far-right) as an ideology attempts to reduce social and economic structures in their complexity and proposes simple explanations for complex and often global developments (Pelinka40; Wodak41, 42, 43). In doing so, populist discourses regularly draw on wellknown and established stereotypes of “the Other” and “the Stranger”, whose discursive and socio-political exclusion is supposed to create a sense of community and belonging within the supposedly homogenous “people” or “Volk”. The fact that these “Strangers” may, indeed, be right at the middle of the respective society marks populism as a pseudo-democratic battleground for internal conflicts of interest within that society. These real political and economic contradictions, however, are not often addressed directly, since populism as an ideological strategy seeks to situate social conflict not where it originates but to obscure or externalize it. In this strategy, social conflicts and ruptures are often re-interpreted as an insurmountable contrast between “Us” and “the Others” (Them). Nationalism, racism, xenophobia and antisemitism play a key role in the discursive construction of such binary frames of belonging, which are meant to compensate for the lack of economic power, social and political influence of large segments of the population without systematically or explicitly revealing them (Köhler & Wodak44; Stögner45). Such exclusionary rhetoric and politics are commonly directed against migrants, especially from non-EU countries. The dichotomous view of society (a merger of anti-elitism with a nativist nationalistic anti-pluralism) is part and parcel of far-right populist ideology, alongside other salient dimensions which I have elaborated elsewhere.46 Protecting the fatherland (or heartland, homeland) implies belief in a common narrative of the past, where “we” were either heroes or victims of evil. Revisionist histories thus blend all past woes into success stories of the Volk or stories of treachery and betrayal by others, of sacrifice and victimhood. Moreover, conspiracies are part and parcel of the discursive construction of fear which frequently draws on traditional antisemitic and anti-elitist tropes. Furthermore, such parties endorse traditional, conservative values and morals (family values, traditional gender roles) and, most importantly, support common sense simplistic explanations and solutions (anti-intellectualism). Usually, a “savior” is appealed to, the (more or less) charismatic leader of the respective party who oscillates between the roles of Robin Hood and “strict father” (Lakoff47; Wodak & Forchtner48; Wodak & Pelinka49). Certainly, not all far-right populist parties endorse all the above-mentioned positions. Moreover, even if they do, the level of support for any of these typical stances depends on the specific context of a given country or even situation of speaking. In the following example, however, exclusionary politics is directed against the western archetype of the Stranger, against Jews (Wodak et al.50).

26 Ruth Wodak 3.2 Analyzing hate-speech and (coded) antisemitic utterances

Ideally, the systematic in-depth linguistic analysis of hate speech and antisemitic utterances of Holocaust denial should – according to the DHA – draw on (while elaborating the four-level context-model provided above): • • • • • • •

Historical analysis of antisemitism and its verbal expressions (i.e. “coded language”) Socio-cognitive analysis of collective memories and frames guiding the acquisition of specific knowledge so as to be able to understand “coded language” Socio-political analysis of ongoing debates and political parties taking part in them; these two dimensions forming the broad context Genre theory; considering, e.g., the functions of TV interviews and TV discussions (persuasive strategies; positive self-presentation and negative other presentation; populist rhetoric, etc.) The setting, speakers etc. of specific utterances; this is the narrow context; The co-text of each utterance And, finally, verbal expressions have to be analysed in terms of linguistic, i.e., pragmatic and/or grammatical approaches (presuppositions, insinuations, implications etc. as characteristics of specific “coded antisemitism”)

Antisemitism occurs in various contexts, e.g. in the public sphere and anonymously in online postings and other Internet genre. Indeed, antisemitism and Islamophobia can also appear together, as recent public debates about banning Halal and circumcision in Austria, Germany and France illustrate.51 Moreover, it is important to emphasize that various antisemitisms exist – racist, capitalist, cultural, religious or syncretic; Muslim or Christian; left- or right-wing; “old” or “new”; traditional, structural or secondary; hard-core or latent; explicit or coded; and soft or violent, resemiotized in physical acts of hatred. Indeed, it seems that after the Shoah, we are dealing with an antisemitism without Jews and without anti-Semites. Fine poignantly describes the many polarized debates about occurrences of antisemitism as follows: To deny the issue of antisemitism in Europe on the grounds that Europe has learned the lesson from the Holocaust, or to deny the issue of antisemitism on the left on the grounds that the left is inherently anti-racist, or to deny the issue of antisemitism within radical Islam on the grounds that Muslims are oppressed within Europe and have a history of tolerance, is in every case a kind of closure, a refusal to engage critically with the legacies of European, left and Muslim antisemitism.52 As Jews are perceived as the universal and ultimate evil in such antisemitic rhetoric, the contradicting moments can be combined within one argument, in the sense of what I suggest labelling as the “Iudeus ex machina” strategy – all antisemitic

Analysing the politics of denial 27 stereotypes work together whenever needed and can be functionalised for political ends, even when in contradiction of each other (Wodak53). Due to the characteristics of post-war antisemitism elaborated above, the denial of antisemitism (and racism) is inherently linked to the utterance of such discriminatory remarks. In the analysis of my example, I apply Van Dijk’s typology of strategies of denial which he lists for racist remarks, to coded antisemitic utterances. Van Dijk defines strategies relevant to the denial of racism as follows: One of the crucial properties of contemporary racism is its denial, typically illustrated in such well-known disclaimers as “I have nothing against blacks, but …” […]. The guiding idea behind this research is that ethnic and racial prejudices are prominently acquired and shared within the white dominant group through everyday conversation and institutional text and talk. Such discourse serves to express, convey, legitimate or indeed to conceal or deny such negative ethnic attitudes.54 He provides a useful typology of denying as part of a general defence or justification strategy – which can thus reasonably be expected to occur when someone is accused of having uttered a racist remark or of being racist. These types are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Act-denial (“I did not do/say that at all”) Control-denial (“I did not do/say that on purpose”, “It was an accident”) Intention-denial (“I did not mean that”, “You got me wrong”) Goal-denial (“I did not do/say that, in order to…”) Mitigations, down-toning, minimising or using euphemisms when describing one’s negative actions

Van Dijk’s insights are also relevant to the analysis of antisemitic utterances. In his ground-breaking 1959 lecture “The meaning of working through the past”, T.W. Adorno already showed that in the German (as well as Austrian) discourse about the Nazi past and the Holocaust, the roles of victims and perpetrators were often reversed: Victims were turned into perpetrators by blaming the Jews for their own suffering.55 This led to the development of a “discourse of justification” which projected guilt in the form of aggression (Wodak et al.56). 3.3 Analysis of a TV interview

The following in-depth analysis of an example will reveal the discursive and, specifically, argumentative means by which speakers attempt to circumvent taboos on antisemitic prejudice. 3.3.1 Immediate context

On August 18, 2012, the leader of the FPÖ, HC Strache, posted a caricature on Facebook (Figure 1.3) which recontextualised a US-American caricature

28 Ruth Wodak from 1962 (Figure 1.4) into a caricature which – as many readers and viewers immediately observed – alludes to antisemitic caricatures from Nazi times that were published daily in the 1930s in the infamous German newspaper Der Stürmer. After the – predictable – scandal had erupted over explicit antisemitic features of the caricature, most newspapers in Austria and Germany published editorials and news reports about this incident; Strache was also interviewed on television August 27, 2012; he first denied having altered the original caricature; he then denied that the stars visible on the cufflinks of the banker were Stars of David; and finally, he categorically denied any resemblances with antisemitic caricatures.

Figure 1.3 Caricature posted by HC Strache on August 18, 2012, on Facebook

Figure 1.4 Caricature, the US-American original from 1962

Analysing the politics of denial 29 The explicit differences between Figures 1.3 and 1.4 are readily apparent and easy to detect: The nose of the sweating and greedily eating banker had been changed to a crooked, so-called “Jewish nose” and the cufflinks had been decorated with a Star of David each. These two changes both insinuate, and resonate with, images of the Nazi past: with the stereotypical image of “the ugly Jewish banker” who exploits the poor (metonymically embodied by the image of a poor worker from the 1930s) and patronises the government which tries to ingratiate itself with the powerful and rich Jew by serving him an opulent meal and pouring wine (see Wodak 2016, 32–33). In Figure 1.5, the relevant segments have been enlarged. By making these changes and posting the altered caricature with an extended comment (see Figure 1.3), Strache utilized the theme of the financial crisis in at least three ways: firstly to accuse the government of wrong policies and of submitting to the EU; secondly to create a scapegoat that can be blamed for current woes by triggering traditional antisemitic stereotypes of world conspiracy and powerful Jewish bankers and capitalists; and thirdly to provoke a scandal and thus attract media attention and set the news agenda. The caricature is accompanied by a textbox which explains the caricature in some detail and accuses the government of selling out to EU policies and foreign punters. This insinuates some other well-known anti-Jewish stereotypes: the world conspiracy and the Jewish capitalist.

Figure 1.5 Details of the “gluttonous and greedy banker”

30 Ruth Wodak Tabloid media and online forums thus allow old prejudices and resentment against Jews, supposedly things of the past, to be disseminated to the greater public. In line with the strategy of “Iudeus ex machina”, such antisemitic stereotypes can be politically instrumentalized and connected to a comprehensive discourse of exclusion: against Others or Strangers within and outside. In contrast to pre-war antisemitism, which was more or less explicitly informed by racist, religious or political-economical aspects and had various roots, post-war antisemitism amalgamates all stereotypes into an undifferentiated arsenal from which the “fitting” prejudice can be selected according to political expediency, context and function (see Wodak et al.57). The “Facebook incident” on the one hand exemplifies typical rhetorical strategies of provocation, calculated ambivalence and denial. On the other hand, it emphasises the power of digital media in their use of traditional genres and the rapid spiral of scandalisation. Moreover, this example illustrates the importance of an in-depth and context-sensitive, multi-layered analysis in terms of the DHA when trying to understand and explain the dynamics of far-right populist propaganda and manipulation. 3.3.2 “There is no Star of David”

The following dialogue between the FPÖ leader HC Strache (HCS) and the well-known anchor-man Armin Wolf (AW) illustrates the politics of denial long pursued by the FPÖ and described above. The TV interview was broadcast on August 27, 2012, i.e. nine days after the caricature was posted, in the daily news programme ZIB 2 at 10pm on ORF II (Channel 2 of the Austrian Broadcasting Company). Text 1 [1] AW

Now, last week you managed once again to make it into international

[2]

headlines, and you did it by using this caricature, which you posted

HCS Hmhm [3] AW on your Facebook page. The Zeit, HCS Hmhm [4] AW

a respected German weekly newspaper, refers to this as “antisemitic

[5] [6]

provocation”, the Spiegel refers to is as “a picture, just as in times of NSpropaganda”, and even the BBC reported on it. Are you

[7]

proud of that?

[8] HCS No. This is absolute nonsense! I got [9] AW

Did you

[10] HCS this hm um um caricature um shared by a user,

Analysing the politics of denial 31 After asking HC Strache whether he is now “proud” of being discussed in so many serious newspapers and radio stations across Europe (Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, BBC), Strache utters his first denial (lines 8–10), an act-denial: “No, this is absolute nonsense! I got this … caricature shared by a user”. Anchor-man Armin Wolf immediately falsifies this claim and shows that Strache actually posted this caricature himself by pointing to a print-out of the relevant Facebook page (line 9). Strache then concedes that he first said something wrong and starts – by way of justification – to explain the caricature as illustrating the unfair and unjust redistribution of money taken away from the Austrian people, while making a first distinction by employing referential strategies, between “The Austrian people – us” and the “elites”, in this case bankers. Here, Wolf interrupts in line 16 and qualifies the bankers as Jews (“who are Jews in your caricature”). At this point, the second round of denials starts and Strache says (lines 16–19): Text 2 [16]

HCS

No, No, they are not,

[17]

AW

What then?

HCS

Mister Wolf. And um with all due respect, I have

[18]

many Israeli, but also Jewish friends who

[19]

have, um, seen this caricature, and not one of them can recognize antisemitism here.

Via a well-known disclaimer (“I have many Israeli, … Jewish friends”), Strache denies that the caricature should or even could be read as antisemitic, a typical intention-denial: The fallacious argument (post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy) is obvious – if his many Jewish friends do not classify the caricature as antisemitic, it cannot be antisemitic. Such disclaimers are widely used to prove that an utterance cannot be categorised via predicational strategies as racist, sexist or antisemitic because “Turkish, Arabic, female or Jewish friends” share the speaker’s or writer’s opinions. Moreover, the justification implies that if one has Jewish friends, then one is incapable of saying something antisemitic (see Wodak et al. 199058; Wodak 201559 for the analysis of similar fallacious argumentative moves and legitimation strategies). After this unsuccessful denial, Wolf points to the Stars of David on the cufflinks and asks who might have put them there if not Strache himself. In his third attempt to deny wrong-doing and antisemitic stereotypes, Strache refuses to recognise Stars of David on the cufflinks and starts a counter-attack with an ad-hominem argument: He claims that Wolf obviously cannot see well, his glasses are probably not strong enough; even if one would magnify the cufflinks, Strache further claims, no Stars of David would be visible. Wolf then shows a Star of David he has brought with him to the studio and asks Strache if he can spot any similarity; Strache denies again and states that the picture on the cufflinks is blurred and that there is no star but actually something like a diamond.

32 Ruth Wodak After this fifth (act) denial, he refers to his “Jewish friends” again who, Strache claims, believe that somebody is intentionally conspiring against him. In this way, Strache accuses the media and the public of conspiring against him, via quoting his “Jewish friends” – another typical justification strategy: claiming victimhood via victim–perpetrator reversal and by introducing conspiracy theories, thus alluding to a traditional antisemitic stereotype frequently employed by far-right politicians. Wolf continues his line of questioning and asks Strache why he apparently finds it impossible to simply apologise for posting such a caricature and why he would rather use a strategy of victim– perpetrator reversal instead of an apology. Strache answers by repeating his denials: There are no stars of David; the caricature is not antisemitic (this staccato-like question-answering sequence continues for several minutes). Text 3 [20] AW HCS [21] [22] AW HCS [23] AW HCS [24] AW HCS

Mister Strache … If you see something else in this, um, then um you have to ask yourself the question, why do you want to see Because you have three Stars of David here, because you put three something else in this, because there is no antisemitism Stars of David here or someone put them there That is incorrect, Mister Wolf No? You do not see three Stars of David here. Well … No, maybe you should have the

[25]

Yes

HCS [26] AW

strength of your glasses checked, if you magnify this picture, Yes. Really? Okay. We did

HCS [27] AW HCS [28] AW HCS

you can see no Stars of David, yes. magnify the picture, Mister Strache. We did I can show you, too, yes. magnify the picture and you cannot see any Stars of David here? Exactly. Yes, yes, no,

[29] AW

Mister Strache, you don’t see any Stars of David?

HCS [30] AW

there are no Stars of David to be seen because Mister Strache, I also brought you

HCS [31] AW HCS [32] AW HCS [33] AW HCS

No! There are no Stars of David to be seen here. Yes a Star of David for comparison. And Yes and this picture … That is one! Yeah? No, that is there are not three Stars of David here? one. No, that’s a star with continuous Good. lines, there is no way you can see that with that blurry picture,

Analysing the politics of denial 33 In the following text, Wolf shifts to the meta-level and frames the entire discussion as a provocation strategy intentionally triggered by Strache to attract media attention. This interpretation is – not surprisingly – again denied by Strache (a goal-denial). The interview continues with other questions about Strache’s political programme for the autumn 2012. Text 4 [74] [75] [76] [77]

AW

Mister Strache, is it possible that you are

HCS

are trying to create here.

AW

in reality quite pleased with the situation? Well

HCS

No, I am not pleased at all!

AW

well, you have once again created a lapse to provoke, the

HCS

Quite the contrary.

AW

outrage is enormous, um not only in Austria, but also internationally,

[78]

and you can once again present yourself as the poor and the persecuted, now

[79]

you are the victim, suddenly, and can enjoy the headlines, HCS

Yeah, yeah.

4 Conclusion After the interview, many commentators accused the moderator Armin Wolf of having been too “harsh” on Strache; some newspapers like the Neue Kronenzeitung wrote that the line of questioning had been unfair and not acceptable for this kind of interview genre; others equated the interview-style with a tribunal or an interrogation. These media comments show that Strache had obviously been quite successful in constructing himself as victim, on the one hand, and as a saviour of the Austrian people, on the other, by telling the Austrians the “truth” about the economic crisis – by connecting known but unspoken stereotypes – because of an apparently “wrong” political correctness – to the causes of the crisis (allegedly the “Jewish bankers”) and thus naming a traditional scapegoat that everyone could blame. However, simultaneously, the state prosecutor started to investigate if the Facebook incident could be persecuted as hate incitement. In April 2013, the court decided that Strache’s posting could not be regarded as a case of hate incitement. The outcome of this investigation is unfortunately quite typical for the ways in which courts of law deal with far-right populist discriminatory and exclusionary rhetoric. By systematically employing genres such as caricatures and comic books to convey xenophobic and antisemitic messages, far-right populist parties cleverly play with the fictionalisation of politics (Wodak60) and frequently argue in ways such as: No discriminatory message was intended as such genres play with humour and are inherently ironic or even sarcastic. The blurring of boundaries between

34 Ruth Wodak fiction and reality, caricature and image, or between comic book plot and historical narrative is one of many ways of staging the strategy of calculated ambivalence, thus simultaneously addressing multiple audiences with – frequently contradictory – messages (e.g., Engel & Wodak61). Facebook potentially adds to this strategy at least in one way: denying having posted the incriminatory content oneself and using the (seeming) anonymity of the Internet. Both allusions to and encoded references to antisemitism and Nazi ideologies are thus part of the strategy of calculated ambivalence that ensures deniability. Closely related to these strategic performances are processes of normalization, transcending and breaking taboos through recontextualization and resemiotization as aspects of extreme-right imaginaries, moving from backstage to frontstage and from party politics to the mainstream. This process became highly evident in the Austrian national election 2017 where the Austrian People’s Party under its new leader Sebastian Kurz appropriated the far-right agenda in respect to migration and asylum issues, thus normalizing important elements of a far-right programme. This specific and very strategic and cleverly planned and marketized election campaign deserves careful investigation in the future to be able to deconstruct the “politics of denial” and normalizing procedures in necessary detail.

Notes 1 Teun A. van Dijk, “CDA is NOT a method of critical discourse analysis,” EDISO Debate – Asociacion de Estudios Sobre Discurso y Sociedad (2013). www.ediso portal.org/debate/115–cda-not-method-critical-discourse-analysis. 2 Ibid. 3 Johannes Angermüller, Dominique Mainguenau and Ruth Wodak (eds.), The Discourse-Studies Reader (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014). 4 Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, “Critical discourse analysis,” in Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. Teun A. Van Dijk (London: Sage, 1996): 357–378. 5 Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap, Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 6 Reiner Keller, Andreas Hirseland, Werner Schneider and Willy Viehöver (eds.), Handbuch Sozial-wissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse (Opladen: Springer, 2011). 7 Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (London: Sage, 2016a). 8 Teun A. van Dijk, Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 9 Christopher Hart, “Viewpoint in linguistic discourse: Space and evaluation in news reports of political protests,” Critical Discourse Studies 12, no. 3 (2015): 226–238. 10 Piotr Cap, Proximization (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013). 11 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Routledge, 2010). 12 Gunther R. Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: Routledge, 1996). 13 See: Margarete Jäger and Siegfried Jäger, Deutungskämpfe: Theorie und Praxis kritischer Diskursanalyse (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007). As well as Siegfried Jäger, Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung (Münster: Unrast, 2009). 14 Andreas Musolff, “The study of metaphor as part of critical discourse analysis,” Critical Discourse Studies 9, no. 3 (2012): 301–310.

Analysing the politics of denial 35 15 Reiner Keller, Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse. Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2011). 16 Johannes Angermüller, Why There is no Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 17 Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, “Critical discourse studies: History, agenda, theory, and methodology,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, eds. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2016b): 1–33. 18 Angermüller et al. Op. cit.3 Emanuel Schegloff, “Whose text? Whose context?” Discourse and Society 8, no. 2 (1997): 165–187. 19 Ian Clarke, Ruth Wodak and Winston Kwon, “A context-sensitive approach to analyzing talk in strategy meetings,” British Journal of Management (2018): 1–19. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00759.x. 20 Li Wei and John Flowerdew (eds.), Discourse in Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 21 Ruth Wodak, “Political discourse analysis: distinguishing frontstage and backstage contexts. A discourse-historical approach,” in Discourse in Context, eds. Li Wei and John Flowerdew (London: Bloomsbury, 2014): 522–549. 22 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986). 23 Paul Chilton, Hailong Tian and Ruth Wodak, “Reflections on discourse and critique in China and the West,” Journal of Language and Politics 9, no. 4 (2010): 489–506. 24 Theo Van Leeuwen, “Critical discourse analysis,” in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Vol. 3. (Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2006): 290–294. 25 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination (London: Routledge, 2001). 26 Markus Rheindorf, “Diskursanalyse in der Linguistik: Der Diskurshistorische Ansatz,” in Sprache und Identität, eds. Edyta Grotek and Katarzyna Norkowska (Neunkirchen: Franke and Timme, 2017). 27 Ruth Wodak, The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 28 Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: Sage, 2015). 29 Ruth Wodak, Politik mit der Angst. Zur Wirkung rechtspopulistischen Diskurses (Wien/Berlin: Edition Konturen, 2016). 30 Trevor Purvis and Alan Hunt, “Discourse, ideology, ideology, discourse, ideology …,” British Journal Sociology 44, no. 3 (1993): 473–499. 31 Ruth Wodak, Peter Nowak, Johanna Pelikan, Helmut Gruber, Rudolf de Cillia and Richard Mitten, “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!”. Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismu (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990). 32 On the history of the DHA, see Martin Reisigl, “Grundzüge der Wiener Kritischen Diskursanalyse,” in Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse, eds. Reiner Keller et al. (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011): 459–499. 33 Ruth Wodak, The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. Op. cit.27 34 Markus Rheindorf, Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies: New Trajectories in Methodology, Open Data and Visualisation (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 35 Michael Foucault, Archäologie des Wissens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1981). 36 Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak, “Borders, fences and limits – protecting Austria from refugees. Metadiscursive negotiation of meaning in the current refugee crisis,” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies (2017). DOI: 10.1080/ 15562948.2017.1302032. 37 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, “The discourse-historical approach,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, eds. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2016): 23–61.

36 Ruth Wodak 38 Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 39 The transcribed interview stems from 2012. Meanwhile, HC Strache and his party had become the junior member in a nationalist-conservative government headed by then Chancellor Sebastian Kurz from December 2017 until May 2019. In 2013, the FPÖ was the largest opposition party (see Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: Sage, 2015)). 40 Anton Pelinka, “Right-wing populism: concept and typology,” in Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, eds. Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik and Brigitte Mral (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 3–22. 41 Ruth Wodak, “‘Anything goes!’ The Haiderization of Europe,” in Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, eds. Ruth Wodak, Majid Khosravinik and Brigitte Mral (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 23–38. 42 Ruth Wodak, “The strategy of discursive provocation – a discourse-historical analysis of the FPÖ’s discriminatory rhetoric,” in Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far-Right since 1945, eds. Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson (Frankfurt: Ibidem Press, 2013): 101–122. 43 Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. Op. cit.28 44 Katharina Köhler and Ruth Wodak, “Mitbürger, Fremde und ‘echte Wiener’ – Ein- und Ausgrenzungen über Sprache. Diskursive Konstruktion von Macht und Ungleichheit am Beispiel des Wiener Wahlkampfes 2010,” Deutschunterricht 6 (2011): 64–73. 45 Karin Stögner, Antisemitismus und Geschlecht. Historisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellationen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014). 46 Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. Op. cit.28: 66–67. 47 George Lakoff, Howard Dean and Don Hazen, Don’t Think of an Elephant! (Berkeley, CA: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004). 48 Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner, “The fictionalisation of politics,” in Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, eds. Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner (London: Routledge, 2017): 572–586. 49 Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka (eds.), The Haider Phenomenon in Austria (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2017). 50 Wodak, Nowak, Pelikan, Gruber, de Cillia and Mitten, Op. cit.31 51 Ruth Wodak, “Antisemitism and the Radical Right,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. Jens Rydgren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 61–86. 52 See Fine, “Fighting with phantoms: A contribution to the debate on Antisemitism in Europe,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 5 (2009): 459–479. 53 Ruth Wodak, “Iudeus ex Machina,” Grazer Linguistische Studien (1989): 153–180. 54 Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and the denial of racism,” Discourse and Society 3, no. 1 (1992): 87–118, 87. 55 Theodor W. Adorno, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” Gesammelte Schriften 10.2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977): 555–572. 56 Wodak, Nowak, Pelikan, Gruber, de Cillia and Mitten. Op. cit.31 57 Wodak, Nowak, Pelikan, Gruber, de Cillia and Mitten. Op. cit.31 58 Wodak, Nowak, Pelikan, Gruber, de Cillia and Mitten. Op. cit.31 59 Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. Op. cit.28 60 Ruth Wodak, “The glocalization of politics in television: Fiction or reality?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2010): 1–20. 61 Engel, J. and Ruth Wodak, “Kalkulierte Ambivalenz: ‘Störungen’ und das ‘Gedankenjahr’: Die Causen Siegfried Kampl und John Gudenus,” in Gedenken im ‘Gedankenjahr’, eds. Rudolf de Cillia and Ruth Wodak (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009): 79–100.

2

Discourse as ventriloquy A pragmatic/relational analysis of media as agents François Cooren

For the past ten years, I have been exploring, with others, the hypothesis that any act of communication can be metaphorically understood as a form of ventriloquism.1 Ventriloquism, as we know, is the activity that consists of throwing one’s voice in such a way that a dummy or puppet—what ventriloquists sometimes call a figure—appears to be speaking in front of an audience. Although metaphors always have their limits, I have been mobilizing this image to highlight that communicating basically is about “making one speak” (faire parler in French). By throwing her voice, the vent—the name ventriloquists sometimes use to speak about themselves—is making a dummy, puppet or figure speak; that is, she makes it say things that are supposed to arouse laughter in the audience. Interestingly, David Goldblatt pointed out that a form of vacillation or oscillation characterizes ventriloquism. When the vent makes the figure say something, it could be said that the figure also makes her say something, to the extent that the audience is, of course, aware that it is the vent who is throwing her voice in order to make her figure say things (Goldblatt rightly notes that ventriloquism is illusion without deception). In other words, the ventriloquist can never be envisaged as completely separated or severed from the figure she is manipulating. Should the figure start insulting the audience, the vent could certainly claim that she is not the one who is hurling insults at people, but this disclaimer could, of course, be called into question and the audience could hold her accountable.2 This oscillation/vacillation is, I believe, crucial to understanding how communication functions. When people speak or write to each other, they always, by definition, produce signs that will act on their behalf, in their name, for them. This explains why communication always is at the mercy of our misunderstanding, which is another way to say that what we say or write can misrepresent what we mean to say. Even if we have various ways to repair misunderstanding, the fact that we can always be betrayed by what we say or do illustrates that the words, writings, and, more generally, signs we produce can be compared with figures or puppets endowed with a relative autonomy. They say things and even if it is usually taken for granted that what they say is what we say,3 some discrepancy can always take place, as conversation analysts nicely show.4

38 François Cooren But what is even more interesting is that communicating is also a way of implicitly or explicitly staging various figures that can also be said to say things when we speak or write to each other. The most obvious case is when a clerk invokes a policy to explain why he must turn down a request we are making. In saying, “I am sorry, sir, but this is against our policy,” this employee can be said to ventriloquize a figure—here, a policy—that is presented as forbidding him to respond favorably to my request. In other words, it is not only he who is saying that my request cannot be met, it is also—and maybe especially—the policy he is ventriloquizing at this point. By oscillation/vacillation, we could also note that the policy is implicitly presented as enjoining him to say what he is saying. If he can be seen as the ventriloquist, he can thus be also envisaged as the puppet saying what the policy and the organization that it represents enjoin him to say (and perhaps be relieved from any blame of inconveniencing or rejecting the applicant). This polyphony has already been identified by scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), who even used once the term ventriloquation to talk about this phenomenon. However, I believe that even Bakhtin did not really draw the ontological conclusions to which this heteroglossic conception of language is leading us. Conceiving communication as a ventriloquial phenomenon indeed helps us realize that whenever we speak, write or, more generally, communicate, other beings or things come to express themselves through our utterances and nonverbal expressions. In other words, this approach invites us to call into question the classical divide that scholars and researchers tend to reproduce between, on one side, the world of discourse and interaction, and, on the other side, what is supposed to surround this conversational world.5 Whenever you study the detail of interaction, you indeed notice that interactants keep speaking in the name of absent persons, rules, principles, values, facts, reports, organizations that they implicitly or explicitly stage as saying or showing things. Letting the facts speak for themselves is, for instance, a very common way we have to give a voice to what the facts are supposed to show or demonstrate. Speaking in the name of a principle or a value is a way to lend weight to our position by showing that this principle or value calls for the stance we take on an issue. Mentioning what a report demonstrates is a way to build our own authority by staging another author of our own position. Speaking for an organization is a way to convey what its position is regarding a specific topic. Pragmatists and semioticians are implicitly aware of this phenomenon to the extent that they acknowledge that we do not simply act on the world, but that we also react to it.6 Charles Sanders Peirce, who is both the founder of semiotics and pragmatism, intuitively understood this very well when he highlighted the possibility that our beliefs be contradicted by our experiences, which is, I believe, the foundations of a pragmatist stance. Acknowledging this possibility, which is at the basis of any scientific endeavor, precisely shows that any experience—both understood as what is happening, but also as what we are experiencing from what is happening—can literally and figuratively say something that contradicts what we believe is the case.7

Discourse as ventriloquy 39 From a semiotic perspective, the world we inhabit thus speaks to us. How does it speak? Precisely because we make it say things and because it makes us say things, which is the essence of the ventriloquial oscillation/vacillation I highlighted at the beginning (Cooren, 2016). The idea of sign has to be understood for what it is: a sign always is what signals or indexes something to someone. When we ventriloquize various beings and things in our daily conversation, we—and what we say—signal or index them to our interlocutors, that is we make these beings or things present to whom we are interacting with, giving these beings or things a way to not only materialize themselves but also say things or express themselves in our conversation. This ventriloquial perspective thus leads us to recognize something that I think has never been really acknowledged before, which is that human beings should be considered as media. In keeping with recent developments in media studies—especially in media archeology, I am thinking especially of the influence of Kittler’s work—we have to stop using the term media to only refer to phones, televisions, Internet, newspapers, etc. or to the industry or people associated with them (journalists, producers, etc.).8 We are ourselves media to the extent that we also always already are the intermediaries, means, in-betweens by which other beings or things express themselves. Peirce (1868/1934) would have said that we—and what we say or express—are signs (he explicitly speaks about the “Man-Sign” (p. 188)). This does not mean, of course, that we should be reduced to this status. The status of media or intermediaries must be understood relationally, that is, we are media in connection or relation with other beings or things that happen to express or ventriloquize themselves through us and what we say, write or express, whether these beings are an absent person, an institution, a situation, a principle, an emotion, etc. An institution materializes itself when someone starts speaking as its spokesperson and is recognized by her interlocutors as doing so. A war invites itself to our conversation when someone evokes it to demonstrate what should be done about it, politically speaking. Anger strikes when one of the interlocutors happens to express it through his tone, gaze, choice of words, or posture. Defending a ventriloquial perspective on communication thus leads us to defend a relational ontology,9 which is, I believe, the essence of pragmatism and semiotics (Robichaud, 2006). By relational ontology, I mean that any being or thing always exists through other beings that materialize its/his/her existence. For instance, an organization exists through its spokespersons, buildings, websites, employees, operations, products, meetings, etc.10 Similarly, a policy exists through its expression in a document, but also through its invocation in a conversation or its application in a specific situation. A human being can be recognized through the body that makes her present to her interlocutor, but also through other forms of embodiment, whether we are talking about a photograph that iconically represents her, a text she has written, a birth certificate, or an attitude that we associate with her. What I mean is that this ventriloquial view of communication invites us to reconsider the way we even conceive of existence. Existence is not a question

40 François Cooren of all or nothing anymore, that is, we have to resist the temptation that consists of saying that something or someone simply exists or does not exist. Existence, on the contrary, is a question of degree, level or gradation, depending on its capacity to materialize in various circumstances. For instance, something like a war can be said to exist more when journalists, politicians and citizens comment on it, as these comments are a way to transport this war to various locations, making it (also) present in our conversations, in our thoughts or in our demonstrations. Similarly, this war starts, unfortunately, to exist less when journalists, politicians and citizens progressively or abruptly stop talking about it, which means that even if a battle keeps raging and materializing itself on the ground, its existence then tends to shrink because it stops inviting itself in our conversations and reflections. This does not mean, of course, that this war loses its intensity on the battlefield (the fact that we speak less about it could, in fact, induce one of the parties to intensify its level of destruction). What I mean is that we have to take seriously the idea that talking about something or someone is always a way to let this thing or person express, ventriloquize or materialize itself in our discussions, which increases its existence in our part of the world. In keeping with Alfred North Whitehead (1920), this position thus helps deconstruct what the British philosopher denounced almost 100 years ago as the bifurcation of nature,11 that is, the belief in the separate existence of two worlds: the immaterial world of ideas, discourse and sensations, on one side, and the material world of facts, properties and nature. According to the relational ontology I defend, materiality is co-extensive with existence, which means that we not only have to think in terms of materializing, but also conceive of communication as the way by which this materializing takes place. Communication is always a way by which various beings and things materialize themselves.12 So what are the analytical and empirical implications of this relational/ventriloquial/pragmatist ontology? The good news is that they are numerous. Once we realize that not only people, but also other beings and things express and materialize themselves in our conversations, I think we have a way to identify how they evolve throughout various episodes, that is, we have a way to follow their various embodiments, expressions and materializations in space and time. So how do I propose to illustrate this point? By following the becoming of an idea. With a colleague of mine and two research assistants, I was lucky enough to be allowed to video-shadow a creative event, called Museomix. Museomix happens every year, simultaneously, in several museums around the world. Over a period of three days, around 70 participants of various backgrounds (graphic designers, software developers, entrepreneurs, art historians, etc.) get together in each participating museum to create prototypes designed to change the way people are supposed to experience their visit. Our study focused on the part of the event that took place in November 2014 at the Museum of Fine Arts of Montreal (Musée des beaux arts de Montréal). During these three days, we video-shadowed the activities of two teams of participants (comprised of six members each), from the moment the teams

Discourse as ventriloquy 41 were formed to the moment they presented their prototypes to the visitors of the museum. We also collected various documents that were used for organizing the event, including snapshots from Museomix’s website and copies of the participants’ handbook. Using the qualitative analysis software Transana, we then watched the videos, created a content log for each video file and transcribed passages where the ideas developed by the participants seemed to undergo significant changes. We used Jefferson’s transcript symbols for the transcriptions.13 What does it mean to follow the germination of an idea from a ventriloquial/relational/pragmatist perspective? It means that we have to identify its materialization through various circumstances during the three days that constituted this event. According to our ontological positioning, we must also acknowledge that an idea—as abstract as it can appear to be—always has a material dimension, that is, its existence must be sustained by something or someone through which it expresses itself. Furthermore, following its evolution means that its properties/characteristics/traits can, of course, evolve throughout these three days, which is what I propose to analyze here. So let’s look at the way Pierre, one of the participants, describes how he initially got the idea that led his team—one of the two teams we observed— to build their prototype (the key passages of his account are in bold). Thinking about it, everything went pretty fast: the idea was born on one of my Post-its during the brainstorming session on Friday. It was a little like a flash, thinking initially about our usage of social networks and that it would be funny to confront this to museum artworks. Eva and I got together around the paperboard that I had posted it on, and in briefly speaking about it, we came to the conclusion that it had some potential. Without knowing yet what form it could take. As we are used to working together, the idea of collaborating came rather naturally … . In waiting in line to pitch the idea, we met Bruno, that I knew by sight because he is a friend of a friend. He was looking for a team, we quickly explained the idea to him and he joined us. You know the rest of the story: we pitched the idea, Mai-Anh, France and Julia joined us and here we go. This account illustrates how Pierre describes the initial idea as materializing itself in the form of a flash he experienced in his mind, a flash that came to him as he said he was thinking about both social media and artwork. From a ventriloquial perspective, we note that this idea thus materialized itself and expressed itself through Pierre, and even more precisely through a flash he apparently experienced. But what is also interesting is how he describes where the idea was, according to him, born, that is, through its materialization on one of the Post-its he had stuck on a paperboard during a brainstorming session. Tracing this idea—which was presented afterwards—we can witness the idea first expressing itself through a flash in Pierre’s mind. Then, it materializes itself as a Post-it on a paperboard (Figure 2.1). We learn that later on, this idea is

42 François Cooren

Figure 2.1 Participants sticking and reading ideas on paperboards

also discussed by Pierre and his colleague Eva, whom he happened to meet during the brainstorming session. Thus, the idea evolved from a flash in Pierre’s mind, to a Post-it where he wrote it down. Then, the idea became the object of a discussion between the two of them, a discussion that, as we will see, allowed both Pierre and Eva to refine it so that they could pitch it to the audience later. As Pierre points out, they share the idea with Bruno, who decided to join their project. In this manner, the idea has progressively expanded—in other words, its existence has expanded—as it is now shared between three persons who can speak on its behalf, three persons who can thus be seen as the media through which this idea also starts to exist and express itself. Moreover, the development of the idea became a central theme in the description, as the idea was pitched to the Museomix crowd: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

((Eva, Pierre and Bruno step onto the stage. Eva grabs the microphone.)) Hi (1.0) Eva Just before, when you were in the tour through the Museum, did you notice the monkeys? (0.3) Audience um::: ((approvingly)) Eva ((nodding)) The funny sculpture. And did you happen to notice that the painting, just behind, of the woman (.) it was like the portrait of a woman and she kind of has her face averted like this ((imitating the woman by turning her face)) as if she Eva

Discourse as ventriloquy 43 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

was kind of like (.) tired of having to look at the monkeys all [day long Audience [((laughs)) Eva ((nods and smiles)) So we want to kind of like give those portraits and the artworks a voice. Kind of like (.) [lay open, reveal kind of the relationships Someone [Oh:: ((admiring)) Eva that they have to establish just by hanging out all day long= Audience =((laughs))= Eva =It’s like- ((looking at the wooden sign where the name of the project is written)) The project is called ((Pierre lifts up the sign to show it to the audience.)) “The secret life- The secret social life of artworks” Audience Ohhh ahhh ((appreciative laughing and clapping)) ((Eva gives the microphone to Pierre)) [((The camera lingers on the sign (5.0). It is divided in four parts by four titles printed in black. Under each title some text is handwritten in pink. Under “title” is written: “the secret social life of artworks”. Under “description” is written: “performance”, “after-hours”, “spotlights”, “conversation”, “gossip”, “(social) networks”, and “personalities”. Under “challenge” is written: “renewing the visitor’s experience”. The text written under “team” is not readable. Pierre [((From this point on, the interaction is in French)) Um yes so “the secret life of artworks” uh:: in French. And we would like to lay open a little this secret life that is happening, these secret exchanges that may happen between a painting, a sculpture, a sculpture that is outside, and so on (.) try to lay open this a little. Uh:: Élodie Which profiles do you need? [°to complete° Pierre [At the moment we have a developer, me I am more in UX, [user] experience, and Bruno who is a graphic designer. We are looking for someone in communication and mostly in content, very much, I think we are going to need it ((Bruno nods yes)) and making too (.) makers of all stripes, join us ((Bruno nods yes, smiling)) and we’re also looking for someone who is not necessarily a participant but someone from the museum who could give- make references, well [who has knowledge of the content Élodie [This, they’re going to go around, yes. No need to put it in your team, it’s all right. Thank you Pierre [Thank01 you Élodie [Great ((she starts clapping while Eva, Pierre and Bruno step down from the stage)) Audience ((Clapping))

This sequence has already been analyzed in other publications (Cooren, 2015; Kuhn et al., in press; Martine and Cooren, 2016).14 Thus, in this chapter, I will concentrate primarily on the becoming of this idea in Eva and Pierre’s presentation. We can first note that the idea by this point had three spokespersons, Pierre, Eva and Bruno. They were all present on the stage, as Eva presented it as “The secret life- The secret social life of artworks” (lines 19–20). Even if Bruno did not talk at all during this presentation, his presence mattered as he implicitly positioned himself as one of the persons who was, de facto, defending the idea

44 François Cooren presented. Eva, who was the first to present it, can be considered the first medium through which this idea materialized itself in front of the Museomix audience, triggering a reaction of admiration in the public, as we hear, “Ohhh ahhh ((appreciative laughing and clapping))” on line 21. Through her presentation, we also learn how this idea can materialize itself in an illustration that she cleverly presented at the beginning of her speech: A woman in a portrait looking away from a monkey sculpture in front of which it has been placed in one of the museum rooms. We thus discover how Pierre and Eva managed to identify a concrete way to materialize their idea, a concretization/ materialization that apparently allowed their audience to visualize what they mean. From a relational perspective, this idea not only had spokespersons boasting its merits, but also a name, a concrete illustration in the museum and a certain form of recognition in the public. Among all the ideas presented during this series of pitches, it is indeed the one that benefited from the most favorable reactions. What we also observe is that the idea has now implicitly transformed itself into a project. Eva indeed said, “so we want to kind of like give those portraits and the artworks a voice. Kind of like (.) lay open, reveal kind of the relationships that they have to establish just by hanging out all day long” (lines 13–16), which is a way to present their idea as something they want to carry on. Pierre confirms this new status when he announces, using a poster, what skills this project needs in order to be completed—a communication specialist, a person of content, a maker, and someone from the museum—while specifying what kinds of expertise they already have—a developer (Eva), a user experience (UX) designer (Pierre himself), and a graphic designer (Bruno) (lines 34–40). The idea, which by then had the status of an official project, thus had a developer and two designers (UX and graphic), but it also needed other forms of expertise. What the idea was—here, a project—therefore corresponded with what it had (a developer and two designers) and should have (a communication specialist, a person of content, a maker and a museum insider). This correspondence between “to be” and “to have” is the essence of a relational ontology, as it shows how something like an idea materializes through various properties that constitute as many relations with other beings: a poster representing the kind of expertise it needs, designers and developers who will be in charge of materializing its form, a spokesperson who artfully presents it to an audience. But let’s now see what happens after the pitch. People have been invited to join the team that interests them. Armed with my video camera, I decide to follow Pierre, Eva and Bruno, who are rapidly joined by France and Julia, who were among the participants attending their pitch. Here is what happens (the lines in italics correspond with turns of talk that were originally in French): 47 48 49 50 51

François I am the researcher (.) Can I follow you? Pierre Uh: yeah sure France Uh:: This is here on uh more on the social side? Bruno Yes that’s [it Pierre [Uh the secret social life of artwork=

Discourse as ventriloquy 45 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

France France

Bruno France Pierre France Bruno Pierre Bruno

France Pierre Bruno France Pierre Pierre Eva Pierre Eva Pierre Pierre Julia Pierre Julia Bruno Julia Pierre Julia France Julia Pierre Julia Bruno

=Yeah (1.0) Well, in any case, personally this strongly interested me because uh, like (1.0) find that- that the museum should be a place precisely where we should precisely speak of (.) of (.) of (.) how should I say that of: of social issues and I think that maybe artworks can speak to us about that, like uh bullying:::, [prejudices, discrimination [You think there are artworks that are- that are politically involved? Yeah, well personally I’m- I’m an historian OK A person of content= =This is interesting= =An [historian [There can be artworks that have cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- claims and others that just have- have very basic considerations, you know, it could be a mix of both, you know Yeah well uh the example earlier uh the- the- the violence uh (0.5) Then it’s also (.) it’s like people who are put together (.) without having necessarily asked for it [so here they are= [Yes that’s it =Yeah ((upholding laughter)) So this is: how can we (.) make parallels also with human beings? (0.5) Uh:: She actually works [at the museum ((presenting Julie to the team)) [Hi [So she has the inside knowledge of the [rooms and the works= [((thumbing up)) [Cool =And you are interested by the project yes? Yes really in fact because there is a way of making it live elsewhere= =Yeah= =than on, you know, we can make it live in the museum but elsewhere [too [Yeah yeah for sure That’s it= =OK= =There is a lot of potential, I really find it very neat ((laughter)) You, you are UX? Yes You, you are design ((speaking to Bruno)) Yes (0.5)

46 François Cooren 97 98 99

Julia Pierre Julia

Ok then coder, [you what are you? ((speaking to Eva)) [Uh Eva is:: coder yes Nice

So what is happening to the idea in this interaction? First, we can note what France says to Pierre and Bruno on line 49 as she gets in touch with them for the first time. She says, “Uh: This is here on uh more on the social side?”, a question to which Bruno responds by confirming that indeed this is the case “Yes that’s it” on line 50, followed by Pierre who repeats the title of their project: “Uh the secret social life of artwork” (line 51). France’s question thus signals what she apparently retained from their presentation, which is the social aspect of the idea/project. This is confirmed from lines 54 to 58, as she specifies that this “strongly interested [her]” (line 54) while explaining why: “the museum should be a place precisely where we should precisely speak of … social issues and … maybe artworks can speak to us about that, like uh bullying, prejudices, discrimination” (lines 55–58). We see how the idea/project is presented as having acted upon France. It “strongly interested [her],” an effect that could indeed be felt in the audience when Eva presented it earlier. Among its many properties, one of them thus appears to stand up: it caught people’s attention, as exemplified in what France is saying at this point. But what is noteworthy is what this idea becomes as France presents the reason of her interest: this is, for her, a way to speak of social issues such as bullying, prejudices or discrimination. As any medium, France thus transforms what expresses/ventriloquizes itself through her. While the idea, through Eva’s pitch, had previously materialized as the social life of a woman and three monkeys—where social life tends to mean, according to the Collins dictionary, “spending time with your friends, for example at parties or in pubs or bars” or “the opportunities in a particular place for a person to socialize”—we see how it materializes, in France’s voice, as a form of struggle where social issues can be addressed and denounced. As can also be noticed, this way of translating, expressing, and materializing the idea appears to arouse interest in Bruno. As France is saying that museums should address social issues, Bruno overlaps what she says by asking her, “You think there are artworks that are- that are politically involved” (lines 59–60), to which she responds “Yeah, well personally, I’m- I’m an historian … a person of content” (lines 61 and 63), leading Bruno to say, “This is interesting” (line 64). The idea or project, as ventriloquized by France, thus now has two potential supporters: France herself, of course, but also Bruno. The fact that France explicitly positions herself as an historian and “a person of content,” as she says, is also noteworthy, as it could be interpreted as an attempt to lend weight to how the idea could be defined or translated. It is not only France who is speaking, but also an historian, that is, someone who is supposed to know what she is talking about when she speaks about social issues, especially from an historical perspective. In other words, this way of

Discourse as ventriloquy 47 defining what the idea could or should be is also, to some extent, supported by a form of historical expertise, which is supposed to express itself through her at this point. The fact that she defines herself as a person of content also means that when she talks, it is also a certain factuality that is supposed to express itself. Bruno’s interest continues to express itself as he elaborated on what the idea could then look like: “There can be artworks that have … claims and others that just have … very basic considerations, you know, it could be a mix of both, you know” (lines 66–68), to which France reacts positively by alluding to the woman–monkeys illustration Eva used in her pitch (“Yeah well uh the example earlier uh the- the- the violence uh” (line 69)). While Eva presented the funny situation of a woman disturbed by monkeys fighting with each other, France thus reasserted what she saw in this interaction, that is, the violence that the monkeys are supposed to express in this sculpture.15 Although Bruno seemed enthusiastic, it is noticeable that Pierre does not express the same fervor. When France first introduced herself, he simply said “OK” on line 62 and then “an historian” on line 65, two turns of talk that arguably do not qualify as markers of excitement (other statements or actions may have conveyed greater enthusiasm such as saying, “cool” or signaling a thumbs up” as he did on line 81 when Eva introduced Julia). But what is even more interesting is how he presented again the idea after France just spoke about violence: “Then it’s also (.) it’s like people who are put together (.) without having necessarily asked for it so here they are” (lines 71–72) and then “So this is: how can we (.) make parallels also with human beings?” (line 75). Through these two turns of talk, we thus see how Pierre ventriloquizes the original version of the idea, that is, an idea that consisted of personalizing the artworks to create fictitious situations of what their social life could look like. While both Bruno and France mark their alignment (“Yes, that’s it” (line 73) and “Yeah” (line 74)), it is noteworthy that this tension between social issues and social life will, later on, burst into strong disagreements between France and Pierre. While Pierre will be, throughout the creative process, mainly attached to the importance of being funny and witty, France will constantly reaffirm the necessity of being historically accurate and factual. As for Bruno, he will often position himself as a passage point between the two, trying to reconcile two expressions of the idea: being funny while remaining historically accurate. Although I do not have enough space to present and analyze the rest of the creative process (for more analyses, see Kuhn et al., 2017),16 following the becoming of the idea will consist, for instance, of identifying these moments where certain ventriloquations will contradict others, leading to various compromises and sacrifices.

Conclusion So what did we learn from these analyses? First, that there is, I believe, an analytical payoff in following the becoming of a being—here, an idea—that appears to drive or animate conversations. While conversation analysis and

48 François Cooren discursive psychology have historically been focused on what interactants do and the way they do what they do (the ethnomethods they implicitly mobilize in their activities),17 I tried to show that it is also possible and interesting to study what they ventriloquize, as well as what ventriloquizes them. Interestingly, I believe that this approach is not incompatible with conversation analysis, discursive psychology or even critical discourse analysis, although I do believe that it calls into question their tendency to center, almost exclusively, on people’s actions.18 According to the ventriloquial approach, human beings are not only actors but also, by definition, passers/intermediaries/in-betweens, that is, media through which other beings express themselves, which is, by the way, why their conduct always is accountable. Accountability indeed means that people can always explain what makes them or others say what they say or what makes them or others do what they do, which leads them to ventriloquize what animates or drives them or others in various situations. Being passers/intermediaries/inbetweens means that something or someone manages to pass through what one says or does, that is, that it/he/she expresses or ventriloquizes itself/himself/ herself in what ones says or does. This is, by the way, why communication is so central to understanding questions of existence, what I already proposed to call the communicative constitution of reality.19 To claim that reality is communicatively constituted does not amount to reducing what exists or is to how human beings coconstruct this reality. On the contrary, it amounts to showing the relational nature of existence, which is another way to speak about its intractable materiality. Materiality and relationality are two aspects of everything that exist, as demonstrated in the analysis I just proposed to you: an idea materializes through various media—participants, posters, Post-its, flashes, discussions, interpretations, etc.—which means that its mode of existence is, by definition, relational and therefore communicational. Conceiving the co-extensiveness of relationality and materiality is therefore a way to reaffirm the co-extensiveness of having and being, something that Gabriel Tarde had, by the way, already noticed more than 100 years ago. Being something or someone always entails having properties, whether it is having a body, a reputation, an identity, and any other characteristics, but having properties is precisely what relates us to the world we inhabit and evolve in, materializing our existence and the existence of everything that is deemed as being. This is valid for ideas and this is valid for us, as human beings.20 It might finally be time that communication studies dares to claim what it should have been from its outset: A new way of conceiving ontology. I believe that this chapter is a step toward that direction.

Notes 1 Ronald Arnett, “Ventriloquism as communicative music,” Language Under Discussion 2, no. 1 (November 2014): 41–44.

Discourse as ventriloquy 49

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

Mariaelena Bartesaghi, “Ventriloquism as a matter for discourse analysis,” Language Under Discussion 2, no. 1 (November 2014): 41–44. Caroline D. Bergeron and François Cooren, “The collective framing of crisis management: A ventriloqual analysis of emergency operations centres,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 20, no. 3 (August 2012): 120–137. François Cooren, “The selection of agency as a rhetorical device: Opening up the scene of dialogue through ventriloquism,” in Dialogue and rhetoric, ed. Edda Weigand (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2008): 23–37. François Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation, and Ventriloquism (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2010). François Cooren, “Communication theory at the center: Ventriloquism and the communicative constitution of reality,” Journal of Communication 62 (2012): 1–20. François Cooren, “Pragmatism as ventriloquism: Creating a dialogue among seven traditions in the study of communication,” Language Under Discussion 2, no. 1 (2014): 65–86. François Cooren, “In Medias Res: Communication, existence and materiality,” Communication Research and Practice 1, no. 4 (2015): 307–321. François Cooren, “Ethics for dummies: Ventriloquism and responsibility,” Atlantic Journal of Communication, 24 (2016): 17–30. Nancie Hudson, “Communication and power in the job interview: Using a ventriloqual approach to analyze moral accounts,” Text & Talk, 36 (2016): 319–340. Jody L. S. Jahn, “Adapting safety rules in a high reliability context: How wildland firefighting workgroups ventriloquize safety rules to understand hazards,” Management Communication Quarterly, 30 (2016): 362–389. Elizabeth Wilhoit, “Ventriloquism’s methodological scope,” Language Under Discussion 2 (2014): 45–49. David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism: Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006). This is what Schütz would have called our natural attitude. See: Alfred Schütz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings, ed. H. R. Wagner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Emanuel Schegloff, “Conversation analysis and socially shared cognition,” in Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, eds. Lauren Resnick, John Levine, and Stephanie Teasley (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1991): 150–171. Mikhael Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986). William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912/1976). George Herbert Mead, “The physical thing,” in The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1932/1980): 119–139. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The fixation of belief,” Popular Science Monthly, 12 (November, 1877): 1–15. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford California Press, 1986/1999). Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999/2010). Timothy Kuhn, Karen Ashcraft, and François Cooren, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017). Daniel Robichaud, “Steps toward a relational view of agency,” in Communication as Organizing: Empirical and Theoretical Explorations in the Dynamic of Text and Conversation,

50 François Cooren

11 12 13

14

15 16 17

18 19 20

eds. François Cooren, James R. Taylor, and Elizabeth J. Van Every (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006): 101–114. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). Bruno Latour, What is the Style of Matters of Concern? Two Lectures in empirical Philosophy (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 2008). Gail Jefferson, “On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next-positioned matters,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies of Conversation Analysis, eds. J. Maxwell and John Heritage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984): 191–222. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren, The Work of Communication: Op. cit.9 Thomas Martine and François Cooren, “A relational approach to materiality and organization: The case of a creative idea,” in Beyond Interpretivism? New Encounters with Technology and Organization, eds. Lucas Introna, Donncha Kavanagh, Séamas Kelly, Wanda Orlikowski, and Susan Scott (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016): 143–166. Incidentally, this sculpture made by the artist Tony Matelli is titled “Old Enemy, New Victim,” which could be interpreted as partly corroborating what the idea becomes through France’s turns of talk. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren, The Work of Communication: Op. cit.9 Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996). Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology (London: Sage, 1987). Ruth Wodak, “Critical discourse analysis,” in Qualitative Research Practice, eds. Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F Gubrium, and David Silverman (London/ Thousand Oaks, CA/New Delhi: Sage): 185–202. François Cooren, “Communication theory at the center: Ventriloquism and the communicative constitution of reality,” Journal of Communication, 62 (2012): 1–20. Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology (Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 1893).

3

Discursive construction A sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis Reiner Keller

Since the early days of Foucauldian writing, the word “discourse” has become an empty signifier widely used in linguistics, the social sciences and the humanities. This seems particularly true of European academia, especially the German context, which has seen an ever-growing and flourishing field of discourse studies and approaches since the 1990s. Referring to “discourse” as an empty signifier does not imply a negative connotation. It simply indicates that people working in the fields of discourse research are interested in different issues, and therefore do different things with this word. They fill the empty signifier with heterogeneous meanings. They constitute lines and networks of argumentation. They create and stabilize discursive events, talks and texts about discourse research, and what it is for. They perform discourses in action. Discourse does not proceed by or in itself: It needs interpreting and mediating actors in order to come into existence. Discourses in action are (human) actors in action, guided, but not determined, by institutionalized rules for producing statements. The present chapter is about the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD), established in German sociology in the late 1990s and now widely used across disciplines, including in education, history, Japanese or Chinese studies, media and communication, political science and sociology.1 SKAD’s core focus is a reorientation of discourse research towards Foucauldian interests in analyzing power/knowledge regimes. But it also, importantly, moves beyond Foucault by integrating US pragmatist sociology and the sociology of knowledge established by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. This move implies a turn to qualitative and interpretative research methodologies and methods. Discourse analysis is considered as one particular way of doing sociology of knowledge research – wherever such questions of knowledge and meaning making are addressed as “discourses”. SKAD intervenes into the broader field of discourse research by addressing some gaps in that field (as became apparent in the 1990s and early 2000s). Foucault, for example, pursued a rather different approach to discourse, realizing only one kind of discourse study. So-called Foucauldian discourse research was not at all clear about its methodology and insisted on being “beyond the actor”. On the other hand, sociological research on public discourses which focused on “framing” neglected wider discursive structuration of framing actions. Critical

52 Reiner Keller Discourse Analysis mixed sociological arguments with (the tradition of) linguistics, focusing mainly on critiquing word usage and unmasking “hidden ideologies”. Foucault’s complex interest in power/knowledge seemed to be widely absent in this field. In contrast, by integrating this interest with basic sociological assumptions about meaning making and the role of knowledge in societies, SKAD develops a theoretical ground as well as conceptual tools and methodological strategies for addressing the politics of knowledge and meaning making in discursive struggles and processes. This will be explained in more detail below in section 2. Before that, section 1 will introduce readers to core issues of a knowledge-oriented approach to discourse studies. Section 3 will discuss some examples from empirical research. In place of a conclusion, section 4 sums up the argument, referring to a current discussion on critique.

1. Three vignettes (1) A case of murder

A young man kills three people. First his mother, second his sister, and third his little brother. After walking around the countryside for a few days, he goes to the police. He tells them about his crime. He knows he is guilty; he wants to be judged by the law and sentenced to death. He says that God asked him to commit the murders. During his weeks in prison, he writes a long memorandum. He confesses that citing God’s order as his ultimate reason was just a trick to confuse the judge. He adds that he committed the crime in clear consciousness in order to restore the lost honor of his father, who suffered intensely by his mother for almost two decades. He knows that killing is a crime, and asks for the corresponding penalty. The trial opens. Up to this point, everything seems to be clear and self-evident. There is a voluntary confession. The facts of the crime scene are beyond dispute. The police report, medical report, witnesses’ reports and psychological reports appear to be a mere formality. But the report of one psychologist introduces a surprising turn. Using the most up-to-date psychological expertise, it states that the perpetrator behind this deed cannot be considered to have been sane when committing the crime. It furthermore claims that the young man has been mentally ill since childhood. This means that he cannot be judged guilty according to the law. The expert sees clear scientific evidence for this: The young man has been observed reading books – an obvious sign of abnormality. Reading means escape from real life into fiction; it implies isolation and withdrawal from social life. As a child, he was seen throwing stones at birds, and picking up a dead frog. And last but not least, his confession can be considered the ultimate proof of insanity. No man of sound mind would confess such a deed in order to be punished. Although a second psychological opinion contests this account, the first report has had its effect. The young man is judged not guilty for reason of mental illness. He will not go to the hangman, but to an asylum. There he will commit suicide.

Discursive construction 53 (2) The flying lake

Here is the second story, something completely different. A country decides to opt for green energy. The plan is as follows: A dam will be built in the mountains to create an artificial lake. The water will then be used to drive turbines and to produce clean electricity. The best engineers and the best geological experts are called on. Five years later the opening ceremony takes place. The state secretary is present. The construction company is present. The mayors of several nearby villages are present. They celebrate this important step into the green future. Two years later, disaster strikes. Following a landslide, the lake overflows and floods five villages. Two thousand people die. The press coverage is as follows: This is the valley of disaster: Mud, silence, loneliness. You will see at first glance that all this is irrevocable. Nothing more to be said or done. Thousands of people dead. And nobody is guilty, nobody could have foreseen this. Given our atomic age, one could say: a pure catastrophe, no human shape in it. It was all nature. Another newspaper comments: A stone has fallen into a glass of water; the water has slopped onto the table. That’s all. But the stone was as big as a mountain, the glass a fifth of a mile high, and on the table there were thousands of helpless human beings. And the glass didn’t even break into pieces. You cannot blame those who did the construction work. The glass was and is a masterpiece, even in its esthetics. End of story? No! Seven years later, all those who played leading roles in the planning and construction of the dam are sentenced to long-term imprisonment, having been found fully responsible for the landslide, the flooding and the deaths, in short, for a totally predictable catastrophe. A carefully conducted reconstruction of the event has shown that several actors had already pointed out risks during the early planning and decision-making stages. As a result of this re-interpretation, the event is repositioned as an example of “risk society” (Ulrich Beck) or “risky entanglements” (Bruno Latour). (3) Hurt feelings

And here is the last vignette. A writer writes a novel. A journalist in a faraway country reads the text a couple of weeks before publication. She writes a review and announces an imminent scandal. Another person enters the fray. He states that this novel will mock a worldwide religion, and calls for a ban on publication. A state secretary adds to the scandal, arguing that the author must have a satanic stance and should be sentenced for his writing because of intentional insult. The book is banned from publication in this

54 Reiner Keller country. A famous postcolonial scholar, teaching at the other end of the world, enters the debate. To him the book in question is an example of ongoing Western imperialism towards the rest of the world. An African writers’ association cancels the author’s invitation to a literary event in South Africa because, as one representative explains, he is attacking the whole Third World. The book is considered disgusting and offensive to any person attached to a particular religious tradition. Some worshippers start campaigning, asserting their right to object to this mockery of their beliefs. They organize a petition as well as public burnings of the book. Nevertheless, the book sells well. The members of this faith community write letters to embassies of countries where the religion in question is dominant. They ask for action. A senior religious leader commands the religion’s worshippers to kill the author. Intellectuals in the Western world support the author in the name of freedom of speech against the preservers of religious tradition. Again, the story does not stop here. Seventeen years after these events, a small number of cartoons mocking the very same religion are at the origin of a world crisis. Here a similar series of events occurs, leading to public protests across countries and continents, resulting in many killings. And here something very interesting happens: A huge number of intellectuals in the Western world now support the religious tradition in the name of the right not to be offended by proponents of free speech. What happened in between? You have just read three different stories about competing discourses in action. They all deal with the discursive construction of reality. They all involve a wide range of speakers with different backgrounds, expertise and resources. They all imply a broad range of knowledge claims. You may have recognized the cases. The first one, the story of the murderer, is from Michel Foucault, and is known as the “Pierre Rivière” case. Foucault comments that this is a prime example of discourses as elements of discursive fights or battles. As he states in the early 1970s, he is no longer interested in big historical discursive formations which shape academic knowledge production for centuries, but in the concrete ways discourses are part of social dispute and problematization, in collective struggles over what we might call today the “definition of the situation” (a famous concept from pragmatist sociology and symbolic interactionism).2 The different speakers involved in such struggles do not speak as somatic singularities, but as institutional role-players, performing particular discursive statement practices. Each of these discursive performances refers to its own way of knowing about what happened, to its own stocks of knowledge and criteria for establishing sound arguments. The second case, the flying lake, was about the real Italian Vajont disaster in late 1963, which took four minutes to destroy the five villages of Longarone, Pirago, Rivalta, Villanova and Faè.3 Here too, discursive struggles took place, long before and after the event. Over decades, different kinds of expert opinions contributed to the Vajont case, establishing evidence of the need for electricity generation, the safety of the site, the involvement of the local communities, the risks and uncertainties of such a project, the character of a natural disaster, human

Discursive construction 55 responsibility, and the legal issues and power games involved, which made some expert reports, as time unfolded, more important than others. In contrast to the Rivière case, the Vajont disaster has a long history of competing expert and public discourses, involving actors with rather different resources for claim making.4 The third case extends from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to the Danish cartoon affair, the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris in January 2015, and the PEN Club debate in summer 2015 in New York,5 and beyond. Again, it is a discursive struggle about the definition of a situation, this time involving heterogeneous speakers and expert opinions across countries, from politics, civil society, art worlds, academia and religion; and again, as in cases one and two, we can observe an interesting and highly consequential shift in the discursive construction of realities. In the Rivière case we see a situated struggle between different discourses, including Rivière’s personal account, composed of a mixture of elements from then-contemporary stories of betrayal and honor, religious belief and moral attitudes, medical expertise, different psychological opinions, etc. They enter into competition, and the “most modern” psychological discourse wins. The Italian Vajont event is different. Firstly, it not only involves human behavior; a major role is also played by material processes and effects. Secondly, there is competition between two discourses and their allied actors, one side in favor of the construction, the other against it. The expert opinions are about nature and infrastructural needs, not about the insanity of a person. But this long-term project becomes a crime too, after the material destruction, and in the course of the long-running discursive struggles. These discourses unfold via documents (such as reports), public events such as demonstrations, and media events such as newspaper coverage. Here it is the sad and catastrophic damage which changes the stakes for evidence making, and implicates a different ex post attribution for truth games. The third event is about public discourses, including religious belief systems, academic scholarship and liberal intellectualism. It brings together extremely diverse speakers and unfolds through very different discursive practices around the world. It is a world event in slow motion. It is about what can be said or written, by whom, when and about what. It is about the control and effects of artistic practice. Each case implies that events do not exist independent of the discursive meaning making that takes place around them. They are constituted in discursive practices. Discursive practices include not just word usages, but also factual claims, knowledges, moral resources, justifications and legitimations, and they make use of institutional or organizational resources. All of them might shift across time and sociocultural spaces. Another important feature of each case is that they have major consequences in the real world: for the murderer’s victims, for Rivière, for the village inhabitants killed by the flooded dam, for the responsible managers sent to prison, for Rushdie and the people killed during the Rushdie and cartoon affairs.

56 Reiner Keller

2. Discourses in action: The SKAD perspective The above cases suggest that a SKAD focuses on the discursive construction of realities, that is, the establishment of social relations of knowledge and knowing, and the politics of knowledge and knowing in (and between) social fields of action, social worlds and societies. What is SKAD’s understanding of “discourse”? How does it relate to its research questions, vocabulary and methodology? “Social relations of knowledge and knowing” refers to the idea that societies establish hierarchies of truth claims, beliefs, ideologies, technical norms, moral orders and institutional definitions of reality – a complex constellation of symbolic ordering of the world (“as it is”). Such relations are highly hierarchical, asymmetric and institutionalized relations of power/knowledge, stabilized by social forces for a particular time and (sociocultural) space. “Politics of knowledge and knowing” refers to the actor-driven and eventafforded processes of establishing, objectifying, evaluating, discounting and transforming realities, whether by reference to religious belief systems, political ideologies or the sciences. Obviously, the material and symbolic resources for the politics of knowledge and knowing are hardly equally distributed in societies. For example: When the pope declares (as he recently did) that there will be a new and empowered role for women in the Catholic liturgy, this undoubtedly exemplifies his politics of knowledge, supported by the symbolic capital attached to his position, and the whole apparatus of the Catholic church. But when a female TV newscaster presents such groundbreaking news to the audience with a slight ironic smile, she adds some (micro)politics of knowledge of her own. “Discourses” are social forms of processing such orders and enacting (cultural) politics. They reproduce, stabilize, attack or transform our realities. In SKAD, “discourse” then refers to a seriality of entangled practices which are produced (performed) according to common patterns of formation, with respect to content and formal elements. For example, sociology as a discourse is different from psychology. Discourses might compete or conflict when they use different methods and stories to explain the similar phenomena, e.g., students’ successes or failures within schools. Within sociology, rational choice and systems theories constitute two sub-discourses. They too may enter into competition when offering different explanations of a social phenomenon. Catholicism is a discourse that differs from Pentecostalism or Islam (and their sub-discourses), assuming different realities and performing different practices of belief. Marxism is another discourse, which differs substantially from liberalism. We are able to distinguish between such discourses not only in terms of their particular forms and contents but by how they are enacted by their practitioners and the consequences they facilitate. In order to participate in particular discursive games, actors have to know their vocabularies and be able to follow previously established practices. Sometimes participation requires certifications (such as academic degrees or institutional positions in the

Discursive construction 57 Catholic Church). Sometimes, participation requires demonstrations of expertise (as in public speaking and sports), and sometimes popularity (as in the social media). We should consider such “big” discourses as discursive formations or universes of discourse which include thousands of sub-discourses. They exist as historically established discursive practices which have been able to install institutional apparatuses, or, as I prefer, institutional dispositifs (devices), which allow them to exist through time, despite the coming and going of individual speakers. Such devices support speaker intervention in concrete issues of concern (such as explaining world migration today or giving a new role to women in the liturgy). In other words, they exist not only as text and talk, but as institutional and embodied materiality. And they produce devices for intervention in the world: therapeutic settings, confessionals, weapons, etc. Public discourses are somehow different. They emerge around contested issues, events, problems or “urgencies” (i.e., situations where collective action is urgently needed). They integrate a broad range of speakers and statement practices, coming from different backgrounds, social fields and resources. They might combine religious authority with scientific arguments; populist rhetoric with counter-factual “truth” or with “bad” ways of othering one’s opponents. They might be performed by movie actors, political players, professors, media professionals, civil society and non-governmental organizations and other speakers. Nevertheless, such discursive activity and interaction creates patterns of argument, which allow for variation and change over time, but which, at a given moment, clearly form a discursive structuration, e.g., of climate change believers on one side and climate change sceptics on the other – just to mention two of the most common current sub-discourses about the climate. SKAD uses this conception of discourse on a meso level of analysis, addressing concrete and material empirical phenomena, produced by and through social actors engaged in and committed to their very different worldly affairs. It starts with the assumption that meaning-making activities are widely embedded in public disputes, routine attempts at problem solving, expert proceedings, and organized or institutionalized work on symbolic ordering and definitions of situations. This holds true for the sciences or other specialized realms of discourse (such as religion), but it also applies to public discourses or public arenas supporting institutional formations of “the real” (including the sphere of mass media). SKAD is about following discourses and discursive struggles, and knowledges and knowing throughout society (societies). It is designed as an intervention in the way the social sciences (and related disciplines) approach the politics of truth, evidence and meaning making. It suggests that these disciplines could make use of sociology of knowledge tools to address the current challenges of so-called knowledge, information and communication societies. This is in need of some clarification. For reasons of limited space, I will just draw on a few points in order to establish SKAD’s reflexive methodology, as well as its ideas about the linkage between knowledge, language and meaning making as objects of discourse research and as necessary grounds for discursive inquiry. As all

58 Reiner Keller approaches to discourse, SKAD builds upon particular “shoulders of giants” (Robert Merton). It bridges gaps between different developments in theory and methodology of researches on knowledge and thereby establishes its own perspective. First, SKAD’s usage of “knowledge,” “language” and “meaning” is inspired by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.6 Here “knowledge” not only refers to “confirmed” positive knowledge and evidence. In fact, it refers to everything considered “knowledge,” including large-scale symbolic orders and worldviews, as well as social institutions, moral orders and regimes of legitimation or justification (for example by religious doctrine, personal experimentation, sociological theory or claims of scientific evidence). Knowledge can be considered the human dimension of meaning making, of attributing a particular meaning to a situation that is occurring. If human beings use signs in writing and speech, they refer to a particular reality beyond this usage. This is, for example, what this text does, by creating a network of arguments and references to external authors (such as Berger and Luckmann and Foucault). “Go to the bus stop and wait for bus number 27, which will drive you home for one dollar” implies a knowledge claim and a setting in the world, the latter of which might deliver evidence for the statement. “God created all men and women equal” does the very same thing. The sociology of knowledge therefore cannot be reduced to the narrow scope of a sociology of scientific knowledge, science and technology studies or standpoint theories influenced by Karl Mannheim’s legacy – traditions that still dominate in Anglo-Saxon contexts. It is much closer to Max Weber’s sociology of meaning and (inter)action, and its extensions in symbolic interactionism (e.g. William I. Thomas, Joseph Gusfield, Howard S. Becker, Anselm Strauss), social phenomenology (Alfred Schütz) and to Émile Durkheim’s interest in the social creation of institutions, classifications and other historical systems of representation. The interesting point here is that such a perspective does not need cognitive theory or assumptions about cognition. Social stocks of knowledge, established by a range of historically ongoing permutations of interaction (including discourses), are a precondition for newborns to become social actors with agency. Knowledges and meaning making is not only present in “positive” data – in texts and talks, in things said, shown and done, visible in actions, practices and artefacts. It is not about singular events or “inner” intentional purposes, but about the visible and observable social patterns, repetitions and transformations of reality established by actors using signifying symbols and creating symbolic universes. It is not about identifying and modelling slots and fillers, but about the discursively patterned structuration of establishing the meaning of reality. SKAD here argues against narrow applications of “social construction” to everyday knowledges, small life worlds, or professional knowledge, which dominated much of German work in sociology of knowledge. It insists on “discursive construction,” a concept absent to sociology of knowledge so far, as a most important level of social politics and relations of knowledge and meaning making: “discourse” not in the sense of discrete segments of text and talk, but in the sense of regulated

Discursive construction 59 practices of statement production in and between institutional and organizational settings. According to Foucault, “knowledge” is the effect of such discursive practices. “Knowledge making” is not to be reduced to a particular social field (the sciences and technology development), but is a common practice in all social fields and part of a highly complex interweaving of such fields. The current political situation around the world, including the USA, gives much evidence for this. Second, by insisting on the performative role of social actors and agency, SKAD goes beyond Foucauldian ideas and concepts in order to address discourses as main social processes of knowledge and meaning making. A few years ago, Stuart Hall stated the following: Recent commentators have begun to recognize not only the real breaks and paradigm-shifts, but also the affinities and continuities between older and newer traditions of work; for example, between Weber’s classical interpretative ‘sociology of meaning’ and Foucault’s emphasis on the role of the ‘discursive.’7 The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies indeed was much influenced by symbolic interactionism as well as by poststructuralist thinking. Despite Hall’s arguments for a knowledge-orientated perspective, its subsequent research practice heavily relied on semiotics and Critical Discourse Analysis. SKAD presents an alternative approach. In order to account for a broad understanding of knowledge, SKAD uses Foucauldian ideas about discourses, their dimensions, functions and stakes. Remember his definition of discourse in The Archeology of Knowledge. The analytic task consists, he writes, of no longer “treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.”8 It is important to note that this quote does not deny the referencing function of signs. But it inverts the direction of this reference: The sign does not represent or account for its exterior but is a constitutive element of this outside. Given the broad arena of discourse research in linguistics and discourse analysis in micro-interaction and communication research, the basic starting point for SKAD is the idea of how to conceive of a sociological analysis of discourses and power/knowledge on meso and macro social levels. SKAD examines discourses as a seriality of regulated performative practices which deal with problems of knowing and acting, and produce power effects in a conflictridden network of social actors, institutional dispositifs and knowledge systems. It emphasizes that discourse is event- or problem-driven, concrete and material, not an abstract idea or free-floating line of ideas and arguments. This means that discourse appears as speech, text, discussion, visual image, use of symbols, interactional settings and practices which have to be performed by skilled actors. Such actors follow discourse-specific instructions. Therefore, discourses are real social practices in the experience of institutional, organizational and

60 Reiner Keller social actors. Social actors enter discourses for shorter or longer periods and become speakers, by training, socialization, institutional recruitment or selfempowerment. Some actors might be silenced, or ignored. Discourses, performed by actors, produce subject positions and appeal to the audience to perform certain acts (as in the famous “technologies of the self” example). They install and use an infrastructure of statement production, and they might produce another infrastructure of intervention in the world. Both of these things can be accounted for by the concept of the dispositif (as devices or infrastructures of discourse production and problem intervention) and the method of ethnography of discourses. Third, SKAD establishes a reflexive methodology. Such a methodology accounts for the meaning-making and thereby discourse-generating capacity of social actors, as well as for the meaning making performed by researchers doing “discourse analysis”. It therefore builds upon symbolic interactionism and social phenomenology. These approaches have provided us with arguments about the social constitution of signs (symbols) and the socialinteractional link between individual consciousnesses and social stocks of meaning or “universes of discourse”. Universes of discourse are collectively produced horizons of shared meanings, established by actors interacting upon common concerns, developed through the continual permutations of such interactions. As Alfred Schütz has shown, an individual’s embodied attribution of conceptualized meaning to a given sensual experience draws upon such social stocks of knowledge and universes of discourse. It cannot be “realized” otherwise.9 This is an important argument for SKAD research: Discourses are major and powerful social devices for constituting and contesting symbolic ordering, the human reality of the real. The individual’s need to use typified symbols to transform sensual body-bound experience into reflected and conceptualized, that is, meaningful, experience is responded to by discursive meaning making. This is why we try to eat healthy food and run to stay in good shape. This is why we vote for this or that political leader. This is why we believe in this or that scientific argument. Such observations immediately lead to SKAD’s core assumption about discourses in action. Discourses need skilled human actors who perform them by switching into speaker positions (e.g. by professional role taking and role making). Such actors have to be socialized into the correct usage of particular sign systems on different levels (e.g. English language in general, the universes of discourse of a concrete discipline like sociology or public debates about climate change). In order to participate in discourse production and discursive struggles, actors must be granted (or possibly claim for themselves) a position to speak (e.g., on the basis of an academic degree or some other qualification of competence). The performance of a particular discursive event is not strictly determined, only guided by precedence, the given situation, institutional and discursive contexts, and their present indicators. In order to participate actors must be able to interpret, first, what is going on, and, second, which discursive performance is to be expected from them. Most of this is routine action, but

Discursive construction 61 sometimes the need for reflective consideration of what and how to perform might arise. Fourth, the reference to interpretive traditions in sociology – from Weberian issues of Verstehende Soziologie to pragmatist sociology and social phenomenology – allows researchers to move attentiveness in discourse studies towards signifying patterns in discourses beyond the usage of single words, and to use “interpretive methods” from sociology in order to account for the discursive construction of reality in a given case of interest. SKAD argues that an isolated word (like “race,” “migrant” or “climate”) is in itself only a narrow indicator of the complex process of meaning production occurring in discursive events. It would be better to consider it as a floating signifier, which is part of a larger structure or pattern of signification established by a particular discursive micro-event. We do not know what a single word appearing in a text “means.” It derives its meaning from the context in which it appears, from the entanglement with other signs. “The race is on” is quite different from “The white race has to end its domination.” Word counts are therefore mostly risky and misleading. Discourse research has to be aware of the contextual embeddedness of sign usage.10 SKAD uses interpretive methods, grounded in social sciences hermeneutics, for textual analysis. This includes the line-by-line sequential analysis of patterns of interpretation and the analytical categorization of results. And it explores the positioning of actors, knowledges and legitimation strategies as presented in the data at hand. This positioning implies cartographies of actors, arenas and discursive processes, e.g., by following the hypertextual links given, if an argument in a talk or text refers to one set of scientific evidence and deconstructs another. And further, this cartography implies an account of the socio-temporal situatedness, unfolding and transformation of discursive structuration. SKAD provides a genuinely sociologically grounded approach to discourse research. It is able to zoom in on particular discursive events or to account for comprehensive “big pictures,” based on larger (e.g., historical) corpora of data. This includes several basic elements, as shown: Establishing theoretical arguments on discourse as an object of analysis; providing heuristic and conceptual tools for doing discourse research; proposing methodological reflections on and methods for “how to do it”; using experiences and strategies from interpretative research methods for the collection and analysis of concrete data. Conceptual tools as well as empirical designs and procedures have been developed in more detail elsewhere. They include concepts for actors (like executives, judges, speakers, performers), models or templates for subjects (like employees, students), processes of identification (like subjectification, selfing and othering, coalitions), practices (like discursive and non-discursive practices, model practices), forms of knowledge (like interpretive schemes, phenomenal structures, classification and narrative), speech acts (like declarations, legitimation), and infrastructures of discourse production or discursive intervention into a given field of practice (the dispositif). It suggests several strategies for corpus building and analysis, with reference to interpretive or qualitative research in

62 Reiner Keller sociology.11 Based on such conceptual grounds, SKAD is interested in discursive structuration and discursive struggles about collective definitions of the situation in public arenas and special interest arenas, as well as their entanglement in concrete cases. The vignettes presented above are all cases in point. They combine, in different ways, with different concerns and meaningful outputs, actors, interactions, expertise, factual claims, different forms of knowledge, moral orders and justification. SKAD offers a common vocabulary to address such cases if research is interested in the “definition of the situation” in and between particular social arenas of concern and the involved speakers, beyond the level of “private life”. Such arenas might be public or special interest, with spatial and sociocultural scales extending from local to global issues, and from short term to long term periods in time (as the vignettes illustrate). SKAD then is about such questions as the following: Who is making what statement about the reality of a situation or problem? What definitions of a situation, problem, or event compete (if there is competition)? What resources come into play to make such a statement? How are factual claims established? How is evaluation of “facts” performed, by which means, moral orders, justification? What resources, events and processes can be identified? What is there role in a given case? Is there conflict of interpretation? Are there hierarchies of knowledge claims involved, and what do they look like? With what effects? What theorizing concepts can be established to account for the case of interest? How does this refer to current theoretical debates? And one can envision many questions to which these may lead. Before turning to empirical work, it might be worth considering differences between SKAD and some other perspectives in discourse research that are present in this volume.12 There are common grounds but also notable differences in research questions pursued, theoretical assumptions, conceptual tools, and analytical procedures. Readers are invited to use the vignettes presented above as test cases. Firstly, SKAD shares with the other contributors to this volume the concern for the non-necessary relationships between language and reality, lying adjacent to and partially intersecting with critical discourse studies as developed by Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak. Assumptions surrounding the discursive motors behind these intricate relationships have a very long and overlapping ancestry in sociology, linguistics, pragmatism and so on. They are also embraced by the Foucauldian and sociological (e.g. Bourdieusien) arguments on language, discourse and reality. However, SKAD is not interested in unmasking current ideological language use or the rhetoric of discriminatory speech in populist or extremist movements. It does not follow a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Paul Ricoeur), but inscribes itself into the genealogical project of critique and experimentation of power/knowledge regimes, seeking to reveal their consequences via the interpretative analytics of discursive formations and discursive struggles. Therefore, when studying populist political discourses of the extreme right (or other fundamentalists), SKAD would ask different questions than CDS, e.g., about how “racist speech acts” or “racist advertisements”

Discursive construction 63 are identified or disputed in public conflicts, about “successful” or “failed” struggles for public recognition, the (mis-)use of historical pasts, the establishment of evidence via norms or “factual proofs,” the symbolic orders created, the dispositif effects and so on. Such research questions focus on competing discourses in discursive struggles for collective problem solving. As such, SKAD would aim not only at different but perhaps also more comprehensive and multiple pictures of what is going on, rather than pursuing a predominating angle of historically and socially informed critique. Secondly, SKAD has been inspired by the concept of “interpretive repertoire” established in the earlier work (on racism) of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell.13 But it does not follow Potter’s turn to conversational analysis and verbal data present in discursive psychology today, even if it shares the call for precise empirical analysis of discursive events. Such microevents of verbal interaction (e.g., a family conversation on a Sunday lunch table) are not considered discursive events in SKAD’s understanding of “discourse”. This is not to deny the importance of the interactive reconstruction of social psychology. Viewed from the perspective of SKAD, private verbal interaction, speech and writing are deeply shaped by institutional and public discourses and social sciences should not overlook such entanglements. SKAD uses the concepts of “discourse” and “discursive” to address more institutionalized, public, and social processes of meaning making and communication. It traces the discursive structuration of (competing) definitions of reality: its unfolding, establishment, rules and transformations across a singular situation. Third, François Cooren’s concept of “ventriloquism,” despite its different purpose and interest, overlaps with SKAD interests in dispositif structures, that is, in the way discourses are produced and reproduced and may intervene into the constellations of urgency and problem-solving which ventriloquism addresses. I guess this is due to some common ground in ethnomethodology and interpretive sociology. Even Schütz’ phenomenology is recognizably present in both approaches. SKAD proposes an ethnography of discourse and dispositif settings, using both data from field observations and the analysis of artefacts such as classification sheets and forms as used in counselling and coaching practices, such as the forms used if you have to evaluate your fields of competence in order to choose a career option, or if you have to ask for Medicare, or whatever your concern might be. Cooren’s examples here provide interesting insights into the way social actors perform role taking and role making in given dispositif structures, and how empirical research leads to a theoretical concept and vice versa. Pointing to the practice of “ventriloquism” shares with SKAD the idea of a certain existential degree of freedom involved in human interpretation and action towards the world (and others in the world), including some room for maneuver when performing a discourse. We, as observers, are not outside of this. We are performers of discourses about discourses; and we might make use of our own room for maneuver. Interpretation is everywhere in discourse research, in terms of both its objects and its analytical approach.

64 Reiner Keller

3. Some examples of SKAD work There is no “one model for all purposes” in SKAD research. A SKAD-based ethnographic inquiry into the work of dispositifs will use different data and different methods of data collection and analysis than a comprehensive discourse study of 25 years of public discourses and conflicts on waste management issues. A SKAD analysis of social disputes about “racism” in speech acts or in “pictures” will proceed in a different way than a SKAD research project on the making of social scientific knowledge or medical knowledge, and their role in a given concern, despite using the same basic heuristic tools. So, the following examples illustrate ways of adapting SKAD to concrete purposes.14 The first example, the present author’s study on public discourses of waste management in Germany and France,15 covered a period from 1970–1995. This research focused less on the core political issues of reference, and more on broader questions of the social and cultural construction of values (of objects, nature and the sociocultural embeddedness of the economy), and sociocultural change. It sampled media coverage data according to selected criteria (such as processes of lawmaking, including different political lines of newspapers), and built up a corpus of 700–800 articles for each country, which was later reduced to around 100 documents in a step-by-step selection procedure. It added expert documents and reports, as well as statements by actors involved and expert interviews. Line-by-line sequential analysis was used in order to account for and categorize the interpretation patterns present (such as “technological risk,” which has been very important in the German context from the mid-1980s to the present). The analysis showed complex constellations, dynamics and processes in the development of waste regulation, presented as maps of involved actors and discursive structuration of the public spheres. In Germany, the public sphere functioned as an arena for confrontation and communication between two opposing discourses (the “structural-conservative discourse,” and the “cultural-critical” one) and their respective phenomenal structures. Disputes over household waste in the federal administration were at the origin of the environmental movement, which emerged partly as a reaction to the government’s strategies for individualizing environmental responsibility. The first of the two opposing discourses (the structural-conservative discourse) used interpretive schemes that stated the need to stabilize existing ways of production, consumption and technical mastery. The second one argued for moral duty, a change in cultural patterns of consumption and a prioritizing of social over economic interests. In the 1980s, this latter discourse introduced new arguments about technological risks in waste treatment, borrowing from the conflicts over nuclear power, and gained much wider public support. Both discourses used scientific evidence alongside moral arguments. The situation of competition led to extensive development of technologies and safety limits. The eventual outcomes (laws on waste treatment and recycling) reflected mixed strategies, combining elements from both discourses and thus mitigating conflicts. In

Discursive construction 65 contrast, in France, there was only a single hegemonic discourse articulated by the French government, which stood alone and unchallenged in the media, through which the government addressed the public and civil society actors. The members of governments held an exclusive position of knowledge about waste, and repeatedly promised to overcome the problem by means of technological progress. If there was a named problem, it was the occasional disrespect of citizens, local political entities and economic actors towards the laws and the common good defined by the government. True, there was a critical discourse too, articulated by some marginal groups (such as Greenpeace France), but this had no chance of entering public debate and the media. In effect, French household waste policy evolved more slowly, with lower technical safety limits and a ritualistic announcement of big, but everfailing governmental plans for France’s triumph over waste. The study gave a comprehensive account of both discursive arenas and argued that France’s situation could be seen – in the terms of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck – as an example of “linear modernization,” and Germany’s as one of reflexive “modernization.” Our second example is from Sara Holmgren, who used SKAD to analyze orders of knowledge in the climate–deforestation nexus. Using document analysis, she examines the discursive construction of measures for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, and the development of a global arrangement for forest governance. With regard to classifications, she shows how some distinctions are “naturalized,” and become established as “common sense,” which cannot be questioned by any reasonable actor. In summing up, she states that REDD+ programme hosts contribute to a stabilization of a symbolic order that legitimates their existence as responsible facilitators of land use transformation. […] [A] major effect of the REDD+ programme narrative is that un-defined actors that are not immediately dependent on forests for their livelihoods become released from responsibility in the quest for transforming tropical land use.16 In a different field of policy constitution, Moritz von Glyszinski17 applied SKAD to an analysis of basic income strategies via cash transfer models on the global level of world social policies. Through a detailed analysis of several decades of negotiation and debate in global forums, he shows how discourses on different levels of abstraction converge with knowledge strategies of evidence-building based on local cases, leading to the establishment of certain policy models as “the right ones” to follow, to the exclusion of others. Interestingly, as these templates for action evolved, major shifts could be observed in the relative dominance of the different actors. Christine Zimmermann18 was interested in how discussions on US television dealt with the problem of homosexual parenting and tried to define what “family” means in US culture. She identified two opposing discourses, one

66 Reiner Keller referring to an individual’s freedom of choice and right to follow different ways of life, and the second referring to community bonds and values. Both of them are intrinsic elements of the American constitution’s founding myths. So, today’s discursive struggles over “the family” are not only conflicts about a way of life, but fights about a structural tension that has been deeply embedded in American identity politics for centuries. Sophie Hövelman19 explored a conflict of interpretations around a critique of racism in street naming in Berlin. The anti-racist activist groups tried, in a first discursive move, to establish historical truth about the naming of the so-called “Mohrenstraße”20 by providing a historical report on the procedure of naming at the time. But this was countered by a second expert opinion arguing that the street naming was intended to bestow honor rather than to discriminate (in much the same way as streets are named after important historical actors). In a second move, the battle over historical evidence was abandoned and replaced by an argument based on people’s “offended feelings” in the current situation – a kind of “affective turn,” which has so far not resulted in any administrative action to rename the street. Finally, Keller and Poferl21 analyzed epistemological cultures of French and German sociology. By sampling and analyzing journal articles and books on qualitative methods in France and Germany since the 1960s, and conducting expert interviews with current protagonists of qualitative research, they established evidence on how discourses defining qualitative methodology emerged out of almost no institutional background and experiences in both countries, but then took very different paths. In Germany, the Frankfurt School, despite its reputation for pure theory and critique, started to put forward a solid methodology for textual analysis from the late 1950s. This is very much at the origin of the later development of qualitative methodology in German sociology, and of the fragmented landscape of communities of discourse research, which argue their cases around particular methodologies of interpretation, each claiming to be the one and only way to understand sensemaking. The low profile of ethnography in German sociology even today can therefore be explained by its “lack of proof in the textual data.” On the opposite side, French sociological ethnography has been booming for several decades now. This success can be traced back to the positioning of qualitative epistemology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which set the researcher’s brilliant skills at the center of qualitative research. It is the researcher him- or herself who accounts for the evidence of the findings, not some kind of method (as in the German context). These different pathways account for the very different ways of doing qualitative sociology in the two countries, the different interests and research questions, and the different outcomes.

4. The discourse analytical imagination As argued above, SKAD’s interpretative analytics does not consider itself “critical” in the sense of CDS and related approaches. Instead, it simply

Discursive construction 67 encourages looking for good research questions and subjects, and then trusts in the possible critical effects of solid discourse research – much like Foucault did, when arguing that he intended to show that realities could simply be different. Such a position is under attack. According to a prominent statement by French anthropologist Bruno Latour, “critique has run out of steam.”22 In a world in which the experience of contingency has become a basic feature of everyday life, social scientific “unmasking” of essentialism and “hidden agendas” is – as he argues – no longer a viable course of action. What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been coopted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge […]?23 In order to save the critical spirit, he suggests that we as social scientists should instead try our hand at turning “matters of fact” into “matters of concern.” This position constitutes a brutal attack on discourse research. Latour suggests first that there is no further need for sociological and discourse approaches labeled as “critical,” since everyone already knows the facts of power and domination. Thus, there is nothing more to unmask. No one will listen to such things anymore. Secondly, by including as targets the genealogical and reconstructive approaches of Foucauldian work and social constructivism in discourse research, Latour expresses not only a deep contempt towards timeconsuming but precise empirical work linked to an urge for political action, but also devalues the role such work plays in generating public awareness of contingency and possibility. Attacking the smug uselessness of critique, and deriding the notion of the “critical mind” as something that serves only to make the critic feel good,24 Latour advocates a strong realism, “a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact.”25 Referring to the linguistic and philosophical etymology of the word “thing,” he proposes to conceive of “things” (such as facts, objects) as “associations” or “assemblages” of different elements. From this, he concludes that they should be presented as “matters of concern,” that is as forums or agendas to involve all kind of concerned actants. I would counter this with the following argument: Pretending that reality is the way it is, and must be the way it is, is surely an ongoing business, in which many social fields and actors are active partners. Therefore, discourse analytical reconstruction and genealogical analysis remain useful and timely tools with which to establish contingency. Latour’s “solution” of transforming “matters of fact” into “matters of concern” has no solid ground – unless it is anchored in discourse analytical reconstruction of implicated constellations, contingencies and silenced actors. How else could we, as scholars, be able to seriously establish a “thing” as a matter of concern? I agree with Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis26 that genealogical work is not all we can do.

68 Reiner Keller Given the contemporary moment, we might also inquire into the current settings of technical innovation, the ever-returning battles between tradition and transformation, and the new globalized conflicts around what can be said and shown in public spaces. Whatever our choice as researchers might be, we can take inspiration from Foucault who said in an interview that he approached research as experimentation, in which he did not always know beforehand what he would see and what results he would obtain. He took this approach in order to challenge and change his own thinking about “the ways things are.” This is today’s challenge for the discourse analytical imagination.

Notes 1 Based on empirical work in the 1990s, a theoretical monograph published in 2005 elaborated the argument for SKAD. Since then the approach has been used in number of edited books and monographic studies, and is increasingly used in ongoing research today. See Reiner Keller, Doing Discourse Research (London, UK: Sage, 2012). Reiner Keller, “The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD),” Human Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 43–65. Reiner Keller, “Entering discourses: A new agenda for qualitative research and sociology of knowledge,” Qualitative Sociology Review VIII, no. 2 (2012): 46–55. Peter Ulrich and Reiner Keller, “Comparing discourse between cultures. A discursive approach to movement knowledge,” in Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research, eds. Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi, and Peter Ulrich (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2014): 113–139. Reiner Keller, The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse. Outline of a Research Agenda (New York, NY: Springer, 2020; translation of the original 2005 German book). Reiner Keller, Anna Hornidge, and Wolf Schünemann (eds.), The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse: Investigating the Politics of Knowledge and Meaningmaking (London, UK: Routledge, 2018). 2 See Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Michel Foucault, “Truth and juridical forms,” in Michel Foucault: Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3), ed. James D. Faubion (New York, NY: The New Press, 2000): 6–89. 3 The story of the “flying lake” is told in Marco Paolini and Gabriella Vacis, Der fliegende See (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000). The first journal quote given was from Giorgio Bocca, Il Giorno, 11 October 1963, quoted in Paolini and Vacis, Der fliegende See, 7; the second quote was from Dino Buzzati, Corriere de la Sera, 11 October 1963, quoted in Paolini and Vacis, Der fliegende See, 9. 4 See the range of documents and pictures on www.slideshare.net/ceriuniroma/gen evois-the-vajont-landslides. 5 See The New York Times, issue from 27 April 2015: “Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo,” http://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/04/27/nyregion/six-pen-members-decline-gala-after-award-for-charliehebdo.html?_r=0. Jeanne Favret-Saada, Comment produire une crise mondiale avec douze petits dessins (Paris: Fayard, 2015); and Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Discursive construction 69 6 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966). 7 Stuart Hall, “The centrality of culture. Notes on the cultural revolution of our times,” in Media and Cultural Regulation, ed. Kenneth Thompson (London: Open University and Sage, 1997): 208–237 (quote: 224). 8 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2010): 49. 9 See Alfred Schütz, “On multiple realities,” in Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. by Maurice Natanson (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1973): 207–259. Alfred Schütz, “Symbol, reality and society,” in Schütz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Op. cit.9, 287–356. 10 Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Social science hermeneutics,” in A Companion to Qualitative Research, eds. Uwe Flick, Ernst von Kardoff, and Ina Steinke (London: Sage, 2004): 95−100. 11 See references in endnote one for further elaborations of such elements. 12 I can address only a few points here. For an extended discussion of SKAD’s relation to other approaches in discourse research, interpretive sociology and linguistics, see Reiner Keller, Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse. Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms, 3. ed. (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2011 [2005]). Interestingly, approaches elaborated in German speaking contexts nowadays often have to account for their relation to Anglo-American perspectives. One hundred years ago, it was the opposite – an interesting case for occurring changes in scientific power/knowledge regimes. English is not just a common language for debate, but a means for inclusion and exclusion. This is not only a concern of the “global south” and the colonial condition. 13 See Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Mapping the Language of Racism. Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation (New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). 14 The following lines in this paragraph are partially based on an unpublished summary written with Wolf Schünemann. 15 Reiner Keller, Müll – Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des Wertvollen, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2009). 16 Sara Holmgren, “REDD in the making: orders of knowledge in the climate–deforestation nexus,” Environmental Science & Policy 33 (2013): 369–377. Quote p. 376. 17 Moritz von Gliszczynski, New Ideas of Basic Social Protection. How Social Cash Transfers Changed Global Development Agendas (Bielefeld: unpublished PhD dissertation, 2013). 18 Christine Zimmermann, Familie als Konfliktfeld im amerikanischen Kulturkampf. Eine Diskursanalyse (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010). 19 Sophie Hövelmann, Deutungskämpfe mit ungleichen Chancen? Der Konflikt um die Umbenennung der ‚Mohrenstraße‘in Berlin Mitte (Augsburg: unpublished master’s thesis, 2015). 20 An old German world for people of black or dark brown skin color, roughly translated as “moor street” or “negro street”. 21 Reiner Keller and Angelika Poferl, “Soziologische Wissenskulturen zwischen individualisierter Inspiration und prozeduraler Legitimation. Zur Entwicklung qualitativer und interpretativer Sozialforschung in der deutschen und französischen Soziologie seit den 1960er Jahren [76 Absätze],” in Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 17, no.1, Art. 14, 2016, http://nbnresolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1601145 [English translation: Epistemic Cultures in Sociology Between Individual Inspiration and Legitimization by Procedure: Developments of Qualitative and Interpretive Research in German and French Sociology Since the 1960s, in editorial process, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research 2020].

70 Reiner Keller 22 Bruno Latour, “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern,” Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248. 23 Ibid., p. 228. 24 Ibid., p. 238. 25 Ibid., p. 231. 26 Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis, Demands of the Day. On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

4

Discursive psychology A non-cognitivist approach to practices of knowing Jonathan Potter

Discursive psychology was born in the early 1990s out of a broader discourse analytic approach to social psychology that was stimulated, in turn, by a critical engagement with work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, poststructuralism, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.1 The classic statements of the basic principles of discursive psychology are in Edwards and Potter,2 Edwards3 and Potter.4 Potter5 situates discursive psychology in contemporary debates and Wiggins6 is a recent book-length overview. Potter and Edwards summarize the relationship between conversation analysis and psychology.7 Since its beginning, discursive psychology has had a major focus on knowledge and epistemics. However, it brackets and respecifies both the particular idea of knowledge and the broader field of epistemics or knowledge related practices. Most importantly, it is not a program of work designed to provide an interaction-focused perspective on knowledge as an object revealed and defined by major traditions of analytic philosophy, or cognitive psychology, or communication science. Instead, it started with a broader, but no less epistemic, interest in the way descriptions are built as vehicles for practices. Let me clarify the analytic basis of the approach by taking one of its earliest studies. Wetherell and Potter looked at the way white (Päkehä) New Zealanders described the apparently violent actions of New Zealand police when dealing with protesters against an all-white rugby team from then apartheid South Africa touring the country.8 They looked at the way descriptions were produced that mitigated the actions of the police, either through ‘role constructions’ of the police ‘doing their job’ or through more psychological constructions that treated police violence as an ‘only human’ response to extreme provocation. The researchers note that when dealing with these descriptions it would be extremely difficult to add them together to produce one seamless account of the actions of the police. Instead, they opted for focusing not on the way the descriptions may or may not relate to ‘states of affairs’ but on how they worked as resources for building actions. To focus on the descriptive adequacy of these accounts of police violence would be to miss out on their relevance to the broader political project that these accounts are supporting, and in doing so it would be downplaying the significance of Maori protest against the Nation’s welcome for

72 Jonathan Potter a ‘racially’ selected sports team. Indeed, focusing on these accounts as authentic descriptions might leave the researcher as having implicitly and inadvertently taken sides in a broader ideological struggle. This approach builds on the lessons from the sociology of scientific knowledge that recognized the value of taking a symmetrical approach to ‘fact’ or ‘error’; that is, it uses the same form of social explanation for each. If the social researcher departs from this symmetrical stance, he or she risks simply providing a confirming sociological gloss for those groups that happen to have the upper hand in any dispute at the time of the research.9 ‘Truth’ becomes a product of the facts; ‘falsity’ a product of social distortions. The social analysis becomes dependent on prior epistemic commitments. However comfortable the researcher is with these commitments, the lesson of sociology of scientific knowledge is that incoherent analysis can follow from starting with them. The social researcher would not be analyzing epistemic practices but (implicitly) arbitrating between competing versions of the world. Discursive psychology extended this argument to epistemic domains beyond science. This approach to knowledge and epistemics is also informed by the discussions of the nature of description and observation developed by figures as varied as Wittgenstein, Popper, Quine and Sacks.10 In philosophical terms this is the problem of the underdetermination of description. That is, ‘the world’ does not determine its own description. Indeed, there is no separable ‘the world’ for which descriptions are offered – it is pervasively and inescapably subject to versions. Some versions are, of course, built as if they were not versions at all. Wittgenstein, for example, argued that ‘an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case’.11 Such underdetermination is inevitable given the practical requirement to have a vocabulary that is at the same time learnable and finite. However, it is also a basic part of the way that descriptions are fundamental parts of human practices. Indeed, while underdetermination may be a problem for some areas of epistemology, it is a consequence of the flexibility required to support the action orientation of language in an endlessly changing environment. Descriptions are produced in and for actions. A major focus of discursive psychology is the explication of this action orientation. These issues in discourse and sociology of scientific knowledge were explored on a broader philosophical canvas in Edwards, Ashmore and Potter’s Death and Furniture paper.12 Here is another example that highlights the issue of alternative descriptive versions and the way those alternatives are oriented to action. In Paul Drew’s classic work on legal cross examination, he noted the way divergent descriptions can manage blame and responsibility.13 C:

W:

An’ during that eve:ning: (0.6) uh: didn’t Mistuh ((name)) [the defendant] come over tuh sit with you (0.8) Sat at our table. (Drew, 1992, p. 489)

Discursive psychology 73 The competing versions produced by the Counsel and the Witness are the basis for different kinds of activities (very roughly blame increasing and blame decreasing). While ‘sit with you’ suggests familiarity and prior relationship, ‘sat at our table’ de-personalizes and de-familiarizes the relationship. Counsel for the alleged rapist (C) uses the (blame decreasing) formulation ‘sit with you’ while the putative victim offers the (blame increasing) competing version ‘sat at our table’. Note that the analysis here does not require a unique (and godlike) access to the reality of events beyond the court case. Drew is not starting with his own epistemic judgements. That is, in methodological terms, the interaction is analyzed for how it is put together to perform activities, without the analyst needing to know about the reality of W’s and Mistuh’s (names) motives, or about the solidity of the table they sat at (or near). Those things are the job of the jury to assess. In terms of knowledge, then, discursive psychologists are bracketing off issues about who ‘knows’ what, what is ‘true’, what ‘states of affairs’ might have pertained and so on. These are the things that are central for the participants; the discursive psychologist is concerned with the practices through which these things are managed by speakers. These issues have particular significance for more standard psychological paradigms for researching issues of knowledge. Indeed, one of the features of a major early theme in discursive psychological work was its critical engagement with cognitive psychology and social cognition – and especially with work on memory and attribution.14 Discursive psychology displayed its alternative to cognitive psychology and epistemics by critically reworking Ulrich Neisser’s classic study of John Dean’s testimony to the Senate Committee investigating the Watergate break in. Neisser used this testimony to develop, illustrate and warrant a division of memory into three kinds: verbatim, gist and repisodic.15 However, in considering the discourse in this tribunal in terms of memory, and then in developing a further division into three kinds of memory that result from underlying cognitive processes, Neisser failed to theorize the practical role of the different versions of what went on in the testimony. That is, he failed to address the conversational and institutional pragmatics of offering accounts which managed Dean’s own culpability in an adversarial setting (different senators were working to show Nixon’s guilt or innocence). Edwards and Potter’s16 reanalysis of his original materials shows that what was originally interpreted in terms of cognitive entities can be understood in terms of interactional pragmatics. Neisser’s cognitivist construction is imposed on Dean’s testimony. In discursive psychology, cognition is not the underlying thing that explains interaction; rather, versions of ‘cognition’ (mind, memory, scripts, attitudes and so on) come to be asserted, displayed or invoked as actions are formed and understood.17 Just as with descriptions of New Zealand police actions, and with versions of W and Mistuh’s relations, what the ‘states of affairs’ in the world are here, what is ‘true’ here, or what is reliably ‘known’, is socially contested. In the case of New Zealand/Aotearoa this contest played out in interview talk,

74 Jonathan Potter parliament and the media18; in the case of the rape trial it played out in questions of the different examining councils and the deliberations of the jury; in the case of the Senate Hearing it was in the quasi-judicial process of examining, testing and refining the evidence by senators and others taking pro or anti Nixon positions. What is known, what is knowledge, what is fact or supposition, believed or dissembled is the business of the participants. Often there are refined institutional procedures that have been designed to manage epistemic alternatives (although notably, legal procedures are adjudicating on guilt rather than truth). From the analytic perspective of discursive psychology, John Dean’s descriptions of events in the White House, his claims to remember (and those made on his behalf), are indistinguishable from his mode of accounting. The Senate Hearing (appropriately) decided on Nixon’s guilt and initiated proceedings for impeachment; discursive psychologists are focused on the way these different versions are built and undermined, bracketing off issues of Dean’s memory and Nixon’s guilt.

Contemporary discursive psychology Contemporary discursive psychology offers an approach to epistemic matters that is distinct from much of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, on the one hand, and from much critical discourse analysis, on the other. It is much closer to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and draws heavily on both of those approaches, yet there are also important points of disagreement particularly in its conceptualization of ‘cognitive’ or ‘epistemic’ matters – see Potter and Edwards19 on ethnomethodology and Potter and te Molder20 and Potter21 on conversation analysis. Like much of this conversation analytic work, discursive psychology addresses ‘knowledge’ and other epistemic matters in term of the ways in which they figure for participants in interactions where truth, knowledge, accuracy, factuality and so on are to be managed in relation to ongoing projects of a more or less mundane or institutional nature. A major theme in discursive psychology is how versions are built in ways that enhance or soften their epistemic status as solid, accurate, literal and separate from the speaker. Moreover, speakers can use the apparatus of footing (quoting, voicing, reporting) to mark their own accountability, or not, for the version being offered. The strength of competing versions is, in contrast, subject to undercutting through treating those versions as invented, distorted, a product of the producer’s stake and interest (ideas developed in more recent conversation analysis in terms of benefits and benefactives.22 I have suggested that we consider these practices in terms of ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ rhetoric: On the one hand, a description will work as offensive rhetoric insofar as it undermines alternative descriptions. It may be constructed precisely to rework, damage or reframe an alternative description. On the other, a description may provide defensive rhetoric depending on its capacity to

Discursive psychology 75 resist discounting or undermining. A whole range of techniques may be used to protect descriptions in this way.23 A range of studies has considered the way versions manage potential attributions of stake and interest and exploit the epistemic entitlements that normatively go with categories such as ‘friend’, ‘witness’ or ‘ordinary person’. ‘Friends’ claim epistemic rights to talk about one another’s personal psychological business24; ‘witnesses’ claim authority with respect to specific ‘seen’ events and happenings; ordinary people are more reliably convincing reporters of strange, unusual or paranormal events than ‘nutters’, sci-fi obsessives and enthusiastic paranormal investigators.25 Furthermore, the thesaurus of mental state terms and their associated displays is regularly bound up with epistemic concerns – ‘surprise’ can show an ‘expectation’; ‘upset’ can warrant a description of an incident as ‘distressing’ and so on. In this way, discursive psychology reveals the complex reflexive relationships between descriptions of the world and descriptions of mental states.26 As speakers provide reports of events which attend to issues of causality, action and accountability in those events, so, simultaneously, they are inevitably displaying or managing their own agency and accountability in the provision of the report. This means that constructions of mind and constructions of reality operate together as parts of practices. For reviews and further illustrations of this perspective, see Edwards and Potter,27 Potter,28 Potter and Hepburn29 and Wooffitt.30 For the rest of this chapter I will focus on two emerging themes in discursive psychology. The first is the practical use of psychological terms such as ‘know’ in ascriptions and avowals, and in particular their epistemic significance. The second is the way a psychological ‘state’ (which might be glossed as ‘knowing’) is displayed and responded to in talk and embodied conduct. The aim will be to show how epistemic terms can operate as parts of particular practices, the way that parties may claim or display knowledge or understanding, and most importantly the way these epistemic practices operate for the parties themselves. Epistemic practices display, assert, undercut and otherwise manage issues of knowledge, linking them to individuals, institutions, features of the world and so on. Crucially such practices must operate for the parties in a way that is intelligible and learnable in situ and does not require the parties to have behind-the-scenes access (whatever that might be) to brain states or cognitive processes (whatever they might be). Although psychologists often confect scenarios that manipulate or presuppose such putative access, this is not a model of life available to actors living their lives. In Emmanuel Schegloff’s (2005)31 formulation, the analytic work here is designed to have an integrity of method, phenomena and explanatory concepts. The method is designed to explicate situated organization of interaction in the participants’ own terms, the phenomena is the collection of epistemic practices that are woven into that interaction, and the explanatory concepts are designed to account for the organizations as they are relevant to those parties (although not necessarily in the terms that they themselves use). Discursive psychology

76 Jonathan Potter started with a strong focus on how event descriptions are built as live parts of actions to support different psychological implications. More recently there has been an interest in considering how psychological terms operate as parts of practices. As we are focused on the role of these terms interactionally they will need to be analyzed within the descriptive, narrative and turn-by-turn sequences where they occur, where inferences about intentions, thoughts, feelings, motives (and so on) are made available and countered in how events are told. In what follows, I will take an example from mundane interaction and another from institutional interaction. In each case the point will be to illustrate the subtle and complex ways in which epistemic issues play out and can be made tractable in discursive analysis. Example one: ‘know’ and tag question

This exchange comes from a corpus of everyday phone conversations recorded in the UK. Ozzie has phoned Skip, who is called to the phone by his partner – Leslie – who answers. Ozzie has identified himself by both his full name and his institutional affiliation – from Castle Cary Red Cross. After the most minimal Hello/Hi exchange, Skip gets straight to the business of the call, which is a request. 01 Ski: Hello::,hhh 02 Ozz: ↑Hi Ski:p .hh I’m on: the lookout fo:r someone: to come 03 out on duty eh to a scramble on Sundee 04 (0.2) 05 Ski: .hh[hhhhhhhhhhhh [hu06 Ozz: [↓if possible [please 07 (0.3) 08→Ski: Uh::,h yeah I know I’d promised for that one too had’n 09 I. .hh Uh::mn (.) this is the Launchly one isn’i:t.h 10 Ozz: Yeh. 11 Ski: .hhhhh Well look Oz ah- (0.2) my daughter’s coming 12 ba:ck u-an’ I may ‘af to take her to Bristol. I:= 13 Ozz: =Yeah? 14→Ski: I know I’ve: (.) promised that one an’ I wanted to do 15 it .hhh uh::m (0.3) can you leave it in abeyance[‘ntil]= 16 Ozz: [Y e h]= 17 Ski: =I’ve had a[word with ‘er 18 Ozz: [( ) 19 Ozz: ↓Ye-:h su:re. 20 Ski: u-Uh: but if I possibly can I: wi↓:ll.h 21 Ozz: Yeh? 22 Ski: .h[hhh 23 Ozz: [Love↓l[y. 24 Ski: [That’(d) be a:fter lu↓:nch. 25 Ozz: Yeh that’ll be fine.= (Holt, 1988 Undated: Side 2: Call 04)

Discursive psychology 77 There are many things that are potentially of analytic interest here. However, for the current discussion my focus is the use of ‘know’ on lines 8 and 14, and the tag question at the end of lines 8–9. I will offer a series of observations. Note first that line 8 follows a turn that is hearable as a request of some kind on 2–3. This request is built through Ozzie reporting his own ongoing action of looking for someone to help at a charity event (Pomerantz, 1980).32 The fact that Skip is the addressee and has been specifically phoned up treats him as being able to accede to the request, or at least help with it in some way; nevertheless, this subject-side construction softens the force of the request somewhat. Second, after a short delay following a point at which the request is hearably (potentially) complete at the end of line 3, Skip produces a long, sharp inbreath. Given the preferred next action following a request is an acceptance or pre-emptive offer, the fine positioning of this inbreath (combined with the 0.2 second delay) will be a real-time indication to Ozzie that the request is in trouble. Almost immediately after the delay and the start of the inbreath Ozzie adds an increment – ↓if possible – that orients to and maybe prepares for the airing of potential contingencies that may affect Skip’s acceptance. In addition, Skip adds ‘please’. In this position, ‘please’ not only confirms its status as an action that makes demands on the recipient which may require them to act but, as Mandelbaum33 shows, makes it hearably more insistent. Third, after a further brief but hearable delay (extended by ‘Uh::,h’ and a ‘yeah’ that may start to acknowledge a prior commitment), Skip produces a construction taking the form ‘I know X’. The X here is ‘I’d promised for that one too’. Consider the status of this. As Searle has argued, a promise is a public and collaborative event. A range of work in conversation analysis has highlighted the difference in entitlement to describe A-events (your own feelings, whether you are having a party and so on) compared with B-events (generic features of the world, characteristics of third parties).34 In this context, a promise is a public event that both parties have equal rights to. The point here is that Skip’s turn is not produced to inform Ozzie of something new; rather Skip is (now) acknowledging with ‘I know’ that he had previously promised. There is another feature of the way this turn builds something that is known or shared between them. Note that it uses a tag question. That is, the ‘I know X’ component is the declarative part of the tag question which is combined with interrogative part: ‘had’n I.’. A standard feature of tag questions is that they treat the recipient as able to confirm what is asserted in the declarative; in conversation analytic terms they ‘prefer’ a confirming response. What Skip has done here is strongly place both parties in the same epistemic position with respect to the commitment Skip has made to help. In

78 Jonathan Potter Heritage’s language,35 it publicly marks both parties as K+ with respect to that commitment. Why? What is the interactional purpose of this avowal of knowledge that they both have? I suggest that there are two key roles, one backward facing and one forward facing. The backward-facing role is in warranting Ozzie’s request. That is, it provides the shared basis for Ozzie making precisely such a request – a request that does not orient to either Skip’s wants or (until the late increment) the contingencies on his compliance. Skip’s construction is thus strongly affiliative, legitimating Ozzie’s right to be making this request, and perhaps making it early in the interaction. The forward-facing role is rather different. Having confirmed his commitment – now described as a promise – there are two details here that are significant. First, note the past tense of ‘I’d promised’ which signals a possible problem with delivering on the promise in the current context. Second, note the use of ‘too’, which at least potentially highlights the relevance of Skip having already helped out on an event of this kind. And indeed, after an insertion clarifying precisely which event he is being asked to help with, Skip produces a high value account for rowing back on his promise to a position of (potential) non-participation – a parent’s duty to his child: ‘my daughter’s coming ba:ck u-an’ I may ‘af to take her to Bristol.’ So, Skip has underscored the authenticity of his prior commitment to help, while invoking a major obstacle. Note the way that Ozzie’s incremental ‘if possible’ projects precisely the contingency of Skip’s compliance: ‘may’ highlights the potential for this problem; ‘have to’ the order of the pre-existing commitment. The general case I am developing here is that both epistemic terms such as ‘know’ and epistemic items such as tag questions have a finely tuned, local, interactional role. These practices are built for the public work that they do. Whatever each party may or may not ‘know’ in some abstract, cognitive sense of the term, what discursive psychologists are focused on is knowledge operating in public epistemic practices. These are exquisitely calibrated to action and unfold in real time with a delicate choreography. This analysis presents a non-cognitivist analysis. What I mean by that is that phrases such as ‘know’ which are often treated as cognitive (referring to mental objects, capturing psychological or individual states) need be analyzed for their practical role. As analysts of those practices we do not need to explain them by way of underlying, inner objects (mental images, perhaps, or lists of propositions, say, or brain states) nor do the parties to the interaction need to have access through some other route to underlying states or objects to make sense of the practices. People do not need to hand out questionnaires or conduct fMRI scans before interacting with one another. The integrity of those practices arises from their public and communicable nature. Key to analysis here is understanding the way such terms work in the formation of actions and the way they are related to the systematics of interaction that are

Discursive psychology 79 uncovered by conversation analysis. Let us develop this with an example from institutional interaction. Example two: ‘Know’, idiomatic construction and tag question

I will focus on the combination of three epistemically related phenomena of talk in interaction: idiomatic formulations, constructions using ‘know’ and tag questions. This example comes from a collection of similar examples taken from a corpus of calls to a child protection helpline.36 The broad interest is in advice giving and advice resistance, and specifically on the way advice givers can resist advice resistance. Advice is an interesting environment for considering epistemics; in their classic work, Heritage and Sefi37 showed that advice sequences assume an epistemic asymmetry between advisor and advised (for a recent overview see also Hepburn, Shaw and Potter38). One of the standard ways in which advice is resisted is to subvert or deny the asymmetry, for example where a young mother asserts better or equal understanding of her own baby than the health visitor who is offering advice.39 In the helpline calls there are strong normative expectations about the distribution of ‘knowledge’. Child Protection workers offer a range of descriptions of child protection legislation, of how social services will respond, of what forms of institutional support are available to victims and so on. These are rarely directly contradicted. In contrast, callers describe particulars of their life circumstances, characteristics of their relatives, the severity of injuries and so on. Again, although Child Protection workers may interrogate these details, they rarely contradict them. In Heritage’s terms they each have normatively privileged status in each of these areas. And unlike Ozzie and Skip’s phone call above, helpline calls are typically the first encounters between the parties.40 This asymmetry is played out in advice giving and advice resistance. The CP worker offers advice that is linked to their privileged status with respect to broadly child protection matters. The caller can resist that advice by drawing on details of their individual lives and locality that they have primary rights to. They can offer individual details of situations and events that can undercut the advice. What resources does the CP worker have to manage this impasse? One common approach they take involves a practice that includes three elements. Element one: repackage the advice in idiomatic terms. That is the advice is packaged in a way that gives it a taken for granted or tautological quality. The flexibility of description provides precisely for such repackaging. Interactional studies suggest such forms are relatively robust and hard to rebut.41 Element two: tag format that idiomatic construction. This builds the idiomatic construction as the declarative element of a tag question. Crucially this treats the recipient as being in a position to confirm what is asserted in the declarative.

80 Jonathan Potter Element three: the CP worker continues to talk past the transitionrelevant place, often with latching to compress the transition space. This denies the caller clear space to develop further resistance. The below example illustrates how these dynamics unfold. In this example, the caller is phoning about her teenage daughter whom she describes as aggressive and claims is disrupting the lives of her other children. It becomes clear early in the call that the caller is hoping that the daughter can be taken into care by Social Services and hoping that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children can make this happen. The CP worker notes that Social Services are very unlikely to take the daughter into care, and advises alternative options, notably taking time off work, focusing on her daughter and starting a course of family therapy. The caller has been resisting this line of advice up this point. Note how she uses details from her epistemically privileged domain for that resistance – she has a new job (i.e. it is difficult to take time off) and a new mortgage (i.e. money is too tight to take unpaid leave). WO Problem daughter II: Priorities 01 CPO: 02 Caller: 03 CPO: 04 05 Caller: 06 07 CPO: 08 Caller: 09 CPO: 10 Caller: 11 CPO: 12 13 Caller: 14 15→CPO: 16→ 17→ 18 Caller: 19 CPO: 20 Caller: 21 22 Caller: 23 CPO: 24 25 26 27 Caller: 28

R:ight.=[would it not be possible for you to] [ .h h h h h h h h h h h ] maybe take some lea:ve while-while she’s livin [wiv you.] [.shih ] I:’ve only jus’ started this jo:b.=I [mean ] er i’ possible but you know [Ri:gh’.] I’d be unpaid ‘n I’m [just st]artin a new [Mm:. ] mhor(hh)tghage (hh)an [I-] [Ri]:ght. Ri[ght. ] [Ye kn]ow it’s:: (0.6) °°k (.)°°tk Yerh:.=.hh I mean- ye know at the end of the day i-it’s about priorities isn’ it.=an [ye know o]bviously she:’s got to come fir:st [I know:.] in all of this.=[because she’s (the-)] [Yeah but if I’ve got] nowhere to li(hh)ve then she sh- .hhh [ye know,] [.hh] [NO::. ]=BUt [y’kn]ow I mean social services would be sayin to ↓you:, y-ye know that th-the job would have to come secondary.=I mean ultimately [(as I said) ] [But it ~ca:n’]t.~ (.)

Discursive psychology 81 Lines 1–10 here are characteristic of advice resistance, which is built through a texture of particulars that the Caller has privileged access to. The CPO responds in lines 15–17 by using the three-element practice. The CPO’s first element is the idiomatic formulation. This repackages the Caller’s action-relevant version of themselves: ‘at the end of the day i-it’s about priorities’. It is hard to counter the claim ‘it’s about priorities’, especially when neither the ‘it’ nor the ‘priorities’ are specified. Indeed, priorities are typically indexically understood – different people can have different priorities; different situations afford different priorities. Put another way, to counter this construction the Caller is faced with unpacking the ‘it’ and the ‘priorities’ – both of which would likely generate more trouble for her project of resisting the offered advice and offer the CPO an opportunity to offer further generic social work wisdom. The additional figurative construction ‘at the end of the day’ neatly disengages the claim about priorities from the kinds of current specifics that the Caller might use to counter the advice. This repackaging presents (represents) the Caller with the course of action that she had up to this point being resisting. In this sequence, ‘the daughter coming first’ is relevantly hearable as the Caller taking time off to support her daughter, and possibly undertaking therapy that will sort out the family problems. In addition, idioms are often used to close off sequences, and its role here may be oriented to bringing the advice (and the resistance) to a halt. The second element is the tag construction: ‘i-it’s about priorities isn’ it.’ This treats the Caller as being in a position to confirm that it is about priorities; that is, to confirm precisely what she has been resisting up to this point – that her daughter’s needs must take precedence over her own job. By issuing the tag in this environment the recipient is designed as already able to agree with (an idiomatic version of) the advice. She is presented as already knowing the thing she is resisting. The third element is the latching. The Caller responds to the advice at a point of grammatical and pragmatic completion with ‘I know:.’ Mikesell et al.42 have shown the way ‘I know’ in environments such as this can agree with the content of the advice while resisting the action of advising. This is yet another practical, situated use of the term ‘know’ and it reflects the earlier work on advice where knowledge is emphasized to build resistance. Without orienting to this, the CP worker latches further talk to the tag, which fills the transition space and thereby works to dampen the response requirement. Despite a further attempt to resist from the Caller, the CP worker continues with talk that unpacks the idiomatic construction, fills the priority explicitly (the daughter), and builds this further construction as both self-evident (another practical epistemic move) and uses a discourse marker (‘ye know’) that suggests shared knowledge.43 This example is more complex than the previous one. However, the general point is the same. Epistemic issues are live and consequential for participants. The development of advice and advice resistance is bound up with issues of

82 Jonathan Potter what is known, which is claimed, described, displayed and oriented to as the sequence unfolds.

Final thoughts The focus of this chapter has been on epistemic matters as they arise in and are managed in participants’ discourse. The basic aim has been to show that a coherent and integrated analysis is possible without reference to the technical and internal concepts of cognitive psychology. Such conduct can be analyzed without making the cognitivist assumption that knowledge must be understood in terms of underlying cognitive objects and systems. The examples above are illustrative – there is much more to be said. In each case the point is that the analysis is self-sufficient at the level of action rather than dependent on some other form of analysis. Indeed, it must be self-sufficient because this is what the interactants themselves are working with. The examples illustrate how epistemic issues are produced and managed in real time in interaction. They show uses of the word ‘know’, uses of questions in tag position to build the recipient as able to confirm some claim, and the use of figurative or idiomatic formulations to build ‘know-in-common’ claims that are tricky to rebut. They are illustrative of a broader discursive psychological tradition of work that is focused on understanding how descriptions are constructed in the service of action and, more specifically, where psychology is understood as an object in and for interaction. In classic philosophical treatments, knowledge is contrasted with belief. However, when looked at from an interactional perspective both knowing and believing are Subject-side constructions.44 Both index the speaker as accountable for knowing or believing. Thus, in example one, Skip’s ‘I know’ construction ties this version to him. In example two the CP worker’s ‘you know’ construction ties the knowledge to both parties. The contrast is with Object-side constructions. These are versions that are not linked to any speaker or participant in the interaction, but produced as objectively and separately how things are. Thus in example two the CP worker’s description about what ‘social services would be saying to ↓you:,’ is built as Object-side. The distinction between Object-side and Subject-side is provided for by range of grammatical constructions and is bound up with the different actions that are being done. For example, assessments can be done as Object-side or Subject-side, with each being used to perform different actions.45 A major issue for cognitivist accounts of knowledge, whether from cognitive or neuropsychology, or from critical discourse analysis, is how their claims can be kept methodically separate from the epistemic practices that are involved in the research process itself. The early discursive psychological research highlighted how the claims produced by cognitive and social psychologists about repisodic memory, say, or the language-category model of attribution, are understandable

Discursive psychology 83 as methodological artefacts that result from failing to fully attend to the practical and action orientation of discourse.46 More recently, interaction researchers have studied the operation of method and how individual psychological phenomena can be constituted by the practices embedded within the method. For example, Antaki and colleagues have shown the way the subtle and complex interaction between researcher and researched can collaboratively generate specific outcomes, yet those outcomes are typically understood as a product of the underlying characteristics of the persons who are researched.47 In another strand of work, Puchta and Potter48 show how key epistemic terms such as opinions or beliefs perform practical tasks in eliciting certain kinds of answers (e.g. quick answers) and head off certain kinds of troubles (e.g. asking the researcher questions). Puchta and Potter show the way that collaborative moves in the generation of opinions are interactionally stripped off in the course of methodological practices to present opinions not as public actions but as entities possessed by individuals.49 These studies caution researchers about the way individual characteristics may be produced rather than discovered by the common methods of psychologists. The point is that interactional studies tune us to both the practical role of epistemic categories, and how that practical role can be methodologically obscured by methods such as experiments, questionnaires and so on. Discursive psychology has a rich, but sometimes complicated, relationship with conversation analysis. John Heritage has recently developed an ambitious, systematic and increasingly influential approach to understanding epistemics in natural conversation (e.g. Heritage50). A range of conversation analytic work with this focus can be found in Stivers, Mondada and Steensig.51 There are, however, still unresolved questions on how cognition should be conceptualized in conversation analysis, as shown in the different contributions in te Molder and Potter52; and there have been sharp exchanges with some ethnomethodologists about the coherence of this tradition of work.53 This is an area of significant analytic and theoretical development. Discursive psychology also sits in a complex relationship with cognitivist approaches to human conduct (cognitive psychology, social cognition, social cognitive neuroscience, critical discourse analysis). One way of understanding discursive psychology is as an account of the way cognitive, or psychological, or mental, or subjective matters figure in, and do important business in, public interaction. This chapter is intended to illustrate the way that this level of analysis can be self-sufficient and done without recourse to separate and underlying cognitive notions. If this works as an adequate account of the organization of epistemic practices it will have identified what cognitive or neurological work discursive psychology in conversation analysis will need to be able to account for. That will be an interesting and perhaps important task – but it is not a prerequisite for the study of epistemic practices. Such a study can continue without, for example, having to have a position on debates between connectionism and computationalism, or on the coherence or not of Fodoresque ideas about the language of mind and the operation of

84 Jonathan Potter mental representations.54 That said, the Wittgensteinian, Sacksian and Edwardian thrust of discursive psychology encourages a rigorously skeptical approach to all forms of cognitivism. Discursive psychology brackets off a concern with the truth of peoples’ descriptions in favor of focusing on how they are used in action.

Notes 1 Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (London: Sage, 1987). 2 Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, Discursive Psychology (London: Sage, 1992a). Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, “Language and causation: A discursive action model of description and attribution,” Psychological Review, 100 (1993): 23–41. 3 Derek Edwards, Discourse and Cognition (London: Sage, 1997). 4 Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996). 5 Jonathan Potter, “Re-reading discourse and social psychology: Transforming social psychology,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 51 (2012): 336–455. Jonathan Potter, “Discourse analysis and discursive psychology,” in APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology: Vol. 2. Quantitative, Qualitative, Neuropsychological, and Biological, ed. H. Cooper (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, 2012): 111–130. 6 Sally Wiggins, Discursive Psychology: Theory, Method and Applications (London: Sage, 2017). 7 Jonathan Potter and Derek Edwards, “Conversation analysis and psychology,” in Routledge Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds. Tanya Stivers and Jack Sidnell (London: Routledge, 2012). 8 Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, “Narrative characters and accounting for violence,” in Texts of identity, eds. John Shotter and Kenneth Gergen (London: Sage, 1989). 9 Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1985). Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How Scientists Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 10 Potter, Representing Reality. Op. cit.4 11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edition, 1958). 12 Derek Edwards, Malcolm Ashmore, and Jonathan Potter, “Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics, and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism,” History of the Human Sciences, 8 (1995): 25–49. 13 Paul Drew, “Contested evidence in courtroom cross-examination: The case of a trial for rape,” in Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, eds. Paul Drew and John Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 470–520. 14 Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, “The chancellor’s memory: Rhetoric and truth in discursive remembering,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 6 (1992b): 187–215. 15 Ulric Neisser, “John Dean’s memory: A case study,” Cognition, 9 (1981): 1–22. Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (Oxford: W.H. Freeman, 1982). 16 Edwards and Potter, Discursive Psychology. Op. cit.2 17 Ibid. Edwards and Potter, “The chancellor’s memory.” Op. cit.14

Discursive psychology 85 18 Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation (London: Harvester; New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992). 19 Jonathan Potter and Derek Edwards, “Rethinking cognition: On Coulter, discourse and mind,” Human Studies, 26 (2003): 165–181. 20 Jonathan Potter and Hedwig te Molder, “Talking cognition: Mapping and making the terrain,” in Conversation and Cognition, eds. Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 1–54. 21 Jonathan Potter, “Cognition and conversation,” Discourse Studies, 8 (1996): 131–140. 22 Clayman, S. and John Heritage, “Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests,” in Requesting in Social Interaction, eds. Paul Drew and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014): 55–86. 23 Potter, Representing Reality. Op. cit.,4 107. 24 Anita Pomerantz and Jenny Mandelbaum, “Conversation analytic approaches to the relevance and uses of relationship categories in interaction,” in Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, eds. Kristine L. Fitch and Robert E. Sanders (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005): 149–173. 25 Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn, “Discursive constructionism,” in Handbook of Constructionist Research, eds. James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium (New York, NY: Guildford, 2008): 275–293. 26 Derek Edwards, “Managing subjectivity in talk,” in Discursive Research in Practice: New Approaches to Psychology and Interaction, eds. Alexa Hepburn and Sally Wiggins (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 31–49. 27 Edwards and Potter, Discursive Psychology. Op. cit.2 Edwards and Potter, “The chancellor’s memory.” Op. cit.14 28 Potter, Representing Reality. Op. cit.4 29 Potter and Hepburn, “Discursive constructionism.” Op. cit.25 30 Robin Wooffitt, Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction (London: Sage, 2005). 31 Emanuel A. Schegloff, “On integrity in inquiry … of the investigated, not the investigator,” Discourse Studies 7, nos. 4–5 (2005): 455–480. 32 Anita Pomerantz, “Telling my side: ‘limited access’ as a fishing device,” Sociological Inquiry 50 (1980): 186–198. 33 Jenny Mandelbaum, “How to do things with requests: Request sequences at the family dinner table,” in Requesting in Social Interaction, eds. Paul Drew and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014): 215–242. 34 John Rogers, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 35 John Heritage, “Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45 (2012): 1–29. 36 Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter, “Designing the recipient: Some practices that manage advice resistance in institutional settings,” Social Psychology Quarterly, 74 (2011): 216–241. Alexa Hepburn, “Crying: Notes on description, transcription and interaction,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37 (2004): 251–290. Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn, “I’m a bit concerned – Early actions and psychological constructions in a child protection helpline,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36 (2003): 197–240. Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn, “Discursive psychology, institutions and child protection,” in Language, Discourse and Social Psychology Handbook, eds. Ann Weatherall, Bernadette Watson and Cindy Gallois (London: Palgrave, 2007): 160–181.

86 Jonathan Potter 37 John Heritage and Sue Sefi, “Dilemmas of advice: Aspects of the delivery and reception of advice in interactions between health visitors and first-time mothers,” in Talk at Work, eds. Paul Drew and John Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 359–419. 38 Alexa Hepburn, Chloe Shaw and Jonathan Potter, “Advice implicative actions: Using interrogatives and assessments to deliver advice in mundane interaction,” Discourse Studies, 17 (2015): 317–342. 39 John Heritage and Sue Sefi, “Dilemmas of advice: Aspects of the delivery and reception of advice in interactions between health visitors and first-time mothers.” Op. cit.37 40 John Heritage, “Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge.” Op. cit.35 41 Paul Drew and Elizabeth Holt, “Complainable matters: The use of idiomatic expressions in making complaints,” Social Problems, 35 (1988): 398–417. Celia Kitzinger, “How to resist an idiom,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 332 (2000): 121–154. Edwards and Potter, Discursive Psychology. Op. cit.2 42 Lisa Mikesell, Galina Bolden, Jenny Mandelbaum, Jeffrey Robinson, Tanya Romaniuk, Alexa Bolanos-Carpio, Darcey Searles, Wan Wei, Stephen M. DiDomenico, and Beth Angell, “At the intersection of epistemics and action: Responding with I know,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50 (2017). 43 Edwards, Discourse and Cognition. Op. cit.3 44 Derek Edwards, “Managing subjectivity in talk,” in Discursive Research in Practice: New Approaches to Psychology and Interaction. Op cit.26 45 Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, “Some uses of subject-side assessments,” Discourse Studies, 19 (2017): 497–514. Sally Wiggins and Jonathan Potter, “Attitudes and evaluative practices: Category vs. item and subjective vs. objective constructions in everyday food assessments,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 42 (2003): 513–531. 46 Edwards and Potter, Discursive Psychology. Op. cit.2 Edwards and Potter, “The chancellor’s memory.” Op. cit.14 Edwards and Potter, “Language and causation.” Op. cit.2 47 Charles Antaki and Mark Rapley, “‘Quality of Life’ Talk: The liberal paradox of psychological testing,” Discourse and Society, 7 (1996): 293–316. 48 Claudia Puchta and Jonathan Potter, Focus Group Practice (London: Sage, 2004). 49 Claudia Puchta and Jonathan Potter, “Manufacturing individual opinions: Market research focus groups and the discursive psychology of attitudes,” British Journal of Social Psychology, 41 (2002): 345–363. 50 John Heritage, “Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge,” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45 (2012): 1–29. 51 Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada and Jakob Steensig, The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 52 Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter (eds.), Conversation and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Potter, “Cognition and conversation.” Op. cit.21 53 Michael Lynch and Jean Wong, “Reverting to a hidden interactional order: Epistemics, informationism, and conversation analysis,” Discourse Studies, 18 (2016): 526–549. John Heritage, “The ubiquity of epistemics: A rebuttal of the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ group,” Discourse Studies, 20 (2017): 14–56. 54 Potter and te Molder, “Talking cognition.” Op. cit.20

Part II

Three prototypical studies of discourses in action Nour Halabi Discourses are objects of study that construct – and are constructed by – the communities in which they circulate, are interpreted, and enacted. The chapters in this section provide three prototypical discourse analyses. The first chapter exemplifies how meanings emerge and are contested in discursive interactions. Such studies tend to focus on the roles that communities, individuals, and the media play in interpreting texts. The second exemplifies discourse analyses that focus on the consequences of discourses for collective or institutionalized action. Such studies tend to examine how the choice of language reflects deeper ontological and epistemological differences between their speakers as performers or actors, with consequences in multiple realms including the application of law, the shaping of policy, and other areas. The third prototypical discourse analysis in this section concerns the nonreferential dimensions of discourse. As such, this last chapter explores the symbolic value of a foundational text on national identity, core values, institution-building, and other areas of political and social life. Mary Angela Bock’s chapter explores the evidentiary value of videos of police–civilian interactions, contesting the assumption that unedited video footage is an objective representation of reality. Her study examines videos of police–civilian interactions captured by police officers’ body cameras or shot on bystanders’ smartphones and argues that the raw and by necessity decontextualized videos rarely function as indisputable evidence. Rather, they acquire different meanings depending on the discourses that recontextualize them and describe the circumstances surrounding their recording and publication. The study then contrasts three competing discursive frameworks: The institutionalized discourse of the police, the discourse of activists for police accountability, and the discourse of the mainstream media, all of which compete for acceptance in the public sphere. Bock’s engaging intervention into the debate on police accountability challenges our assumptions of the inherent objectivity of photographic and videographic representations by demonstrating how different discursive frameworks seek to control their meanings and evidentiary value. Anabela Carvalho’s chapter turns its discursive analytical lens to diverse responses to global climate change. She argues that discursive responses to the challenge of global climate change can either empower and mobilize individuals

88 Nour Halabi and communities or disincentivize them by placing governments and international institutions at the helm of a top-down response to this global environmental problem. In her comparative discourse study, Carvalho analyzes two documents: A United Nations Report on climate change and an activistgenerated Leap Manifesto. Carvalho’s analysis of the United Nations’ report finds that it favors conventional and conservative responses which preserve existing power structures and calls for governmental action that is more easily applied at the international level. This conventional discourse also perpetuates existing and largely ineffective frameworks to tackling climate change, while subsuming climate change action within discussions of “sustainable development” and the “green economy” which deprioritize environmental protection and privilege global economic development. In contrast, she finds that The Leap Manifesto, written by a broad coalition of activists and artists, unleashes the transformative potential of radical discourse towards achieving a socially, economically, and environmentally just futures. In so doing, Carvalho’s study exemplifies the ability of discourses to individually motivate or institutionally curb transformations of socio-political reality for generations to come. For his chapter, Greg Urban turns to a foundational body of text that discursively defines political, legal, and social realities: A Constitution. Urban looks beyond the legal and political implications of national constitutions to attend to the relatively under-theorized dimension of these crucial texts as national emblems of stability, national identity, and shared values to the communities living under their jurisdiction. He adopts Durkheim’s concept of the “group totems” to explore how constitutions serve the function of “representing a group to itself.” The chapter draws on the findings of 870 interviews conducted with citizens from all over the world. Urban seeks to capture the “thing-like” salience of national constitutions in each public to measure the affective attachment of citizenry to their national constitutions. The resulting cross-national comparative discourse analysis illustrates that, despite historical, legal, cultural, and linguistic differences, constitutions function as national emblems that symbolize political order and reassurances of the rule of law and citizens’ moral rights. Thus, Urban observes that the prospect of the abolition of a constitution evokes fear of chaos, tyranny, loss of identity, or uncontrolled change. Together, the chapters of this section present three discursive analytical prototypes. They are extendable to the study of numerous discursive phenomena whether in need of clarification or calling for socially transformative actions. As most of social phenomena are argued and settled in language, by placing discourse at the center of their analysis, scholars of discourse are uniquely qualified to provide deeper understanding of social phenomena and suggest ways of constructively intervene in the political, legal and social realities we live with and often habitually enact.

5

Re-contextualizing visual representations The videos of and about police accountability in three competing discourses Mary Angela Bock

The sound is muffled, but the voices sound lighthearted. Two boys approach, and suddenly the sound of a basketball hitting the pavement can be heard. The camera moves, jolts, jostles and we hear panting, a push here and there, some cries of triumph. Only for a split second or two do we see the focus of all this activity: a basketball. The camera is focused on the officer’s hands, the boys, the street. Such is the nature of a subjective camera, long used for theatrical effect in the cinema, to bring our eyes into another’s space, to see what another has seen. Body cameras or “badge-cams” for police are relatively new and are seen by many law enforcement leaders as an important technological tool for solving crimes and, perhaps more importantly, for defending the decisions made by police officers. Such videos are also a response to those made by citizens who record police activity from a completely different perspective, geographically and politically. Videos of police activity are changing public debate about law enforcement in the United States. The limits of what a camera can convey about reality through de-contextualized images are well-established among communication scholars, but for the most part have not been a mainstream concern. That is changing, in part because of the role of video in police accountability activism. This chapter examines the way two opposing stakeholders, police accountability activists (PAAs) and law enforcement officers (LEOs), discuss the evidentiary value of such videos. Based on ethnographic material and a small case study, I argue that the interpretation of video evidence relies simultaneously on its indexicality and contingency, enabling discourses of and discourses about “what happened.” Critical discourse analysis (CDA) will guide the effort, as it offers not only a method but a way of thinking about how language and power are intertwined in the contextualizations of evidentiary video. As other contributors to this volume have argued, CDA productively combines theory and method and enables analysts to “uncover” the way power can be exercised in language. CDA’s flexibility and the way its methods can be productively applied to such seemingly unrelated discourses are testament to its strength.

90 Mary Angela Bock

Theoretical foundation At its simplest, CDA examines the way power is manifest in language.1 The term is often used interchangeably with critical linguistics, but at its core “aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized and so on by language use (or in discourse).”2 This parenthetical is important for the purpose of this project, in that contemporary discourse often takes multi-mediated forms, combining word, image, audio, graphic and design cues. CDA examines the way language is used to establish the “position” of a speaker or reader, hide harsh realities through jargon or euphemisms and establish assumptions about “common sense.”3 Kress and Leeuwen4 described the way these elements operate individually and symbiotically. CDA is best applied reflexively, for in order to consider the subject and actor positions of others in discourse, it logically follows that researchers acknowledge their own position.5 In that spirit, I acknowledge that I am concerned about social equality, and as a former journalist, I am sympathetic to the role of photographers in civil discourse. Because it is concerned with the relationship between power and language, CDA is well suited for studying the police accountability videos. This chapter explores the way such videos are both indexical and interpreted in language, what I call, respectively, discourses of and about video. The analysis draws from interviews (pseudonyms are used here for the anonymity of research subjects), social media, and news accounts about police accountability video. Using iterative, grounded analysis of the corpus as prescribed by Strauss and Corbin,6 I first examine the way such videos are created and talked about by key stakeholders, PAAs and LEOs. Then, using a specific case from Austin, Texas, I examine how the discourse of one video artifact can yield very different discourses about it. Before this analysis, though, it is helpful to briefly review the way that photographic evidence has been used by law enforcement; the history of the police accountability movement, and the role of context in the interpretation of photographic artifacts. Photography and policing

The camera has long been employed by law enforcement as a crime-fighting tool.7 Alphonse Bertillon, a key figure in the effort to professionalize police departments, established the use of mug shots, partly as a misguided effort to scientifically identify a “criminal facial type” but also to catalog criminals, which remains a function of mug shots today.8 As a scare tactic in 1871, the French government displayed photos of the corpses of Communards whose rebellion at the barricades had failed.9 Photographs were used in court as evidence in the United States for the first time in 1860, taking advantage of what at the time was a strong sense of faith in the camera’s empiricism.10 One of the more important trajectories in photography in the twentieth century is the shrinking of its cameras, and this too affects the way they’re

Re-contextualizing visual representations 91 used to gather evidence. Once as large as home appliances, cameras could be hand-held by the 1970s for what was named “Electronic News Gathering,” which replaced the use of film for television news.11 Soon cameras were small and inexpensive enough that the general public could invest in a camcorder, the kind that was used by a bystander in 1991 to record the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles.12 Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007, with its embedded highquality camera, spawned a new era of police accountability videos. Today many police departments are collecting their own video evidence with even smaller cameras, or “badge-cams,” which can be worn by officers on the job. Citizen videos and badge-cam videos are only the latest types of visual evidence offered in criminal cases.13 Cases might also use traditional surveillance video from cameras posted outdoors or inside buildings for security.14 “DashCam” video is a technology that has been available to police departments since the start of the twenty-first century and uses small cameras to capture what is in front of a police car, sometimes with audio, sometimes not.15 Organized cop-watching

Smartphones and wireless connectivity have energized the police accountability movement but its roots precede the digital age. The practice can be traced to a form of protest and resistance that emerged in the 1960s.16 The group claiming to be the oldest in the USA, in Berkeley, California, was established in 1990 (wecopwatch.org) before the 1991 beating of Rodney King and – notably – long before video cameras were small and ubiquitous. The contemporary police accountability movement differs from bystander activity in that it entails organized practice, what some observers have come to call “sousveillance,” or surveillance from below. Some of the groups are connected to each other by way of digital networks, and there are even some loose confederations of groups from different cities, such as copblock.org, the Peaceful Streets Project, and WeCopwatch. One of the earliest websites devoted to cop-watching, “Photography is Not a Crime,” or PINAC, was created by Carlos Miller, a former journalist who was arrested in 2007 while photographing police and started blogging to document his case. Another group, the Peaceful Streets Project in Austin, Texas, sponsored a local summit on police accountability in 2012 and a national conference in 2013.17 Organized cop-watchers distinguish themselves with a claim to public altruism; routinized practices, and the use of embodied witnessing to prevent violence as much as document it. As one long-time activist (“Steve”) put it, If it turns out to be something then you’re a combination of a protector of sorts, because you’re there, hopefully, convincing the officer not to do what they would normally do.

92 Mary Angela Bock Cop-watchers are generally distrustful of local reporters and see the mainstream media as too cozy with law enforcement to be effective watchdogs, and so they often use online networks to communicate their message directly to the public – presenting their own “discourses about,” rather than collaborate with reporters. When journalists do report on videos made by PAAs, they do so using traditional news language, which subtly sets apart the video’s indexicality within a news story in order to maintain balance and operationalize journalistic objectivity.18 The language used for outsider images or accounts often places them in a subjunctive space of the possible – but not absolute. For instance, news accounts will use phrases such as “the video appears to show,” or “activists claim the video shows” police overreach. This is not at all the way PAAs or LEOs talk about such videos. Each set of stakeholders provides its own discursive context in pursuit of public support.

Context and discourse Why split the analysis into discourses of and about video? Photography of any kind presents a complicated puzzle for discourse analysis. It is used by stakeholders to determine “what happened” in a particular instance, yet “what happened” is a contingent narrative. In some ways video “speaks for itself” (sometimes literally, if audio is recorded) and it conveys an indexical message: discourse of. The discourse of video may seem obvious, literal, and concrete; it represents a scene de-contextualized from space and time. Yet because it is a document of reality that has been pulled out of its original context, much of its interpretation relies on discourse about video, that is the language that re-contextualizes it. Examples include such languaging as a reporter’s narration, an online description, or explanatory testimony. Discourses of and about video are in conversation with one another and change as contexts such as medium, presentation, or occasion change. Figure 5.1 illustrates the way that a video clip is re-contextualized in discourse by stakeholders as it is viewed in various embodied contexts. The scene captured by the video camera exists – it is a real event – but it is de-contextualized in the moment of the video’s creation, made with photographic choices such as angle of view, duration, and distance. As long as it remains unedited, the clip plays back the same visual, aural and temporal information, but each social context offers different possibilities for discursive re-contextualizations, by police, by journalists, by citizens who view it online, and so on. The medium in which the video is played back and the embodied experience of its viewing constitute additional dimensions of re-contextualization. These discourses about the video are changeable and reflect the interests of stakeholders, even as the depictions within the video remains the same. Here again, the Rodney King example is useful. Played in real time, the video horrified the national TV audience as a discourse of brutality.19 But when it was re-contextualized in court, the video was subject to

Re-contextualizing visual representations 93

A video is always re-contextualized in the narratives of their viewers’discourses encouraged by media of communication

Social systems operate within the affordances of media technology, politics, and culture

PAA Discourse

LEO Discourse

Public Discourse

b d

b d Police Accountability Activists

b d

Law Enforcement Officers

Medium

b d

Situation

b d

Institution Media transmit images and institutionalized re-contextualizations

Videosarealways anchoredin time and space but arede-contextualized as soon as they are taken

Figure 5.1 De-contextualized videos are re-contextualized as they move through different discourses

discourse about what the video proved.20 Defense attorneys for the officers involved in the beating played the tape in short spurts with long procedural explanations, a strategy credited for the eventual acquittal of all four officers.21 As with any image-based artifact, video conveys photographic information: the camera records a perfect document of the light waves that reach its receiving media, whether that is film or a digital sensor. It is this indexicality that imbues photography as an ultimate purveyor of reality, one that can help with scientific investigations, allow us to remember our vacations, or solve crimes. “Raw,” or unedited video goes beyond the visual indexicality of a still image because it also presents a timeline, and therefore a narrative that unfolds before us.22 The combination of visual, aural and temporal information gives unedited video a triple indexical power. Yet even with its moving images and sound over time, accurately documented by a recording device, most of what is meaningful about video is derived from discourse about it. As a linguistic methodology, CDA is concerned with this discourse, such as the language used to situate an artifact (talking about an image) and language that contextualizes an image within a larger media product (i.e. a caption).

94 Mary Angela Bock Such “anchoring language,” to borrow from Barthes’ typology,23 can be just as, if not more important in answering the question posed to evidentiary video: “what happened?” If we are told “this video shows the man who robbed a convenience store today,” we are much more able to interpret the shadowy figures on the screen. A switch in anchorage, i.e. “this video shows the man who was shot by police for shop-lifting a pack of gum” could shift our interpretation of the very same series of moving images. Finally, language might narrate a tape within or from outside the video. For example, a narration that explains “here you can see him reach behind the counter,” or “the clerk opens the cash register,” contextualize video so it can be understood. Contextualizing language is not indexical; it is constructive. Language can explain – or explain away – events portrayed in video, and so discourse about video serves as a productive site for CDA. Anchoring and intra-textual language about a video are well-suited to some of the most essential components of analysis for CDA.24 A video clip might be a selfcontained indexical narrative but the way it is situated in discourse can vary widely according to the goals of a particular stakeholder. The rest of this chapter examines these discourses about video and its changeable nature, the video as an artifact that must be contextualized and is quite limited in what it can say for itself.

Police accountability activist (PAA) discourse The empiricism of video’s triple indexicality (image, audio and timeline) is only one way PAAs establish authority but it is their primary means of access to the public sphere. As individuals, often marginalized individuals, they do not have the institutional authority to break into the larger civil conversation about policing without video evidence. Therefore, these stakeholders tend to focus on the indexical message, or discourse of video. Whether shot by organized groups on patrol or serendipitously by bystanders, such photographic evidence has changed the public conversation about law enforcement. Individual videos seem to say “see, it’s real, I told you so.” Still, photographic indexicality presents only one discursive strategy for activists. They also establish authority by quoting law and policy and through testimonies of ritualistic witnessing. Indexical evidence

As an imperfect but impactful document, video remains the primary source of discursive power for cop-watchers. Some became involved in PAA work after seeing videos online; scenes that shocked them into action. Marci, a white woman, is an active PAA in the southwest USA and said, “I think black people’s experience is on film and it’s helping people get it.” One of her colleagues, Traci, adds this:

Re-contextualizing visual representations 95 I think those cameras have finally, like it helps me to breathe a sigh of relief … when you can see that on film you don’t have to, you’re not the crazy one anymore because it’s on camera. Video is useless, however, unless people see it. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites ensure that PAA video can be viewed. It is in this way that video lends political voice to marginalized groups. As “Bruce,” put it: The Internet is the real key – being able to share this with somebody. You needed the 5-o’clock news back in the day to get a story out. Now anybody can be the reporter the journalist and with no swing or bias in any way. PAA organizations often train participants in how to use a video camera in ways that maximize a video’s evidentiary value. For example, they learn how to triangulate a scene with three photographers to provide multiple views.25 They know it’s important to stay “wide” so that the full scene can be viewed. One group has been experimenting with a drone camera to get ultra-wide scenes from above. Organizers warn participants to keep their distance and to not interfere with arrests – in part as public relations strategy and to avoid getting arrested themselves. Quoting the law

Another discursive strategy employed by PAAs is legal citation. Again, as groups that are normally marginalized, it is useful to rely on a document for authority. Videos posted by the Peaceful Streets Project will be marked with text that cites specific ordinances. Knowing the law, being able to quote it in real time, is part of cop-watch training and can be heard in many of the confrontational videos online. Individuals who stand their constitutional ground against officers who ask them to stop filming are heroes on these sites, lauded for their courage under pressure. One activist who covers local politics more closely than the professional media in his city combines his video skills with his legal interest to work as a gadfly at meetings. He takes pride in learning the details of procedure in order to prove official misconduct: Well, I’m trying to show, by going into these meetings where citizens are coming forward and saying, “Hey, you’re not following these laws and you’re not doing what you said … is on the books, and you’re not following your own policies and procedures, and you’re not doing this and you’re not doing that. …” In short, groups without institutional power are able to draw from the authority of the law, a strategy that is particularly powerful when combined with evidentiary video that illustrates their point.

96 Mary Angela Bock Surveillance rituals

Interestingly, some of the most damning videos have come from bystanders, not accountability activists, because the predictable/over-time surveillance by such groups seems to prevent bad behavior. In fact, one PAA who participated in this research could not afford a camera when she started monitoring police in the gay nightclub district of her city – she used a fake camera, and says it served her purpose, which was to change police behavior, not make a film: we didn’t have access to a camera, but if the police believe that they’re being filmed, yeah, their behavior does change. We did think that some traffic stops became just a warning as opposed to something more. Members of a different organization in the southern USA are convinced that their presence has reduced the number of use-of-force incidents against African Americans in that city. “Lynda” stayed with a young woman who had apparently overdosed in order to monitor the way the responding police officer handled the situation: I watched because I thought I’m going to see what this police officer does for her. I have to say, he got there and he was very nice. He had her sit down and he called medical for her. PAAs, of course, are happy with these types of changes in police responses. Yet at the national level officers are claiming that they are afraid to do their jobs for fear of being video-taped.26 Even though photographs and video have long been part of police investigations, when the cameras are controlled by outsiders, the resulting evidence must be explained.

Law enforcement officer (LEO) discourse Sometimes discourse of video can be so damning, so visceral, and so hard to dismiss that the primary way the law enforcement community contends with it is to keep it out of the public eye. Lawyers fought for months in Chicago for the release of video recorded by the police themselves of an officer shooting Laquan McDonald as he walked away.27 In Texas, police stalled for four years before releasing tape that showed the way a young man on LSD died in their custody after rough treatment that included being shocked by the Taser in his testicles.28 Even though federal courts have repeatedly upheld a citizen’s right to film police in public places, websites like PINAC and CopBlock often post videos of officers trying to convince cop-watchers otherwise, often by blocking, grabbing, or shining flashlights into camera lenses. When video is released, LEOs have the opportunity to provide their own explanations of what happened, either when talking to reporters or on their own social media sites. Three strategies can be seen in law enforcement

Re-contextualizing visual representations 97 language about video: the first might be called police “film criticism” for the way it focuses on media construction. Another strategy, to focus on police procedure, is well-known to CDA researchers who research the way people in power use euphemism, jargon, or doublespeak.29 Finally, when all else fails, LEO discourse resorts to authoritarian appeals. That is, as our protectors, they must be our disciplinarians, and to criticize them undermines their protective abilities. Police film criticism

Even though video has a self-contained timeline, it only contains what was recorded. Because most bystanders won’t start shooting until after there is a problem to document, the full timeline of reality is not evident; the video doesn’t tell the “whole story.” In this way, officers are re-contextualizing “what happened” onto a larger timeline. This critique is so ingrained in the law enforcement community that during a community workshop for citizens, an officer was able to get the group to respond in unison that video “doesn’t show the whole story!” A related critique is that a camera can only document what is in front of it; that one angle cannot possibly show everything that was happening. The officer who offered up the basketball tape cited at the start of this chapter put it this way: It kind of goes to the fact that we live and we react in a threedimensional world. Cameras are done on a two dimensional plane and the scope of the camera’s lens doesn’t catch everything that the human eye sees … This isn’t a Hollywood video shoot where the lighting is perfect and you have seven different camera angles and you know exactly where the bad guy is gonna be standing when he pulls his gun. Police film criticism has influenced the debate on badge-cams, because their subjective, wide-angle lens moves with an officer’s body and can only record what’s in front of it, and even this is a distortion of what an officer actually perceives. A public information officer with one major city explained that such considerations factored into his department’s plans to adopt badgecams: “Do you wear it on your shoulder, do you wear it on your lapel? Do you wear it in the place of a button? Where do you wear this thing?” This discourse about video is essentially a media construction critique, and it is in many ways valid, though somewhat ironic considering the degree to which law enforcement has historically employed photography to combat crime. It should also be noted that video cuts both ways, as officers might be absolved as easily as they are blamed for confrontations. An oft-cited study of the impact of badge-cams in California found that citizen complaints went down after officers started wearing them, but not necessarily because officers changed their behavior.30 That is, the reduction was explained in part because citizens would withdraw their complaints after viewing their own misbehavior on tape.

98 Mary Angela Bock Procedural explanations

The “ugly” nature of some police work is held up as another source of authority in LEO discourse about videos. Some officers use the phrase “awful but lawful” to explain that force is sometimes necessary in their job, and that confronting criminals can be violent and upsetting. This was the strategy successfully used in the trial of officers involved in the Rodney King beating, and it often employs euphemisms such as “subdue,” “neutralize” or “control” in relation to situations rather than human beings. A public information officer from the southwest pointed out that policies are written to protect officer safety: We don’t expect our officers to be confronted with a life or death situation and turn their cameras on before they defend themselves. That wasn’t written in the policy, so we had an officer that was ambushed in his police car, for example, and he defended himself and he shot and then there was no video. Well, why didn’t he turn his video on? Well, because his first responsibility is to protect himself, not video recording and protecting himself. Many departments now run citizen workshops to teach members of the public about procedure. One popular demonstration in these workshops puts everyday citizens into role playing or virtual reality video games in which they must make a use-of-force decision. The director of one such workshop explained, “We give them a chance to make the decisions that they realize how hard it is to make a decision in that unusual situation.” Hitting suspects, using head locks, wielding batons and throwing people to the ground are all potentially part of legal protocol for subduing a violent suspect. Focusing on procedural language, though, elides questions about whether or not the suspect was hurt, or whether the alleged crime was worth such a confrontation. Using such language to describe a situation, and not human beings, further distances the video’s depictions from lived experience. Authoritarian appeals

When it’s impossible to deny what is shown on video, police officers will resort to what might be colloquially named the “good guy” defense. This strategy is based on law enforcement’s authoritarian role and need for autonomy. Rather than speak to the incident in question, LEOs will stake claim to the virtuous position of a crime-fighter willing to combat evil. In comments to journalist in 2016, for example, FBI Director James Comey suggested that “viral video” causes officers to be less aggressive resulting in more danger on the streets. “There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime,” he told reporters, “the getting out of your car at two in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?”31

Re-contextualizing visual representations 99 After his department suspended two officers for using inappropriate force, Austin police chief Art Acevedo mentioned another—unrelated—incident from the nightclub district in which a woman was shot and killed. He told journalists, “We have got to take Sixth Street back, people are going out there, they’re acting a fool, they’re getting drunk, they’re coming out at bar-closing and they’re just … We’re going to start holding people accountable.”32 Note in his statement the positioning of revelers on Sixth Street as combatants who are “taking” the street away from presumably law-abiding people. They’re “acting a fool, they’re getting drunk” and they must be held accountable. Using his professional status as a source of authority, he shifted the attention of “common sense,” from officers inappropriately roughing someone up to the need for social discipline. This strategy boxes subjects into either agreeing with the Chief—or sympathizing with violent criminals. The pepper spray incident

An illustrative example of the tension between discourses of and about video can be drawn from an incident in Austin, Texas on March 17, 2016. During an arrest in the nightclub district there, an officer strapped a man into a police van and then pepper sprayed the restrained suspect. A Peaceful Streets Project activist was on the scene, recorded it, uploaded it, and the video spread internationally. The view was clear enough that even news reports did not use the usual distancing language, but instead wrote that the video “shows an Austin police officer pepper-spraying a man while he sat inside a police van.”33 The original video posted by the group overnight is more than fifteen minutes long and presents a montage of events from that night. Text was added to the video in some places, with labels indicating that officers tazed someone, violating a particular part of the criminal code: an example of the legal citation strategy. Just before the pepper spray scene, a full-screen “slate” of white text on a black background offered this declaration of what was happening, including the officer’s name and badge number: “Cameron Caldwell #7408 committed the crime of assault by pepper-spraying a restrained person.” Here PAA activists combined the video’s indexicality (discourse of) and added legal citation (discourse about) to declare a “common sense” interpretation of what happened that night (peacefulstreets.com). A story in the leading local newspaper the next day included a quote from the founder of the Peaceful Streets Project, Antonio Buehler: “Listen we see these cops violating policy and committing crimes all the time, but usually there is some gray area that they like to dance (in),” Buehler said. “This was just crystal clear, there is no way by law or policy that what this guy did was acceptable. There is zero gray area.” Again, note the subject position as a “witness” to police abuse and the legal assessment that an officer broke the law.34 The police department’s immediate response was to completely sidestep what the video portrayed. The police chief at the time, Art Acevedo, used Twitter to respond quickly: “We are aware of the incident on video & have

100 Mary Angela Bock launched an investigation. Witnesses should contact Office of the Police Monitor at (512) 974-9090.” Authority can be presumed here by Acevedo’s professional status, but also note the euphemistic “incident,” and the royal “we” in terms of awareness. Neither pepper spray nor restraints are mentioned; no human beings are referenced either. Finally, only those who follow city politics in Austin would know that the Police Monitor is limited in its power to discipline officers and is notoriously behind in its work.35 A local television station reported the next day that the police association (the equivalent of a union) also issued a statement.36 Note the way it too uses the euphemistic word “incident,” and the way it invokes the film critic defense: We’re aware of the video, and it’s easy for some to criticize those few seconds on tape, but what the video doesn’t show is what happened in the hours that led up to that moment. A full investigation will reveal more information about what led to the officer’s actions. The “easy for some to criticize” phrase does two discursive jobs: it invokes the legitimate authority of officers working hard to protect citizens, and establishes a subject position that marginalizes police critics. Eventually the police officer in this case was suspended but not charged with a crime.37 It’s likely that nothing would have happened without the video, or just as importantly, without people who made the video, distributed it, and pressured the city to take action.

Discussion Video brings procedure down to earth. We can see a person react to being punched, hear the sound of a kick, wince in empathy as someone falls to the ground. It is because raw video has such indexical power that stakeholders battle so ferociously over its contextualization, those discourses about it. It is also the reason that authorities work so hard to control the distribution of videos to the public, for without the discourse of a tape, there’s no need to talk about it. Critical discourse analysis is an invaluable tool for analyzing the way video recordings are put into context by various stakeholders. Cameras, even with their limited field of view, subjective angles, and incomplete timelines, are notoriously neutral: they record what is in front of them, good, bad and ugly. Because video is indexical in three ways, with image, sound and a timeline, it conveys a self-contained narrative, presenting discourses of. But because it is limited to what the camera recorded, its timeline can easily be recontextualized into other narratives, enabling discourses about – language that can be examined with an eye on how language sustains power positions. This chapter has reviewed the discursive strategies that PAAs and LEOs use to account for what a particular video reveals. Activists rely on discourses of video; its indexicality provides the credibility necessary for activists to then

Re-contextualizing visual representations 101 present discourses about their legal knowledge and surveillance rituals. When discourses about video are unavoidable, LEOs employ the discourse of the film critic, pointing out the way filmic representations are constructed. Officers will also explain away incidents that look troubling as proper procedure, citing regulations in euphemistic ways. When pressed, LEOs will also use authoritarian language that demands respect, for as protectors of society they are also its disciplinarians who must be granted autonomy.

Conclusion For the sake of public oversight, video has value only if two conditions are met: first, that the public may view it and secondly, that its reveals “enough” of the narrative to be coherent. The first condition is tangible; the second is constituted in discourse. Citizen video of police activity is able to satisfy both conditions if the person recording it considers the perspective of the public. Evidentiary video controlled by police, however, often is not released to the public, failing the first condition. Police video is also not necessarily recorded in a way that considers the public’s perspective; it is evidence for an investigation; a tool for police. Any value for public accountability is secondary. Police hold a unique power in public life: they have the legal authority to kill a person and in the USA they do so approximately every eight hours.38 It stands to reason that monitoring the way they conduct themselves in public is an appropriate citizen responsibility. As this analysis has shown, discourses of and about video can make a significant difference in how it is understood, interpreted and used as evidence. But it is only useful if it exists; only helpful if it can be seen. If discourses about evidentiary videos are to have a positive impact on police policy, it is essential that citizens continue to create discourses of video.

Notes 1 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013). Teun A. van Dijk, News as Discourse (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1988). 2 Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (London: SAGE, 2001). doi.org/10.4135/9780857028020, p. 2. 3 Teun A. van Dijk, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis,” Discourse & Society, 4 (1993): 249–283. doi.org/10.1177/0957926593004002006. Wodak and Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Ibid. 4 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001). 5 Klaus Krippendorff, “On the ethics of constructing communication,” in Rethinking Communication: Paradigm Issues, eds. Brenda Dervin, Lawrence Greenberg, Barbara J. O’Keefe, and Ellen Wartella (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989): 66–96. van Dijk, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Op. cit.3

102 Mary Angela Bock 6 Anselm Strauss and Juliet M. Corbin, Grounded Theory in Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997). 7 Jonathan M. Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Zachary R. Hagins, “Fashioning the ‘born criminal’ on the beat: Juridical photography and the police municipale in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” Modern & Contemporary France 21, no. 3 (2013): 281–296. doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2013.781143. 8 Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society; Hagins. Ibid. 9 Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “Revolution at a standstill: Photography and the Paris commune of 1871,” Yale French Studies, 101 (2001): 54–78. doi.org/10.2307/3090606. 10 Christine A. Guilshan, “A picture is worth a thousand lies: Electronic imaging and the future of the admissibility of photographs into evidence,” Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Journal, 18 (1992): 365–380. 11 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Vol. 1983) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 12 John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Robert Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2013). Robert Deitz, Willful Injustice: A Post-O.J. look at Rodney King, American Justice, and Trial by Race (Washington, DC, and Lanham, MD: Regnery Publishing, 1996). 13 Mary Angela Bock and David Alan Schneider, “The voice of lived experience: Mobile video narratives in the courtroom,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 3 (2016): 1–16. doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168474. Denis, J. Brion, “The criminal trial as theater: The semiotic power of the image,” in Law, Culture and Visual Studies, eds. Anne Wagner and Richard Sherwin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016). Jennifer L. Mnookin, “Image of truth: Photographic evidence and the power of analogy,” The Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 10 (1998): 1–74. 14 Astrid Gynnild, “Surveillance videos and visual transparency in journalism,” Journalism Studies 15, no. 4 (2014): 449–463. doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2013.831230. David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007). 15 Paul McMahon, “Calls mount for cop car cameras Tape of black teen’s arrest may increase video presence,” USA Today, 3a (2002, July 19). 16 Hans Toch, Cop Watch: Spectators, Social Media, and Police Reform (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002). 17 Mary Angela Bock, “Film the police! Cop-watching and its embodied narratives,” Journal of Communication 66, no, 1 (2016): 13–34. doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12204. 18 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti, “Re-imagining crisis reporting: Professional ideology of journalists and citizen eyewitness images,” Journalism 14, no. 7 (2013): 960–977. doi.org/10.1177/1464884913479055. Barbie Zelizer, “Where is the author in American TV news? On the construction and presentation of proximity, authorship and journalistic authority,” Semiotica 80, no. 1 (1990): 37–48. Barbie Zelizer, “Journalism through the camera’s eye,” in Issues in Journalism, ed. Stuart Allen (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2005): 67–176. 19 Regina Lawrence, The Politics of Force: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 20 Deitz, Willful Injustice: A Post-O.J. look at Rodney King, American Justice, and Trial by Race. Op cit.12 21 Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, “Contested vision: The discursive constitution of Rodney King,” in The Construction of Professional Discourse,

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eds. Britte Lousie Gunnarsson, Per Linell, and Bengt Nordberg (New York: Routledge, 1997): 292–396. Bock and Schneider, “The voice of lived experience: Mobile video narratives in the courtroom.” Op. cit.13 Roland Barthes, Image, Music Text (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1977). Wodak and Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Op. cit.2 Bock, “Film the police! Cop-watching and its embodied narratives.” Op. cit.17 Eric Lichtblau, “F.B.I. director says ‘viral video effect’ blunts police work,” The New York Times (2016, May 11). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/ 2016/05/12/us/comey-ferguson-effect-police-videos-fbi.html. Nausheen Husain, “Laquan McDonald timeline: The shooting, the video and the fallout,” Chicago Tribune (2017, January 13). Retrieved April 30, 2017, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/laquanmcdonald/ct-graphics-laquan-mcdo nald-officers-fired-timeline-htmlstory.html. Eric Dexheimer, “Texas police withheld records of their son’s death: Now they know why,” Austin American Statesman (Austin, TX, 2017, April 20). van Dijk, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Op. cit.3 Ruth Wodak, “The Waldheim affair and Anti-Semitic prejudice in Austrian public discourse,” Patterns of Prejudice 24, nos. 2–4 (1990): 18–33. doi.org/10.1080/ 0031322X.1990.9970049. Barak Ariel, William A. Farrar, and Alex Sutherland, “The effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens’ complaints against the police: A randomized controlled trial,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 31, no. 3 (2015): 509–535. Eric Lichtblau, “F.B.I. director says ‘viral video effect’ blunts police work,”. Op cit.26 Ashley Paradez, “Austin cop suspended for pepper spray,” KIDY Fox San Angelo, TX (KIDY Fox San Angelo, TX: 2016, September 1). Philip Jankowski, “Video of Austin cop pepper-spraying man prompts police investigation,” Austin American Statesman (Austin, TX: 2016, March 18). Retrieved from mystatesman.com. Philip Jankowski and T. Plohetski, “Two police supervisors suspended over pepper spray incident,” Austin American Statesman (Austin, TX: 2016, October 24). Retrieved from statesman.com. Audrey McGlinchy, “Why are the Austin police monitor’s reports a year behind schedule?” KUT 93 News (2015, August 12). Retrieved April 28, 2017, from http:// kut.org/post/why-are-austin-police-monitors-reports-year-behind-schedule. “Video shows APD officer pepper spraying man in custody,” Fox 7 News (Austin, TX: Fox 7, 2016, March 18). Retrieved from http://www.fox7austin.com/news/ local-news/109631029-story. Jankowski and Plohetski, “Two police supervisors suspended over pepper spray incident.” Op. cit.34 Jamiles Lartey, “By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years,” The Guardian (2015, June 9). Retrieved from http://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-othercountries.

6

Discourses for transformation? Climate change, power and pathways to the future Anabela Carvalho

Contemporary societies face various crises of sustainability related, inter alia, to consumption, resource use, financial management, employment, and environmental degradation. Climate change is the most threatening and wide-ranging expression of the environmental impact of human activity (especially as conducted in rich societies) in the last few decades. Since it emerged in policy and public arenas in the late 1980s, climate change has been assigned a variety of meanings with numerous implications for action. Discourses advanced by scientists, political actors, corporations, civic groups and others have been reconstructed in the media and other public fora in diverse ways, with values, worldviews and power issues working as important filters. Those aspects have also weighed heavily in the progressive institutionalization of discourses on climate change, which led to the dominance of techno-managerial approaches and the marginalization of calls for addressing structural issues at the root of climate change.1 In the USA and, to a smaller degree, in other societies, various economic and political forces have been continuingly invested in large-scale propaganda to deny scientific evidence and impede any changes to the present status quo.2 Nonetheless, in recent years there has been a mounting realization that current socio-economic practices and policies are conducing societies and the planet to very dangerous limits and that important changes will have to occur in order to achieve sustainability.3 Multiple interlinked “transitions” have been pointed out as necessary, including an economic transition, a social transition, an institutional transition, an informational transition, and an ideological transition.4 The scale of the challenge has generated terms such as The Great Transition and The Great Transformation (see below), but there is no shared understanding amongst the very diverse relevant social agents on what those changes can mean or require. Examining the discursive struggles between the proponents of alternative pathways to the future, analyzing the relation between discourses and sociopolitical contexts, and identifying the (potential) space for discourses of transformation are critical tasks for social scientists. Discourse analysis offers productive tools to carry this out, as this chapter aims to illustrate. In the first part of the chapter, I will present the challenges posed by climate change and the contributions that discourse analysis has made towards understanding its scientific, political and cultural dimensions. This will be

Discourses for transformation? 105 followed by a brief review of the raison d’être of calls for transformation. The chapter will then move on to the theory and methods of Critical Discourse Studies and outline the analytical approach to be adopted. The final section before conclusions will offer a brief exploratory application to two key texts on transformation towards sustainability.

Discourse and (in)action on climate change Of the numerous large-scale risks faced by current and future societies, climate change is likely to be the most severe. As multiple scientific reports have highlighted, potential impacts on human and physical security, food production, water availability, health, ecosystems, biological diversity and other domains would mean vast human, ecological and economic costs and losses.5 Addressing climate change calls for major changes in energy production and consumption, with implications for industrial processes, transportation, spatial planning and many other areas. Moreover, climate change is connected to wider sustainability challenges in societies around the world, as urban congestion, waste generation and the levels of consumption of multiple resources continue to rise dramatically creating challenges as to how to curb and reverse these upward trends in the coming decades. Mitigating climate change and other sustainability crises, as well as adapting to already inevitable impacts, would require crucial modifications in policies, lifestyles and business, particularly in more affluent societies. Integrated solutions to sustainability would have to be found at multiple geographical scales and necessarily involve a multitude of actors including governments and governmental organizations, local authorities, commercial, industrial and service enterprises, research institutions, non-governmental organizations and individual citizens. How is all of this connected to discourse? What does language have to do with changes in weather patterns? How can discourse analysis help us understand the governance of climate change? This chapter will show that words, together with other semiotic resources (e.g. visual images), construct the meaning of both climate change and the practices and structures that are at its root. Language influences understandings of those issues, constraining social and material action and contributing to the institutionalization of given ideas and values, all of which, in a dialectical manner, contribute to the production of (given) discourse(s) on climate change. As Feindt and Oels have maintained, discourse matters to environmental issues because: (i) environmental policy problems are obviously the effect of social constructions although they concern ‘natural’ objects; (ii) struggles about concepts, knowledge and meaning are an essential element of environmental policy; (iii) environmental discourse has material and power effects as well as being the effect of material practices and power relations.6

106 Anabela Carvalho Given its complexity, the multiple time and spatial scales at stake, the diversity of socio-economic domains involved, climate change clearly epitomizes these symbolic dynamics. Various definitions and (in)action proposals compete for attention and legitimacy in discursive struggles where economic, political and other forms of power are played out. The current regime on climate change developed both through nonlinguistic social practices and through a multitude of discursive/semiotic practices that shaped each other.7 Such practices took place both in a myriad of “private” spheres, in the fields of science, economics, and political negotiation and regulation, and in public ones, with highlight to the media. Some studies have shown that since the late 1980s politicians have attempted to control the definition of climate change and played a crucial role in shaping media discourses in several countries.8 Similarly, intergovernmental organizations have discursively constructed climate change in ways that justify the continuation of their policies and practices.9 Among the meaning-making systems that have produced and/or are keeping the symbolic/material regime in place, corporations also occupy an important position: for instance, many in the USA have frequently sponsored denialist discourses through the organization of conferences, the production of reports, media materials, etc.10 Extant empirical research on dominant discourses on climate change and sustainability, such as the ones that are put forth by the most powerful political institutions11 and those that circulate in mainstream media,12 shows that those discourses are characterized by exclusionary mechanisms that reinforce the current distribution of power and foreclose alternative voices and views. The media, a vital element of the contemporary public sphere, have contributed mainly to reinforcing the symbolic power of certain social actors, such as top-level politicians, and reducing the scope for non-expert/non-elite participation in the politics of climate change.13 In contrast with mainstream media, alternative (non-commercial) media have been a significant venue for the expression of other worldviews and ideologies.14 Promising to reconcile economic, social and environmental priorities, several varieties of the sustainable development discourse, including ecological modernization and the green economy, have gained a hegemonic position in most societies, as further discussed below.15 By failing to convey more radical views on the relation between humans and nature and the associated social arrangements, most media have legitimated and reinforced the existing social order.16 Hence, the national and international governance of climate change has increasingly been constrained within the parameters of free-market capitalism, industrialism and neo-liberalism.17 Discursive practices involve complex narratives as well as simple linguistic choices. The labels and categories that we use to organize reality are powerful lenses in our experience of the surrounding world. For instance, terming climate change as an “environmental issue” may create a (somewhat) distorting conceptual lens. By reducing it to the realms of nature and “the environment”, this commonly found language practice detaches climate change from

Discourses for transformation? 107 the economic, social and political sites and systems that produce it and that need to be transformed. “The category of ‘the environment’… is (…) politically suicidal”, says Beck.18 It fails to motivate and engage citizens. Beck adds that “using the concept of ‘climate politics’ too much castrates climate politics. It ignores the fact that climate politics is precisely not about climate but about transforming the basic concepts and institutions of first, industrial, nation-state modernity.”19 Ironically, the language of “climate politics” may be depoliticizing climate change and all the civilizational challenges it entails. Depoliticization refers to the deletion of alternatives and of democratic debate about alternatives regarding climate change from public spheres. In spite of climate change’s massive impacts on citizens around the world, it has been largely transformed into a seemingly consensual techno-managerial matter where citizens have no say.20 Those depoliticization processes have crucial implications for public engagement.21

The idea of transformation Interest in processes of change towards sustainability is not new. A significant body of research, developed mainly in the Netherlands from the 1990s, has focused on “sustainability transitions”, defined as “longterm, multi-dimensional, and fundamental transformation processes through which established socio-technical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption.”22 Such studies have highlighted how a given development pathway involves interconnections between technological, organizational and economic dimensions and how those trajectories lock in or lock out (un-)sustainable developmental trajectories. However, the sustainability transitions literature has been criticized for overlooking power and political struggles,23 in its attempt to circumscribe and monitor given “systems” (e.g. “energy systems”; “transport systems”) and “evolution” processes therein. Meadowcroft has asked the “sustainability transitions” scholarship the disarming question “what about the politics?” and called attention to the importance of democratic legitimacy.24 Although recent works have attempted to address some of these issues, this scholarship remains strongly associated to the notion of “transition management”,25 i.e. the idea that transition can be managed via appropriate policies. More recently, a number of scholars have called attention to presumed “cockpitism”, “the illusion that top-down steering by governments and intergovernmental organizations alone can address global problems.”26 Processes of change involve a multiplicity of issues and actors and continuously changing challenges leading some to consider that they are inevitably unruly, bottomup and complex.27 Besides emphasizing the roles of civil society, numerous scholars and institutions have argued that the changes needed to address current socio-ecological problems have to involve deeper transformations than what has been on the table so far. As climate change and other pressures on the biophysical environment gain

108 Anabela Carvalho ever more evident crisis proportions, there has been a proliferation of texts offering pathways to imagined sustainable futures. Such texts have appeared mainly in three social fields – academia and research; governmental agencies; and nongovernmental bodies and social movements – suggesting that there is a growing acknowledgement that significant, possibly radical changes in current societies are necessary. Examples of titles include: “World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability” [original German title: “World in Change: A Social Contract for a Great Transformation”] (German Advisory Board on Climate Change, 2011); “The Great Green Technological Transformation” (United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs, 2011); “The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy” (Lester Brown, 2015); “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (UN General Assembly, 2015); and “Policy Innovations for Transformative Change: Implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (“Flagship report” by the UN Research Institute for Social Development, 2016). The IPCC also refers to “transformation pathways” (title of chapter 6) in its 2014 Fifth Assessment Report. There is, however, no agreement regarding the breadth or the nature of said transformation. Analyses of academic literature suggest that the term “transformation” appears at times to be just the new “fashionable buzzword”28 with no specific meaning. Ulrich Brand calls “transformation” the “new critical orthodoxy” while pointing out that most “strategic” or “prescriptive” uses of the concept do not address structural obstacles such as “ongoing expansion of the production and consumption of un-sustainable commodities, a focus on economic growth at almost any cost, fierce world market competition”, etc.29 These various remarks point to the importance of thorough analysis of views on change, be it labeled transition or transformation (or indeed something similar) and the nature of social and political relations that are advanced. As Patterson et al.30 noted, sustainability transformations are deeply political as they favor particular values, worldviews and political-ideological stances; take place in powershaped contexts and institutions; and are likely to have redistributive impacts. “Concerns relating to whose knowledge counts, what changes are necessary and desirable, and even what constitutes the end goal of transformation are all intensely political processes.”31 Thus what matters here is not just how the present and future worlds are constituted through discourses on transformation but also who is constructed into which (power) positions through those discourses.

Tools for analysis and critique “Discourse” is not a univocal term. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Chouliaraki32 argues that it “refers (…) to the capacity of meaning-making resources to constitute social reality, forms of knowledge and identity within specific social contexts and power relations (Hall 1997: 220).” Semiosis is another way of naming the process of generating meaning through various modalities (photography, design, body language, etc.), which is always situated in a given social, cultural and historic setting.

Discourses for transformation? 109 As pointed out in Chapter 1, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) encompass theoretical and metatheoretical elements, as well as methodological elements.33 Drawing on various influences, such as sociolinguistics, French social and political thinking (especially Foucault’s) and Frankfurt School theories, the approach privileged here looks at how, in Norman Fairclough’s words, texts relate to “wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes”, aiming to “explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony”.34 This leads us to the “critical” in CDS, which refers to the intent to analyze and expose how discourse can contribute to social and political wrongs, as well as to provide potentially emancipatory knowledge. As CDS scholars often emphasize, doing critique implies a normative dimension.35 This means that the analyst has a normative perspective or sees discourse from a particular normative position. It also means that the analysis involves normative evaluation. To conduct analysis and critique, CDS scholarship offers several approaches and is often viewed – and indeed used – as a “toolbox” where researchers can pick up different analytical instruments and combine them, often together with other contributions from the human and social sciences, to address their specific objects of study and research questions. Although CDS scholars generally underline the historical nature of discourse,36 the process of circulation of meanings is not always fully examined. Wetherell summarizes it in eloquent terms: As accounts and discourses become available and widely shared, they become social realities to be reckoned with; they become efficacious in future events. The account enters the discursive economy to be circulated, exchanged, stifled, marginalized or, perhaps, comes to dominate over other possible accounts and is thus marked as the “definitive truth”.37 Drawing on the British Cultural Studies tradition, this chapter attaches high importance to those dynamics and attempts to grasp them in doing CDS. I will focus on two examples produced respectively in the context of intergovernmental organizations and of a social movement. One is a 2012 report titled From Transition to Transformation: Sustainable and Inclusive Development in Europe and Central Asia supported by 13 United Nations agencies, from the UN Environment Program to the International Labor Organization.38 It was prepared in advance of the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. The other example is a 2015 document titled The Leap Manifesto: A Call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and for One Another,39 which is said to come in response to climate change and other crises40 and was initiated in a meeting attended by representatives from “Canada’s Indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labor movements”.41 It has been signed by a broad coalition of artists and activists fronted by filmmaker Avi Lewis and author Naomi Klein and was presented at a convention of the Canadian National Democratic Party.

110 Anabela Carvalho The two texts were chosen because they tackle “big questions” concerning future sustainability and emerged from two socio-organizational settings that are crucial to environmental politics – intergovernmental policy-making and civic action. Arguably, distinctive socio-political cultures as to how social change can be brought about are both reflected in and re-produced in these texts. Although they are not necessarily representative of those socio-political cultures, the two texts shed light into alternative “thought systems” regarding sustainability and the kinds of transformations needed. Obviously, these texts are of very different genres with very different voices speaking to most likely different intended publics: a more specialized, expert audience in the first case and a more general one in the second. More than comparing these two discursive acts I wish to develop a sense of how alternative visions of the future are being discursively constructed and reconstructed and of their potential to generate engaging debates. In an exploratory manner, I will raise multiple questions about the two texts referring to two general functions of discourse, namely representation (in this case representation of both present and future worlds) and interaction (or how discourse plays in the construction of social relations and identities). Those questions arose from several readings of the two texts in repeated back and forth-type “dialogue” with academic literature on socio-ecological transformations, on environmental discourses and, at a higher level, on CDS, as well as with “grey” literature on social dimensions of climate change and sustainability (e.g. other policy and NGO reports, media texts, political speech). Familiarity with these kinds of debates enhanced abilities for deconstruction and critique. I propose distinguishing three levels of analysis. The first level, which may be designated critical semantic mapping and analysis, includes questions such as: What do these texts claim that needs transforming? What is the direction of the proposed transformation (or where should the world be heading)? Who are the subjects constituted as relevant in the process of transformation? What roles are different social actors “made to” play in the process of transformation and in the aspired future? At this level, analysis is focused on the text itself although of course any form of critical analysis involves perspectives and knowledges brought by the researcher from outside the text leading, for example, to inquire what values underpin the proposed transformation (e.g. whether consideration is given to socio-environmental justice). Methodologically, it involves, inter alia, identifying key concepts used in texts and examining representations of agency. The second level is inter-discourse analysis. Paying special attention to processes of recontextualization of discourses, it involves asking: How do these texts draw on different discourses and recontextualize them? What new articulations of discourses are there in the texts? What is the origin and semiotic trajectory of those discourses? Are there new ideas/discourses? This kind of analysis focuses on the relation between one particular text and other texts, and on the discourses that they (re)construct.

Discourses for transformation? 111 I will call the third level of analysis explanatory critique, a term borrowed from Norman Fairclough that refers to the goal of explaining existing realities as “effects of structures or mechanisms or forces which the analyst postulates and whose reality s/he seeks to test out”.42 The following questions relate to that goal: What do the texts naturalize or legitimize? What do they challenge or contest? What social effects may (or has) this produce(d) (e.g. generate consent for the implementation of certain policy proposals)? How do the subject positions that different actors are constructed into redefine social relations? What is the counter-hegemonic potential of these proposals? How can these discourses contribute (or how have they already contributed) to redressing structural problems and shifting relations between social agents? Can (or have) these discourses change(d) relations of power and the politics of climate change? This level of analysis involves examining how discursive strategies relate to certain social, cultural and political effects of discourse, such as the institutionalization of certain ideas. It is centered on the circulation and reconstruction of discourses, which the second level of analysis started opening up to.

Alternative discourses for transformation This section will offer a short exploration of the selected texts, guided by the questions/analytical lenses enunciated above. At first sight, the proposals advanced in From Transition to Transformation and in The Leap Manifesto are not very different, as both put an accent on transformation towards environmental sustainability and on social inclusivity. Many of the suggested measures, such as removing fossil fuel subsidies, creating “green” jobs and increasing social protection are coincident. Closer attention reveals differences. For instance, use of the concepts of “development” and “sustainable development” is ubiquitous in the UN report and absent from The Leap Manifesto. The foreword of the UN report defines the situation and goals as follows: We know now that all the countries of the world need sustainable development (…) The report is among the first attempts to take an integrated look at sustainable development in the Pan-European region. It argues that a new growth model in this region is both necessary and possible – one which increases human development, advances equality and reduces the ecological footprint.43 Sustainable development” is the well-worn concept advanced in the 1980s by the World Commission on Environment and Development44 and based on three pillars: economic development, environmental protection and social justice. Multiple actors have employed the concept in very different senses (e.g. economically sustainable, green-ish and economically sustainable, ecologically sustainable). Its ambiguity (or “flexibility”) has allowed it to become hegemonic, i.e. widely used and accepted, and hard to contest, as it neutralizes

112 Anabela Carvalho difference and conflict.45 A wide range of standpoints and discourses fall roughly within the “Sustainable Development debate”, from views that in terms of environmental protection and social equality correspond to the status quo, to reformist discourses and to transformational discourses.46 The UN report addresses those matters by discussing the difference between “weak sustainability” and “strong sustainability”. Weak sustainability advocates consider that natural capital, say a local marine ecosystem, is substitutable by human capital, for instance, infrastructure benefits gained with a new industrial harbor. Strong sustainability calls for the maintenance of the separate capital stocks, assuming that natural and human-made capital are not perfect substitutes.47 This implies that there are physical limits to human capital development. The UN report claims to “espouse” strong sustainability but, throughout the document, the difference between “strong sustainability” and “green economy” is obscured and an implicit semantic equivalence between the two is established. The UN report speaks of “sustainable development” but also of a “sustainable and inclusive transformation” and of a “rethinking of environmental, economic and social policies,”48 thereby articulating – in the sense of combining or building bridges between – conventional and transformational views. A few lines down it refers to the “need for a new growth model”49 which, throughout the report, is associated with the “green economy,” another key concept, which especially since the 2008 financial crisis has become a new “common sense” with its promise to generate increasing prosperity while maintaining the natural systems that sustain us. It should be noted that prior to or around the time of publication of the UN report a number of international organizations, including the OECD, World Bank, IMF and WTO, had started adopting a “green economy” discourse, led (of course) by ideas of economic growth.50 The report suggests that it is possible to make the “green economy work for the poor,”51 adding on an issue, rather than transforming the dominant logic of the “green economy,” often spearheaded by economic competitiveness aims, which it sanctions. In its second chapter, the report advocates “moving beyond GDP”52 as an indicator of development, which some scholars have considered a condition to move to a socio-economic model compatible with strong sustainability in a post-growth society. However, this appears to be one more act of strategic navigation of the seas of ambivalence because everywhere else GDP is at the core of the UN agencies’ analysis. It is worth recalling that the stated goal is a new “growth model.”53 By recontextualizing economic growth in a manner that appears to conciliate various types of problems and concerns, the report does more in the way of sustaining contemporary modes of socioeconomic organization than challenging them. In contrast with this approach, The Leap Manifesto speaks of a radically different type of “growth” in maintaining that “caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors.”54 The language and the imaginary are strongly communitarian. The proposed change is to be led by an ethics of socio-environmental justice with

Discourses for transformation? 113 indigenous rights and the unequal distribution of environmental harm taking center stage (“Indigenous Peoples should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects. So should communities currently be dealing with heavy health impacts of polluting industrial activity.”). The Leap Manifesto promotes grassroots-led change in the organization of the economy: “as an alternative to the profit-gouging of private companies and the remote bureaucracy of some centralized state ones, we can create innovative ownership structures: democratically run, paying living wages and keeping much-needed revenue in communities.” Thus, it operates a fundamental restructuring of socio-economic relations, which is also encapsulated in the increasingly popular term of “energy democracy”: “The time for energy democracy has come: we believe not just in changes to our energy sources, but that wherever possible communities should collectively control these new energy systems.” The recent historical trajectory of some ideas helps understand this text. It has resonances, amongst others, with ecosocialist initiatives calling for “system change, not climate change”,55 with Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014), and with indigenous values and ways of knowing, which have become more visible through various forms of mobilization of indigenous peoples.56 The interactional function of discourse is particularly important for the study of the governance and politics of the transformation towards sustainability. The Leap Manifesto constitutes “we”, an encompassing collective, as the key claimant but also the key agent of change. It therefore enacts a fundamental discursive shift in political relations. “We”, the “indigenous peoples”, “women” and “workers” occupy in this text a subject position of action, of possibility, not one of passivity or helplessness. The Leap Manifesto is a strong statement of collective, democratic ownership of social and political issues. Nevertheless, this seemingly inclusive language, this “we,” is contingent and temporary as it brings together diverse identities, standpoints and interests regarding the environment and other domains of life. For instance, as they try to negotiate environmental values with material development rights, First Nation Canadian communities may in some respects align with “workers” or other groups whereas they may otherwise be in tension with those groups. Moreover, this kind of language has and will continue to generate fissures and opposition. For instance, in an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, an influential Canadian academic, distanced himself from the “Leap revolutions” saying that the “we” “subordinates” the entrepreneurial “I”: [The Leap Manifesto] ideological starting point (…) largely sidelines the individualist, the entrepreneur, or anyone who thinks that society’s health depends on ensuring lots of space for people to exercise their agency and creative possibility. In The Leap Manifesto, altruism trumps selfishness, and “we” subordinates “I”.57

114 Anabela Carvalho This example illustrates how visions of community and individual action may collide in debates on future sustainability. It would be naïve to take “we” as a neutral term. Identity is always relational and The Leap Manifesto’s “we” has several “constitutive outsides.”58 As we have seen, one of them is the “profit-gouging of private companies,” another the “remote bureaucracy of some centralized state ones.” Democracy, it can be argued, is about the enunciation of difference. The UN report constitutes “governments” and “markets” as the most important social agents although in a polycentric form of governance of sustainability where public participation is called for.59 However, it predominantly construes the public as consumers who are to be informed, educated and steered to greener consumption: Major behavioral changes are essential for effectively transforming production and consumption patterns. Awareness-raising, combined with different forms of incentives, plays a decisive role in this process and must address all actors in society: producers, consumers, political parties, scientific and cultural communities, the media and the public at large. Such changes in behavior call for a mix of general sensitization campaigns and well-targeted information and education programmes.60 The report is in many ways an act of strategic ambivalence. It should come as no surprise that it has (seemingly) generated no reactions. In searching for its reception and possible discursive reconstructions, I found little more than references to the document by the authoring UN agencies themselves. This does not in any way mean that the report has been ineffectual: instead, it is likely to be one more step towards the normalization of somewhat stronger views of sustainability at the level of intergovernmental organizations. But it has had no expression in public spaces or been taken up by any other actors, which indicates a short-range impact. The Leap Manifesto certainly has and in many different ways. It has been seen as divisive and dividing.61 But it has also garnered a significant degree of support: a 2016 poll showed that, among the people who had heard of it, half were in favor (Ekospolitics, 2016).62 The Leap Manifesto is much more likely to bring back “the political”63 and to stimulate political engagement with climate change than the UN report. Its calls for transformation in political relations, suggesting that a “bottom-up revival will lead to a renewal of democracy at every level of government,” translate in nearly exact terms the argument that Carvalho and Peterson put forth in 2012 on “reinventing the political: how climate change can breathe new life into contemporary democracies.”64 Effects on conventional (party) politics could also occur. As journalist Martin Lukacs wrote in the Guardian about the Manifesto:

Discourses for transformation? 115 Canadians craving bold change could be won over to a party that can courageously advocate for it, as the NDP [New Democratic Party] has done before. But only if it is loud and proud and unapologetically progressive, clearly distinguishing itself from the Liberals.65 This may be the time for clear political language towards a sustainable future.

Conclusions As illustrated by presentations to the Annenberg Scholars Symposium and the resulting chapters featured in this volume, discourse analysis can shed light on many forms of knowledge on social, political and “natural” realities. It can also be applied to different types of materials, from interviews (Urban, this volume) to official reports and social movement’s speech (this chapter). Among the various approaches to discourse analysis, this chapter has drawn mainly on Critical Discourse Studies (cf. Wodak, this volume) and combined it with the concept of circulation (also employed by Greg Urban in this book), which has been operationalized via research questions regarding the diverse readings and appropriations of a given text. In its multiple variants and strands, discourse analysis offers theoretical, conceptual and analytical resources of enormous relevance to social research. As current societies face growing threats from climate change and other crises of sustainability, the notion of “transformation towards sustainability” has gained currency in the last few years with diverse types of social actors claiming to promote it. This chapter has started delving into different discourses on/of/for transformation with the goal of understanding the ways in which (and indeed whether) they advance social change and how they relate to different forms of power. What is offered here is not a closed off analytical framework but a starting contribution to discourse-analytical research focused on the transformations needed to address climate change. Although space limitations allowed only for brief examination of two texts, we encountered very different proposals for future sustainability: one dominated by a more “inclusive” variety of the “green economy” with no significant alterations of current political and economic power, and another one, grounded on notions of social and environmental justice, corresponding to a very different configuration of energy governance and economic ownership. Advanced by a set of UN agencies, the former attempts to devise a “new growth model” where the needs of the poor are seemingly reconciled with the primacy of market economics. Other ambivalences prevail in that UN report. As Schneidewind and Augenstein have noted, conceptual ambiguity and vagueness may be the terrain for co-opting by powerful actors of the idea and the agenda of transformation and “actively impede radical societal change.”66 The development of a new (false) consensus would allow for the continuation of the current post-political condition of climate change.67

116 Anabela Carvalho The second text analyzed in this chapter (The Leap Manifesto) repoliticizes climate change and other socio-economic crises in a bold manner. It expands the range of legitimate political actors and redefines socio-economic possibilities. Whereas its uptake (and contestation) will have to continue being analyzed it is, anyhow, a discursive act of great significance. It enacts a “politics of sustainability” which, in John Barry’s words, is ultimately about choices to live in a different type of society, not some brief public consultation about how to “green” business as usual and our existing societies. And this is a politics of resistance and struggle for transition and transformation not the continuation of what we currently have.68 As illustrated here, discourse analysis shows how contemporary societal challenges can be addressed very differently under the guise of similar lexicons. Thorough and context-sensitive analysis of texts and of their social circulation can make visible their constitutive effects either towards reinforcing the ideas and values that dominate current practices and institutions or towards challenging them. Alternative visions of socio-economic and political relations can gain support, get normalized and, ultimately, radically different proposals for social, political and economic organization can be institutionalized.

Acknowledgement The author is grateful to Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia for Sabbatical Grant SFRH/BSAB/128424/2017.

Notes 1 Romain Felli, “Environment, not planning: The neoliberal depoliticisation of environmental policy by means of emissions trading,” Environmental Politics 24, no. 5 (2015): 641–660. 2 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). 3 E.g. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al., World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability (Berlin: German Advisory Council on Global Change, 2011). 4 Murray Gell-Mann, “Transformations of the twenty-first century: Transitions to greater sustainability,” in Global Sustainability: A Nobel Cause, eds. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Mario Molina, Nicholas Stern, Veronica Huber and Susanne Kadner (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 1–8. 5 See IPCC, Fifth Assessment Report (2014). 6 Peter H. Feindt and Angela Oels, “Does discourse matter? Discourse Analysis in environmental policy making,” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 7, no. 3 (2005): 161–173 (cit. p. 161). 7 Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 8 E.g. Anabela Carvalho and Jacquelin Burgess, “Cultural circuits of climate change in U.K. broadsheet newspapers: 1985–2003,” Risk Analysis 25, no. 6 (2005): 1457–1469.

Discourses for transformation? 117 9 Paul Methmann, “‘Climate protection’ as empty signifier: A discourse theoretical perspective on climate mainstreaming in world politics,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 345–372. 10 Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt. Op. cit.2 11 Methmann, “‘Climate protection’ as empty signifier.” Op. cit.9 12 Tammy L. Lewis, “Media representations of “sustainable development”: Sustaining the status quo?” Science Communication 21, no. 3 (2000): 244–273. 13 Ana Horta, Anabela Carvalho and Luísa Schmidt, “The hegemony of global politics: news coverage of climate change in a small country,” Society & Natural Resources (2017, online first): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2017.1295497. 14 Shane Gunster, “Contesting conflict? Efficacy, advocacy and alternative media in British Columbia,” in Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives, eds. Robert Hackett, Susan Forde, Shane Gunster and Karrie FoxwellNorton (London: Routledge, 2017): 120–143. 15 Anneleen Kenis and Mathias Lievens, The Limits of the Green Economy (London: Routledge, 2014). 16 Lewis, “Media representations of ‘sustainable development’.” Op. cit.12 17 David Edwards and David Cromwell, Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media (London: Pluto Press, 2006). 18 Ulrich Beck, “Climate for change, or how to create a green modernity?” Theory, Culture & Society 27, nos. 2–3 (2010): 254–266. 19 Ibid., p. 256. 20 Yves Pepermans, and Pieter Maeseele, “The politicization of climate change: Problem or solution?” WIRES Climate Change 7 (2016): 478–485. 21 Anabela Carvalho, Margit van Wessel and Pieter Maeseele, “Communication practices and political engagement with climate change: A research agenda”, Environmental Communication 11, no. 1 (2017): 122–135. 22 Jochen Markard, Rob Raven and Bernhard Truffer, “Sustainability transitions: An emerging field of research and its prospects,” Research Policy 41, no. 6 (2012): 955–967 (cit. p. 956). 23 E.g. Ian Scoones, Melissa Leach and Peter Newell (eds.), The Politics of Green Transformations (London: Routledge, 2015). 24 James Meadowcroft, “What about the politics? Sustainable development, transition management, and long term energy transitions,” Policy Science 42 (2009): 323–340. 25 Derk Loorbach, Transition Management: New Mode of Governance of Sustainable Development (Utrecht: International Books, 2007). 26 Maarten Hajer et al., “Beyond cockpit-ism: Four insights to enhance the transformative potential of the Sustainable Development Goals,” Sustainability 7, no. 2 (2015): 1651–1660. 27 E.g. Adrian Smith and Andrew Stirling, “The politics of social-ecological resilience and sustainable socio-technical transitions,” Ecology & Society 15, no. 1, Article 11 (2010). http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss1/art11/. Andrew Stirling, Emancipating Transformations: From Controlling ‘The Transition’ to Culturing Plural Radical Progress (STEPS Working Paper 64, Brighton: STEPS Centre, 2014). 28 Giuseppe Feola, “Societal transformation in response to global environmental change: A review of emerging concepts,” Ambio 44 (2015): 376–390. 29 Ulrich Brand, “Transformation as a new critical orthodoxy: The strategic use of the term ‘transformation’ does not prevent multiple crises,” Gaia 25, no. 1 (2016): 23–27. 30 James Patterson et al., “Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions (online first, 2016), cit. p. 2. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422416300843. 31 Ibid., p. 10.

118 Anabela Carvalho 32 Lilie Chouliaraki, “Discourse analysis”, in The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, eds. Tony Bennett and John Frow (London: Sage, 2008): 674–698 (cit. p. 674). 33 Linda A. Wood and Rolf Kroger, Doing Discourse Analysis: Methods for Studying Action in Talk and Text (London: Sage, 2000), cit. p. 3. 34 Norman Fairclough, “Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: The universities”, Discourse and Society 4, no. 2 (1993): 133–168 (cit. p. 135). 35 Norman Fairclough, “Critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies,” Critical Policy Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 177–197. 36 Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, “Critical discourse analysis,” in Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. Teun van Dijk (London: Sage, 1997): 258–284. 37 Margaret Wetherell, “Themes in discourse research: The case of Diana,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, eds. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor and Simeon J. Yates (London: Sage, 2001): 14–28, cit. p. 16. 38 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe et al., From Transition to Transformation: Sustainable and Inclusive Development in Europe and Central Asia (Geneva: Information Service, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2012), www.un-rcm-europecentralasia.org/fileadmin/DAM/RCM…/RIO_20_Web_In teractif.pdf. 39 The Leap Manifesto, https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Fairclough, “Critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies,” Op. cit.35 Chouliaraki and Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity. Op. cit.7 43 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe et al., From Transition to Transformation. Op. cit.38 44 World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford University Press, 1987). 45 Alice Krieg-Planque, “La formule “développement durable: Un opérateur de neutralisation de la conflictualité,” Langage et Société 134, no. 4 (2010): 5–29. 46 Bob Hopwood, Mary Mellor and Geoff O’Brien, “Sustainable development: Mapping different approaches,” Sustainable Development 13 (2005): 38–52. 47 Eric Neumeyer, Weak Versus Strong Sustainability: Exploring the Limits of Two Opposing Paradigms, 2nd ed. (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2003). 48 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe et al., From Transition to Transformation. Op. cit.38 49 Ibid. 50 Methmann, “‘Climate protection’ as empty signifier.” Op. cit.9 51 Ibid., p. 31. 52 Ibid., p. 39. 53 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe et al., From Transition to Transformation. Op. cit.38 54 Ibid. 55 “System change, not climate change: An ecosocialist coalition,” systemchangenotclimatechange.org. 56 Candis Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 57 Homer Thomas-Dixon, “Start the Leap Revolution without me,” Globe and Mail (April 22, 2016). https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/start-the-leap-revo lution-without-me/article29711945/. 58 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990): 17.

Discourses for transformation? 119 59 Ibid., p. 24. 60 Ibid., p. 17. 61 Sarah Bridge, “A look at the Leap Manifesto that is dividing the NDP,” CBC News (April 17, 2016), http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-leap-manifestopolicy-1.3538439. 62 According to Lukacs, “[t]hat includes a majority of New Democrats and Greens, half of Liberal voters, and even twenty percent of Conservatives. Considering the relentless smears by the media, these figures are astonishing. What they demonstrate is that Canadians are hungry for dramatic government action on climate change and inequality”. Martin Lukacs, “Surprise, the pundits were wrong: Poll shows huge support for Leap Manifesto,” The Guardian (April 29, 2016), https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2016/apr/29/surprise-the-pun dits-were-wrong-poll-shows-huge-support-for-leap-manifesto. 63 Anabela Carvalho and Tarla Rai Peterson, Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011). 64 Ibid., p. 1. 65 Lukacs, “Surprise, the pundits were wrong.” Op. cit.62 66 Uwe Schneidewind and Karoline Augenstein, “Three schools of transformation thinking: The impact of ideas, institutions, and technological innovation on transformation processes,” Gaia 25, no. 2 (2016): 88–93, cit. p. 88. 67 Pepermans and Maeseele, “The politicization of climate change.” Op. cit.20 68 John Barry, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-changed, Carbon-constrained World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 273.

7

The circulation of constitutional discourse Greg Urban

Discourse analysis focusing on large-scale institutions and practices is used in a range of disciplines and focuses on a wide array of topics. Other chapters in this section utilize it in the context of the sociology of knowledge, and in the exploration of the contemporary struggles over climate change. This chapter focuses attention on discourse in relationship to nation building. Rather than taking a sociology of knowledge approach to constitution-making and its expert discourse,1 or examining the political struggles involved in giving birth to and maintaining or transforming constitutions2—appropriate topics themselves for discourse analyses—this chapter looks at the uptake or lack of uptake of constitutions as discourse within modern nations, paying particular attention to the nonreferential aspects of constitutions, and to their role in circulatory processes. I choose the US constitution as a point of reference because of the extent to which it has become a group emblem, in addition to functioning as a set of agreed upon group laws. My goal will be to examine the potential variability in national constitutions. To what extent do they function as emblems? In what measure are they laws like other laws? Can we detect other roles that national constitutions play? By way of background, about a decade ago, I began to conceptualize a large-scale ethnographic project that would involve the collection of semistructured interview materials from a wide range of people in countries around the world regarding their orientation to their national constitutions. My thought was that the study of constitutions as discourse could shed light on the nature of discourse circulation. Simultaneously, an ethnographic perspective on the uptake—or lack of uptake—of constitutions by individuals in a nation could illuminate the role of constitutions in relation to the selfregulatory functions of nation-states. It might help in understanding the factors that favor the rule of law, as well as those that undermine it. The past two and a quarter centuries, of course, have witnessed the copying of the idea of the constitution from one part of the world to the next. As could be anticipated from the study of discourse circulation more generally, the copying or replication processes typically resulted in changes to the discourse.3 Some of those changes were related to adaptation to new social circumstances.

The circulation of constitutional discourse 121 In this chapter, I report some preliminary findings from the ethnographic research. First, despite small sample sizes, differences seem to be apparent regarding the circulation of constitutional discourse in different nations. That is, nations appear to have, in some measure, distinctive constitutional cultures. In this essay, I look at just one dimension of variation: how salient to consciousness the constitution of a nation is as a discrete thing-like entity.4 Second, there are significant intra-national variations within the small samples, revealing nonuniformities in how circulation has been and is occurring within nations. From the perspective of discourse circulation, nations are internally diverse. I look here briefly at one axis of variation: how individuals respond to the idea of doing away with or abolishing their constitution. The data suggest a wide range of variation in opinion in virtually all nations. At the same time, despite the internal diversity, I argue that such variation can be made sense of in terms of the affective orientations of individuals to their constitution versus their affective orientations to their country’s leaders. Do they view power as residing in and emanating from the constitution or from specific individuals or roles? My own longer-term goal for this research is to investigate the extent to which constitutions in the American sense—a single document containing foundational laws together with rights and duties of citizens—function as group totems, acquiring the kind of sacredness Durkheim believed to be present in the Australian churingas, and that Freud viewed in relation to historical psychodynamic processes. To be clear, I am suggesting that the American constitution is a group emblem like the churinga and other totems.5 It occupies, I argue, a quasi-sacred if not actually sacred place within American popular culture, a claim the research presented here supports. In what measure are other national constitutions similar or different in this regard? In Durkheim’s account, the Australian churinga—typically a wooden or stone object with designs carved on it—represented the social group to itself. It made the collectivity salient to individual consciousness, as an entity having power over them. Simultaneously, because of the belief in the churinga’s powers, it did in fact exercise a force over the group members. In many ways, he could have been describing a well-functioning constitution.6 Similarly, Freud regarded the totem as a representation of the father, defeated and slain by the group of sons who overthrew his despotic reign. The totem was instated as a form of atonement that demanded ritual subordination to it.7 Freud too could have been describing the American constitution. Created in the wake of the defeat of the despotic British king, the American constitution called forth the allegiance once owed to the crown.

Regarding the samples The data I have been using derive from interviews with citizens from diverse countries around the world. They were conducted under a variety of circumstances, mainly by student researchers and assistants. Researchers chose interviewees who were typically either acquaintances or acquaintances of

122 Greg Urban acquaintances, often from countries with which the researchers were already familiar. Interviewees ranged in age from college students to retirees, many of the non-US citizens temporarily or permanently residing in the USA, with interviews conducted face-to-face. Other interviews were collected during travels or research abroad or in electronic video conferencing sessions over the Internet. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews, using a set of preformulated questions, but were free to stray from the script as the conversation unfolded. The questions included: Does your country have a constitution? If not, does it need one? What role does the constitution play in your country? Did you study the constitution in school, in what grade, etc., and, if so, do you believe that what you learned about the constitution is accurate? How important is the constitution with respect to the current political leader? Is the leader subordinate to the constitution, or can he/she act independently of its restrictions? How different would your country be if its constitution were abolished? In what ways would it be different? How important is your constitution to making the country a distinctive place? Besides the constitution, what other things might contribute more to distinguishing your country from other countries? Do you think your views are typical of other citizens in your country? If not, how would you expect other citizens of your country to answer these questions? Have you had any emotional experiences relative to your constitution, or any feelings about your constitution other than those you’ve already described? Is there anything else you would like to say about your constitution? The interviews were converted into short analytical accounts, containing significant direct quotations from the interviews. At this juncture, I am merely sampling the accumulated data, which as of this writing consists of 732 reports, based on more than 870 interviews. The interviews represent an unquestionably biased sample, since they are generally from the better-educated and wealthier strata of the various nations. While we cannot yet begin to construct an adequate space of intra-national variation for a single country, it does appear that one axis will likely be the level of education. I should also note that the data set includes abundant evidence of the complicated nature of the modern world when it comes to national citizenship. Impressionistically, most interviewees voice no conflicts over their sense of belonging, but a fair number nevertheless report moving between countries, such that identifying with a particular collectivity was far from clear-cut.

The thing-like salience of the constitution Despite the limitations of the data set, some observations regarding intercountry suggest themselves. Perhaps none is more obvious than variation in how thing-like the national constitution appears to be to its citizens. In many of the US interviews, the constitution appears as a concrete document, an

The circulation of constitutional discourse 123 object in the world. Of course, an original signed copy is kept preserved and on display at the National Archives. Even more interesting is the number of US interviewees who mention pocket constitutions, which some individuals have carried on their persons, some even up to the present. For example, one interviewee noted, “I always carry around a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution, just in case.” I do not myself own a pocket size copy of the US constitution. However, I do possess a thin booklet I had acquired when I was in eighth grade. Called “The Liberty Collection,” the booklet is 14 inches tall and 10 inches wide and contains a copy of the constitution on made-to-look-like old parchment, in imitation of the original in the National Archives. In 2001, I wrote: Through the peregrinations of my life, it has maintained a strangely special quality, something to which I was attached by unconscious ties. Never once did I seriously consider jettisoning it, despite geographical displacements that have forced me to dispose of other childhood treasures.8 Evidently, some Americans, at least, feel a connection to their constitution as thing by virtue of indexical and iconic associations. The facsimile constitutions are icons of the originals, and those copies or facsimiles maintain an indexical—that is, spatiotemporal—relationship to the person. In some cases, the copies are carried around on the individual’s person; in others, they are kept in the individual’s house, moving from house to house as the individual relocates. In concluding this chapter, I will suggest that the processes by which constitutions circulate as discourse and embed themselves in a population are based on similar iconic and indexical associations, albeit ones not necessarily grounded in tangible physical objects like facsimile constitutions. The same kind of iconic indexical connections are created when individuals hear or utter words that link back to the constitution, connecting some aspect of that individual’s life to the constitution. The utterance of the word—even something like: “it’s not in the constitution”—has an indexical relationship to the person uttering or hearing it, and an iconic connection to the constitution, where the word “constitution” is used (as in: “do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America).” Most of the interview data from this project reveal indexical iconic connections, sometimes affectively charged, although many, alternatively, reveal the absence of such connections. The United States, with its pocket constitutions and facsimiles as well as its constitutional discourse more generally, is probably near one extreme among the nations of the world—the extreme in which the constitution becomes salient to individuals as a thing in the world. While the data set is still small relative to the countries and their populations, I have not yet found another interview from another country in which the individual discusses pocket or facsimile constitutions. It would not be surprising to find other such

124 Greg Urban countries, and it might even be surprising if pocket constitutions have not appeared anywhere else, given the tendency of countries to copy their practices from other countries. Still, the interviews to date tend to suggest that the United States is an extreme case when it comes to the salience of the constitution. Perhaps the extreme in the other direction, low or minimal salience, is the United Kingdom. One interviewer (himself a British national) asked the interviewee (a nineteen-year-old British national): “does your country have a constitution?” She responded: “What’s a constitution?” The interviewer then stated: “Okay, so let’s think of a constitution as a written document giving the foundations of the state.” She responded that, in that case, “no.” Nor was this an isolated instance. Another interviewee stated adamantly: “There is no UK constitution.” “Nobody seems to know what it is, or that it even exists!” Britain is often regarded as one of the few countries “without a constitution.”9 A striking fact, however, is that in a sample of eighteen interviews, twelve— that is, two thirds—spontaneously referenced in one way or another the “monarchy,” “crown,” “royal family,” “Queen,” or even “King.” For some, the monarchy is a source of pride. One put it this way: “everyone loves the royal family, they bolster national pride and get money from tourists.” In some ways, the monarch becomes the salient thing-in-the-world for many of the British interviewees. When thinking about the constitution of the UK as its political organization, what so frequently comes to mind is the monarch. For some, this popping into consciousness concerns not so much the emblematic quality of the monarch as an account of the limits placed on the monarch’s power: Were the constitution not to exist, the power of the Queen would be rather high, leaving Parliament in ruins. History has shown us that this is not a good thing; too much power under one authoritative figure works out somewhere from rarely to never. To be sure, the monarchy is part of the UK constitution, so mention of it in the interviews should not be unexpected. What is interesting, however, is that in many of the interviews the monarchy or royal family or simply Queen is not just referenced as part of the political organization. It is looked at also as emblematic of Britain and even, for some, as a source of pride or other strong feelings reminiscent of the attitudes towards the constitution held by many Americans. The royal family, as thing-in-the-world, seems to resemble the US constitution as a discrete entity, intelligibly luminous, in the foreground of thought. The salience to consciousness of the royal family in turn enables the backgrounding of the principles underlying the political organization of the UK, that is, the constitution. On a more general plane, therefore, we might wonder whether a modern nation requires a special kind of emblem or totem—a document or an office like monarch or something else—that seems to embody or represent the political organization of the nation and from which the affective power over

The circulation of constitutional discourse 125 individuals flows. My inquiry in this section is confined to the relative degrees of salience of the constitution to its citizens, and here there appears to be considerable variation between the USA, with its highly salient constitution, and the UK, with its constitutional arrangement relatively invisible, in the background. From the interviews to date, it appears that the monarchy replaces the emblematic function of the constitution; or, looked at from a historical point of view, the fledgling USA historically substituted the constitution for the monarch as emblem. The central issue raised for the rule of law is that a publicly salient constitution is not strictly necessary. Britain’s eclectic set of documents together with traditional practices results in a general orientation to the rule of law. However, this may be the result of a custom in which the monarch plays almost no political role, yet is able to serve as salient entity through which power flows, much like the US constitution. Many of the interviews from other countries reveal situations, in contrast, in which the leader is viewed as effectively above the law, so that the constitution has relatively little practical efficacy. In such cases as Zimbabwe, for example, the constitution appears to some or even most citizens as irrelevant. As one Zimbabwe citizen put it: “To the current political leader, the constitution is of no relevance. He did what he wanted, how he wanted … . We’ve had the same president for about three decades now … . It’s a popular dictatorship.” Similarly, someone who had grown up in Iran during the era of the Shah reported: “The Shah could change [the constitution] without opposition, or act completely against what the constitution said. He was the only ruler of the country and he could do whatever he wanted.” In such cases, it is the individual who is the source of power, rather than, as in the case of the UK monarch, the emblem through which power flows. As regards salience, the constitution can be relegated to the background by an autocratic leader, as in Zimbabwe, or by a monarch without political power, as in the UK. In the one case, the relegation appears to be unfavorable to the rule of law, although in the other it is. And there are other possibilities as well, such as the appearance that the constitution is merely derivative of another text, which is actually of most salience and importance, as in the case of the Quran in a number of countries. One former citizen of Iran, not the one who grew up under the Shah, put it this way: There are laws, there is a constitution, that is primarily based on the Quran. So it’s an Islamic Republic. All the laws are completely based off the Quran. If the Quran says anything is forbidden, then it’s totally forbidden in Iran by the constitution. As regards the rule of law, this same former citizen remarks: “if you abide by the Quran, you should be fine.”

126 Greg Urban It is noteworthy that, even with small sample sizes, we begin to discern variation between countries along different parameters. In the present instance, the variation occurs along a continuum of salience from maximally foregrounded and recognized by citizens to largely invisible to its citizens. Insofar as the constitution of a country is salient, it has indexical/iconic connections to the lives of the people. Those connections keep it alive as discourse. We might speculate that iconic/indexical connectedness—or what could be called constitutional embeddedness—augurs well for the rule of law. The fact that many Americans own and even carry around copies of the constitution suggests as much. However, a constitution conceivably could be embedded but the associations with it negative. While the current Iranian constitution may be subordinated to the Quran, as one of the interviewees above suggested, yet another former citizen of Iran claimed there is in that country a widespread belief that the constitution “is detrimental to our politics and society … many people know that the main source of all the chaos is because of the constitution.” The affective orientation is thus something deserving of investigation in its own right.

Abolishing the constitution One way to probe the affective orientation to the constitution through interviews is to discuss the possibilities that the constitution might be abolished. Here even in the American case we find a range of responses. A view reflected in many interviews was articulated particularly well in this quote: Without the constitution, it would be questionable as to whether or not the United States would even have a government. One of two things would happen: Either America would devolve into anarchy or tyranny. And, most likely, the first would precede the second. Right now, the constitution carries the connotation that the government should be subordinate to the people. If the constitution were abolished, this power balance stands to be reversed: the people would become subordinate to the government. This would materialize as a degradation of equality between people. The general feeling expressed here and elsewhere in the interviews is that the constitution stands between the individual and chaos or predation. The theme of chaos, and, indeed, use of the word “chaos,” can be found in a number of interviews. The word “anarchy” is also used, as in this interviewee’s response: there would be anarchy and people would lose control of themselves at first. Eventually, everyone would calm down, though. Since the morals of the country are based on the constitution, there would be transitional chaos before the people learned to control themselves.

The circulation of constitutional discourse 127 The constitution was seen as standing between many of the interviewees and such breakdown. The other commonly associated scenario is the rise of tyranny. Many of the interviewees who mentioned chaos or anarchy also referred to tyranny, as in this one: “[there] would be chaos, either a police state or a state of anarchy, but most likely some totalitarian government.” The main words used are “tyranny,” “totalitarian,” and “dictatorship,” or variants of them. Interestingly, fully 52 per cent of this (admittedly small) sample see either anarchy or despotism as the outcome of abolishing the constitution. The constitution in turn stands between them and this dire outcome. It acts as a guardian of rights and liberties, a protector and insurer of wellbeing, a bulwark against the forces of destruction and disorder. Many of the interviewees’ comments suggest that there is something unthinkable about getting rid of the document as the center of a union. Of the remaining interviews, some failed to focus on the abolishment question. Because they were semi-structured, interviewers were free to follow the flow of the conversation, and, in those cases, the flow moved away from abolition. Other interviews, however, stress the amount of change that would ensue: “[it] would be very different because people would not have any incentive to abide to this great outline [of law and order].” The theme of whether the USA would be the same entity comes up in other accounts as well, where change and difference are the main worries: “Well, the United States would be a completely different country because it was established on the Constitution. It’s what makes the United States the United States.” The constitution, it seems, contains the essence of the United States, giving to the country its distinctive quality. Lest it appear that all of these interviewees (50 in total) were concerned about the dire consequences of the hypothetical abolishment of the US constitution, three interviewees stand out. One of the three, an ardent libertarian, when asked about the matter, stated: “I think we should just scrap [the Constitution] entirely. It doesn’t stop congress from restricting speech; it doesn’t stop the president from making an executive order; and it doesn’t stop the courts in any way.” He clearly held a low opinion of the document so many others regard as tinged with the sacred. Another interviewee remarked: “The Constitution needs to be changed or preferably rewritten,” a sentiment actually not far from that of a number of interviewees who believed that aspects of the constitution did, indeed, need to be updated, although they had as well serious worries about jettisoning it entirely, even in favor of a new one. Thus, even in this relatively small sample, a wide range of variation occurs, from an individual who wants to “scrap” the constitution, on the one end, to those for whom scrapping would produce “chaos,” “anarchy,” and/or “tyranny,” on the other. Given how different the USA and UK are, in these interviews, with regard to the salience of the constitution, it is interesting that striking parallels can be found when it comes to the question of abolishing the constitution.

128 Greg Urban I was able to examine twenty interview reports from the UK. They split evenly between those who took the question of abolition to refer to existing political arrangements, including documents and uncodified procedures, on the one side, and those who asserted that the UK lacked a constitution, on the other. For those who took the constitution to be the traditional political arrangements in the UK, including acts of parliament, the responses to doing away with the constitution centered on chaos and disorder, as “the country would go into complete and utter chaos,” or “I guess if you had to abolish the constitution the country would just fall apart.” In general, these individuals had a sense of dire consequences expressed in words similar to those used by Americans to describe what would happen were the US written constitution to be suspended. It is worth pausing here to notice that for nearly all of these UK interviewees, the response was abolishing the current governing institutional arrangements and precedents, especially parliament and the monarchy. Seeing their political system as undermined evokes a sense of ominous foreboding as to what might ensue. What is perhaps most intriguing is that the Americans are making reference to a specific document. Getting rid of that document would be tantamount to dismantling the institutional arrangement arising from it. In the American case, power flows into the world through the written constitution as its conduit. In the British case, power flows into the present world through tradition, especially institutional arrangements. In the British case, 50 per cent of the interviewees did have worries about chaos and disorder, much like the 52 per cent of Americans in the sample who had similar worries. The big difference between the two cases was that the other 50 per cent in the British case started from the premise that Britain had no constitution, so that the interviews tended to move in the direction of speculating on the desirability of the UK having a single-document constitution analogous to that of the USA. The striking similarity between the UK and US orientations regarding chaos attendant upon elimination of the constitution, despite the huge gap regarding the issue of whether the country even has a constitution or what it might be, leads us to wonder whether the pattern is replicated elsewhere. Even a cursory examination of the interviews from other countries suggests that the pattern is not perfectly replicated, though it seems often possible to find some individuals who have nearly identical feelings. At this time, I have only ten reliable interviews for Russia, including those focused on the former Soviet Union. Of those, one—with an individual who came of age with the 1993 constitution—put it this way: [the constitution is] where everything is coming from so I think it would be chaos if it weren’t there … I believe in a very um – I’m a person who does it by the book so to me the constitution is fundamental so without the constitution I think it would be chaos.

The circulation of constitutional discourse 129 The other interviews all downplay the importance of the constitution, though some acknowledge that it does have an impact. One individual who attributed a minimal role to the constitution, stating: “it’s not just the leader not obeying the constitution, it’s everyone,” also claimed, seemingly contradictorily, that without a constitution Russia “would probably be destroyed.” None of the others expressed this latter sentiment. One interviewee described the current state of affairs as “rampant corruption. And the constitution does not have the seriousness of law necessary to stop it.” That individual too felt that abolishing the constitution would have little effect: “The leader would still act as he would otherwise.” An American audience is likely to read such comments as critical of Russia and its government. But a more contextual reading suggests that this is not necessarily the case. As one interviewee put it: The reason that [the current leader] has had such high appeal is that compared to the nineties, he is helping restore them back to where they should be. They want security. Under a weak government or a government that they see as too gentle, they would feel a sense of insecurity. One individual who referred to the Russian constitution as a “dead body” also noted: “Putin does everything by the letter of the law.” Indeed, while the strong leader still does what he wants, he endeavors to follow constitutional procedures in doing it. The source of security, of a sense of social order, provided by the constitution as document, in the case of the USA, and by the traditions of government for which the Queen stands as emblem, in the UK case, seems to be furnished in some measure by the strong leader in Russia.

Affect, circulation, and power As an anthropologist, my main theoretical interest is in the movement of culture, and, in this case, in particular, in the circulation of discourse—constitutional discourse. I am interested in why culture moves, that is, why circulation takes place. What are the forces that bring this motion about? One of the forces is affect, and I want to now turn to the role of affect in relation to the circulation of constitutional discourse. My hope is to shed some light on questions that have a deep history in social and cultural thought, though my purpose is primarily ethnographic. When it comes to constitutional discourse, there are long-standing questions about social order and the rule of law that pervade the literature, going back at least to Thomas Hobbes’s formulations in Leviathan about the “war of all against all,” and the role of the sovereign in providing order.10 In Hobbes’s formulation, which does not involve reference to discourse, the driving force behind acceptance of the monarch is fear, in particular, the fear of death. Because people fear death, they seek to establish order. To do so, they give up some of their freedom. In particular, they give over to the sovereign the right to settle disputes, thus securing for themselves an orderly social world.

130 Greg Urban Intriguingly, the fear motive can be detected in the USA, UK, and Russian cases. In the US case, the fear of breakdown in social order is attached to the constitution as document. This trepidation is augmented by worries about tyranny. In the British case, the worries center on the breakdown of traditional political order, for which the monarch serves as emblem. In the Russian case, the current political leader seems to be the primary bulwark providing a sense of security, though the constitution as document plays some role for some people. In any event, fear seems to be a factor there as well. At this point it is too early to tell whether apprehensiveness about social breakdown plays a significant role in other countries. However, that a document can be regarded as a bulwark standing between an individual and the frightening world of chaos is itself significant. For an actual person, in the role of group leader, to provide that sense of security is perhaps understandable from a developmental perspective, where young children rely on their parents for protection. Insofar as childhood is the workshop for later affective orientations, this makes sense. A documentary basis for the allaying of fears is perhaps harder to comprehend, though the basis for such an orientation in Judeo–Christian–Islamic religion has already been laid in the case of numerous nations. With regard to the role of fear in relation to fostering circulation, once a constitution has widespread acceptance, as in the US case, it is likely to be a motivating factor only when there is a threat, even a hypothetical one, that it might be taken away. Otherwise, its circulation seems to be maintained primarily by the force of tradition, i.e., inertial practices, such as teaching about the constitution in public schools here in the USA—I have data on this subject, though discussion of it is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, fear could play a significant role in the initial acceptance phase, especially if there is concern about competing political groups within a polity. Some preliminary work on the Bosnian constitution suggests as much. The current constitution evidently has not achieved an inertial place in the culture of Bosnia and Herzegovina. People hold onto it in part, at least, out of fear that war would return were it abandoned. To put this into perspective, the internecine fighting there, in the aftermath of the post-Soviet era breakup of the former Yugoslavia, came to a halt only in December of 1995 with the Dayton Agreement, of which the current constitution is Annex 4. Unlike Hobbes, Max Weber explicitly linked authority to discourse. For him, authority is a form of domination, which he understood as the probability or likelihood that a command—a linguistically formulated piece of discourse— would be obeyed.11 He narrowed authority to those situations of domination in which the command is obeyed because the one receiving it regards it as legitimate. He further distinguished three types of legitimacy, one grounded in custom or tradition; a second deriving from the charisma of the commander; and a third based on reason. Of course, in his tripartite scheme, Weber is following Immanuel Kant, for whom one’s actions could be the result of habit/custom or they could be affectively driven or they could be derived from reason.12

The circulation of constitutional discourse 131 A constitution can, of course, be looked at as a series of commands. So it can be understood in the Weberian scheme in terms of traditional authority, that is, as grounded in inertial culture. People follow commands because they are accustomed to following them. Could it also be looked at in terms of charismatic authority? The term is usually applied to human beings, leaders whose characteristics inspire the devotion of their followers. Can this kind of charisma apply to words?13 The US Declaration of Independence seems to have such a charismatic quality, as do portions of the US constitution, notably the Preamble, and, for many, a number of the amendments. Even the phrase “We, the people” has an inspiring quality. Many (though by no means all) constitutions around the world contain portions that can be regarded as affectively stirring, and, hence, as grounding authority in charisma. In the realm of classical social theory, it seems appropriate to come back to Durkheim and his analysis of the Australian churingas. These are objects found among the Arunta tribe of Central Australia, as well as other tribes in the region though they are called by different names. The objects, in Durkheim’s account, stand for the social group. He describes them this way: They are pieces of wood or bits of polished stone, of a great variety of forms, but generally oval or oblong. Each totemic group has a more or less important collection of these. Upon each of these is engraved a design representing the totem of this same groups.14 The churinga is a group emblem, but it also has a sacred quality, inspiring respect. According to Durkheim: “every churinga, for whatever purpose it may be employed, is counted among the eminently sacred things; there are none which surpass it in religious dignity.”15 As described by Durkheim, the orientation to such objects, which he characterizes as sacred, involves something like a combination of the two basic affective orientations I have been describing—fear and inspiration. In discussing the churinga and related emblems of the group, he uses expressions such as “reverential fear” and “pronounced respect” (188). He later connects these attitudes to the totems with the behaviors associated with them, in a way compatible with certain reverential attitudes to the US constitution: “So if he acts in a certain way towards the totemic beings, it is … because he feels himself morally obliged to act thus; he has the feeling that he is obeying an imperative, that he is fulfilling a duty”(190). We might translate this as: “If individuals act in accord with the constitution, it is because they feel themselves morally obliged to act thus; they feel that they are obeying an imperative, that they are fulfilling a duty.” The latter formulation is consistent with the idea that some people, at least, might follow the provisions of a constitution out of a combination of fear of what would happen otherwise, and also an admiration for the ideals it embodies, a kind of “reverential fear.” It would make no sense to exclude, from the discussion of classical theory, the similar ideas of Freud, since he was most explicitly concerned with the

132 Greg Urban affective orientation of individuals to the totem.16 For him, of course, the story of laws—somewhat like that of Hobbes—begins with conflict. However, in Freud’s case it was family drama, the conflict between fathers and sons. In his mythical-historical account, our primate ancestors lived in family groups with a dominant male who jealously guarded access to the females, denying his own sons. The great revolution occurred when the sons banded together and killed the father, an act for which they felt remorse. As a consequence of that remorse, they agreed to formulate and obey laws, giving birth to a civilized version of humanity. The remorse or guilt—anger directed against the self—mixed with admiration and love for the father combine to form the basis of adherence to the laws. In Freud’s interpretation, it is fear of punishment rather than fear of social disorder. However, the fear of tyranny does seem consistent with the Freudian model. Indeed, the fear of tyranny, which comes about in cases of social disorder, is in fact a fear of punishment— in the form of the punishing tyrant. The contemporary incarnation of this line of investigation leads to “affect theory,”17 growing out of a cultural approach to social theory grounded in the attempt to read affect off the surface of discourse, and to view affect as circulating along with the circulation of discourse. In many ways, my attempts to fathom affect from ethnographic interview data regarding the possibility of a constitution being abolished are continuous with affect theory approaches. Particularly relevant is the work of Brian Massumi on fear in the form of a linguistically articulated sense of threat. 18 He points to the “future reality of threat,” observing simultaneously that “the future of threat is forever” (53). The point seems especially relevant to constitutions as warding off danger. The future danger is the possibility of chaos or some other untoward eventually, such as tyranny. Putting one’s faith in the constitution preempts that threat—at least insofar as other members of the group also put their faith in it. Indeed, the discourse logic of the “double conditional,” as Massumi dubs it, could be applied directly to one’s orientation to the constitution. As Massumi argues, “the felt reality of threat legitimates preemptive action, once and for all” (54). The preemption stands outside of time because it is grounded in a specific discourse logic, in the case of Hobbes, for example: if people could (first conditional) they would (second conditional) aggress upon others in order to achieve their ends. So, to avoid that situation, and, specifically, to avoid being the one aggressed upon, people give over their absolute freedom to the sovereign. The same discourse logic can be discerned in the case of the constitution. As one interviewee put it, regarding the US constitution, “without [the Constitution], there would be just huge chaos.” That is a timeless proposition, since the constitution could be abolished at any time [first conditional], and the result would be at any time “huge chaos” [second conditional]. Affect theory, however, seems not yet to have made the linkage to classical social theory problems à la Hobbes, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud. Yet its contributions could prove key to figuring out how affective forces influence the circulation of constitutional discourse. In Massumi’s case, for

The circulation of constitutional discourse 133 example, the timelessness of the double conditional (could have/would have) means that constitutional discourse might move along inertially (traditionally, in Weber’s sense) without affective bolstering, receiving that bolstering only when threat is articulated, as when the question is asked in an interview: “How different would your country be if its constitution were abolished?” Both fear and inspiration (as the response to charisma) can be found in the social theoretic literature as foundations of authority. Both can be found also in the ethnographic data on orientations to the constitution. However, the ethnographic data—using the insight from Massumi and affect theory—suggest that the fear and/or inspiration need not be constant factors. They may be evoked at particular moments. We can add to this the observation that, at least in the case of fear, there is a difference between this transitorily evoked affect and the kind of primal fear activated during a fight or flight response to imminent danger. Indeed, there is a way in which the primal affect washes out to its traces in the discourse effect of interviews.19 At a still further remove, we might say that an exceedingly faint trace—perhaps vanishingly small—can be detected even in Max Weber’s ideal form of “rational authority.” The latter seems to be based on something like the Kantian notion of the “categorical imperative,” where one should act such that the rule in accord with which one acts could become the basis of law for everyone everywhere. Here we can imagine traces of affect, as when one reasons about whether oneself might be afraid were a certain rule put into effect, such as a rule permitting slavery; if they could enslave me, they would enslave me, in Massumi’s double conditional; since I fear being enslaved, I cannot adopt that rule. The threat of oneself being enslaved, albeit present only as a trace in reason, could be the foundation for an ultimate value in Weber’s sense.

Conclusions Based on this preliminary look at a small portion of the data accumulated to date, it seems possible to draw a series of conclusions, though all remain tentative: (1) Methodological: with even fairly small sample sizes (10 to 100 semistructured interviews per nation), it appears possible to detect differences between national populations, despite the wide range of variation within populations, in regard to the orientations of their citizens to their constitutions. The variation is evident in the case of the relative thing-like salience of the constitution, where the USA and the UK fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. However, it is even the case with a variable like one’s response to the thought of abolishing the existing constitution. The American responses, though ranging from those who think the country would “devolve into anarchy” to those who feel that “we should just scrap” the constitution altogether, suggest that the prevailing attitude is closer to the former. The

134 Greg Urban USA is a country where the population on balance regards the constitution as a source of security. In the Russian case, in contrast, while we find again a similar range of opinion, the source of security seems to lie more with the strong leader. The constitution is widely regarded as important, and by some as crucial. However, by most it is seen as less important than the security provided by the leader. The sample set for Bosnia is still too small, but suggests a country in which, while there is widespread dissatisfaction with the existing constitution, it is considered essential until a new one comes along to take its place. (2) Rule of law: a salient thing-like emblem—in the form of a single document or an office (such as monarch)—may be necessary for the circulation and maintenance of the rule of law, which is seen as standing between individual citizens and undesirable consequences. However, where a person becomes the emblem (as a strong leader), the law can come to seem to emanate from the person rather than the person representing the rule of law. In the USA, where the constitution is highly salient as a discrete thing in the world, individuals readily make iconic-indexical connections to it. The thing-ness of the constitution seems to lend itself to circulation. In the UK case, where the constitution is scattered in documents and parliamentary proceedings and traditions, the constitution has minimal salience, and is known mainly to those experts who have studied the political organization. Here the monarch seems to play the role of thing-like emblem, standing for the constitution. The UK system appears to render possible the rule of law precisely because monarchs do not actually exercise their will but serve rather as emblems for the rule of law as tradition. We can readily imagine the possibility of a continuum between the British system and one in which the leader is both emblem and someone who exercises their own will, subordinating the constitution to it. This is a tendency we see in the data from many countries around the world, such as Zimbabwe and even Russia. As one individual remarked regarding the former: “When you have a popular dictator in power, he is the constitution.” The possible significance of this continuum lies in the suggested need for a modification of Weber’s scheme of bases of legitimate authority. In his scheme, unlike Durkheim’s or Freud’s, there seems to be no role for the emblem, as I have been calling it, of authority. While much further investigation needs to be made even of the data already at my disposal, let alone new data, it appears that the discursive circulation of the law may depend on its emblematization. In Weber’s scheme, charismatic authority appears to emanate only from a person who can be simultaneously an emblem. The data here suggest that, where the law originates from a constitution that is a single document, the document itself becomes the emblem, as in the US case, and when the law is dispersed throughout various documents and customary practices, as in the UK case, an alternative emblem of the rule of law capable of circulating widely becomes

The circulation of constitutional discourse 135 necessary—in the UK, the emblem is the monarch who does not intervene directly in legal processes; replicas of the monarch can readily circulate, the way pocket constitutions do in the USA, and thus render the law salient or thing-like.20 When and insofar as authority originates from an actual person, rather than from the law, we move away from the rule of law per se. A related conclusion is that for some individuals—and, in some countries, a considerable portion of the population—the possibility of abolishing the constitution is scary. It evokes fear, whether of chaos, tyranny, loss of identity, or uncontrolled change. The constitution, like an actual person, can stand between the individual citizen and scary consequences. In such instances, it acts like a talisman, a bulwark against an untoward future. At the same time, given the range of variation within a given population, it seems almost certain that at least some individuals will regard themselves as above the need for such a talisman. They may feel confident that they can rewrite the existing constitution to produce a better one, or because of a faith in something else—in one case, for instance, in our “political culture.” (3) Classical social theory: affect appears to play a major role primarily in changing the existing pattern of circulation of constitutional discourse, or when there is a threat to established patterns. If a constitutional awareness is kept alive only or primarily among lawyers and politicians, as in the British case, it will tend to continue that way unless affective forces come along to change it, such as dissatisfaction with the royal family with concomitant calls for a single-document American style constitution, as has happened in the past in Britain.21 Even putatively rational orientations to law get carried forward in time through the force of tradition, or what can be called “inertia.” In Kant’s and Weber’s sense, laws are rational when they derive from reasoning about what would make for the best laws.22 But once people become convinced that the laws are rational, once the laws take hold, they may be passed on without the intervention of further reflexive processes.23 At the same time, tradition as inertia meets with the friction of entropy, so to speak. Without the input of energy, culture—including the orientation to constitutions—tends to get disorganized. Affect can be summoned to help maintain traditional cultural flow, especially if there is a recognizable threat to that flow, such as the suggestion raised in the interviews that the constitution might be abolished altogether. This kind of discursive intervention through the interview summons the trace of fear, through the “could have/would have” double conditional of Massumi. It is not that the fear is present all of the time, as in Hobbes’s argument. It is summoned when the threat is evoked discursively. The fear appears as a conservative force, bolstering tradition, propelling it along. The flip side of this is change brought about by a charismatic leader, or, perhaps more precisely, by a leader who produces charismatic discourse. The

136 Greg Urban new discourse inspires and so catches on. Such inspiring affect was undoubtedly part of the circulatory force behind the Declaration of Independence in the US case. The charisma of words is much less apparent in the US constitution, excepting perhaps the Preamble, along with various oft-repeated phrases, such as “freedom of speech” in the first amendment or “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” as in the second amendment. While stirring words can be found in a range of constitutions around the world, much of even these constitutions lacks charisma altogether. I suspect that affect comes into play, in such cases, instead in the reflexive arguments for and against various of the constitutional provisions, or even for and against the adopting of a particular constitution as a whole in the first place. The ethnographic data thus provisionally confirm the Hobbesian analysis of fear as motivation for social order, albeit fear present as a trace in the could have/would have double conditional of Massumi. In Freud, the fear is transfigured as guilt—the fear of reprisal—as the basis for adherence to the rule of law, something not directly detectable in the data. However, we do find the constitution as well as strong leader as a source of security, and this arguably supports Freud’s analysis of law as substitute for the father. At the same time, the responses within a population cover a wide range, from those for whom doing away with the constitution or strong leader is understood to be catastrophic to those who express confidence in the face of such eventualities. And, lastly, we find in the data evidence for the importance of the Durkheimian emblem of the collectivity—here as emblem of the rule of law—in the form of the single-document constitution as well as the monarch morphing to strong leader. Again, however, the response to the emblem is far from uniform within a given country, the range of variation being considerable. My purpose in this chapter is not to deny the significance of constitutions as blueprints for political organization around which public debates can unfold. But a settled debate abandons the continuing life of constitutional discourse to inertia, and inertial motion is subject to the corrosive effects of entropy. Affect, therefore, whose role may be limited, is nonetheless essential to the discursive success of a constitution, and therefore also to the rule of law. It can stimulate defense of existing constitutional discourse as well as renew debate about its possible transformation.

Notes 1 See, for example, Kim Lane Scheppele, A Constitution Between Past and Future, 49 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1377 (2008). http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol49/ iss4/11. Jennifer Widner, Constitution Writing in Post-conflict Settings: An Overview, 49 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1513 (2008). http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol49/iss4/16. 2 A topic on which much has been written, but little of it from the perspective of discourse analysis. See, for example, Richard R. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York, NY: Random House, 2009).

The circulation of constitutional discourse 137 3 See Greg Urban, “A sentence that shaped the modern world,” Signs and Society 5, no. 2 (2017): 183–200. 4 Michael Silverstein, “The ‘value’ of objectual language.” Paper delivered at a symposium of the 83rd American Anthropology Association Meetings 1984, Denver, CO. 5 The hallowed aura of the US constitution has been noted by legal theorists, notably, by Karl N. Llewellyn, in his well-known article: “The constitution as an institution,” Columbia Law Review 34, no. 1 (1934): 1–40. He refers to the constitution as a “sacred code” (p. 12). 6 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 7 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1950), hereinafter, Totem and Taboo. 8 Greg Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 113. 9 See, for example, James Allan, “Why New Zealand doesn’t need a written constitution,” A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform 4 (1998): 487–494, or Eric Barendt, “Is there a United Kingdom constitution?” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7, no. 1 (1997): 137–146. My purpose in this chapter is to empirically probe the question of how ordinary people, in this instance ordinary British people, view their constitution, not to engage the scholarly and professional debates. At the same time, it is intriguing that those debates do sometimes reflect the views culled from ethnographic research. Compare, for example, the opinions of these two writers with those of the various authors in Vernon Bagdanor (ed.), The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003). In the latter work, “constitution” is understood in the sense of political arrangements, whether codified or not, although consideration is given to the judiciary as a force bringing about change. 10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994): Chapters XIII–XIV. 11 Max Weber, “The types of legitimate authority,” in his Economy and Society, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978): Chapter III, 212–301. 12 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1981). 13 Presumably, a constitution could also, and perhaps most properly, be looked at in terms of Weber’s rational authority, although I will not endeavor to do so here. It is worth noting also that an instrumental rational orientation to the constitution might itself be driven by the fear of disorder, as in the Hobbesian framework. Hence, it could be understandable in terms of affect. 14 See, supra, note 6, 119. 15 Ibid., p. 120. 16 Totem and Taboo, supra. See also, Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1939), Robert Paul, Moses and Civilization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 17 See Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 18 Ibid., Brian Massumi, “The future birth of affective fact: The political ontology of threat,” 52–70. 19 Various authors have discussed affective traces, for example, Joel B. Cohen, “Attitude, affect, and consumer behavior,” in Affect and Social Behavior, eds. S. Bert Moore and Alice M. Isen (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 152–206; also, Louise J. Boscacci, The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter:

138 Greg Urban

20 21 22

23

A Picture Postcard, Its Provocations, and Processual Becomings, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong, 2016. http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5745&context=theses. For an account of British discourse about the monarchy, see Michael Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (London: Routledge, 1992). Among the many examples, see Anthony Barnett, This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution (London: Vintage, 1997). The reasoning that gets circulated through publicly made arguments becomes metaculture—that is culture (the arguments) that reflects back on other culture (the laws regulating conduct). In this sense, metaculture influences the circulation of culture. Those reflexive forces become “metacultural” when the reasoning process itself gets passed on, as in the course of debates.

Part III

Cultural contingencies of discursive practices Kate Zambon The chapters in this section grapple with the ways that culturally situated discourses are mobilized by different cultural communities in their struggles to assert themselves in a national public sphere. Understanding the communicative potential of discourse requires exploration of the historically grounded networks of cultural meaning at play, networks so familiar as to appear natural to members of discourse communities. The concept of cultural contingency at the nexus of this section refers to the particular, unspoken “webs of significance,” to borrow Geertz’s classic formulation, that make talk, text, and practices meaningful in a discourse community. The chapters in this section make these naturalized discursive fields manifest in three different national contexts: Egypt, China, and Israel. They show how authority and legitimacy is indirectly reproduced through discourse, as political actors use the culturally contingent symbolic tools of discourse to communicate directives or secure public legitimacy. At the same time, counter-hegemonic actors depend on culturally resonant forms, concepts, and styles to build movements and challenge authority. In her chapter on the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Sahar Khamis analyzes the narrative strategies of three groups of actors in their struggle for legitimacy and discursive hegemony. Khamis compares the pragmatic and conservative approaches of the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood with the heterogeneous “leaderless” group of revolutionary activists. While recognizing the many differences between the military and the Brotherhood, Khamis identifies common discursive ground between them; both groups denied their ambition to power by claiming to be servants of the people’s revolution and, paradoxically, the traditional order of the nation and religion, respectively. In contrast, young revolutionaries adopted an abrasive, counterhegemonic approach, rejecting the need for ideological commonality in favor of solidarity across factions based on resistance against authority. Each of the three groups identified by Khamis called on different discourse traditions familiar in Egyptian public culture. The military and the Brotherhood both maintain formality, using traditional florid styles and rhetorical devices that draw authority from past hegemonies. The young revolutionaries, in contrast, self-consciously break with discursive formality, but draw on another important discursive tradition: the use of humor to overcome fear and to challenge

140 Kate Zambon those same authorities. In each case, groups used culturally specific discourses to connect with the Egyptian public in very different ways. Khamis shows that beyond content of intended messages, the form of discourse itself communicates. Hailong Tian picks up this theme in his exploration of how authority in Chinese governance operates not through direct mandates from top leaders, but through the selective mobilization of different culturally situated discourses. Tian examines a single capital murder case in which the sentence was swiftly decided and implemented only to be overturned 18 years later, over a decade after another confessed to the crime. Tian argues that Chinese cultural and political contingencies are crucial to understanding the timing and results of the conviction and the posthumous exoneration. In each period, Chinese political authorities publicly emphasized divergent values encapsulated by two Chinese thematic nodes – yahnda (severe, immediate, and decisive action) before the conviction and gongping-zhengyi (equality and justice) in advance of the exoneration – but with the constant stated aim of maintaining social and economic stability. These themes act as what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as “nodal points,” activating a series of related judicial norms and practices, indirectly providing complex and specific guidance for how subordinates in the justice system should approach a case. Thus, the same case and the same ultimate goal of stability are operationalized with opposing results in these two periods, according to the two divergent themes publicly accentuated by political leaders. One cultural factor involves the figurative nature of the character-based language, which encourages consistent use of key concepts generalized to a case. Another is the institutional nature of state communications, which imbues statements by party members with the force of the party as a whole. Tian argues that in China’s one-party system, lower-tier officials access power by reproducing the cultural conceptions emphasized by leadership, an emphasis that shifts with changing state priorities. In this way, political leaders enact their will through the unquestioned acceptance of their discourse rather than through direct intervention. Tamar Katriel further explores the issue of the tension between embodied action and speech through an analysis of Israeli activist groups resisting the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory. Starting with the observation that activists frequently claim that their work is “more than just talk,” Katriel asks why groups that focus on witnessing and dialog disparage the act of speech. Katriel focuses on what she calls the “speech-action nexus,” where she identifies a deep ambivalence among activist groups regarding the value of speech as activism. On the one hand, activist groups frequently devalue language as a feeble alternative to embodied action, even when speech and witnessing form a core of their activities. At the same time, these same groups are organized around the belief that speaking, listening, and being heard has transformative power. Katriel locates the foundations of this ambivalence in the “language ideologies” that guide activist values at both global and local levels. In the case of Israeli activism, the speech-action nexus is influenced both by the globalized cultural formations

Cultural contingencies 141 of activism with its skepticism of language and by historically grounded Israeli language ideologies that prioritize the practical function of speech and recognize its transformational role in the establishment of the Israeli nation. Each of the authors in this section show the importance of the often naturalized, but occasionally contentious discursive fields that constitute cultural contexts. These chapters tackle complicated and contradictory events. They demonstrate the complexity and flexibility of cultural contingencies of discourses at play in given contexts.

8

Dueling discourses of power and resistance The cultural contexts of the shifting revolutionary rhetoric of three Egyptian political actors Sahar Khamis

This chapter unpacks the discursive struggles that took place between the three major political actors in the Egyptian political scene during and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011: the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the young revolutionary activists. At the heart of this power struggle lies a parallel rhetorical and discursive struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people, through crafting unique identities and distinctive narratives of the “Self” and counternarratives of the “Other.” By engaging in these discursive struggles, each party strived to delegitimize other parties by positioning them as juxtaposed to one’s own positive qualities and highlighting the other’s shortcomings. The data upon which this study is based came from a multiplicity of sources using long-term observation over a period of many years, before, during, and after the 2011 revolution in Egypt. These sources included leading media outlets, whether print, broadcast, or online, as well as both pro-regime, mainstream media, and anti-regime, oppositional media, in addition to street billboards, banners, slogans, chants, symbols, and even jokes, which were all used as vehicles of political agency. This longitudinal, multi-textual, and multifaceted data gathering approach allowed for a deep, rigorous, and comprehensive understanding of the studied research topic. It is worth noting that in instances where protest banners, chants, slogans, symbols, or jokes were used, the method of selection was capturing the most popular, prominent, and repetitive ones, because this signaled that they resonated with the public the most due to their relevance, significance, and wide appeal.

The Egyptian military: shifting rhetorical strategies and revolutionary narratives Although the military has traditionally been a significant part of the establishment in Egypt due to its unique position of political power and economic privilege, and, most importantly, the fact that successive Egyptian rulers, namely Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, came from within its ranks, it didn’t really emerge as an outright political player, with a loud discursive voice and an amplified message, until the eruption of the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

144 Sahar Khamis During the 18 days of this revolution, the army chose to be neutral, by not siding with President Mubarak and not using any power against the demonstrators and the protestors. Statements from military spokesmen at that time regularly emphasized that “the Egyptian military will never open fire on its own people” and that “the military will not harass, attack, or punish honorable citizens who are seeking reform and fighting corruption.”1 One famous slogan which the military repeatedly highlighted and emphasized at that time was: “The military and the people are ONE hand.” This slogan was borrowed from a popular slogan that the protestors were constantly chanting in Tahrir Square: “The Egyptian people are all ONE hand.” This is a good example of the echoing of the revolutionary rhetoric of activism and protest by the military.2 Thus, the rhetorical framing of the messages coming from the military at that time completely detached them from any interest in seeking power or authority, since they always described themselves as “the protectors of the Egyptian people” and “the executers of people’s will.” Moreover, they described their role as “protecting the nation with one hand, and building the nation with the other hand,” thus, emphasizing their double-role in serving the nation, both by safeguarding it and by developing it simultaneously, as indicated in many of their public statements and media announcements. This neutral position assumed by the military was interpreted by some observers as less of an act of solidarity with the protestors in their fight for freedom and reform, and more of a strategic decision to resist ceding its position of political and economic privilege by ensuring that whoever comes to power is, indeed, from their own ranks. This was especially pertinent as President Mubarak was paving the way for his civilian son, Gamal, to succeed him.3 Yet again, the image of the military as the quasi-parental guardian of the people’s will was reaffirmed when Mubarak stepped down after the 18-day revolution to the “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” (SCAF), not to the Egyptian people. The Supreme Council, which consisted of 25 high ranking military officers, issued statements and press releases addressing the Egyptian public during the one-year transitional period after Mubarak stepped down in 2011. Throughout these statements, the SCAF emphasized the image of the military as “the guardian of the nation,” who is aiming “to ensure a safe, swift and smooth transition of power,” without being interested in seeking power. The SCAF simultaneously framed its image rhetorically as that of the “just dictator” who may be curbing freedoms—in this case the freedom to criticize the military which is considered a major treason, especially when the country is going through a difficult transition—to safeguard the nation’s best interest; as well as that of the “impartial bystander” and the “neutral mediator,” whose role was to observe and resolve tensions or conflicts between the different parties, including the young revolutionaries. Yet again, this role positioned the military as the guarantor of moral and parental authority over the young revolutionaries. These rhetorical strategies of self-representation again succeeded to win the military a high degree of credibility and legitimacy among a large segment of the Egyptian public, who didn’t doubt the sincerity of its intentions and, therefore, accepted, justified, or even internalized its self-framed identity of “just dictatorship.”4

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 145 The SCAF started appropriating both the tools and the rhetoric which were utilized by the young protestors and the revolutionaries. It created its own website on Facebook and started to post many of its statements and press releases online. Beside using social media, it also started sending SMS messages to update the masses on its views of events,5 thus jumping on the bandwagon of “cyberactivism”6 in an attempt to catch up with the young revolutionaries, who were more technologically savvy. Therefore, it could be said that the military, represented in this case by the SCAF, appropriated not only the rhetorical toolkit of the young revolutionaries, by borrowing and propagating their very same revolutionary phrases and slogans, rather, it also appropriated the rhetorical toolbox, i.e., the means of delivery through which these messages were circulated, which was social media. Through appropriating the language of the revolution and the terminology which was used by the protestors by declaring itself “the guardian of the revolution” and “the executor of people’s will,” the SCAF was boosting its legitimacy and creditability; expanding its wide base of popular support; and, ultimately, consolidating its position of leadership and tightening its grip on power, while all the time denying to be doing so.7 These strategies allowed the army to ultimately give Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president ever, an ultimatum in June 2013 to conduct a referendum on his presidency and to call for a new election within a period of 48 hours, something he vehemently refused to do as a legitimately elected president. The army claimed that it was simply “executing the will of the Egyptian people” and “protecting the gains of the 2011 revolution” by deposing Morsi and ending his one-year rule. He has been imprisoned since. This planted not just the seeds of deep political fragmentation, but also the seeds of equally deep rhetorical divisiveness, with some Egyptians describing what happened as a “second revolution,” others describing it as a “coup,” and a third group describing it as a “popularly-backed coup,” in an effort to create a middleground of semi-legitimacy. In parallel, the army discredited President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). They accused him of treason and framed members of the MB as “terrorists,” “extremists,” and “fanatics,” who “posed a threat to national security” and who “betrayed the 2011 revolution.” These claims, which oftentimes remained rhetorically vague and obscure, allowed the military to add another rhetorical frame to its image: that of “countering terrorism” and “safeguarding stability and security” through “fighting both internal and external enemies” of the nation simultaneously. This fear appeal approach, which prioritizes security over freedom and stability over democracy, plays on the Egyptian people’s innate fear of terrorism, chaos, and even civil war, by warning of tumultuous, tragic developments similar to those witnessed in other countries in the region, like Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen. Ironically, curtailing freedom in the name of “putting safety, security, and stability first” was the exact same rhetorical strategy which has been used by former President Hosni Mubarak to stay in power for three decades. In fact,

146 Sahar Khamis one of his most memorable quotes was: “It’s either me, or chaos!”8 Thus, reviving these strategies demonstrates a full-circle recycling of the old regime, not only with all its key ideologies, main themes, and prominent figures and symbols, but also with all its rhetorical framings, slogans, and narratives. By rhetorically framing itself as the “protector of the nation,” the army was able to grant itself a position of unique immunity, which would render anyone who dares to criticize it an “unpatriotic traitor,” or an “agent,” accusations which were used to justify the long lists of military trials and harsh prison sentences for thousands of civilian activists and critics, not to mention journalists and media people. These accusations of treason and being unpatriotic were brilliantly framed by the military as “betraying the country and the nation,” and, therefore, projecting images of the critics of the military as “enemies of their own homeland,” and, consequently, “enemies of the Egyptian people,” rather than being simply “critics of the army” or “opponents of the regime.” This resulted, in turn, in many harsh consequences and punishments for those involved in any act of political opposition or defiance, including military trials leading up to many years of imprisonment or even death sentences, based on this rhetorical framing. These rhetorical strategies, with all their ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions, were a double-edged sword for the military. On one hand, they served the Egyptian army well, as they helped in removing two presidents from office, namely, Mubarak in 2011 and Morsi in 2013; getting a president elected from their own ranks, namely General El Sisi in 2013; and suppressing public resistance and open protest against them to a large extent, so far.9 On the other hand, however, these rhetorical framings also triggered rejection and objection from those who didn’t buy into this rhetoric on the part of the military, and who doubted the sincerity of the military’s intentions, and, therefore, opened rhetorical counter-fire on it in the form of harsh criticisms and counteraccusations,10 as will be witnessed in analyzing the counter-rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood and the young revolutionaries. Overall, the hegemonic discourse adopted by the military mostly embodied the rhetoric of “nationalism,” “statehood,” and “nation-building,” which was heavily used by the previous successive rulers coming from a military background: Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Using the rhetorical strategy of repetition, which is one of the main features characterizing Arabic discourse,11 and that is oftentimes used to emphasize meaning and to stress the salience of key ideas,12 most of the military’s rhetoric centered on repeating themes, such as “protecting the nation,” “safeguarding national unity,” and “preserving the safety, security, and stability of the state.” This is an indication of the military’s continuation of the legacy of previous military leaders, not just in terms of ideological orientation but also in terms of rhetorical strategies, which enabled it to skillfully tighten its grip on power—something it claimed it was not interested in doing—and to effectively regain control of the nation, while refusing to admit that it was doing so.

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 147

The Muslim Brotherhood: shifting rhetorical strategies and revolutionary narratives The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), commonly known in Arabic as “Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun,” is the largest and oldest Islamist group in Egypt and was established in 1928. It has been banned by successive Egyptian governments, and many of its members were arrested, tortured, exiled, or even killed. It wasn’t until the era of President Mubarak that the MB started to return to play an active role in public life, not just in the social and economic arena but also in the political arena, fully participating in politics through elections. The golden, but brief, moment of glory for the MB came with the election of President Mohamed Morsi to power in 2012, one year after the 2011 revolution. This golden moment was very short-lived, as protests against Morsi erupted in June 2013, marking the one-year anniversary of his inauguration as president. This was followed by the army deposing Morsi and arresting him, which led to violent clashes and confrontations between Morsi’s supporters, on the one hand, and the army and the police, on the other hand.13 These events ended not just the Brotherhood’s brief moment of political influence but also Egypt’s historical moment of utopian unity and idealistic solidarity, with all its rhetorical symbols and slogans, which was replaced by deep political fragmentation and rhetorical division, both online and offline. During this period, the polarization on the ground gave birth to a highly divisive and polemic discourse online, and vice versa. For example, the slogan “one people, one hand” was replaced by “we are one people, and you are another,” which became the title of a famous song, signifying the widening distance between not just the pro-Morsi and anti-Morsi camps, but also those who described what happened in 2013 as a legitimate revolution (thawra) and those who described it as an illegitimate coup (inqilab). This was not only reflected in the abrasive shouting matches, verbal attacks, and stigmatization exchanged between different parties, both online and offline; rather, it was also reflected in popular culture, including drama, art, music, not to mention interpersonal relationships, which, in turn, fueled polarization even further, contributing to an ongoing cycle of mutual intolerance. One of the main slogans that the MB always widely propagated to frame its own identity and shape its own narrative was “Islam is the solution,” which emphasized its Islamist agenda and its belief in the comprehensiveness of Islam, not only as a religion but also as a way of life. This slogan, however, was criticized by many of the group’s opponents for being too broad, empty, and vague. The dominant identity frame that the MB tried to reinforce about itself through its own publications and rhetoric before the 2011 revolution was that of the “advocates of Islam,” “the propagators of the faith,” and those who are keen to engage in “building the country and supporting the development of the nation.” During this period, MB members usually framed their image as “reformists,” who were trying to do what is best for their country, without seeking a position of power or authority. Therefore, they

148 Sahar Khamis always emphasized their role in serving the people and providing social welfare services to the needy. By doing so, they tried to convince the Mubarak regime that they are NOT the enemy, and that they had no political ambition or hidden agenda. One way through which they did that was asserting that they were not against a new presidency period for Mubarak, and by distancing themselves from the term “revolution,” by claiming that they “have never been revolutionaries before,” and that the term revolution “has never been part of their literature or discourse.” Interestingly enough, however, this rhetorical position shifted during the 2011 revolution, when they started to heavily use the term “revolution” (thawra) for the first time in their history, and to frame their image as “revolutionaries” (thowar). They started claiming that they protected the revolution in Tahrir Square and contributed greatly to its success, because without their large numbers, sacrifices, and ability to organize and bring a million people to the square, the regime would have been able to easily crush the revolution and to defeat the protestors. What is witnessed here is another “non-revolutionary” force, just like the military, trying to appropriate the language of the revolution and to frame their identity as “protectors of the revolution,” in an attempt to gain legitimacy, credibility, acceptance, and popularity among the Egyptian people. This is one of the few points of similarity between the military and the MB, who, otherwise, are starkly different. With Morsi’s deposing from power and his imprisonment, the MB returned to being a banned group, viewed with even more suspicion from the regime than before, after being labelled a “terrorist organization,” amid accusations of treason, conspiracy, and extremism, causing severe divisions and deep polarization between Egyptians. Additionally, the deposing of Morsi by the military led to the birth of a new dominant discourse among the MB after 2013, which framed themselves as “defenders of legitimacy.” This echoed President Morsi’s position, since he said in a late-night television address that he would “defend the legitimacy of his elected office with his life,” and he added that “there is no substitute to legitimacy” as he vowed not to resign.14 Starting from this point onward, the word “legitimacy” (shar’iya) was used heavily in the Brotherhood’s discourse, and was usually accompanied by the term “coup” (inqilab) to describe the situation in Egypt. This explains the dominant identity frame which was used by the MB during this period, as they referred to themselves as the “protectors of legitimacy.” They also used the slogan “the revolution is continuing” (El Thawra Mustamera) to clearly indicate their determination to continue their struggle, while framing it as part and parcel of the broader struggle of the Egyptian people and their quest for freedom. The violent clashes which left hundreds of Morsi’s supporters dead and thousands injured and imprisoned triggered a new dominant discourse among the Brotherhood, who started to talk about “revenge” and “punishment.”

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 149 They quickly labeled the violent crackdown on Rab’aa mosque in Cairo by security forces to disperse a pro-Morsi sit-in as a “massacre,” while supporters of the military simply used the benign and rhetorically-neutral term “operation” to describe the very same incident. Subsequently, a generational rhetorical split took place within the ranks of the Brotherhood. The old guard were more reluctant to openly talk about revenge or to endorse using force or violence, and they emphasized the importance of “self-restraint” to avoid further retaliation from the regime. The younger generation, however, spoke more openly about these issues with less fear and with more anger and agitation. This new rhetorical shift didn’t just entail the use of new words, but also the deployment of new techniques, such as visual rhetoric as a powerful tool to communicate meaning.15 The best example here is the widespread usage of the famous image of the four fingers, which became symbolic of the Rab’aa massacre, since the word Rab’aa means fourth in Arabic. This popular image became a clear and visible symbol representing solidarity with the Brotherhood and signifying support for them in their struggle against the Sisi regime. Interestingly enough, just like the military, the MB didn’t just appropriate the revolutionary rhetoric in their quest to seek power, while denying to be doing so; rather, they also jumped on the bandwagon of “cyberactivism.”16 They created their own online platforms and websites, the most famous of which is Ikhwanonline, an avenue for expressing their views, spreading their rhetoric, and reaching their supporters. Overall, both the hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses adopted by the MB were generally characterized by formality, conservatism, traditionalism, and religiosity. This was clearly manifested in their heavy reliance on slogans such as “Islam is the solution,” and the fact that the group’s leaders, including President Morsi, always used verses from the holy Quran, as well as famous sayings of Prophet Mohamed (hadith), which is one of the commonly-used rhetorical strategies in formal modes of Arabic discourse.17 The reliance on these formal modes of linguistic expression,18 in both their written and verbal discourses, aims to create a legitimacy drawn from their religious identity. They also used highly flowery, decorative language, which is another famous, commonly-used rhetorical strategy in the Arabic language, known as bala’ghah.19 This technique oftentimes infuses poetic-like, artistic, figurative speech in public address as a means of formally expressing salient ideas while beautifying the mode of delivery.20 Here again, as in the case of the military, these rhetorical strategies proved to be a double-edged sword. On one hand, they were mostly praised by the group’s supporters, as well as those who were older, more conservative, and more traditional. On the other hand, however, they were frowned upon by the group’s opponents and critics, as well as those who were younger, more secular, and more liberal, who criticized this type of rhetorical address for being outdated, old-fashioned, empty, and obsolete.

150 Sahar Khamis

The young activists: shifting rhetorical strategies and revolutionary narratives Unlike the military and the MB, who each represented a largely homogeneous, uniform, and monolithic entity, the young activists were a diverse, varied, and even eclectic group of people, who represented different orientations, clashing ideologies, diverse backgrounds, and multiple affiliations. Some of them adopted an Islamist, secular, leftist, or other ideological orientation, while others were simply independent activists and/or citizen journalists. This was reflected in their diverse activities, as well as their varied selfrepresentations and identity frames, and their competing rhetorical strategies, which sometimes seemed more like a cacophony than a symphony, due to lack of coherence, harmony, and coordination, with the unique exception of the golden moment of solidarity in January 2011. Most of these young activists, who were the driving force behind the 2011 revolution, were urban, elitist, upper-middle class, educated, young people, mostly under 40 years old at the time, and technologically savvy. They succeeded to create a “trickle-down” effect to broader segments of the Egyptian public, through both their online and offline activism, by providing not only updated news and information but also interpretations of ongoing events and commentary, and, most importantly, by breaking the barrier of fear with their heroism and bravery, which elevated them to the status of public opinion leaders.21 Many of them, therefore, framed their identities during this period as “citizen journalists” and “bloggers,” who played a vital role in paving the way for the revolution through exposing the government’s corruption and violations of human rights, raising awareness about these issues, and influencing the agenda of mainstream media, which also started to discuss sensitive and controversial issues thanks to the spillover from of citizen journalism.22 Many of them also contributed to mobilization and networking, exchanging useful knowledge and advice, whether between the activists and protestors inside the country, or between those who were inside the country and those in the diaspora. This led to the birth of another identity frame for them as “bridge-builders.”23 Some of the most famous protagonists of this new era were famous bloggers, such as Wael Abbas and Nawara Negm, who not only broke out of the conventional ideological norm of deference to the regime through the bold topics they dared to address, such as the police torture of civilians, in the case of Wael, and epidemic governmental corruption, in the case of Nawara; rather, they also broke out of the conventional discourse and traditional speech mode by using daring and bold language. For example, both bloggers, albeit to varying degrees, used profanities and insults against the regime in power and its supporters, as well as against those whom they disagreed with or those who criticized them.24 Therefore, their blogs mostly exemplified highly polemic, divisive, and, oftentimes, abrasive rhetorical battlefields. This signified a remarkable shift from the conventional, traditional, mainstream

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 151 political discourse, which was characterized by formality and conservatism, as witnessed in the case of both the military and the MB, albeit in different forms, i.e., with the military focusing more on national identity and the MB focusing more on religious identity. This new form of expression exemplified the counterhegemonic mode of resistance, embodied in these young activists’ discourse as they attempted to break all the taboos, not just ideologically but also rhetorically. In their attempt to revolt against the existing power structures and modes of domination in their society, they also simultaneously revolted against the conventional modes of expression and rhetorical structures through which they were expressed. Beside using very daring, and oftentimes even shocking, language on their blogs, these young bloggers/activists also used equally shocking audiovisual materials, in the form of videos and photos, mostly exposing police brutality, as a counterhegemonic strategy. This provides further evidence of the relevance and significance of deploying “visual rhetoric”25 as an important tool in resisting hegemony and authority. During the 2011 revolution, many of these activists transferred their activism from the online to the offline sphere, or combined both spheres simultaneously. Their active involvement in Tahrir Square, and elsewhere, was oftentimes at high risk to their own safety and wellbeing, since some of them got arrested, harassed, beaten up, or injured. But it led to the birth of new identity frames, namely that of “activists,” “change agents,” “freedom fighters,” and “revolutionaries.” The rhetorical strategy employed by the young activists during the revolutionary phase shifted from indirect to direct, from subtle to bold, and from covert to overt by replacing words like “kefaya,” or enough, which was the name of an opposition group that tried to send a message to Mubarak before the 2011 revolution that his time was up, with “irhal,” or leave, which was a public demand, collectively expressed and loudly amplified by the million plus protestors in Tahrir Square during the revolution. This shows that as the degree of freedom ebbs and flows in a certain society, so does the discourse of resistance and the tone and form it takes, which also shifts and varies in terms of the degree of implicitness or explicitness, subtlety, or openness, as witnessed in the shift from timidly implying to assertively demanding Mubarak’s ouster. Many of the activists also started harshly criticizing the military, as represented by the SCAF, and subsequently the MB, for being “non-revolutionary forces,” “enemies of the revolution,” and “abusers of human rights.” One good example was the young blogger, Maikel Nabil Sanad, who challenged the military’s slogan “The people and the army are ONE hand,” during the SCAF’s transitional period by publishing a post on his blog stating that “The army and the people were NEVER one hand,” in which he warned people against believing any of the claims that the army was making, as he alerted people to the army’s hidden agenda of staying in power. He ended up spending three years in jail, after facing military trial, as a result of his controversial views and his rhetorical acts of resistance.26 In a rhetorical act of solidarity, some

152 Sahar Khamis political activists started a Facebook page titled “We are all Maikel Nabil” to rally public support for him.27 This was an obvious emulation of the iconic “We are all Khalid Said” Facebook page, which was created to honor the memory of another young activist, who paid his life as a price for daring to post a YouTube video exposing police corruption and which became one of the significant triggers for the eruption of the 2011 revolution.28 In their political and rhetorical struggle against both the military and the MB, the young activists oftentimes used not only their writings but also different forms of artistic expression, including photos, videos, banners, and even graffiti to widely deliver their messages. They also used rhetorical strategies, such as jokes, humor, and sarcasm, to make their voices heard, before, during, and after the eruption of the 2011 revolution, commonly-used strategies in Arabic, and especially Egyptian, political rhetoric.29 Indeed, Egyptians are famous for their witty sense of humor,30 which becomes even more obvious and prevalent during political crises, in particular.31 Some good examples illustrating this deployment of humor were protestors raising banners during the 2011 revolution which said to Mubarak “Leave, my hand is hurting!” “Leave, my wife is about to give birth, and the baby doesn’t want to see you!” and “Leave, I want to get a haircut!” Similar jokes were posted on the young activists’ blogs and Facebook pages, echoing the same sentiments and amplifying the same messages.32 After the SCAF took over power, following Mubarak’s ouster, the young activists resorted to some innovative means of communication to delegitimize the military, such as launching the campaign “Askar Kazeebon,” which means “Lying Soldiers.” This campaign utilized large screens and projectors in the streets, for the very first time, to display some of the army’s transgressions and wrongdoings and to expose some of the army officers’ alleged lies and mistakes, while making fun of them and mocking their actions. Likewise, to oppose and resist Morsi and the MB, some of the young, liberal activists also launched a sarcastic, public campaign, in this case called “Ikhwan Kazeebon” or “Lying Brotherhood,” following the same model and using the same technique to expose some of the mistakes committed by the MB, and to show why people were dissatisfied with them and shouldn’t trust them. Both of these campaigns were an effective and visible illustration of the power of combining innovative means of communication with counterhegemonic, resistance discourse, which employs sarcasm, humor, and mockery to break the barrier of fear and to challenge authority. Overall, the use of humor and sarcasm has been viewed as a double-edged sword. On one hand, it was believed to help break the barrier of fear by delegitimizing whoever was in power, making fun of them and mocking them.33 On the other hand, it was criticized for potentially turning into a safety valve, which can provide a platform that allows people to vent their anger, frustration, and grievances through jokes and laugher, instead of taking immediate action.34 In every

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 153 case, it could be best described as a strategy to “tickle giants,” as the most famous political satirist in the Arab world, Bassem Youssef, who came to be known as “the John Stewart of the Arabs,” puts it.35 Because many of the young activists were visionaries, who lacked proper political training, expertise, and shrewdness and did not exhibit the same pragmatic tendencies of the two other political actors, many of them shifted from being the protagonists and heroes of the revolution to becoming the prime victims of the revolution, when they ended up in jail, faced military trials, or were forced to flee the country and live in exile out of fear of punishment and retaliation. When these crackdowns on freedom and human rights took place, and oftentimes affected them personally, new discourses started to emerge in their own rhetoric, such as talking about “the dark days ahead,” “despair,” “helplessness,” “loss of hope,” and the “failure of the revolution.” This, in turn, led some of them to adopt a “diagnostic frame” in their rhetoric, in an attempt to understand why and how the witnessed setbacks to democracy took place, and what could be done to rectify the path to reform, moving forward. For example, some of them started exploring the missing link between democratization and civic engagement, which they described as a “chicken and egg question,” by questioning the centrality of the role of civil society in democratic transition and grappling with the term “leaderless revolution” and its multiple flaws and implications.36 Out of this diagnostic rhetorical frame emerged a number of new themes, such as “rebuilding civil society,” “the need for better political engagement,” the emphasis on “community building,” and the realization of the importance of “getting ready to step up” and to assume positions of power, moving forward, since they admitted that one of the biggest mistakes they made was not filling any positions of power in the new government, which was formed after Mubarak was ousted from office. Some of them commented on this using bitter humor, such as the English proverb “If you are not at the table, you will be on the menu!” Since the revolution was perceived to be deviating away from the desired path, and a full recycling of the old regime was on hand, this again triggered a surge in bitter humor and sarcasm on the part of the young activists, which was expressed through slogans such as “From Tahrir Square to Zero Square,” reflecting their disappointment in the course that the revolution had taken and the failed transition to democratization. Overall, the young activists’ framing of their own identities was not only as eclectic and diverse as their own backgrounds and orientations, it was also fluid and in flux. As their discursive representations and revolutionary narratives evolved through different stages, so did the tools, strategies, and tactics they used, which broke many of the conventional, formal modes of expression by using shockingly bold language and equally shocking audiovisual images, sarcasm, mockery, and humor in their counterhegemonic discursive struggle to resist those in power.

154 Sahar Khamis

Concluding remarks: competing rhetorical struggles and continuing paradoxes The intertwined relationship between rhetoric and the complex process of cultural production revealed itself in three different, but interrelated, forms. First, the evolving political realities on the ground, as they manifested themselves through different phases and varying forms of hegemony and resistance, dictating new contexts, giving birth to new actors, and, in turn, new discourses. Second, generational differences, with older vs. younger generations exhibiting varying degrees of formality and informality, deploying varying rhetorical tools, such as sarcasm, mockery, and humor, in addition to exemplifying varying degrees of verbal aggressiveness to vent anger and express emotions. Third, the medium of delivery through which the rhetorical discourse is being transmitted, which enabled new forms of expression, not just verbally but also artistically and visually. The choice of which rhetorical tools to use, when, why, how, and by whom varied widely in light of the overall political climate, the actors and players on the ground, the underlying context, and the desired outcomes; it was both an outcome, and a reflector, of this unique combination. For example, the hegemonic, dominant discourse coming from those in positions of power, whether it was the military, as exemplified in Mubarak, the SCAF, or Sisi, or whether it was the MB, as exemplified briefly by Morsi, was mostly formal using classical Arabic language “fusha,”37 as well as classical modes of delivery, while drawing legitimacy from either a nationalistic or a religious identity frame, respectively. To the contrary, the counterhegemonic resistance discourse coming from the young activists was mostly informal, using colloquial Arabic “amiyah,”38 in addition to bold rhetorical strategies, such as aggressive language, or even profanities, in addition to mockery, humor, and sarcasm. It was shaped as such to delegitimize those in power and to challenge their authority. A number of parallel, albeit contradictory, phenomena were witnessed here, which, in turn, gave birth to equally contradictory and ambivalent rhetorical discourses. The first was authoritarianism versus resistance. While governmental hegemony and control have been widely exercised in the political domain in Egypt, oftentimes without genuine political participation or effective opposition, many alternative, resistant voices are creating their own platforms to express their political thoughts and oppositional views.39 Second, the phenomenon of resistance to authority gave birth to diverse and sometimes diametrically oppositional and dichotomous discourses, which ranged from Islamism to secularization, conservatism to liberalization, and formality to informality. Third, the coexistence of an official, dominant sphere, alongside an unofficial, popular sphere. On one hand, official views and hegemonic discourses, representing dominant positions, were mostly expressed through mainstream media. On the other hand, popular counterhegemonic views, mostly coming from private independent sources, such as bloggers and activists, were mostly expressed through social media.40

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 155 The rhetorical contestations and discursive struggles witnessed across these different political players did not occur “in an information vacuum.”41 This mediated warfare can only be fully comprehended when it is fully contextualized within the broader picture of ongoing developments and constant shifts in the interrelated political, social, cultural, and mediated landscapes.42 The high level of media hybridization, synchronization, interconnectedness, and interdependence currently witnessed in the Egyptian media arena, coupled with the oftentimes contradictory, or even conflicting, narratives and counter-narratives of different political actors, is closely intertwined with the complex shifts and constant transformations in the political, social, and mediated landscapes in Egypt. This implies that any analysis of the rhetorical tug of war taking place in this country has to transcend “media-centric logic”43 and “technological deterministic” approaches to embrace a more nuanced analysis of why and how political discourse is both a contributor to, as well as a product of, these complex socio-political realities, and how these realities are, in turn, both mirrors and molders of this discourse as well as producers of new discourses in a cyclical, interrelated, and ongoing process. It is, indeed, this complex process, with all its ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions, which will determine the fate and destiny of Egypt, in general, and the Egyptian revolution, in particular, as well as the future of the various political players and the tone and direction of their discourses and narratives, moving forward. The key question then becomes whether there is any hope to return back to a unifying discourse, or at least a constructive dialogue, between the different conflicting parties, in the hope of returning to the road of democratization and building a better future for the country, despite current challenges; or whether the severe political and rhetorical struggles are inevitably expected to increase the gap and widen the distance between the “Self” and the “Other.” It would be safe, albeit sad, to predict that as long as the current condition of deep polarization and severe fragmentation prevails in Egypt, the political tug of war between the various political players, who have their own agendas, priorities, and ambitions, is also likely to continue, or even to escalate, over the coming years. Likewise, the rhetorical struggle accompanying, shaping, and reflecting these divisions and tensions is also likely to continue and to escalate. This, in turn, will lead to widening the distance and increasing the gap between the various parties by creating new divisive discourses in an ongoing vicious cycle. If, when, and how this cycle could be broken, and by whom, remains to be seen.

Notes 1 Hagar Atia, “Appropriating the ‘Revolution’: An analysis of Egyptian army rhetoric versus social media activist rhetoric.” Unpublished paper presented at The Eastern Communication Association (ECA) 107th annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland, April 2016. 2 Mohammed El-Nawawy and Sahar Khamis, Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement, and Citizen Journalism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 3 Atia, “Appropriating the ‘Revolution’.” Op. cit.1

156 Sahar Khamis 4 Ibid. 5 Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee, “Egypt from revolutions to institutions: Opportunities to support the people and groups that are designing better governance” (New York, NY: Reboot, 2011): 29–30. Online report available at http://reboot.org/wordpress/ wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Reboot-Egypt-From-Revolutions-To-Institutions.pdf. 6 Philip N. Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7 Atia, “Appropriating the ‘Revolution’.” Op. cit.1 8 Noha Mellor, “Who represents the revolutionaries? Examples from the Egyptian revolution 2011,” Mediterranean Politics 19, no. 2 (2013): 82–98. http://www.tandfon line.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13629395.2013.826446. 9 Atia, “Appropriating the ‘Revolution’.” Op. cit.1 10 Mellor, “Who represents the revolutionaries?” Op. cit.8 11 Barbara Johnstone, Repetition in Arabic Discourse: Paradigms, Syntagms and the Ecology of Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991). 12 Abdullah Shunnaq, “Arabic–English translation of political speeches,” Perspectives 8, no. 3 (2000): 207–228. 13 Mellor, “Who represents the revolutionaries?” Op. cit.8 14 Atia, “Appropriating the ‘Revolution’.” Op. cit.1 15 Christiane Gruber and Sue Haugbolle (eds.), Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 16 Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Op. cit.6 17 John Wansbrough, “Arabic rhetoric and Qur’anic exegesis,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 31, no. 3 (1968): 469–485. 18 Safaruk Z. Chowdhury, Introducing Arabic Rhetoric: Course Book (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). 19 Hussein Abdul-Raof, Arabic Rhetoric: A Pragmatic Analysis (London: Routledge, 2006). 20 Basil Hatim, “A model of argumentation from Arabic rhetoric: Insights for a theory of text types,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin 17, no. 1 (1990): 47–54. 21 Sahar Khamis, “The transformative Egyptian media landscape: Changes, challenges and comparative perspectives,” International Journal of Communication, 5 (2011): 1159–1177. http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/813/592. 22 El-Nawawy and Khamis, Egyptian Revolution 2.0. Op. cit.2 23 Sahar Khamis and Kathryn Vaughn, “Cyberactivism in the Egyptian revolution: How civic engagement and citizen journalism tilted the balance,” Arab Media & Society, 13 (summer 2011). http://www.arabmediasociety.com/? article=769. 24 El-Nawawy and Khamis, Egyptian Revolution 2.0. Op. cit.2 25 Gruber and Haugbolle (eds.), Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East. Op. cit.15. 26 El-Nawawy and Khamis, Egyptian Revolution 2.0. Op. cit.2 27 Tarek Amr, “Egypt: Debating the role of the media in covering blogger’s arrest,” Global Voices, April 9 (2011). http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/04/09/egyptdebating-the-role-of-the-media-in-covering-blogger-arrest/. 28 Sahar Khamis and Kathryn Vaughn, “‘We are all Khaled Said’: The potentials and limitations of cyberactivism in triggering public mobilization and promoting political change,” Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 4, nos. 2–3 (2011): 139–157. 29 Amal Ibrahim and Nahed Eltantawy, “Egypt’s Jon Stewart: Humorous political satire and serious culture jamming,” International Journal of Communication, 11 (2017): 2806–2824. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6359. 30 Bassem Youssef. Personal Interview at the University of Maryland, College Park, September, 2016.

Dueling discourses of power and resistance 157 31 Deepa Anagondahalli and Sahar Khamis, “Mubarak framed! Humor and political activism before and during the Egyptian revolution,” Arab Media & Society, 19 (fall 2014). http://arabmediasociety.com/?article=846. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibrahim and Eltantawy, “Egypt’s Jon Stewart,” Op. cit.29 34 Anagondahalli and Khamis, “Mubarak framed!” Op. cit.31 35 Bassem Youssef. Personal interview. 36 El-Nawawy and Khamis, Egyptian Revolution 2.0. Op. cit.2 37 Shunnaq, “Arabic–English translation of political speeches,” Op. cit.12 38 Hatim, “A model of argumentation from Arabic rhetoric,” Op. cit.20 39 Mohamad Zayani, “The challenges and limits of universalist concepts: Problematizing public opinion and a mediated Arab public sphere,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 1 (2008): 60–79. 40 Richard Seymour, “Middle East bloggers set cat among the pigeons,” Middle East, April 1, (2008): 62–63. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Middle+East+bloggers+set +cat+among+the+pigeons.-a0177830064. 41 Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003): 143. http://people.bu.edu/tboas/open_networks.pdf. 42 Sahar Khamis and Vit Sisler, “The new Arab ‘cyberscape:’ Redefining boundaries and reconstructing public spheres,” Communication Yearbook, 34 (2010): 277–316. 43 Stefano Allievi, “Islam in the public space: Social networks, media and neocommunities,” in Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe, eds. Stefano Allievi and Jorgen Nielsen (Leiden: Brill, 2003): 1–28, 12.

9

One case, two verdicts The vertical interplay of authoritative discourses in China Hailong Tian

Discourse is primarily understood as language in use, as a social practice involving communities of participants who are institutionally affiliated and politically, ideologically, or professionally committed to its use. Discourse makes use of natural language but is not confined by it. In this chapter, I investigate how various Chinese discourses interact—Chinese in the sense of being practiced in contemporary China and undeniably influenced by its underlying culture. To this end, I focus on three types of discourse. The first is political and represented by Chinese leaders’ speeches, the second is legal and practiced by the legal community, and the third is public and manifests in how the news media comments on both the political and legal contexts via print. A legal case that surfaced between the periods of 1995–1996 and 2013–2014 exemplifies how these three types of discourse played surprisingly different roles. During both periods, all three covered two discursive themes but differently: that of yanda (severe strike) and of gongping-zhengyi (equality and justice). One reason for their unequal treatment of these themes is that they operated on different discursive levels. The political discourse can be said to be vertically related to what it seeks to control—in this case, the use of the legal discourse. One aim of this study is to show how the two discursive themes are contextualized and recontextualized in the three types of discourse. The discourse of Chinese leaders can be interpreted as a meta-discourse, in the sense of being about other discourses, which, when articulated by the governing authority and accepted by the legal community, constitutes its authority and power over the recontextualized judicial practices. I will show the vertical relationship of authority and power via a widely publicized legal case, the so-called “Huugjilt case,” characterized by the quick sentencing of Huugjilt for murder in 1996 and its complete reversal in 2014: one case, two verdicts.

The lawsuits and research questions The lawsuits I examine in this chapter date back to April 9, 1996, when a woman was found killed in a public men’s restroom in the city of Huhhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the northern part

One case, two verdicts 159 of China. A young man, named Huugjilt, happened to enter the restroom and encountered the dead woman. He then reported his findings to the local police. Soon thereafter, Huugjilt was found guilty of the crime and, over the following three months, his case passed through all the judicial processes available. On June 30 of the same year, this 18-year-old man was convicted of raping and killing the woman, sentenced to death, and executed. Besides the speed at which the original verdict was reached, what makes the case unusual and worthy of examination is that, following Huugjilt’s execution, a murder suspect was arrested in 2005 for other crimes. He admitted to having murdered the woman in the Huugjilt case of 1996 and revealed more details surrounding the murder than what Huugjilt had offered. This caused Huugjilt’s conviction to be overturned. However, it was not until 2014, 18 years after Huugjilt’s execution, that the truth would be uncovered. On November 20, 2014, the High Court of Inner Mongolia started the process of redressing the Huugjilt case, announcing on December 15 that Huugjilt had been erroneously executed. The exoneration of Huugjilt initiated academic discussions of various legal issues. Some scholars took this reversal as an example of belatedly achieving justice under the law.1 Others focused on who or what was responsible for the initial wrongful conviction of an innocent man, calling for severe punishment of those responsible for this miscarriage of justice.2 I contend that these scholarly studies failed to take into consideration the discursive nature of the judicial practices in general and of this case in particular. Inasmuch as discourse is inherent in every social practice,3 including judicial practices, the present study, while attempting to complement the legal interpretation of this case, will take another look at this case from a discourse perspective. It will ask such questions as: What are the discursive mechanisms responsible for the quick sentencing in 1996 and its reversal in 2014? What is the role of the sociopolitical context in the interplay of discourses leading to the two contradictory judicial judgements? Additionally, it asks: Why did the reversal of the erroneous legal judgement not happen in 2005 when the actual killer revealed the details of the killing, but instead in 2014, nine years after the real murderer became known? By answering these questions, this study attempts to uncover how the interaction between the three types of discourse—political, legal, and public—affects Huugjilt’s conviction in 1996 and his exoneration in 2014, and, consequently, to discover any Chinese cultural contingencies that may be relevantly unique to its judicial practice. To this end, I draw on the theories and methods developed in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), relevant tenets of which are highlighted in the following section.

The approach taken I begin this analysis by articulating the roles that the three types of discourse played in the judicial practice and public discussion of this case. To be clear, discourses are social practices that participate in virtually all social phenomena.

160 Hailong Tian They are manifest in text, talk, and action, and they are disseminated through formal channels such as mass media, and informal networks of interpersonal communication. Discourses establish social relations, produce artifacts, define individual identities, support cultural values, and aid us in everyday life. They account for making habitual and “conscious decisions.”4 This conception of discourse can also be found in the research of the Wu Ying lawsuit.5 Its use of language constitutes its users and how they relate to each other. While discourse, so conceived, includes ideological orientations and political motivations, particularly when institutional pronouncements enter the public sphere, like the lawsuit in question, here I am more interested in the ways in which the Chinese language serves as a platform on which discourses of different social participants interact with one another in the process of exercising justice. Of particular interest is how the aforementioned political, legal, and public discourses, which operate on different levels of authority, influence each other. I want to examine the vertical interplay of discourse: between the legal and public discourse and the political discourse, conceived as a meta-discourse; and the horizontal interplay of discourse: among legal professionals—the networked contingencies within the judicial system that define the unique features of legal practices. To this end, I will start by examining the speeches of political leaders to the extent they appeared in newspaper articles and became a matter of public record concerning the Huugjilt case. The use of Chinese language also invokes a number of cultural contingencies that are unique to China, cutting across the various discourses involved in this case. One concerns written Chinese. Themes appear in sequences of character strings like in all writing systems. However, unlike their propositional appearances in Indo-European languages, in written Chinese, themes are more indexical, figurative, and less abstract. They are easily copied whole or with only minor variations from one document to another and talked of accordingly. Writing affects also speech although spoken Chinese allows more degrees of freedom. Another contingency derives from the fact that in China, top leaders from the Communist Party of China (CPC) do not speak as individuals. The guidelines and policies for the development of the state are issued in the name of the Party and are influential as such. The Party’s top leaders’ speeches set policies for judicial practices with the expectation that legal practitioners carry them out. Thus, judicial practices are conducted not only within the legal discourse, but they are also regulated by the political discourse of the government as articulated by its leaders. All horizontal contingencies among discourses are thereby subject to the political metadiscourse. I maintain that it is these contingencies that render the Chinese judicial system unlike that of the Western world, particularly in the United States. This makes it worthwhile to investigate how the directives in the form of policies articulated by top leaders are communicated through the discourses of hierarchically intermediary participants and end up being carried out by leaders with less authority.

One case, two verdicts 161

Social practice, recontextualization, and meta-discourse Earlier in this chapter, I defined discourse as a social practice that involves the use of text, talk, action, and social relations. Its vertical transmission is a more or less “stabilizing social activity”6 which establishes “regulated ways of doing things.”7 Any social practice involves a number of elements, of which discourse is the most important one, to which Fairclough has added the elements enumerated above.8 Van Leeuwen identifies entirely compatible elements, such as participants, actions, performance modes, presentation styles, times, locations, resources, and eligibility conditions.9 Among all of these elements, I take talk, text, action, and interaction as primary and indispensable to social practices. This applies also to the discursive regulation of social practices. While easily observable in its generality, the dependence of legal practice on discourse is even more obvious. Laws are written (i.e., text). Accusations of having violated a law, witness accounts, prosecutions and defenses by attorneys, are all conducted in language, and all verdicts announced by a judge, pronounced and/or recorded, have real-life consequences. Discourses are relevant largely because of the actions they entail. In CDA, social practices are investigated by examining the interaction of discourse with other elements, elements that may be different but cannot be understood as independent of each other and certainly not without reference to language. In essence, these elements are dialectically related, and they may embrace others without being reducible to them. Discourse, too, may embrace other elements—say, social relations, social identities, and policies—and be embraced by becoming a part of other activities such as doing a job (e.g., a judge who uses language in a particular way). In these capacities, discourse plays constitutive roles in the sense of realizing something that would not exist without naming it. This constitutive ability of discourse may “sustain and reproduce the social status quo” as well as “contribute to transforming it.”10 Thus, discourse is socially influential by constituting not only other discursive but also nondiscursive practices. In its ability to variously name, characterize or represent things and positioning people, discourse helps to produce and reproduce unequal power relations between social classes, which amounts to doing ideological work. When investigating social practices, the embrace of discourse by other elements can be further conceptualized in terms of “entextualization,” which, according to Bauman, links two processes: decontextualization and recontextualization. The former can be understood as “extracting preexisting components from one context” and the latter as “fitting them into another.”11 Recently, the concept of entextualization—of recontextualization in particular—has been applied in CDA to explain how social practices are discursively conducted and how new meaning and social relations come to be when parts of one discourse are decontextualized from its origin and recontextualized and reproduced in another. For example, regarding the process of recontextualization, van Leeuwen observes in his analysis of

162 Hailong Tian a short Sydney tabloid newspaper article from the “family pages” that a number of transformations may take place simultaneously: substituting elements of the actual social practice with semiotic elements, like deleting, rearranging, adding, and repeating elements of social practices.12 Such recontextualizations modify the meanings of the resulting discourse and redirect its practitioners’ social practices. Moreover, depending on the authority of the source of the recontextualized elements, the resulting transformations construct purposes for, add legitimacy and evaluative criteria of the social practice as articulated. Following the recontextualization of elements from one discourse to another offers significant insights about how recontextualization works. It not only brings hybridity to the receiving discourses, with new and old meanings mixed together, but also transmits power relations from the originating discourse to the receiving discourse, which one can interpret as the former colonizing the latter. This is especially the case when the former is practiced in systematically and hierarchically principled structures. This is the case of vertical recontextualization, and the original discourse can then be called a “vertical discourse.”13 I will elaborate this point when further discussing the Huugjilt case by asking what is being recontextualized, who does the recontextualization, and how this recontextualization creates power relations. In an article observing the discursive construction of the social stratification order in reforming China, Zhang analyzes the interplay of the discourses of China’s top leaders.14 She identifies three former CPC top leaders, namely, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zeming, and Hu Jintao, with four meta-discourses; that is, Deng’s meta-discourses of “bringing order out of chaos” and “building socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Jiang’s “three represents,” and Hu’s “harmonious society.” As she observes,15 these meta-discursive themes were intended to direct a discursive evolution and assert hegemony at various points of the economic-reform trajectory. The interplay of these discourses was informed by the hierarchical structure in which these themes emerged, with Deng’s “bringing order out of chaos” paving the way for ensuring a metadiscursive ideological shift towards Deng’s overarching meta-discourse of “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The other two meta-discourses, namely, Jiang’s “three represents” and Hu’s “harmonious society,” are, according to Zhang,16 entextualized discourses which simultaneously recontextualize Deng’s two meta-discourses. In other words, Hu’s meta-discourse of “harmonious society” recontextualizes Jiang’s meta-discourse of “three represents,” which in turn recontextualizes the previous Deng’s meta-discourses. Zhang’s research offers an answer to the question of what is recontextualized when new power relations are reproduced. As her research indicates, each of the four meta-discourses has become entextualized, which is recontextualized by subsequent leaders as they develop their own meta-discourse to serve as ideological guidelines for the CPC and the state. To make her point clearer, one can say that it is the topics of the meta-discourse that are recontextualized. For example, in examining the discursive production of a teaching quality assessment report, Tian observed eight topics that are

One case, two verdicts 163 decontextualized from the university’s self-assessment report and then recontextualized to the report made by the authoritative assessing group.17 These topics represent the themes of the meta-discourse. As Zhang states, decontextualizing the topics from the meta-discourse and recontextualizing them in the later leaders’ discourse grants the later leaders’ discourse power and authority while simultaneously reproducing the authoritative and canonical status of the earlier leaders.18 This phenomenon was also investigated by Silverstein who called it “a meta-pragmatics that stipulates law-like regularities.”19 The power and authority reproduced by the recontextualization of both earlier and later leaders is of interest to the present research. As will be seen in the following section about the Huugjilt case, the top leaders’ discursive themes, once recontextualized, not only add new meaning but also reproduce power relations and shed light on the consequent social practices. I will revisit this point in the discussion section following the presentation of the two cases.

Discourses two decades apart I suggest that the theories of discourse outlined in the preceding section will help us understand the unequal outcomes of the same recontextualization practices two decades apart. In both cases, the power and authority of the recontextualized discourse (i.e., the earlier leaders’ discourse) is reproduced after entering the new (i.e., the later leaders’) discourse. This is evident in the recontextualization of two different meta-discourses at two distinct periods of time, namely, in the years 1995–1996 when the Huugjilt case occurred and in the years 2013–2014 when the case was reversed. The texts of these discourses are mostly taken as form of speeches which bear the ideological features of, for example, the yanda theme in 1995–1996 and the gongpingzhengyi theme in 2013–2014. The yanda speeches in 1995–1996

Around the years of 1995–1996, people holding top positions of the hierarchical social network made several speeches which served as instructions and directions in the fields of the police, procuratorate, and court. For example, on March 14, 1995, Ren Jianxin, then Head of the Supreme Court, stated in his report to the annual People’s Congress that the People’s Courts should deliver a “severe strike,” the equivalent of which in the Chinese language is 严打 (yanda), on all kinds of crimes. In the same year, on December 19, Ren Jianxin as Secretary of the Political and Judiciary Commission under the CPC’s Central Committee, then the top leader in the law field in China,20 highlighted this yanda principle yet again in the national working meeting of politics and law. To ensure an effective delivery of this severe strike, he put up eight guidelines that needed to be carried out in the coming 5 to 15 years. The first four of the eight guidelines were:

164 Hailong Tian Maintaining stability always at the primary position so as to serve the opendoor practice and economic construction; launching on a lawful basis a severe and quick strike on the criminals who seriously endanger the society; launching on a lawful basis a severe and strict inspect[ion] on various crimes that destroy the socialist market economy, including bribery and corruption; sticking to the combination of specialized work and mass line, mobilizing all social forces, and utilizing all means to maintain a comprehensive public security; … (始终把维护稳定放在政法工作的首 位，更好地为改革开放和经济建设服务；依法从重从快惩处严重危害 治安的刑事犯罪分子；依法从重从严查处贪污、贿赂犯罪和各种严重 破坏社会注意市场经济秩序的犯罪活动；坚持专门工作和群众路线相 结合，动员全社会力量，运用多种手段，对社会治安进行综合治理…)21 These guidelines, when followed, demanded severe and quick actions on salient criminals and avoidance of slow procedures involving the police and legal practitioners. In the same speech, Ren Jianxin emphasized that all political and legal departments needed to firmly stick to the yanda principle, strengthening the force of a strike, preventing an ineffective strike from occurring, and, should one have occurred, allowing for it to be immediately redressed. The guidelines demonstrated that severe strikes were preferred to light blows—quick actions to slow resolutions. The yanda principle struck a response in the procuratorial authority when Zhang Siqing, then Procurator General of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, made a speech on April 18, 1996, as he was conducting a local investigation in Beijing. Zhang called on the different levels of procuratorate to act in accordance with the court in terms of speed and severity when dealing with lawsuits, delivering severe verdicts, and even penalties on batches of criminals.22 The yanda principle initiated at the top turned to practice and became a movement on April 28, 1996, when a working meeting was held by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). Xinhua News Agency began its report on this meeting with the following words, which explained the reason and background of this yanda struggle while indicating its “top-down” directional nature. In response to the unstable public order in areas where severe crimes were constantly endangering the public security, the CPC’s Central Committee made a series of important directions, demanding a nationwide yanda struggle to soon be put into action in order to further maintain public security and increase the sense of safety on the people’s part. (针对部分地方治安状 况不好, 严重危害社会治安的犯罪活动猖獗的情况, 党中央最近作出 一系列重要指示, 要求迅速组织开展全国范围的“严打”斗争, 以进一步 维护社会治安, 切实增强人民群众的安全感.).23

One case, two verdicts 165 At this same meeting, Ren Jianxin formulated specific requirements for carrying out this yanda struggle, and Tao Siju, then minister of the MPS, reminded the police department of the various levels of the severe situation of public security, demanding that the yanda struggle be efficiently organized and effectively put into action. Bai Jingfu, then Vice Minister of the MPS, emphasized once again that through the struggle a large number of criminals could be punished in a severe and quick way according to the law. The next day, April 29, Zhang Siqing chaired a procuratorial meeting, and, while learning the important directions of “the leading comrades from the Central Committee,” he demanded that the procuratorates at different levels cooperate closely with the police department and the court to firmly carry out the guidelines of severe and quick punishment: being resolute and quick in action, quick in arrest and prosecution, and severe in punishment, ensuring no delay in the procuratorate process. (要与公安、法院等有关部 门密切配合, 通力协作, 坚决贯彻依法从重从快方针, 做到狠抓、快办、 严惩, 坚持快捕、快诉, 保证在检察环节上不贻误战机).24 From the above reproduced speeches of top leaders from the CPC’s Central Committee (Ren Jianxin), the Supreme People’s Court (Ren Jianxin as well), the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (Zhang Siqing), and the police (Tao Siju, the minister of MPS), we see the theme of yanda discursively reproduced. Two decades later, the dominant theme of discourse produced by the top CPC leader in 2013–2014 was different. We can recognize a theme of gongping-zhengyi in the following section of this chapter. The gongping-zhengyi speech in 2013–2014

As President Xi Jinping came into office in October 2012, desirous of establishing new governance of the country, he called for the creation of a law-based administration and for the people to follow the law. On February 23, 2013, he made a speech at a Political Bureau study meeting emphasizing the equality and justice in the legal cases. He urged the country to make a breakthrough in scientific legislation, to strictly carry out the laws, and to perform justice in all political-judiciary practices. Xi’s idea of gongping (equality) and zhengyi (justice) was further developed to form a part of his governance principles. At the political and legal meeting held by the CPC’s Central Committee on January 7, 2014, he emphasized this point again by saying: We should take as basic task the maintenance of general social stability, as key value the furthering of the social equality and justice, as utmost goal the guarantee of people’s happiness in working and living. We should strictly act by law and stick to justice in registration. By actively deepening reform, we want to enforce and improve the political-legal work, to maintain people’s concerns and interests. Only by doing this can we guarantee the

166 Hailong Tian fulfillment of the task we set to realize the Chinese dream of reverberating the Chinese nationality by the years of 2021 and 2049. (要把维护社会大 局稳定作为基本任务, 把促进社会公平正义作为核心价值追求, 把保 障人民安居乐业作为根本目标, 坚持严格执法公正司法, 积极深化改 革, 加强和改进政法工作, 维护人民群众切身利益, 为实现“两个一百 年”奋斗目标、实现中华民族伟大复兴的中国梦提供有力保障.).25 On February 27, 2014, People’s Daily, a newspaper run by CPC’s Central Committee, published a review article entitled “Creating a new situation of law-based state governance,” reviewing the progress in the political and judiciary fields made in the last year. In the same article, a new round of reform legislation is said to begin in six aspects, including reforming the appeals system and redressing erroneous verdicts. 26 This new reform is closely related to the Huugjilt case, for what follows is that it was brought to court again in 2014, both on November 20 and on December 25, when the Inner Mongolia Supreme Court announced that Huugjilt was innocent.

Political power and influence in judicial practices The top leaders’ speeches concerning the examined judicial practice can be taken as the discursive aspect of judicial practice. In the years 1995–1996, CPC leader Ren Jianxin made several speeches advocating a yanda principle nationwide, and leaders in charge of the court, procuratorate, and police answered the call and put yanda into action across their respective fields. Two decades later, Xi Jinping, CPC’s top leader, made a series of speeches calling for gongping-zhengyi in judiciary cases against the background of the reversal of the Huugjilt case. The two discourses, though different in theme and almost two decades apart in time, were both authoritative and recontextualized in a lower level of discourse. In this sense, they served as meta-discourses, linking the discursive to the social and regulating the social via the discursive. But how are the two meta-discourses linked to the quick sentence of Huugjilt in 1996 and to the reversal of his sentence in 2014? To address the mechanism in these two judicial practices, I examine the vertical recontextualization of meta-discourse. Vertical recontextualization

Vertical recontextualization is a concept that I derive from Bernstein’s idea of vertical discourse and make use of in explaining the top-down recontextualization of meta-discourse in the judicial practice of the Huugjilt case. Bernstein defines vertical discourse as the kind of specialized discourse practiced in the natural or social sciences and humanities, in contrast to horizontal discourse which takes the form of everyday uses of language involving common-sense. For Bernstein, vertical discourse is coherent, explicitly structured, systematically principled, and hierarchically organized, much as in the natural sciences, and

One case, two verdicts 167 for the social sciences and humanities. It takes the form of a series of specialized languages with specialized modes of interrogation and specialized criteria for the production and circulation of texts.27 Whereas the circulation of horizontal discourse occurs between sites and segments/contexts, vertical discourse circulates in an ongoing process in which procedures are hierarchically linked to other procedures to bring about integration at the level of meaning. For this, Bernstein acknowledges official and institutional controls with systematic recontextualization as its distributive principle.28 Through Bernstein’s lens, we can see a number of characteristics of vertical discourse in our two examples. First, its practice bears an institutional and official character. Second, its circulation is hierarchical rather than heterarchical. And third, vertical discourse is articulated in terms of general and abstract theories that acquire an integrating function. In discussing the processes of recontextualization of the discursive themes in the Huugjilt case, I recognize the features of Bernstein’s conception of vertical discourse, his integrative function in particular. The speeches of top leaders in the periods of 1995–1996 and 2013–2014 are made from an obvious hierarchically superior position, recognition of which makes it likely that their speeches are recontextualized into the speeches of lower-ranking officials. We can see that in the speeches quoted under the previous section, “The yanda speeches in 1995–1996,” in which the word yanda, initiated by CPC leader Ren Jianxin as a topic and theme of the meta-discourse, is repeated in subsequent speeches by leaders in the court, procuratorates, and police. This vertical recontextualization of metadiscourse in 1995–1996 happens again in 2013–2014, but this time it is Xi Jinping’s gongping-zhengyi meta-discourse that is recontexualized in the newspaper articles and Party documents (e.g., see the review article of People’s Daily on February 27, 2014). Here, in the vertical recontextualization of meta-discourse (yanda and gongping-zhengyi, in their respective historical periods) is a type of hierarchical relationship in administration and governance and a regulating function of vertical recontextualization at work, a function that mediates recontextualization of the discourse with action caused by reality. Thus, vertical recontextualization does not only visibly go top-down, but it also regulates social practices and carries practical effect. This regulating function of the vertical recontextualization can be illustrated in Figure 9.1 in which the upper left oval indicates the yanda meta-discourse in 1995–1996 and the upper right oval represents the gongping-zhengyi metadiscourse in 2013–2014. The yanda meta-discourse is recontextualized into what I call regulated discourse in the form of, for example, speeches of lowerranking leaders and, ultimately, in the text form of verdicts as indicated in the lower left oval. Similarly, the gongping-zhengyi meta-discourse is recontexualized into regulated discourse as well, but in the form of newspaper articles and, ultimately, in the text form of rehabilitation as indicated in the lower right oval. The top-down vertical arrow indicates the function of this recontextualization practice; that is, by this vertical recontextualization, a regulating practice

168 Hailong Tian

Figure 9.1 Vertical recontextualizations as regulating practices

is activated in which a policy made by a top leader is carried out and put into action. It might be safe to say, then, that the death sentence of Huugjilt and the redressing of Huugjilt’s case are both outcomes of a regulating practice which is embodied in the recontextualization practice in the form of vertical recontextualization of the meta-discourse of, for instance, a severe strike in the period of 1995–1996 and equality and justice in the period of 2013–2014. Meta-discourse as colonizing context

As indicated in the above discussion, the meta-discursive themes of yanda and gongping-zhengyi, once vertically recontextualized by the legal practitioners, acquire new meaning in discourse, but it is in the act of compliance with the perceived authority that the recontextualized themes reproduce power relations and exert influence over the consequent social practice. This is in line with Zhang’s observation about the recontextualization of China’s four top leaders’ meta-discourses. Thus, the question raised is: What is the mechanism for this power reproduction? This question is easily lost in the abstractions of discourse analysts, who simply, and I would say naively, talk of the reproduction of power as if this process is unquestionably determined by the higher-ranking officials over those in lower-ranking positions. This illusion prevails particularly with regard to Chinese contexts wherein a one-party system allots more power to those in higher positions. However, when seen from a sociocognitive approach, as developed in van Dijk’s critical discourse studies,29 the social influence of top leaders cannot take place without compliance. Colonization is not a deterministic process and power cannot be separated from those who seek to exert influence as well as from those who willingly recontextualize the discourse of leaders and enact that recontextualized discourse accordingly.

One case, two verdicts 169 To account for these phenomena, van Dijk develops a “context model” of discursive practices to explain how social contexts influence text and talk. According to this theory, context is not an objective situation or a social fact that embraces, for example, time, place, setting, participants’ gender, identity, and even social position, but a subjective construct of individual participants, defining relevant aspects of their communicative situation.30 This way of modeling context, termed “context model,” mediates the social structure and discourse structure. Thus, with the Huugjilt case, it is not that the top leaders’ authority inherently exerts influence but that it operates via the individually constructed authority of the top leaders by leaders who see themselves as occupying inferior positions. In other words, the way leaders of lower-ranking positions speak (as seen in the regulated/recontextualized discourse) and act (as seen in the legal decisions they make—the yanda movement) are not causally generated by the top leaders but are complemented by the individual constructions of leaders of lower-ranking positions; that is, by the way they understand and agree with the yanda meta-discourse of top leaders. The above suggests that discourse and its communicative situation overlap. In fact, van Dijk goes so far as to question the distinction between discourse and its communicative practice.31 Van Dijk points to a conceptualization of meta-discourse as providing a colonizing context. As I discussed earlier in this chapter, meta-discourses work as regulating social practices. I now wish to go further in arguing that the regulating function of meta-discourse works only because the leaders of lower-ranking positions accept this function and recognize its hegemony. In this sense, it might be useful to reconceptualize metadiscourse in terms of the dual requirement of offering meaningful regulations that its practitioners are willing to enact or pass on as obedient participants. In a colonizing context, meta-discourse makes salient the connection between discourse and social structure, which is a key issue in the critical dimension of discourse analysis. In our examination of the Huugjilt case, speeches made by the top leaders are constructed in a yanda context in the years 1995–1996 and in a gongping-zhengyi context in 2013–2014. These contexts are further perceived as prevailing and overwhelming, discouraging the leaders in lower-ranking positions from seeing alternatives and obeying and carrying out their directives. These subjective constructions are to a great extent responsible for the quick sentence of Huugjilt in 1996 and the reversal of his case in 2014. In investigating these two cases, we gained considerable insights by not only tracing the meta-discursive themes from one recontextualization to another but also by examining their communicative context which turns out to be “a crucial methodological and theoretical issue in the development of a critical study of language.”32

Concluding remarks The aim of this chapter is to show the interaction between three Chinese discourses in the Huugjilt case—the official political discourse made by the speeches of Chinese leaders, the legal discourse of judicial practitioners, and

170 Hailong Tian the public discourse of printed opinions—and the resulting miscarriage of justice in the execution of an innocent young man. In following this case through its texts, this chapter examines some of the abovementioned contingencies unique to Chinese language, culture and politics which are helpful in understanding the interplay of the discourses involved. I draw my inspiration from the theoretical conceptions of Fairclough’s social practice, Silverstein’s meta-discourse, Bernstein’s entextualization and vertical discourse, van Leeuwen’s recontextualization, and van Dijk’s idea of recognizing the social context of discursive practices. Finally, I discuss judicial practices in terms of vertical recontextualization of the legal discourse using official and political meta-discourses, in effect colonizing the discourse of legal practitioners. I believe that vertical submissions of discourse exist elsewhere, but that the horizontal interplay between various discourses and their vertical submissions to the official discourse of political leaders are uniquely Chinese. I summarize and reflect on my findings as follows. First, speeches made by top leaders during the two historical periods (i.e., 1995–1996 and 2013–2014) relied heavily on the yanda and gongping-zhengyi themes in their meta-discourse. They have no effect unless they are read, understood, discursively constructed, and adopted by the community of legal practitioners. They could be seen as prevailing and overwhelming forces, regulating the legal discourse and subsequent legal actions by legal practitioners in China but not without consent. Second, the regulating function of meta-discourse is realized in the process of recontextualization of particular themes. When these themes (e.g., severe strike and equality and justice) are used repeatedly in speeches made by top leaders and then mindlessly reproduced by leaders in lower-ranking positions, they acquire new meanings and grant authorities to legal professionals. The power thus obtained by reproducing these concepts becomes a regulating force in the practice of recontextualization. This is especially true of vertical recontextualizations, which are more easily visible than horizontal ones.33 These findings, while answering the first two research questions of this study, readily address the third as well: Why did it take nine years (from 2005 when the actual murderer confessed to the crime until 2014) to correct the injustice perpetrated on Huugjilt in 1996? My findings suggest that this delay might have been due to the fact that the gongping-zhengyi theme appeared only after 2005 in the colonizing meta-discourse and migrated only slowly into the legal discourse. While my findings are solidly grounded in the texts I examined, they most likely are not generalizable to countries that practice different political-judicial discourses. I believe the prime grounds for the lack of generalizability are the often difficult-to-articulate cultural contingencies that underlie all discourses. The cultural contingencies of China are seemingly compatible with its one-party system where the CPC has the absolute and highest power over the governance of the state. This power is often exercised via the discourse initiated by its leaders, as was the case in convicting Huugjilt and then reversing that conviction 18 years later. What can be

One case, two verdicts 171 generalized from this research is that discourse cannot be limited to text, talk, and actions, but must be considered in the cultural context in which it is practiced.

Notes 1 Qianqian Wang and Yuanyuan Hao, “The realization of law ustice and the Huugjilt case,” Law and Society 2 (2016): 62–63. 2 Yichou Fan, “Claiming the responsibility for wrong trials: Comparison of and reflection on the Present Huugjilt case and the ancient Yang Naiwu case,” Journal of Law 9 (2016): 3–16. 3 See, for example, Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999): 19–35. 4 Norman Fairclough, “The discourse of new labor: Critical discourse analysis,” in Critical Discourse Analysis: Essential Readings, eds. Hailong Tian and Peng Zhao (Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2012): 181–225. 5 See, for example, Hailong Tian, “Discourse and public sphere in China: A study of Wu Ying lawsuit case,” in Contemporary Chinese Discourse and Social Practice in China, eds. Linda Tsung and Wei Wang (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015): 27–44. See also, Hailong Tian, and Paul Chilton, “Issues in discourse approach to social transformations in China: A synopsis,” in Discourse, Politics, and Media in Contemporary China, eds. Qing Cao, Hailong Tian, and Paul Chilton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014): 195–207. 6 Fairclough, “The discourse of new labor: Critical discourse analysis.” Op. cit.,4 187. 7 Theo van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 6. 8 Fairclough, “The discourse of new labor: Critical discourse analysis.” Op. cit.,4 187–189. 9 van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Op. cit.,7 7–12. 10 Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, “Critical discourse analysis,” in Critical Discourse Analysis: Essential Readings, eds. Hailong Tian and Peng Zhao (Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2012): 16–47. 11 Richard Bauman, “Transformation of the word in the production of Mexican festival drama,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, eds. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996): 301–327. 12 van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Op. cit.,7 17–19. 13 Basil Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique (revised edition) (London and New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000): 155–174. 14 Qing Zhang, “The discursive construction of the social stratification order in reforming China,” in Discourse and Socio-political Transformations in Contemporary China, eds. Paul Chilton, Hailong Tian, and Ruth Wodak (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012): 19–37. 15 Ibid., 24–25. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Hailong Tian, “Discursive production of a teaching quality assessment report: A critical discourse analysis,” Journal of Language and Politics 9, no. 4 (2010): 574–592. 18 Zhang, “The discursive construction of the social stratification order in reforming China.” Op. cit.,14 34.

172 Hailong Tian 19 Michael Silverstein, “The uses and utility of ideology: A commentary,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, eds. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 123–145. 20 In the political system of China where the Communist Party of China (CPC) holds power, the Secretary of the Political and Judiciary Commission under the Central Committee of CPC is the highest post responsible for the court, procuratorate, and police. 21 People’s Daily (December 19, 1995): 3. 22 People’s Daily (April 19, 1996): 3. 23 People’s Daily (April 29, 1996): 1. 24 People’s Daily (April 30, 1996): 3. 25 People’s Net, politics.people.com.cn_n_2014_0109_c1024-24064154. 26 People’s Daily (February 27, 2014): 3. 27 Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Op. cit.,1 160. 28 Ibid. 29 Teun A. van Dijk, Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 1–27. 30 Ibid., 119. 31 Ibid., 117. 32 Jan Blommaert, Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 39. 33 In terms of features of social practice, vertical recontextualization may differ from horizontal recontextualization, but this needs further exploration in other research.

10 Discourses of dissent The role of speech and action in Israeli grassroots activism Tamar Katriel

Activism as a cultural-discursive formation Let me set the stage for my discussion with two vignettes, both drawn from my ethnographic study of the discourses and practices of a range of anti-occupation grassroots groups active in Israel in the past decade: (1) The scene is a small group meeting with a representative of the veterans’ organization Breaking the Silence (hence, BTS), an NGO devoted to collecting, disseminating and archiving soldiers’ personal accounts of their experiences of military service in the occupied Palestinian territories and the oppressive measures involved.1 This was one of numerous such meetings that have been held in private homes and public venues around the country since 2004. Following the speaker’s presentation and the formal Q&A session, as we went on chatting, I asked him: “What do you actually expect people to do with the information you are sharing with them?” His prompt answer, spoken in what sounded to me as a blend of apology and defiance, was: “To speak is action, too” [gam ledaber ze pe’ula]. (2) The scene is a tour of Palestinian villages adversely affected by Israel’s construction of the Separation Barrier, also known as the Wall. The tour was organized and guided by Combatants for Peace, an organization jointly founded in 2005 by former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters who have decided to renounce violence and joined hands in seeking a path to reconciliation.2 The goal of the tour was to familiarize Israelis with the plight of the Palestinian farmers adversely affected by the Wall on the one hand, and with the border-crossing model of action employed by the organization’s mode of operation on the other. At one point, I overheard one of the guides conversing with a tour participant about the organization’s dialogue-building activities and the sense of possibility they enacted. He concluded the exchange, saying: “But we don’t just talk, we also do things” [aval anaxnu lo rak medabrim, gam osim dvarim]. Literally minutes later, as we all convened in a general open discussion in the yard of a Palestinian village house, an exasperated participant, obviously troubled by what he had seen and heard on the tour,

174 Tamar Katriel asked: “So what can we [regular citizens] do?” The other tour guide, who moderated the discussion, promptly responded: “To speak, to persuade” [ledaber, leshaxne’a]. These vignettes exemplify what I call the speech–action nexus. This nexus addresses and problematizes the action potential of language rather than its representational function. As the foregoing examples illustrate, this nexus becomes repeatedly thematized in activist contexts, giving voice to a deepseated ambivalence regarding the role of speech in social affairs. Thus, the representative of BTS, which is a discourse-centered “witnessing organization,”3 insisted that speech should be viewed as a form of action. He thereby implicitly rejected the speech–action binary that grounds such common phrases as “All talk and no action” or “Deeds not words.” The latter slogan, popularized by the British Suffragettes in their struggle for the vote a hundred years ago,4 signals the devaluation and distrust of speech in activist and political contexts, a hermeneutics of suspicion. The same devaluation of speech was implicit in the first Combatants for Peace comment “We don’t just talk.” On the other hand, the organization’s work and identity is predicated on a faith in the possibilities of speech, as exemplified by the change of heart its members have undergone that turned them from fighters to dialogically-oriented peace-makers. A similar faith in language underpins the slogan circulated by the Bereaved Parents’ Circle, a joint organization of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members to the conflict, which runs: “It will not stop until we talk.”5 A recognition of these entangled and tension-filled relations between language and action as cultural—rather than analytic—categories marks the point of departure in my attempt to understand ‘activism’ as a historically-situated yet globalized cultural formation. In Foucault’s terms, it can be seen as a discursive formation—a system of ideas, attitudes, beliefs and practices that systematically constitute a field of action, subjects, regimes of truth and power-related social relations.6 Notably, dictionary definitions of ‘activism’ do not address the ambivalence implicit in the speech–action nexus manifested in the foregoing examples. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines activism as “a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue.”7 It dates its first known use as 1915, a temporal trajectory supported by the Google NGram graph for activism (which currently goes up to 2000). According to this graph, the term ‘activism’ emerged in the early twentieth century, peaked in the 1970s and steadily rose to peak again in 2000.8 Other dictionaries speak of activism as “campaigning,” or “noticeable action to achieve a result,” or “direct, often confrontational action.”9 They also differentiate between activist domains, such as environmental or peace activism, and provide examples of activist practices—such as demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, letter-campaigns, and so on. These practices are extensively described in both scholarly and popular writings about activism.10

Discourses of dissent 175 Notably, the English words “activism” and “activist” are language borrowings that have been integrated into Hebrew vernacular usage. The term “activist” [pa’il(male)/pe’ila (female)] is used both as a noun to refer to a person identified (by himself or others) through his or her engagement in struggles for social or political change, and as an adjective describing the practices involved in such struggles. The shape of the Google NGram for Hebrew “activism” is somewhat different from the English one, but follows a generally similar trajectory (it peaks in the 1980s). In Hebrew the term “activist action” [pe’ula activistit] does not sound as tautological as it does in English, and I will use it to refer to the kinds of actions locally considered to be part of activists’ distinctive repertoire. As a first approximation, then, we can say that as a cultural-historical formation activism defines the social experience and public engagement of people who claim an activist identity by participating in a range of vigorous and demonstrative activities in response to a deeply felt moral imperative to act. In so doing, they engage in a double act of rejection—rejecting violence on the one hand and social indifference on the other. They enact their dissent through nonviolent symbolic means. Among activists, therefore, the term “activism” carries decidedly positive connotations and inaction is interpreted as complicity with a morally-objectionable state of affairs. Indeed, although Raymond Williams did not include either the term “activism” or the term “action” in his list of Keywords, it seems to carry the same positive aura Williams attributes to the term “community.” Like community, within activist circles “action” and “activism” seem “never to be used unfavorably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.”11 Outsiders to these circles may, of course, have quite a different take on activist engagements, e.g., activists can be viewed as agitators who pose a threat to the social order, and dissent may be seen as the road to chaos or criminalized as treason. “Activist action” straddles a gap between two commitments that are both associated with nonviolent struggles for social and political change—the commitment to restrict the struggle to symbolic means and the commitment to attain tangible material results. Bridging this gap brings out the essential rhetoricity of activist action whether it is enacted discursively or not. Whatever its material components or designs, activist action is understood in terms of its symbolic value and potential addressivity12 rather than in terms of its tangible effects. Thus, when in the fall of 2016, I joined a group of Israeli activists who went olive picking in a West Bank village barred from parts of its land due to the building of the Wall, it was clear to everybody that this effort was not about the two pithy sacks of olives we managed to salvage from the desolate olive grove, which its owner had been unable to cultivate properly. This embodied activist action symbolized the possibility of expressing resistance, affirmed the value of border-crossing solidarity as well as the satisfaction of doing things together. Such symbolic actions are a well-recognized feature of the worldwide cultural legacy of nonviolent struggles.13 Indeed, the globally circulating memories of such struggles testify to activists’ ongoing reflexive

176 Tamar Katriel attention to the forms, functions, meanings, merits and shortcomings of various modes of action and their ways of addressing the public at large.14 Thus, even while the “deeds not words” dictum pits action against speech, activists’ notion of non-discursive action foregrounds its symbolic significance so that their embodied action comes to perform an essentially communicative function. Thus, whereas embodied activist actions are often evaluated by their symbolic power rather than by their material effects, speech is acknowledged to be an effective tool for mobilizing and coordinating activist efforts. Deliberative, goal-oriented speech activities go under the heading of “strategizing,” which is considered a central activist practice. The various entanglements related to the speech–action nexus can be traced to the language ideologies that inform activist discourse as both a globalized and a localized discursive formation, as the following discussion of Israeli activist discourse demonstrates.

Language ideology and Israeli activist discourse The notion of language (or linguistic) ideology has been elaborated in the subfield of Linguistic Anthropology in the past several decades. It relates to the ideas groups of speakers hold about the nature of language and its varied uses in the conduct of social affairs.15 In Michael Silverstein’s widely circulated formulation, language ideology refers to “any sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.”16 Such beliefs and valuations implicitly attend all language use, but at times, as in the vignettes that opened this essay, they are explicitly articulated by social actors in the form of meta-linguistic or meta-discursive “talk about talk.”17 The metadiscursive cultural conversation that I have identified as central to activist discourse under the heading of the “speech–action nexus,” points to a cultural juncture in which speakers’ language ideology becomes explicitly thematized and problematized. In this case, it is not the value attached to particular linguistic forms—such as accent or style—that is at issue but the role of language as an instrument of social change and the power of speech as such. Indeed, the study of activism as a social field, which both articulates and valorizes localized notions of “activist action” and “activist identities”, provides a particularly rich opportunity for exploring the entanglements of language and action in the semiotic economy of contemporary cultural groups. The simultaneous valuation and de-valuation of language in activist discourse speaks to larger issues related to the cultural construction of language and action in modern Israeli culture and in the Western tradition from which Zionism has drawn some of its basic tenets.18 I therefore turn now to a brief discussion of these cultural underpinnings, addressing both the distinctive role of the Hebrew language in constructing the Israeli nation-building ethos and the culturally inflected notions of action implicit in it. Israel’s hegemonic linguistic ideology, which has been termed ‘revivalism,’ considers modern Hebrew as a revival of Classical Hebrew whose various historical layers include Biblical Hebrew, Talmudic Hebrew and later rabbinical

Discourses of dissent 177 19

sources. At the same time, the structure of Hebrew, on the one hand,20 and Hebrew language ideology, on the other, have been influenced by the European languages spoken by modern Hebrew’s early speakers. The linguistic debates about the structure of modern Hebrew, and about the revivalist ideology that has shaped mainstream Israeli attitudes towards language, form the wider context of my discussion, which will specifically address Israeli localized conceptions of the cultural categories of language and action. The revivalist linguistic ideology of modern Hebrew involves a double focus: 1) a focus on the ancient origins of the Hebrew language (and by extension, the Hebrew/Jewish nation) and 2) a focus on language revival as a revolutionary cultural gesture of both individual and national selftransformation. The claim of linguistic revival is based on a claim of unbroken continuity, which is predicated on the fact that Hebrew was used as a ritual language in Jewish diasporas throughout the centuries since the expulsion of Jews from the land of Palestine during Roman times. It resonates with the Jews’ claim of having returned to Israel/Palestine from their longtime exiles in the late nineteenth century with the advent of Zionism, which constructs Palestine as an ancestral home. As in modern European nationalisms more generally, language and territory are the hallmarks of Israel as a modern nation. Both are woven into a tale of cultural continuity and both are implicated in processes of cultural invention, giving rise to a cultural configuration comprised of what is considered a new-and-old language in a new-and-old country. The revival of the Hebrew language has thus become a metonym of Jewish national revival. Alongside tangible state-building projects, Israeli nationhood has also been discursively reproduced through commemorative retellings of the embattled story of how Hebrew turned from a liturgical language used by diasporic communities into a secularized instrument of mundane social living and sovereign statehood. As a vernacular language, modern Hebrew involves a new emphasis on the instrumental dimensions of speech, privileging such values as practicality, goaldirectedness and effectiveness in line with the dominant strand within Israeli national discourse known as “practical Zionism.”21 In terms of the speech–action nexus discussed earlier, we could say that the vernacularization of Hebrew has been accompanied by a shift in language ideology as well. The spiritual-religious aura surrounding Hebrew as leshon kodesh, or sacred tongue, gave way to a more pragmatic view of language as a collective tool of self-making. In Israel’s nationbuilding era, language was a major tool in the hands of the native-born Israeli, the Sabra, who epitomized the New Jew as both the designated product and creator of modern Israeli society. As my earlier studies of Israeli cultural style have indicated, the Sabra identity is closely tied to a particular cultural communication style natively known as dugri speech. 22 Dugri speech enacts an action-oriented language ideology that privileges sincerity over equivocation and vagueness; direct and transparent talk over indirectness and politeness; verbal parsimony and simplicity over rhetorical flourish; the courage of truth over the aesthetics of form; the expression of

178 Tamar Katriel inner strength and conviction over verbal caution. This cluster of beliefs and preferences concerning the form and function of speech underlie dugri speakers’ emphasis on the productive and transformative power of language. This accords with the weight placed on human action as a moving force in history, which is a basic tenet of Zionist ideology. The call to cultivate the possibilities inherent in discursive and embodied action, along with the practical and moral responsibilities such interventions entail, has animated Israeli nation-building ethos from the early days of Jewish settlement in Palestine.23 The valorization of human action, and the concomitant stress on viewing the use of language in terms of its instrumental function, makes considerations of effectiveness central to the assessment of speech exchanges. This leads to new questions—and deliberations—regarding what counts as effectiveness in particular arenas of speech action. Is effectiveness to be assessed in symbolic or material terms, or some combination of both? Can we point to any patterning in the forms of speech deemed “effective” in given contexts, or are such judgments a matter of ad hoc inferences and assessments? The question of effectiveness is crucial to the discussion of activist discourse since activism is predicated on participants’ commitment to bring about tangible social and political change. In other words, to the extent that speech serves as an activist tool, it is designed and deployed in such a way as to contribute to the promotion of change. Those aspects of Hebrew language ideology that valorize the action potential of speech over its power to articulate ideational systems, or its ability to perform aesthetic gestures, thus resonate with the demands put on language in the context of activist discourse. At the same time, modern Hebrew, and the Israeli activist scene, are also informed by a Western linguistic ideology that posits a sharp dichotomy between language and action, grounding the “deeds not words” slogan within a broader set of often untapped beliefs about language. These beliefs, however, have been addressed within the field of linguistic anthropology whose attention to non-Western languages and to their underlying linguistic ideologies provides a valuable comparative angle and a fresh perspective on the study of Western linguistic traditions. One such study is Judith Irvine’s discussion of language ideology and political economy in Senegal. As she argues, in the Western intellectual tradition of thinking about language, following Ferdinand Saussure’s legacy, 24 there has been “a radical separation of the denotational sign (qua sign) from the material world,”25 a fundamental assumption that has led, inter alia, to the emergence of claims for an autonomous science of linguistics. Irvine challenges the universality of this intellectual assumption, pushing beyond the idealist/materialist dichotomy. She proposes a political economy framework to the study of language that makes the argument that “linguistic signs are part of a political economy, not just vehicles for thinking about it.”26 On the one hand, she points out the need for “conceptions of economy and of value that are comprehensive enough to include linguistic resources and verbal activities,”27 i.e., she argues for recognizing the symbolic dimension of actions and material objects. At the same time, she also argues for a more comprehensive

Discourses of dissent 179 view of language that would acknowledge the multiple links between signs and the material world. Irvine identifies three types of linkage between linguistic phenomena and the political economy: 1) Propositionality, which refers to signs that denote objects and activities in the material world; 2) Indexicality, which refers to signs that index social groups, social situations and identity categories that enter into social relations of production; and 3) Incorporation, which refers to linguistic phenomena that are part of the economy as practices and commodities. While the first two types have been extensively explored within the fields of linguistics and sociolinguistics, the third type has attracted less attention in these research areas. It is the relation of incorporation that holds Irvine’s particular attention in the ethnographic example she elaborates of speech practices among the Wolof of Senegal. She uses this case to demonstrate the multi-functionality of linguistic signs, focusing on the role of stylized utterances of praise made by the local bards, called griots, in the political economy of the group. These are utterances that are exchangeable for material goods in the form of monetary compensation and thus come to epitomize the commodification of speech.28 In another study, Alan Rumsey discusses the role of linguistic ideology in his comparative discussion of particular linguistic structures in English and in Ungarinjin, the language of the Ngarinjin people of Northwestern Australia, focusing on the grammar of reported speech and on linguistic devices of textual cohesion, and relating them to aspects of language ideology.29 The interesting point for our present discussion is that (as in Irvine’s case) the comparative analysis allows him to highlight the nature of the linguistic ideology dominant in the West as grounded in a series of dualisms—most notably, in a sharp dichotomy between words and things, speech and action. These dualisms are absent from the Australian Aboriginal linguistic ideology he studied, in which language was viewed as a form of action and in which the social rather than the referential-propositional functions of language were emphasized. In his words: Alongside the Western dualism of form and content another tenet of our linguistic ideology is the dualism of words and things; talk versus action; real world events versus ways of speaking about them. Words in this view are not things, but only stand for things. They are mere symbols or signs, the purpose of which is to talk about a reality that lies beyond them and apart from them.30 Rumsey does not claim that this linguistic ideology is the only one current in the West, but considers it to be a dominant one “underwritten by the most powerful and prestigious institutions—the courts, legislative bodied, print media, schools and Universities.”31 Another strand in both intellectual and vernacular Western traditions treats language as a form of action. The view of language as action underlies influential approaches to the study of speech, such as the long-standing tradition

180 Tamar Katriel of rhetoric with its focus on language’s capacity to move and persuade through symbolic action,32 or speech act theory with its focus on the performativity of language and speakers’ capacity “to do things with words.”33 This recognition of the diverse, even competing linguistic ideologies in Western thought brings us back to the speech–action nexus, whose entanglements become particularly accentuated in the context of activist discourse. We can say that the co-existence of the devaluation of language as it appears in the “deeds not words” slogan is grounded in an ideologically charged dichotomy between the ideational and the material, between words and things as well as words and actions. At the same time, activist projects see themselves as employing verbal and visual signs as oppositional tools designed to effect change in the world. As discussed earlier, this action oriented linguistic ideology has found further reinforcement within the action-centered Zionist, nation-building ethos. Activist discourse thus marks an ambivalent juncture between these two non-commensurate linguistic ideologies that activists must navigate as they mount their struggle to bring about social and political change. The next section traces some of the discursive strategies I have identified as particularly significant components of activist discourse within Israeli anti-occupation activism.

Discursive strategies in activist discourse Recognizing the action potential of speech, activists mobilize a series of speech practices that become part of their strategic tool-kit of discursive action. The first strategy I will address involves stylized proclamations of an oppositional stance.34 The verbal act of proclaiming dissent is often part of a testimonial rhetoric that insists on speaking truth to power. Michel Foucault’s discussion of the ancient Greek meta-discursive notion of parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” offers insights into the contextual factors and discursive dimensions of this type of oppositional speech activity.”35 Foucault describes parrhesiastic rhetoric as involving a verbal variant of the activist’s urge to “put one’s body on the line”. He says: parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relation to truth and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia the speaker chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.36 Dissident organizations’ mission statements and public letters disseminated through the mainstream press, like those circulated in the Israeli press and online by various oppositional groups, are examples of the use of parrhesiastic rhetoric, with its double emphasis on courage and truth. The following

Discourses of dissent 181 example comes from BTS’s current website, where they declare their refusal to go along with the Israeli mainstream and take part in normalizing the occupation regime by keeping silent about their experiences of it: Soldiers who serve in the territories witness and participate in military actions which change them immensely. Cases of abuse towards Palestinians, looting, and destruction of property have been the norm for years. Yet they are still explained as extreme and unique cases. Our testimonies portray a different and much grimmer picture in which deterioration of moral standards finds expression in the character of orders and the rules of engagements, and are justified in the name of Israel’s security …37 For Israeli activists, speaking out in line with the verbal activity of parrhesia resonates with the language ideology underlying dugri speech discussed in the previous section. In undertaking to speak truth to power, and to confront Israeli society with counter-knowledge it would rather suppress, BTS (like other dissenting groups) are enacting a cultural communication pattern that is deeply rooted in Israeli culture in which language is seen as a form of action. Indeed, BTS activists go so far as to present their activist, discourse-centered engagement as a direct extension of the military action to which they were committed during their years as conscripted soldiers in the Israeli army, as clearly stated on the cover page of one of the organization’s testimonial booklets, which reads: “During our service we successfully fulfilled a wide range of military tasks. There is one task left: to tell, to speak, and to hide nothing.”38 A second discursive strategy employed by various groups of activists involves assuming the role of witness to the ills of the occupation regime.39 Witnesses stress the factuality and authenticity of their accounts, attempting to induce in their audiences a sense of “epistemic responsibility”40 that is captured by the oft-repeated mantra “don’t say you didn’t know.” Some of these witness accounts include narrative segments recounting life-changing moments, which take the form of “moral shock narratives”41 that register moments of acute distress leading to self-recognition, and model the possibility of a fundamental change of heart. An example of such a narrative is the story of a soldier-witness who recounts an incident that became etched in his memory, when his commander brutally dispersed a funeral procession led by an elderly Palestinian patriarch followed by his large family. Taken aback by the coarseness and cruelty of his commander’s conduct, and overcome by remorse at the fact that he did not speak out in real time, the narrator tries to explain to himself why this incident, which resembled others he had experienced before, had remained so vivid in his mind. Reflecting back, he concluded with a harsh self-directed moral judgment: “There was something so noble about him [the elderly Palestinian], and I felt like the scum of the earth.”42 A fourth discursive strategy used to mobilize the action potential of language involves lexical choice. As in other cases of contentious politics, the Israeli field of anti-occupation activism constitutes a lexical battlefield,

182 Tamar Katriel reflecting the clash of master-narratives that underwrite the parties’ political stances. While the Left speaks of occupation, Palestinian territories and the West Bank, the Right speaks of liberated Jewish territories, an ancient, Godgiven patrimony, and Judea and Samaria. Since right-wing parlance has become increasingly naturalized in mainstream Israeli society through official decrees (e.g., lexical choices explicitly mandated on public radio), constant modeling and habitual usage, naming the occupation and the Palestinian territories as such has become an activist gesture of defiance in and of itself. These defiant naming practices are part of the ongoing, usually losing battle over agenda-setting and framing in public Israeli discourse today. Another lexically-centered strategy employed by activists involves the insistence on specificity and concreteness in debunking hegemonic accounts that are permeated by abstractions and vagueness. Both silence breakers and conscientious objectors repeatedly point to the obfuscation and outright fabrication rampant in media accounts of the occupation scene, and consider it their duty to reveal what the generalized term “occupation” actually means to those in its grip. Thus, in a tour led by a BTS activist in the city of Hebron, he rejected official military reports concerning incidents of indiscriminate shooting by ridiculing the military terminology in which they were cast and calling the bluff of mainstream media reporting. He said: And stop hiding behind [the phrases] ‘preventive shooting’, and ‘demonstration of presence,’ and ‘violent patrol’ and ‘deterrent shooting’ … . You wake up in the morning, turn on the radio in Israel and hear: ‘The IDF fired back at the sources of fire.’ Never for once did we identify any sources of fire! This sounds clean … you may call it the silence of the media. I call it our silence.43 The specificity and concreteness of the soldiers’ personal accounts construct a counter-discourse that exposes the vacuity of official military language and speaks to the witness’s authenticity and narrative authority. A sixth and final strategy involves the use of irony and self-mockery to debunk the very rationality of the occupation regime in Catch-22 style. In a memorable example of the use of this strategy, a soldier-witness expounded on his perplexed agony upon learning one morning that the military command had inexplicably decreed unnecessary the checkpoint he had been manning for several months, spending endless days controlling the daily movements of Palestinian civilians through it, and the checkpoint was removed, so to speak, from under his feet. This unexplained change of policy brought to a head the meaninglessness of his months-long efforts to navigate between security concerns and his personal desire to play it fair, and made him realize how much he had become attached to his gatekeeper role. He eventually found himself planted there in the middle of the road, cars whisking by, lamenting the disappearance of his checkpoint.

Discourses of dissent 183 Thus, parrhesiastic rhetoric, i.e., factuality and truth-telling in witnessing accounts, moral shock narratives, lexical specificity and concreteness, the use of irony and self-mockery: these are all strategies designed to enact the performativity of language in activist contexts. Magnifying language’s action potential, they turn words into deeds. The use of this set of strategies is predicated on the view of words as deeds, and therefore counteracts the “deeds not words” dictum and the devaluation of language it implies.

Concluding remarks Activist discourse is a distinctive arena in which some of the ways that language is used and evaluated in the conduct of social and political life come to the fore. Predicated on a particular understanding of action, activism is a social field that has both local and global resonances. It therefore invites consideration of the speech–action nexus as well as particular attention to the ways in which language is valued or devalued when employed as a tool of expression or governance. As I have argued, the ambivalent valuation of language in activist discourse can be traced by attending to the conflicting strands of language ideology in this particular arena, and has far-reaching implications for the conduct of democratic societies in which grassroots politics takes the form of symbolic action. Cultural assumptions concerning the dichotomy between the ideational and the material, and particularly those relating to the language–action dualism, color speakers’ conceptions of the role of language as a political tool or alternatively as “mere talk.” The dismissal of language as talk about reality but never reality itself is counteracted by rhetorical approaches and speech act theory that focus on language’s action potential. In this ideational scheme, the category of action is the more clearly valorized one within the language/action dualism, whether language is devalued for not being effective or whether it is valued for being action-like. But this favoring of action can be problematized as well. As Umberto Eco has famously pointed out in his discussion of Ur-Fascism, the over-emphasis on language efficacy, which he refers to as “the cult of action for action’s sake,”44 has its dark side, leading to a degradation in language’s meaning-making potential. More recently, the problematic of the speech– action nexus has become a central theme in public discussions of political life in the era of “post-truth”. The rhetorician Marianne Constable has pointed to the devaluation of language in the 2016 US Presidential elections, when statements uttered in the campaign became so vacuous and self-contradictory that they lost their saying power and became mere moves in the political game of power. She claimed that in a state of affairs in which words lose their ideational content and become all action, i.e., “when words cease to matter,” the possibility of a meaningful political sphere is ruptured.45 Israeli activist discourse is but one arena in which the speech–action nexus comes to the fore, raising fundamental questions about the nature and the role of language ideologies in activist contexts and beyond. Between the two

184 Tamar Katriel poles of “mere talk” on the one hand and “action for action’s sake” on the other there lies a whole range of local possibilities and globalized situations in which speech and action clash and intertwine as they participate in the production of social meaning and in the quest for social change. Further explorations of such discursive junctures can help us shed more light on the ways in which social actors negotiate their saying and doing as they reclaim the possibility of a culturally shared political sphere.

Notes 1 See the English version of Breaking the Silence at http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/. 2 See the English version of Combatants for Peace at http://cfpeace.org/. 3 Paul Frosh, “Telling presences: Witnessing, mass media, and the imagined lives of strangers,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 265–284. 4 While the “Deeds Not Words” slogan is associated with the suffragettes’ struggle, a quick search on the web will readily show that it has proliferated and attained the status of a “meme”. See Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 5 See the English version of The Parents’ Circle website at http://www.theparentscir cle.com/. 6 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1973). 7 “Activism” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary at http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/activism. 8 The Google Ngram for “activism” at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph? content=activism&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=2& share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cactivism%3B%2Cc0. 9 Several further examples of online dictionary entries for “activism” can be found at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/activism; http://dictionary.cambridge. org/dictionary/english/activism; http://www.thefreedictionary.com/activism. 10 E.g., Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston, MA: P. Sargent Publisher, 1973). John Downing, Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media (London: Sage Publications, 2010). 11 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976): 76. 12 The notion of addressivity is based on Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). See also: Chaim Noy, “‘I was here’: Addressivity structures and inscribing practices as indexical resources,” Discourse Studies 11, no. 4 (2009): 421–440. 13 Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001); John Downing, Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media (London: Sage, 2010). 14 Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel (eds.), Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 15 Kathryn A. Woolard and Bambi B. Schieffelin, “Language ideology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 23, no. 1 (1994): 55–82. Alan Rumsey, “Wording, meaning, and linguistic ideology,” American Anthropologist 92, no. 2 (1990): 346–361. 16 Michael Silverstein, “Language structure and linguistic ideology,” in The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, eds. Paul Clyne, William Hanks, and Carol Hofbauer (Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1979): 193.

Discourses of dissent 185 17 Adam Jaworski, Nicolas Coupland, and Daiusz Galasinski (eds.), Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). 18 The modern Jewish settlement of Palestine in pre-State years (known in Hebrew as yishuv) was initially established by Jews from Eastern (and then central) Europe who identified part of their mission as bringing the West to the (Middle) East. Dafna Hirsch has labeled this attitude as “Zionist Occidentalism,” in her in-depth exploration of its working in the discourse of hygiene. See Dafna Hirsch, “‘We are here to bring the west, not only to ourselves’: Zionist occidentalism and the discourse of hygiene in mandate Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41 (2009): 577–594. 19 For a critical discussion of “revivalism” as a language ideology that promotes a non-revivalist approach to the historical study of modern Hebrew and its contemporary implications, see Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001). 20 See Ghil’ad Zuckerman, Israeli: A Beautiful Language (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008, in Hebrew) for a provocative discussion of Hebrew’s European linguistic roots. Zuckerman rejects Hebrew revivalism, insisting that the language spoken by Israelis be named “Israeli” rather than Hebrew. 21 “Practical Zionism” [Tzionut ma’asit] was one of the branches of early Zionist thought, whose competitors were “spiritual Zionism” that saw Jewish revival as a culture-making project rather than stressing the importance of superstructural enterprises in settlement, construction and agriculture. For overviews of Zionist history, see David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). For a language-centered discussion of the instrumental, goal-oriented ethos in modern Hebrew speech culture, see Amos Morris Reich, “Surface, depth, and teleology in Israeli culture: The case of the Hebrew expression tachles bashetach,” Jewish Culture and History 11, no. 3 (2009): 39–58. 22 Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 23 Notably, dugri also means ‘direct’ in colloquial Arabic, from which, like many other slang terms, it has been borrowed into spoken Hebrew. For more on the semantic journey of dugri from Turkish to Arabic to Hebrew, see Katriel Op. cit.,22 10–16. 24 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, NY: McGrawHill, 1966): [Original publication in 1916]. 25 Judith T. Irvine, “When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 2 (1989): 248. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 249. 28 Clearly, as Irvine points out, an analogous argument can be developed for modern service economies in which language skills and performances play a central role. Indeed, the argument about the commodification of language in contemporary globalized service economies has been persuasively been made. See Deborah Cameron, Good to Talk? Living and Working in a Communication Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2000). 29 Rumsey, “Wording, meaning, and linguistic ideology,” Op. cit.15 30 Ibid., p. 352. 31 Ibid. 32 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). For an influential research program that explores the language of politics as symbolic language, see Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1971) and

186 Tamar Katriel

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Murray Edelman, Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1977). John Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Robert Ivie, “Enabling democratic dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 46–59. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001). Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). See also, Tamar Katriel and Nimrod Shavit, “Speaking out: Testimonial rhetoric in Israeli soldiers’ dissent,” Versus: Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 116 (2013): 81–105. Foucault, Fearless Speech. Op. cit.,35 19–20. About Us section of Breaking the Silence at http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ about/organization. BTS, Testimonial Booklet #1, n.d., Hebrew version, back cover. My translation from Hebrew. See Michal Givoni, The Care of the Witness: A Contemporary History of Testimony in Crises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Per Linell and Ragnar Rommetveit, “The many facets of morality in dialogue,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 31, nos. 3–4 (1998): 465–473. James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). BTS, Hebron Booklet, p. 40. BTS Hebron tour, July 1, 2007. Umberto Eco, “Eternal fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a Blackshirt,” New York Review of Books (22 June 1995): 12–15. http://interglacial.com/pub/ text/Umberto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fascism.html. Marianne Constable, “When words cease to matter,” Amor Mundi newsletter, published by The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2016. https://medium.com/amor-mundi/draftc-when-words-cease-to-matter-fe71c3637099#.jwn24jaumn.

Index

accountability: activists 96; defined 48; police 88, 90–92, 95; public 101; for scholarly discourse 10 Acevedo, Art 99 actions, symbolic dimensions of 178–179 activism 90; as cultural-discursive formation 173–176; cyberactivism 145, 149; definitions of 174–175; discursive strategies in activist discourse 180–183; Google NGram graph for 174, 175, 184 n8; Israeli 140; language ideology and Israeli activist discourse 176–180; online and offline 150; rhetoric of 144; as a social field 176–180, 183; speech as 140–141 activist action 175–176 activists, as witnesses 181, 183 actor-network theory (ANT) 17 addressivity 175 affect theory 132–133 agency, as attribute of abstractions 5; and accountability 75, 110–113; as attribute of matter 5, 17; attribution of agency to abstraction 5; discourses 12; human 15–16, 58–60; performative role of social actors and 59–60; political agency 143 anchoring language 94 Angermüller, Johannes 20 Annenberg Scholars Symposium 115 ANT see actor-network theory (ANT) Antaki, Charles 83 anti-racism 26, 66 antisemitic caricature 27–29, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33 antisemitic discourse 22 antisemitic utterances 26–27 antisemitism 16, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27 Apple 91

argumentation strategies 24 artifacts 1, 93, 160; anthropological 4; ceremonial 9; constructions of 9, 12; cultural 3; discourse-specific 3, 4, 6, 8, 11; discursive 3–4, 6, 8, 11; material 9; novel 12; photographic/image-based video 90, 93, 94; of physics of 3–4; video 90, 93, 94 Ashmore, Malcolm 72 “Askar Kazeebon” (Lying Soldiers) campaign 152 Augenstein, Karoline 115 authoritative discourses in China 158–159; the approach taken 159–160; concluding remarks 169–170; discourses two decades apart 163–166; political power and influence in judicial practices 166–169; social practice, recontextualization, and meta-discourse 161–163 authority 38, 99, 100, 101, 135, 134, 139; charismatic 131, 133, 134; establishing 94; institutional 94; of the law 95; policework 98; religious 57; scientific 2; Weber on 130–131, 133, 134, 137n 13; witnesses 75; see also authoritative discourses in China autonomy 6 Bai Jingfu 165 Bakhtin, Mikhail 21, 38 bala’ghah see florid/decorative language Barry, John 116 Barthes, Roland 94 Bateson, Gregory 5 Bauman, Richard 161 Beck, Ulrich 53, 65, 107 Bereaved Parents’ Circle 174 Berger, Peter 51

188 Index Bernstein, Basil 166, 167, 170 Bertillon, Alphonse 90 bifurcation of nature 40 binary frames of belonging 16, 25 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies 59 blogs/bloggers 150–152 Bock, Mary Angela 87, 89 Bosnia, constitution 130, 134 boundaries, discursive 10, 11, 6–7, 12–13 Brand, Ulrich 108 Breaking the Silence (BTS) 173, 174, 182 British Council Studies 109 Bruno (Museomix participant) 41, 42, 43, 44–47 BTS see Breaking the Silence (BTS) Buehler, Antonio 99 calculated ambivalence 16, 30, 34 Caldwell, Cameron 99 Canadian National Democratic Party 109 Cap, Piotr 20 Carvalho, Anabela 87–88, 104, 114 categorical imperative (Kant) 133 causality 3, 5, 8, 9, 11–12, 75, 169 CDA see Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) CDS see Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) charisma 131, 133, 134 charismatic leaders 135–136 Charlie Hebdo killings 55 Child Protection workers 79–82 China: cultural contingencies 159, 160, 170–171; language 160, 170; one-party system 140, 168, 170 Chinese language 160, 170 Chomsky, Noam 2 Chouliaraki, Lilie 108 churinga 121 citizen journalists 150 climate change: depoliticizing 107; The Great Transformation 104; The Great Transition 104; the idea of transformation 107–108; media 106 climate change, discourses on 87–88, 104–105; alternative discourses for transformation 111–115; discourse and (in)action on climate change 105–107; the idea of transformation 107–108; tools for analysis and critique 108–111 climate politics, language of 107

cognitive metaphor analysis 20 cognitive psychology 73, 74, 83 cognitive science 74 Combatants for Peace 173, 174 Comey, James 98 communicative constitution of reality (Cooren) 48 Communist Party of China (CPC) 160, 167, 170–171; Central Committee 163, 164, 165; jurisdiction 172 n20 computational metaphors 12 conceptions, feminist, of human rights 10 Constable, Marianne 183 constitution 8, 48, 60, 65, 88; as discourse within modern nations 120–136 constitutional discourse: affect, circulation, and power 129–133; background 120–121; regarding the samples 121–122, 133–134; responses to possibility of abolishing 126–129; and social order 129–130; the thinglike salience of 122–126, 133–136 constitution(s): charismatic 131, 133, 134; defined 100–133; as discourse within modern nations 120–136; as emblem 120, 121, 124–125, 129, 130, 131, 134–135, 136; and fear of death 130; policy agency 143; responses to possibility of abolishing 121, 126–129, 132, 135; as series of commands 131 constitutions as discourse within modern nations 120–136; Bosnia 130, 134; Herzegovina 130; indexical and iconic associations 123, 126; Iran 125, 126; Russia 128–129, 130, 134–135; United Kingdom 124–125, 128, 130, 134–135, 137 n9; Zimbabwe 125, 134–135 context 4, 21, 25, 169, 170, 171; and meaning 61; visual representations 92–94, 93 “context model” of discursive practices 169 contextualization of evidentiary videos 89, 92–94, 93 contingent narrative 92 conversation analysis 17, 47–48, 74, 83 Cooren, François 15–16, 37, 63 cop-watching 91–92 CopBlock 91, 96 Corbin, Juliet M. 90 counter-discourse 182 counterhegemonic discourse 139–140, 149, 151, 152–153, 154

Index 189 CPC see Communist Party of China (CPC) creativity 12 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 48, 51–52, 59, 74, 83, 159, 161; and entextualization 161–163; evidentiary video 89, 90, 93–94, 98, 100; see also Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) 16, 62–63, 115, 168–169; climate change 109–116; discourse, use of term in 22; distinguished from other approaches 21; principles and underlying assumptions 21–22; theoretical approaches to 19–21, 20; see also Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) “critical mind” 67 critical semantic mapping and analysis 110 critique 19, 22, 67, 109, 111 cultural-critical discourse 64–65 cultural contingencies 139–141; China 159, 160, 170–171 cultural-discursive formation 173–176 cultural studies 1, 109; see also Birmingham School of Cultural Studies cyberactivism 145, 149 Danish cartoon affair 55 Dean, John 73, 74 debunking 182 decontextualization 163 decorative language 149 “deeds not words” slogan 174, 176, 178, 180, 183, 184 n4 defensive rhetoric 74–75 definition of the situation 16–17, 54, 62 Deng Xiaoping 162 denial, strategies of 27 deniability 34 description 72–74 DHA see Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) “diagnostic frame,” as rhetorical strategy 153 disclaimer 31 discourse: and action 2–3; artifactual nature of 3–4; challenges 11–13; constitutive roles 161; definitions of 1, 3–6, 11, 12, 20, 21–24, 51, 56–59, 63, 87, 104, 106, 108, 158–161, 171, 176; as empty signifier 51; historicity of

21; linked to authority 130–131, 137 n13; mutual support among various 8; use of term in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) 22 discourse analytical imagination 66–68 discourse circulation 120–121, 129–133, 167 discourse communities 3, 12; autonomous and self-organizing 6; discursive practices 5–6; institutionalize recurring practices 6–7; outsiders, influence of 10–11 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) 16, 22–24; example analysis: far-right populism and the “politics of denial” 25–34; four-level context model 23, 26; levels of analysis 23; strategies 24 discourse representation 24 discourse(s): counterhegemonic 153; ecological relations between 9–10; economic 6; engineering 7; hegemonic 65, 139–140, 146, 149, 154–155; and (in)action on climate change 105–107; legal 7, 158, 160, 169–170; mathematical 6, 8; medical 6, 8–9; physical 3; populist political discourses 62–63; professional 10; scientific 5, 7; scholars of 5, 11, 12, 88; scholarly 10–11; sociology as a 56; therapeutic 7; about videos 90, 92–93, 94, 97–98, 99, 101; of videos 92, 94, 96, 99, 100–101 discourses of dissent: activism as a cultural-discursive formation 173–176; discursive strategies in activist discourse 180–183; language ideology and Israeli activist discourse 176–180 discourses of transformation 104; agenda of 115; alternative discourses for 111–115; end goal of 108; idea of 107–108; The Great Transformation 104;The Great Transition 104; number of 162; process of 109; towards sustainability 115 discursive, construction of 11 discursive artifacts 3 discursive boundaries 10, 11, 6–7, 12–13 discursive change 21 discursive construction 58–59; the discourse analytical imagination 66–68; the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) perspective 56–63; some examples of Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse

190 Index (SKAD)) work 64–66; vignette 1, a case of murder 52, 54, 55 discursive construction of measures 65 discursive construction of realities 54, 55, 56, 61 discursive construction of the social stratification 162 discursive information (Foucault) 15 discursive practices 55 discursive psychology 17, 48, 63; analytical basis of 71–74; contemporary 74–82; example one: ‘know’ and tag question 76–79; example two: ‘know,’ idiomatic construction and tag question 79–82’ final thoughts 82–84; focus 71, 72; origins 71; relationship with cognitivist approaches 73, 74, 83; research development 82–83 dispositif 16–17, 57, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 64 “double conditional” (Massumi) 132 Drew, Paul 72–73 dualism 179 dueling discourses of power and resistance: competing rhetorical struggles and continuing paradoxes 154–155; the Egyptian military 143–146; the Muslim Brotherhood 147–149; young activists 150–153 dugri speech 177–178, 181, 185 n23 Durkheim, Émile 58, 88, 121, 131, 132, 134, 136 Eco, Umberto 183 ecological conceptions 12; of interdiscursive relations 9–10 ecological relations between discourses 9–10 economic discourse 6 Edwards, Derek 71, 73, 74, 75, 84 Egyptian military 139–140; shifting rhetorical strategies and revolutionary narratives 143–146 emblem of the collectivity (Durkheim) 136 emblems, constitutions as 120, 121, 124–125, 129, 131, 134–135, 136 energy democracy 113 engineering discourse 7 entextualization 161–163, 170 epistemic responsibility 181 epistemics see discursive psychology ethnography of discourse 63, 66, 173 ethnomethodology 63, 71, 74

Eva (Museomix participant) 41, 42–44 evidential videos 87 existence, concept of, reconsidered 39–40, 48 explanatory critique 111 Facebook 27–28, 30–31, 33–34, 95, 145, 152 facts 1, 11–12, 15, 38, 40, 67; evaluation of 62; physical 3; scientific 3; truth a product of 72 Fairclough, Norman 20, 62, 109, 111, 161, 170 falsity 72 far-right populism see “politics of denial” fear 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 Feindt, Peter H. 105 feminist reconceptions of human rights 10 figure (in ventriloquism): speech by dummy/puppet 37–38 fight or flight response 133 Fodor, Jerry 83 footing 74 Foucault, Michel 2, 5, 8, 15, 16–17, 23–24, 51, 52, 54, 59, 62, 67, 68, 109, 174, 180 framing 51, 148; of identities 153; of messages 144; in public discourse 182; of representation 24; rhetorical 144, 146; of slogans and narratives 146 France (Museomix participant) 41, 44–47 Frankfurt School 66, 109 Freud, Sigmund 121, 131–132, 134, 136 From Transition to Transformation: Sustainable and Inclusive Development in Europe and Central Asia (United Nations) 88, 109–116 GDP see Gross Domestic Product Geertz, Clifford 139 God’s eye view 12 Goldblatt, David 37 gongping-zhengyi (equality and justice) 140, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170; speech in 2013-2014 165–166 Google NGram graph for activism 174, 175, 184 n8 The Great Transformation 104 The Great Transition 104 green economy 88, 106, 112, 115 griots 179 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the monetary value of all finished goods

Index 191

Hailong Tian 162–163 Hall, Stuart 59, 108 Hart, Chris 20 hate speech 26–27; see also racist speech acts Hebrew language: ideology of 178; role in constructing Israeli nation-building ethos 176–180; vernacularization of 177 hegemonic discourse 65, 139–140, 146, 149, 154–155 Heisenberg, Werner 3 helpline calls 79–82 Hepburn, Alexa 75 Heritage, John 78, 79, 83 hermeneutics 1, 21, 61 “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricouer) 16, 62, 174 Herzegovina, constitution 130 High Court of Inner Mongolia 159 Hirsch, Dafina 185 n18 historians, approaches of 1–2 Hobbes, Thomas 129, 132, 135, 136 Holmgren, Sara 65 Holt, Elizabeth 76 Homer-Dixon, Thomas 113 horizontal discourse 167 Hövelman, Sophie 66 Hu Jintao 162 human beings: as media 15, 39; as passers/ intermediaries/in-betweens 48; and Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) 60–61 human rights, feminist reconceptions of 10 humor 139–140, 152–153 Huugjilt case (1995-1996, 2013-2014) 158, 166–168, 169–170

Ikhwanonline 149 IMF see International Monetary Fund (IMF) incommensurability of discourse 7–9, 11 incorporation 179 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 112 indexical evidence 94–95 indexical narrative 94 indexicality 89, 92, 93, 94–95, 99, 100–101, 179 inertia 135 Inner Mongolia Supreme Court 166 inspiration 131, 133, 136 institutional definitions of reality 56 institutional dispositifs (devices or infrastructures of discourse production and problem intervention) 16–17, 57, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 64 institutionalization of linguistic discourse 1; of discourses on climate change 104; of ideas 105, 111 intensified utterances 24 inter-discourse analysis 110 interaction 110 interdisciplinary interaction 12 interdiscursive relations: ecological, mutually supportive, antagonistic, competitive 9; dynamics of 10–11; ecological in nature 9–10; explaining 8, 9; exploitative 7; and meaning 8–9; and new perspectives 10–11; inter-discourse analysis 110 Interdiscursive constructions of artifacts 13 interdiscursivity 21 intertextuality 21 intra-textual language 94 iPhone 91 Iran, constitution 125, 126 irony 182, 183 Irvine, Judith 178–179, 185 n28 islamophobia 26

ideas: acted upon 44–47; material dimension 41–42; pitching 42–44; ventriloquial/relational/pragmatist perspective 40–47 identity framing 147–148, 150, 151, 154 ideology, coded language of 16; language/linguistic 176–177, 178, 179–180 idiomatic constructions 79–81 “Ikhwan Kazeebon” (Lying Brotherhood) campaign 152

Jäger, Margarete 20 Jäger, Siegfried 20 Jefferson, Gail 41 Jew, new 177 Jiang Zeming 162 judicial practices, political power and influence in 166–169 Julia (Museomix participant) 41, 44–47 just dictatorships 144 justification 31, 32

and services made within a country during a specific period 112 group totems 88, 121

192 Index Kant, Immanuel 130, 135; categorical imperative 133 Katriel, Tamar 140, 173 Keller, Reiner 15–17, 20, 51, 66 Khamis, Sahar 139–140, 143 King, Rodney 91, 92–93, 98 Kittler, Friedrich 39 Klein, Naomi 109, 113 knowledge: in Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) 58–59; see also discursive psychology knowledge-oriented approach 52–55; vignette 1: a case for murder 52, 54, 55; vignette 2: the flying lake 53, 54–55; vignette 3: hurt feelings 53–54, 55 Kress, Gunter 20, 90 Krippendorff, Klaus 1, 17 Kutz, Sebastian 34 Laclau, Ernesto 140 language: as action 176–180, 181; character-based 140; Chinese 160, 170; colloquial 154; commodification of 179, 185 n28; devaluation of 140, 183; effectiveness of 178; florid/decorative 139–140, 149; formal 139–140, 149, 151, 153, 154; Hebrew 176–180, 177, 178; role of 10; semiology of (langue) 1 language as speech ( parole or langage) 1 language ideology 140–141, 176, 181, 183; hegemonic 176–177; and Israeli activist discourse 176–180; revivalist 177 Latour, Bruno 17, 53, 67 law enforcement 89, 90, 92, 94; authoritative appeals 98–99; leaders of 89; police film criticism 97; the pepper spray incident 99–100; practice of 9; procedural explanation 98 law enforcement officers (LEOs) 89, 93; discourse 96–101; body cameras/badge cams for 87, 89, 91, 97 The Leap Manifesto: A Call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and for One Another 88, 109–116 legal discourse 7,158, 160, 169–170 legal practice, dependent on discourse 161 LEO see law enforcement officers (LEOs) Lewis, Avi 109 lexical choice 181–182 lexical specificity and concreteness 182, 183 The Liberty Collection 123

lingua 1 linguistic anthropology 176, 178 linguistic phenomena, and the political economy 178–179 linguistics 1–2, 19, 24, 26, 51–52, 69; corpus 21; critical 90; Saussurean 1, 5; socio- 20, 109, 179; structural 1, 8 literary scholarship 1 Luckmann, Thomas 51 Lukacs, Martin 114–115, 119 n62 macro-sociological approach 20 Maikel Nabil Sanad 151–152 Mandelbaum, Jenny 77 Mannheim, Karl 58 Massumi, Brian 132–133, 135, 136 Matelli, Tony 50 n15 material objects, symbolic dimensions of 178–179 materiality 17, 40, 48 mathematical discourse 6, 8 McDonald, Laquan 96 Meadowcroft, James 107 meaning 17; and context 61; interdiscursive relationships 8–9; in Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) 58 media, and climate change discourse 106 media-centric logic 155 medical discourse 6, 8–9 memory: verbatim, gist, and repisodic 73, 82 meta-discourse 158, 160, 161–163, 170; as colonizing context 168–169, 170; regulating function of 170; vertical recontextualization of 167, 170 meta-discursive, talk about talk 176 meta-linguistic 176 military 139, 144, 148, 173, 181, 182 Miller, Carlos 91 Ministry of Public Security (MPS), China 164–165 mitigated utterances 24 Mohamed, the Prophet, sayings of (hadith) 149 monarch/monarchy 129–130 Mondada, Lorenza 83 monologue 5, 7 moral shock narratives 181, 183 Morsi, Mohamed 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154 Mouffe, Chantal 140

Index 193 MPS see Ministry of Public Security (MPS), China Mubarak, Gamal 144 Mubarak, Hosni 144, 145–146, 147, 148, 151, 153, 154 Museomix 40–48, 42 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) 139–140, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154; rhetorical strategies and revolutionary narrative 147–149 Musolff, Andreas 20 nation 139 nationalism 16, 25, 36n39, 146, 154, 177 Nawara Negm 150–151 Neisser, Ulrich 73 Neue Kronenzeitung 33 Ngarinjin people, Northwestern Australia 179 non-cognitive analysis 78–79 normalization 34 object-side construction 82 OECD see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Oels, Angela 105 offensive rhetoric 74–75 official sphere 154 offline sphere 151 one-party system 140, 168, 170 online sphere 151 ontological relevance of communication 15–16 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 112 oscillation/vacillation 37–38, 39 Other/Otherness see dueling discourses of power and resistance PAA see police accountability activist (PAA) discourse parrhesiastic rhetoric 180–181, 183 Patterson, James et al. 108 Peaceful Streets Project, Austin, Texas 91, 95, 99 Peirce, Charles Sanders 38, 39 People’s Daily 166, 167 “Photography is Not a Crime” (PINAC) 91, 96 PINAC see Photography is Not a Crime” (PINAC) physical discourse 3 physics, artifacts of 3–4

Pierre (Museomix participant) 41–47 “Pierre Rivière” case 52, 54, 55 Poferl, Angelika 66 police accountability 87; see also law enforcement; law enforcement officers (LEOs) police accountability activist (PAA) discourse 94–96, 100–101 police accountability movement 87, 91–92; discourse 94–96, 100–101 police accountability videos 90, 91 police film criticism 97 policing: authoritarian appeals 98–99; bystanders 96; cop-watching 91–92; pepper spray incident 99–100; and photography 90–91; police film criticism 98; procedural explanations 98; quoting the law 95; surveillance rituals 96 political discourse 158, 160, 169–170; see also dueling discourses of power and resistance political economy, linguistic phenomena and 178–179 political power and influence, in judicial practices 166–169 political sphere 183–184 “politics of denial”: analysis of a TV interview 27–33; analyzing hate-speech and (coded) antisemitic utterances 26–27; socio-political context 25 “politics of knowledge and knowing” 56 Popper, Karl 72 popular sphere 151 populist political discourses 62–63; see also “politics of denial” Potter, Jonathan 17, 63, 71, 73, 74, 75, 83 power/knowledge regimes (Foucault) 51, 52 “practical Zionism” 177, 185 n21 pragmatism 38, 39, 51, 54; see also ventriloquial/relational/pragmatist perspective predictional strategies 24 private interactional sphere 17 private sphere 17, 106 procuratorate, an institution of the People’s Republic of China whose functions include approving arrests, deciding on investigations and prosecutions in support of the courts 163–165, 166, 167, 172n 20 professional discourse 10

194 Index propositionality 179 protest 54, 71, 91, 144, 150 provocation strategy 33 public discourse 6, 8, 10, 51, 55, 160, 170; as different 57; and Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) 63, 64; and video 93 public sphere 9, 26, 64, 87, 94, 106, 107, 139, 160 Puchta, Claudia 83 Qing Zhang 162, 163, 168 Quine, Willard Van Orman 72 Quran 125 Rabinow, Paul 67–68 racism 16, 22, 25, 26–27, 30, 31, 63; see also anti-racism racist advertisements 62–63 racist discourse 22 racist speech acts 62–63, 64, 66 rational authority (Weber) 133, 137 n13 reality, institutional definitions of 56 reconstruction 4–5, 12, 53, 67, 104, 110, 111, 114; analytical 67–68; interactive 63 recontextualization 161–163, 168, 170; meta-discourses 168; vertical 166–168, 170; visual representation 87 referential strategies 24 reflexive forces as multicultural 138n 23 reflexive methodology 4–5, 11, 60, 65, 75 reflexive moves 4–5, 11 reflexivity 5–6, 11, 135, 136; Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 90; see also Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) relational ontology 39, 40 relationality 48; see also ventriloquial/ relational/pragmatist perspective religion 53–54, 55, 130, 131, 139, 147, 177 religious discourse, versus science discourse 7–8 religious identity 149, 151, 154 Ren Jianxin 163–164, 165, 166, 167 repetition 146 repisodic memory 73 representation 24, 110 resemiotization 26, 34 respect 131 revivalism 176 revolution, language of 145, 148

revolution narratives 139, 143–146; Egyptian military 143–146; the Muslim Brotherhood 147–149; young revolutionaries 150–153 revolutionaries, young 139–140, 145, 146, 150–153 rhetoric 180, 183; visual 149, 151 rhetorical framing 144, 145, 146, 153 rhetorical strategies: Egyptian military 143–146; and humor 152–153; the Muslim Brotherhood 147–149; paradoxes in 154–155; young revolutionaries 150–153 Ricouer, Paul 62 risk society (Beck) 53 risky entanglements (Latour) 53 rule of law 134 Rumsey, Alan 179 Rushdie, Salman 55 Russia: constitution 128–129, 130, 134–135; fear of death 130 Sacks, Oliver 72, 84 sarcasm, as rhetorical strategy 152–153 Saussure, Ferdinand de 1, 5, 178 SCAF see Supreme Council of Armed Forces Schegloff, Emmanuel 75–76 scholars of discourse 5, 11, 12, 88 scholarly abstractions 1, 2, 12 scholarly discourse 2, 10–12; accountability for 10 Schneidewind, Uwe 115 scholarship, accountability 4–5 Schütz, Alfred 60, 63 scientific discourse 5, 7; versus religious discourse 7–8 Sefi, Sue 79 self-contained narrative 94 self-mockery 182, 183 self-organization 6, 8 Self, the see dueling discourses of power and resistance semiology of language (langue) 1 semiosis 21, 108 semiotics 15, 38, 39, 59 Senegal 178–179 Silverstein, Michael 163, 170, 176 Sisi, General El 146, 154 SKAD see Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) social change 21 social cognition 73, 83

Index 195 social cognitive neuroscience 83 social media 95, 99–100, 145, 150–152, 152 social order, and constitutions 129–130 social phenomenology 60 social practice 161–163 social psychology 63 “social relations of knowledge and learning” 56 social theory, classical: Durkheimian 132; Freudian 132; Hobbesian 132; Kantian 132, 135 sociocognitive approach 168–169 sociolinguistics 20, 109, 179 sociology as a discourse 56 sociology of knowledge 1, 51, 57, 58–59, 120; see also Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) 16; core focus 51; in discourse 56–57; an ethnography of discourse 63; examples of work 64–66; performative role of social actors and agency 59–60; perspective 56–63; reflexive methodology 60–61; in relation to other discourse research 62–63, 69 n12; requires human actors 60–61; a sociologically grounded approach 61–62; usage of “knowledge,” “language” and “meaning” 58; use of discourse 57–62; ventriloquial/relational/pragmatist perspective 63 sociology of scientific knowledge 72 speech: antisemitic 26–27; commodification of 179, 185 n28; intensified utterances 24; mitigated utterances 24 speech act therapy 180, 183 speech-action nexus 140–141, 174–176, 177, 180, 183–184 Stavrianakis, Anthony 67–68 Steensig, Jakob 83 Stivers, Tanya 83 Strache, HC 24, 27–33, 36 n39 Strauss, Anselm 90 strong sustainability 112 structural-conservative discourse 64–65 Subject-side construction 82 Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) 144–145, 151, 152, 154 Supreme People’s Procuratorate 164, 165 sustainability transitions 107

sustainable development 88, 111–112 symbolic interactionism 54, 60 symmetrical approach 72 System Functional Linguistics 20 tag question 77–79 Tao Siju 165 Tarde, Gabriel 48 te Molder, Hedwig 74 “technicological risk” 64 technological deterministic approaches 155 text 1, 19, 29, 59, 61, 99, 110; co-text 23, 26; dialogic 21–22; origins of 4–5; and politics of denial 30–33; symbolic value of 87, 88 therapeutic discourse 7 “thing” (Latour) 67 Tian, Hailong 140, 158, 162–163 totems 88, 121, 131–132 Transana 41 transformation 23; discoursed of 104, 108; of discursive structuration 61; the Great Green Technological 108; of reality 58; socio-ecological 110; transition to 109, 111, 116; transformations 155, 162 transition management 107 Twitter 95, 99–100 Ungarinjin language 179 United Kingdom: constitution 124–125, 128, 130, 134–135, 137 n9; fear of death 130 United States constitution 8, 121, 126, 135; abolition of 126–129; and charisma 131; and fear of death 130; the thing-like salience of 122–124, 133–136 United States Declaration of Independence 131, 136 universal grammar (Chomsky) 2 “universes of discourse” 60 Ur-Fascism 183 Urban, Greg 85, 115, 120 vacillation see oscillation/vacillation Vajont disaster 53, 54–55 van Dijk, Teun 19, 27, 20, 168–169, 170 van Leeuwen, Theo 20, 90, 161–162, 170 ventriloquial/relational/pragmatist perspective 40–47 ventriloquism: illusion without deception 37; speech by dummy/puppet 37–38 verbatim memory 73

196 Index vertical discourse 162, 167, 170 victim-perpetrator reversal 32 victimhood 32 videos: discourses about 90, 92–93, 94, 97–98, 99, 101; discourses of 92, 94, 96, 99, 100–101; and public discourse 93 visual representations, recontextualizing: context and discourse 92–94, 93; discussion 100–101; law enforcement officer (LEO) discourse 96–100, 100–101; police accountability activist (PAA) discourse 94–96, 100–101; theoretical foundation 90–92 visual rhetoric 149, 151 von Glyszinski, Moritz 65 Wael Abbas 150–151 we, use of term 113–114 weak sustainability 112 Weber, Max 58, 59; rational authority 130–131, 133, 134, 137n 13 Wetherell, Margaret 63, 71, 109 Whitehead, Alfred North 40 Wiggins, Sally 71 Williams, Raymond 175 witnessing accounts 75, 181, 183 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72, 84

Wodak, Ruth 16–17, 19, 62, 115 Wolf, Armin 30–34 Wooffitt, Robin 75 World Bank 112 World Commission on Environment and Development 111 World Trade Organization (WTO) 112 WTO see World Trade Organization (WTO) Wu Ying lawsuit 160 xenophobia 25, 33 Xi Jinping 165–166, 167 Xinhua News Agency 164 yanda (severe strike) 140, 158, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170; speeches in 1995-1996 163–165 Youssef, Bassem 153 YouTube 152 Zhang Siqing 164, 165 Zimbabwe, constitution 125, 134–135 Zimmermann, Christine 65–66 Zionism 176, 177, 180, 185 n18; “practical Zionism” 177, 185 n21 Zionist ideology 178